Cut the cravings & break free from emotional eating – with Dr. Glenn Livingston

Have you ever found yourself reaching for chocolate in moments of stress, only to later feel a pang of guilt? This episode of Untethered with Jen Liss features Dr. Glenn Livingston, a former psychologist for food and pharma companies, who shares his personal journey through food addiction and how he emerged stronger and wiser. Together, we unravel the deep-seated societal pressures that shape our eating habits and discuss effective strategies to overcome the cycle of emotional eating. Dr. Glenn inspires with his candid revelations about the impact of diet culture and offers practical techniques to develop a healthier mindset.

We take a closer look at the emotional triggers that lead to cravings and how the advertising industry plays on these vulnerabilities. By recounting personal experiences and client success stories, we uncover the subtle justifications our minds create and offer solutions to counteract them. Dr. Glenn introduces methods like labeling compulsive cravings to introduce a crucial pause, allowing for more rational choices in our eating habits. Whether it's embracing a hearty breakfast to counteract nighttime binges or crafting personal food rules, this episode provides actionable insights to foster a healthier relationship with food.

Empower yourself to transform feelings of shame into productive change. We discuss the societal normalization of overeating and the challenges posed by pervasive food temptations, highlighting the importance of accountability and self-awareness. Dr. Glenn and I emphasize turning negative emotions into passionate motivation for adopting healthier habits. With resources like free e-books and food plan starter templates, listeners are equipped to align their eating patterns with their personal philosophies. This episode is your guide to breaking free from food obsession and living a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Meet Dr. Glenn
Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. was the long time 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 NY Daily News, American Demographics, or any of the other major media outlets you see on this page. You may also have heard him on ABC, WGN, and/or 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 clients AND a self-funded research program with more than 40,000 participants.  He earned his Ph.D. is in psychology from Yeshiva University in 1991.

Connect with Glenn:
Website

Chapters

• 0:05 Untethered
• 9:06 Chocolate Cravings and Emotional Triggers
• 14:14 Conquering Overeating and Cravings
• 22:51 Navigating Nighttime Overeating and Wellness
• 28:15 Finding Food Freedom and Productivity
• 38:47 Transforming Shame Into Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hey and welcome to Untethered with Jen Liss, the podcast that's here to help you break free, be you and unleash your inner brilliance. I'm your host, jen, and in this episode we're going to talk about how to stop letting ravings for food control your life. Let's dive in. Hey there, unicorn, it's Jen. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Dr Glenn Livingston.

Speaker 1: 0:38

I invited Dr Glenn on because I had this realization that there is a huge tether that we've never talked about on this podcast, or very rarely. Actually, I've talked about this particular topic a lot because I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. Food, food. So many of us have a troubling or challenging relationship with food that we know about and we feel guilt about it and we feel shame about it. And all the things We've dieted, We've done all the diets Maybe you're doing a diet right now. You know that relationship with food, our relationship with our bodies these are things that we have not talked about on this podcast, and I had this realization like, oh my goodness, we've got to talk about this and invited onto the podcast this amazing human being who has done tons of research in this area and actively works with people and has created a program that genuinely helps people in the most loving and positive way Dr Glenn Livingston.

Speaker 1: 1:35

So Dr Glenn is on the podcast today to help us understand the reason that we have a difficult relationship with food and what the heck we can do about it, how we can untether from the ways in which food is controlling our lives. He actually helped me in this conversation with one thing that I have been dealing with lately, where I'm like why am I having these sudden cravings? That makes no sense. I've never craved this in my entire life. And he pinpointed the exact problem right here in this conversation, which might be something that you're currently going through. Regardless of that, you will find something in this conversation for you If you are somebody who has had a difficult relationship with food, who sees that your relationship could be better, who just wants to have a healthier, more abundant relationship with food and with your body and with your mindset around it in general. So I am so excited to welcome on to the podcast Dr Glenn Livingston. Hi, dr Glenn.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Hey, how are you? It's nice to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1: 2:39

Fabulous. I'm excited to have you on. I was telling you right before we hopped on here, and for my listeners, that there is a huge tether that we have never talked about on this podcast never talked about and so that is why you are here to help us dive into this, because even for myself, this has been my experience and my life with food. It's been a thing. It's been a thing. I grew up with diet culture and the diet generation, and so to have you come on and talk about this with us is so awesome. So thanks for being here.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Do you want to know a little bit about how I wound up doing this, or is there another direction you want to go?

Speaker 1: 3:26

Yeah, I would love to hear how did you get to the point of food being something that you talk about, because you have a long experience as a CEO of a company, right?

Speaker 2: 3:40

I was. Yeah, I was on the wrong side of the war. I was working for the food companies to help them sell sugar and for the pharma companies to help them sell more drugs. In my 20s and 30s it was, but the food problem started before then and I like to jokingly say that if you've been by the Woodbury Country Deli on Long Island in the 90s and they're out of pizza and Pop-Tarts, there's a very good chance I got there before you, which is my way of saying that I'm not just a doctor who wants you to work with food problems.

Speaker 2: 4:17

I'm a guy who had a very serious problem with food myself. If it wasn't nailed down, I was in trouble because I'm 6'4" and just genetically I'm lucky. I'm modestly muscular without doing anything about it, and if I worked out a couple hours a day when I was a kid, I could eat boxes of muff, a lot too much time digesting and too much time in the bathroom. But I was thin, I was energetic, I was happy and I really enjoyed my old days with food. But when I got married, I was about 21, 22 years old when I got married and I was going to graduate school and my metabolism slowed down a little bit bit and was commuting two hours each way to see patients and take classes. And then I'd get home and I'd have to work on the business and God forbid, my ex-wife now, but wife at the time wanted to talk to me. I just didn't have two minutes to work out, much less two hours a day, and I found that the food still had a hold of me. I'd be sitting with a suicidal patient and thinking when can I get the next pizza or when can I get to the deli, and that bothered me a lot more than the weight, which came on slowly. I eventually got up to about 300 pounds, but the weight came on very slowly. I was just obsessed with food. I was thinking about it all the time. I was just obsessed with food. I was thinking about it all the time.

Speaker 2: 5:46

And, from a family of 17 psychotherapists, being a really great psychologist was the most important thing to me. I wanted to be able to lend people my soul and help them to love and trust me enough to think new thoughts and try new things. And it's not really all about book knowledge and figuring out the puzzle of their life, it's really getting them to have a connection with you, so they feel comfortable doing things that they wouldn't be comfortable otherwise. And it wasn't as good as that. I never lost anybody and I got good results anyway. But I had to compensate for my food obsession, and that's what really bothered me.

Speaker 2: 6:24

Coming from the family that I came from, I figured that there must be a hole in my heart, in my metaphorical heart, and if I could fill that hole, then I wouldn't have to just keep trying to fill the hole in my stomach. And so I went for the best psychotherapy you could find. I saw the best psychologist, I saw the best psychiatrist. I took medication. I went to Overeaters Anonymous. I had a spiritual journey. It was a very life-enriching, soul-enhancing journey, but it didn't really help with the food.

Speaker 2: 6:54

I'd get a little better, and then fatter, a little thinner, and then a lot fatter, a little thinner and a lot fatter, and eventually there were three things that changed my paradigm. It took 20 years. There were three things that changed my paradigm. Took 20 years, but there are three things that changed my paradigm from. You know, nurture your inner mood to child and fill that hole in your heart to or love myself thin, for lack of a better way to put it to. Um, you know, be the alpha dog of my own mind, my own mind. And you know, when alpha, when an alpha wolf, gets challenged for leadership, it doesn't say oh, my goodness, goodness, someone needs a hug. It growls and it snarls and it says get back in line. Or because I'm the boss and I'm in control.

Speaker 2: 7:31

And those three things were working for the food industry. I saw that they were spending tens of millions of dollars to engineer these hyperpalatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt, of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt. And it was all designed to hit the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you the nutrition to feel satisfied. And it turns out that the reptilian brain, the seed of the fight or flight response, the feast or famine response the just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt. Response it doesn't know. Love, it's all about survival. It's like a bad college drinking game. It's like eat, mate or kill. When I see something in the environment, do I eat it, do I mate with it or do I kill it? So figure, that's the reptilian brain, it's the mammalian brain on top of that that says before you eat, mate or kill that thing, what impact will that have on your tribe, on the people that you love? And it's your neocortex on top of that that says what impact will that have on your longer-term goals and your health and your fitness and weight loss and health optimization and those kinds of things. And it turns out that the reptilian brain has the ability to push the rational brain out of the way. So when it perceives there to be an emergency, when the sympathetic nervous system gets all revved up and it perceives there to be an emergency, it can push your rational brain out of the way. And that's why you can read all the diet books you want to and make the best plans from your higher self over the weekend and then Monday afternoon when you're at Starbucks and there's a chocolate bar. It just all seems to go out the window.

Speaker 2: 9:06

I looked at the advertising industry and they were very good at convincing you that you needed this stuff to survive. They would do things like arrange for the packaging to be multicolored and diverse and vibrant, which in nature would signal a diversity of micronutrients that were available, but in many of these cases they were taking the micronutrients out of the food and putting the money into the packaging instead. And these were very powerful forces, very, very powerful forces, separate and apart from whether my mom had dropped me in my head or I wasn't loved enough or anything like that and they're all geared towards the reptilian brain, which doesn't know love. So I kind of started to think maybe love isn't really the way to do it, maybe I really needed to be more of an alpha wolf.

Speaker 2: 9:53

The final story that really shifted me was this big study that I did In the days when internet clicks were cheap and we didn't have things like Google. I bought clicks when people were searching for stress management and over the course of about five years I got about 40,000 people to take a survey and in that survey I asked them what were they feeling stressed about? What was it that they couldn't stop eating when they felt stressed. And I saw some interesting things which I thought was going to lead me to a solution. It actually didn't at all, but it did change my mind. One of the things that I saw was that people who struggle with chocolate and my binges always started with chocolate they were feeling lonely or depressed or a little brokenhearted. And people who struggled with salty, crunchy things tended to be stressed at work. And people who struggled with soft, chewy, starchy things tended to be stressed at home. And I thought this was really cool and I was thinking, gee, maybe I'll write a book about it or something.

Speaker 2: 10:48

But before I did, I called my mom. I said I just want to figure this out for myself. Why do I run into chocolate when I feel lonely or brokenhearted? And I get her on the phone, on Skype, and I said Mom, I'm not really happy in the marriage, so I am a little lonely and brokenhearted. But how did this pattern get set up? Why do I write the chocolate, like everybody else does when they feel like that? And she got this horrible look on her face and this horrible sound on her voice and she goes oh honey, I'm so sorry. And I said mom, it's decades ago, I love you, I forgive you, I just want to figure this out. And she said oh, honey, when you were a one-year-old in 1965, your dad was a captain in the army and they were going to send him to Vietnam.

Speaker 2: 11:28

And I was terrified At the same time, my dad, your grandfather, had just gotten out of prison and I had idolized him my whole life and I didn't know he was guilty and he was, and so I was horribly depressed. So most of the time when you would come running to me for love or to play or to have some even healthy food, I would not have the wherewithal to do it because I'd be sitting and staring at the wall, feeling anxious and depressed. And 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'd say go get your Bosco, and you'd go running over to the refrigerator, crawling over to the refrigerator, you'd take out the bottle, you'd suck on the cap and you'd go into a chocolate sugar coma and I could go resume staring at the wall. And, jenny, if that was a movie movement, if that was a movie, mom and I would have a big hug and a big cry and I'd never have trouble with chocolate again. It was a really good conversation to have. I don't regret it.

Speaker 2: 12:23

I learned to feel a lot more compassion for her and what she went through. I learned a lot about her. I wouldn't have known otherwise. I felt more compassion for myself. There was a softening of that self-hatred. You know, you, fat F, I wasn't talking to myself like that anymore. But it didn't help the food. As a matter of fact, it made it worse Because there was this voice in my head I'm not schizophrenic, but it was like a voice of justification and it said you know what, glenn, you're right, our mama didn't love us enough and she left a great big chocolate-sized hole in your heart. And until you can fix the marriage or get out of it and find the love of your life, you're going to have to go right on eating chocolate. Yippee, let's go get more right now.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Isn't that interesting One voice was replaced with another voice. Yeah, Exactly.

Speaker 2: 13:07

So I kind of put this all together and I did something a little crazy. And this was way before I was teaching it Maybe I was a child and family psychologist at the time. I did something a little crazy. I decided that I was going to remember. This was not going to be public.

Speaker 2: 13:22

I decided that I needed to draw really clear lines in the sand so I would know what healthy behavior was and not healthy behavior. Because if I was going to take control of this reptilian brain, you know, and dominate it in the same way that I dominate my bladder when it says, glenn, you really have to pee. And I say, well, no, I have an interview with Jen right now, I'm going to wait until later. If I was going to take control like that, I was going to have to know when it was active. And so I set up a kind of a tripwire, a line on the sand.

Speaker 2: 13:49

My first one was something like I will never have chocolate on a weekday again, I'll only ever have it on the weekend, and no more than two ounces. And then this is the crazy part If I would be at Starbucks and I'd hear a little thought in my head, that would say you thought in my head that would say you know what, glenn, you worked out really hard today and even though it's a Wednesday, it'd be just as easy to start your silly plan again tomorrow. Go ahead and have a couple ounces of chocolate, it's not going to hurt you. Yippee, let's get some right now. I'd say wait a minute, that's not me, that's my inner pig. You don't have to call it a pig, you can call it anything you want to.

Speaker 1: 14:19

Did you say pig I?

Speaker 2: 14:20

did. I called it my inner pig and I said chocolate on a Wednesday is pig slop. I don't eat pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. As ridiculous as that sounds, as crude as it is and as embarrassing as it is that that's what I did because it was private. It worked somewhat. It kind of opened up a space between stimulus and response and it made it possible for me to wake up and say who's in charge here, my upper brain or my lower brain? Now, at that point I learned that once you open up that space between stimulus and response, you could fix your thinking about food, you could disempower that justification, and that was the bulk of how I got better. I've learned an awful lot more since then. But for the next seven or eight years it only takes a month or two now.

Speaker 2: 15:02

But I didn't have the book that I wrote.

Speaker 2: 15:04

For the next seven or eight years I would keep a journal of everything my pig would say and why it was wrong. So, for example, it's not just as easy to start tomorrow, because if you have the thought you have a craving for chocolate and you have the thought I'll just start again tomorrow and then you eat the chocolate. The way the brain works is called the principle of neuroplasticity. What fires together, wires together, and if I have the craving and think I'll start tomorrow and I have the chocolate, I will have reinforced both the craving and the chocolate so that tomorrow I'll be more likely to say to start tomorrow, and tomorrow the craving is going to be stronger. So you can only ever use the present moment to be healthy. If you're in a hole, you've got to stop digging. That's an example of what I would call a rational refutation or fixing your thinking about food. For years and years I just kept a journal of everything it said and slowly but surely I got better. I got down to a normal weight, all kinds of health problems resolved.

Speaker 1: 15:57

What happened in the journaling, what was happening with the journaling specifically that was helping so much.

Speaker 2: 16:02

Well, it removed that voice of justification and without that voice of justification there was a cognitive dissonance that occurred. There was a calmness, and I know that that's partially from the rational disempowerment of the false logic, because the false logic no longer seemed reasonable. But I also know that writing is more of an upper brain activity and it's not something you can do when your emergency system is activated. You have to kind of breathe and calm down. This gets into the intersection of what you do. You have to be able to calm yourself down enough that it's okay to rest and digest and think and strategize. And so just the goal of writing in and of itself at those times was helpful, because the binging, the response, the screw it, just do it response looks to be driven by a falsely perceived emergency. We have too much work coming up, there's too much input, we don't have enough time to rest and think we're out of contact with our tribe, we are dehydrated, we're fatigued. All of those things cause your sympathetic nervous system to activate and think there's an emergency. In an emergency we would seek all the resources we could. In primitive times that was a good thing because food was relatively scarce. But in the modern food environment where you could walk out of McDonald's and see another one across the street. It's not really so healthy for you. So that's what was happening with the journaling and that got me better.

Speaker 2: 17:36

I published the book when I got divorced about eight years later. I wrote it into a book. I knew what I was doing but I didn't expect it to take off the way that it did and I had about a million readers for the book. And then I got a gig on Psychology Today and I got about a million readers there, all kinds of requests for coaching. So I opened up a little coaching agency. Over the next seven or eight years we worked with about 2,000 clients, measured results. Most of that time I was working on how do I fix people's thinking quickly, how do I let them fix their own thinking quickly. So instead of taking eight years of journaling, we could do it in about a month. It was kind of interesting. There weren't as many creative excuses as I thought. I thought if I worked with thousands of people there'd be thousands of creative excuses. There are about 50. There are about 50 excuses that people have and we kind of know the answers for most of them. So it got to be a lot quicker.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Are those excuses, the things that the voice would say, that the pig would say?

Speaker 2: 18:35

Yeah, one bite won't hurt. You're so stressed that you deserve this. Come on, you can't be good forever, all of that kind of thing. In the last couple of years, when we started measuring results more carefully, I found that at the one month mark for the people who engage, some people take programs and don't engage. I don't really understand why, but we can't help them. So the people who engage got an 89.4% reduction in over-reading in the first month. But when I looked at it at six months or a year, it was significantly worse, like 55, 60% and even worse at the one year mark. And I said, well, why is that? Because that really bothered me.

Speaker 2: 19:11

I wanted people to hold on to it the way that I had. When I really investigated that, it always turned out that it wasn't because we failed to fix their thinking. It's because eventually people get to the point where they say, yeah, doc, I don't have any excuse for doing this anymore. There's nothing that I believe justifies breaking my own rules because it's silly. I made the rule myself and we've gone through all the silly excuses and showed me how to disempower that. But oh well, what the hell Screw it, just do it. People got to that point when I looked at what was behind that, it was always that falsely perceived emergency, or what I would call organismic distress, and so that's when we started adding a certain type of breathing, like parasympathetic breathing, to help people breathe out for longer than they breathed in, because if you're being chased by a hungry bear, you couldn't do that, so you're signaling the brain and you're trying to get the vagal. You know more about this than I do.

Speaker 1: 20:03

Which I mean. It activates the part of the brain that you're talking about, the more human part of the brain that gives us time to think. It does all of those things that you're saying earlier, that made a difference.

Speaker 2: 20:13

We started talking to people about having regular nutrition. We found out that people would say screw it, just do it if they happen to skip a meal or if they ate an awful lot of processed food all day and didn't get enough actual nutrition into their body. I'm not a medical doctor or a dietitian, but it was not rocket science to say look, if you eat more fruit and vegetables and maybe some protein, you're going to feel better than if you have potato chips all day. We learned that willpower is the ability to make good decisions, and there are only so many decisions you can make in the course of the day. So if you could take a couple of decision-free breaks over the course of the day, you're much less likely to get to that point where you didn't have any willpower. It kind of restored some of your willpower, and so we added to the mix all of these relievers of organismic distress and when we did that, our results started to get even better.

Speaker 2: 21:05

That's why I wrote the new book called Defeat your Cravings. It's kind of a combination of how to fix your thinking but how to fight the screw it, just do it response and kind of put it together into a holistic package and then also over the course of that eight years, I learned a lot about the science of cravings and cravings extinction and I want to incorporate that. So that's my story. That's why I do what I do and, yeah, I couldn't imagine doing anything more remaining. I'm really happy.

Speaker 1: 21:32

Yeah Well, life has sent you on this journey for a reason and you're helping so many people and the dots that you're connecting for a lot of us along the way. As you talk about the voice that was in your head, I've got that voice in my head all the time. I've got this current. There is a current thing that I've been fighting, which is 11 PM chips. Like I want chips at 11 pm and you said it's people who overwork and I'm like, yeah, it's usually when I'm sitting there working a little bit too late that I suddenly want some chips. So it's like I recognize the voice that says, oh, you know, it's fine, just tonight.

Speaker 2: 22:04

Jen, I did a whole study on nighttime overeating because it's a very common problem and it's a harder problem than most other types of overeating and there's some interesting things that we found. I could tell you about them or we could do it a different time if you want to go in another direction. It's fascinating.

Speaker 1: 22:16

There's like a little nugget that you can add, because I think it's not just me, there's people who are listening too, and I think that the whole reason that we're talking is because food is a tether. Food is something that is keeping us from living our best lives in many ways, and it's interconnected, and you've connected a lot of those dots, because it's very similar to some of the other things that we do too, like overbuying courses and not taking them, like buying the course because it feels good but then not taking the course and the habit that that is, so you feel like you did something.

Speaker 2: 22:47

Yeah, I'll bust through a couple of quick tips. We found that the problem starts a lot earlier than the evening time. Most people who are overeating at night are waiting too long to have breakfast in the morning, and they all tell me they don't want to change that. They all heat to eat breakfast in the morning. They're not hungry. They feel disgusting in the morning if they eat breakfast, and once they start eating they feel like it's going to be harder to stop.

Speaker 2: 23:16

But without fail, when we've gotten people to stop overeating at night, it's because we help them to start having breakfast.

Speaker 2: 23:19

It could be at nine o'clock or 9.30. It doesn't have to be at six o'clock, but breakfast is an important meal for people who are trying to overcome overeating, because the brain perceives that it's going to be too long, too long of a fast until it gets to eat again, and so if there's leftover hunger or tension at the end of the day, it's very prone to say screw it, just do it. We also find that if you add some crunch to your lunch, like some cruciferous vegetables, carrots, radishes, celery, cucumbers we don't entirely know why. My hypothesis is that we build up a certain amount of oral aggression over the course of the day and we need to chew or crunch, and when people aren't doing that, there's this residual pressure in the evening to chew or crunch something. So if you add some crunch to your lunch, you have to have a decompression routine at night. You have to know when work stops and the day is ending and you're decompressing. Think about it like in the vampire movies. There's a very clear delineation.

Speaker 1: 24:15

I love vampire movies. Thanks for going there.

Speaker 2: 24:18

I love vampire movies. We actually made a list of 100 best vampire movies in the book. Yeah, it was the zombie vampire movie. So you have to have a clear delineation about when dinner's over, when does the decompression routine start, and that could be as simple as going dinner and done. Oh, I didn't finish the vampire analogy In the vampire movies.

Speaker 2: 24:39

You know when the sun goes down and you have to protect yourself from the vampires and these rituals that people go through. You got to protect yourself from your inner pig or pigula in the evening, from all the pig whispers, and it could be as simple as saying dinner and done, or going into another room and changing your clothes or taking your makeup off. Or I know a woman who goes kitchen's closed. She puts it which everybody always says kitchen's closed. There's got to be a delineation. And then you need some type of routine for decompressing and letting go of the day and if you put together that whole protocol it makes a dramatic difference in your ability to stick to a rule for the evening. So that's my quick take on nighttime overeating.

Speaker 1: 25:17

Thank you for this. I love Pegula so much Just the idea of that and that idea of the delineation. So I never mind sharing the things that I'm going through and how that can relate. I decided a few months ago that I was not going to eat breakfast because I'm doing the fast thing, but that is when this started. So you're connecting some big dots for me in terms of my own eating habits and what is likely happening there. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Jen, I once had a conversation I've supervised as many as 10 coaches at a time. I once had a conversation with all of them when we were at the height of seeing all these clients and I said have you ever helped anyone to stop overeating at night without getting them to eat breakfast? And they were all silent. Nobody could think of a single example where they helped them stop overeating at night without getting them to eat breakfast. So for you and your listeners, it's worth thinking about.

Speaker 2: 26:08

I also find, despite the medical benefits of fasting or intermittent fasting, my empirical experience has been that if people are struggling with binge eating that it's better to wait about six months to really get the binging out of your system and have regular meals three times a day, kind of like flood your body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit.

Speaker 2: 26:28

If you need to lose weight, that's better for overcoming the binging and then once you've really got the hang of that, then you can head back into fasting or the intermittent fasting.

Speaker 2: 26:37

But I have about half the success rate with people that are trying to fast out of the gate. Because, if you think about it, if we live in an environment where food is scarce, despite the medical benefits, despite the fact that we evolved like that. If your brain thinks it's in an environment where food is scarce, then it only makes sense that when it finally has calories that it wants to hoard them. And this is why people will say that it feels like someone put a gun to their head and said eat. And some people will say being too full is a trigger to eat more, which would make sense if we evolved in a scarce food environment where we had the risk of starving to death death because when you found food, you got as much as you can, even if you were full right. And so if you keep signaling your brain that food is regularly, reliably available, then it's much more likely to overcome the overeating.

Speaker 1: 27:25

This is so supportive. I mean, we all have to eat and we all. This is very I find it very rare that we naturally, in the environment that we have grown up in, with advertising and all of the food industry challenges that we have, that we have a healthy relationship with food without some effort. Unless you happened to grow up in a very food aware household, then we all grew up basically at the at the hands of advertising, and so this is all so helpful. I'm curious for you and this may or may not be your professional experience, might be more from your personal point of view is how is our relationship with food impacting our overall wellness and our overall ability to live the life that we really want to live?

Speaker 2: 28:15

Well, what happens when all food is a possibility at every time and you're living in an environment where there are chemicals in a lot of these packages that move your ability to know when you're hungry and full? What happens is a level of food obsession that makes it difficult to think about other things, and so what I try to teach people to do is come up with a set of rules that you love not overly restrictive, not things that make you feel like they're a bunch of Nazi food policemen following you around all day, but rules that you love, so that a lot of these decisions have been made for you. And then there is a comfort and a presence and an ability to be in the present moment, which is bliss, by the way. We live in the present moment and most people are not there, but there's an ability to be in the present moment when you can improve your relationship with food. That just isn't there otherwise.

Speaker 2: 29:13

Weird experience where I felt like everybody was smiling at me all the time, and then I realized they were always smiling at me all the time. I just wasn't there. I was too busy thinking about food and it was actually a little bit overwhelming at first. So that's kind of a big deal. And the other thing is that when people are overeating, you have no idea how much energy it takes to process that stuff and recover from it. In my reader surveys we found that most people were overeating several times a week and they reported not feeling back to normal for 24 hours later. So let's just say that's two days a week that you're losing of vibrant energy and ability to play with your kids or go hiking or go running around or just be the less cranky mother or father or entrepreneur that you want to be.

Speaker 2: 29:59

It's dramatic. I mean, we are what we eat. It's an essential thing that we do every day. It's one of the core decisions that we make every day and it's a big part of who you are, what you're processing in your body. So for me it's a dramatic difference. I'm not the same person as I was 20 years ago. I'm really not. Also, my forehead has become a five head and it's all gray now.

Speaker 1: 30:20

But you wear it all really well, so things change, but you get to wear it differently For entrepreneurs. A lot of listeners here are entrepreneurs or even people who work at home. I know my relationship with food changed when I suddenly was working at home and I wasn't on a regular schedule, because when I was working a corporate job, it was breakfast, was very. I went down with my coworkers to go get breakfast and then at lunch I went with my coworkers and I didn't have snacks in between because I didn't have snacks at my desk. I've got snacks. I got snacks on snacks, on snacks here at the house, and so do so many other people, and so there's this tendency for myself and likely a lot of other entrepreneurs, to either just continuously go grab snacks or forget to eat altogether. Do you have any tips? Is there something? Is it with the self-presence, what is supportive to people?

Speaker 2: 31:14

Well, food preparation makes a big difference. It's worth putting in an hour or two on Sundays to set yourself up for the week, or Sundays and Wednesdays to set yourself up for the week, so that and it's worth it putting some time and energy into thinking about what's going to be delicious and healthy for you.

Speaker 2: 31:32

You know it's a fallacy to think it's a false economy. It's a false economy to think that you're more productive when you're just grabbing and going all the time. You're actually more productive when you're well-nourished and you don't have to think about what you're going to eat all the time. So I tell people, for example, when they're on a trip, when they're on a business trip, that if you're spending thousands of dollars and you want to be productive, it's worth spending the time before you go to Google supermarket and then the zip code of where you're going to go and see what supermarkets they have and research the inventory that you want. And then get a little refrigerator in the hotel and stop at the supermarket before you go to the hotel so you're not tempted by the hotel mini bars, you're not tempted by the wings and everything else that's downstairs with your colleagues and then make a list of your trouble foods, your trigger foods or your trigger situations. So if you tend to overeat desserts when you're out to dinner with your colleagues, then ask yourself well, what would I be proud of? I've got this business trip coming up. What would I be proud of in terms of dessert at dinner? Would it be one dessert every other day. Would it be that it's okay if I have dessert, but not okay if I have chocolate? Would it be it's okay that I only have it once a week? Or maybe I don't want to have it at all. If I have chocolate, would it be it's okay that I only have it once a week? Or maybe I don't want to have it at all?

Speaker 2: 32:54

But step back and make those decisions beforehand, because you have to recognize that when you're with your colleagues, there's the social pressure and there's a lot of the fabric of society that's built into breaking bread or eating the same things together. It's a tremendous pressure and it goes a lot deeper than you think that it goes. I explain that if we had more time. But don't go into battle wearing a plastic helmet. Try to make your decisions beforehand. Before you go to the restaurant, look it up online, write down what you're going to have. Write down if they don't have this, then I'm going to have that. Write down a substitute, just in case. I once knew a food critic who had to go to three restaurants a day for 90 days, and three restaurants a day for 90 days, and her only rule was that she could eat whatever she wanted to, as long as she wrote it down beforehand and she'd log it all in my fitness pal and she didn't have to make any decisions in the restaurant itself.

Speaker 2: 33:39

You don't need willpower if you make your decisions beforehand. You don't have to make decisions by burning all your willpower if you make the decisions beforehand. So a big trick is to know what your trigger situations are and then make decisions before you go. It makes a big difference. Also, there are tricks for improving your productivity as an entrepreneur which don't necessarily have to do with food, but uses the same structure of mind and the same techniques to do that. Let's say you want to make your plan for the day before you get started with actual work, before you open your email or something like that, and let's say that you never open your email before you drink your cup of coffee. So you might make a rule that says I will never make my coffee before I wrote my plan for the day. You kind of link it to something that you're already going to do, no matter what, and you really want to do it Sprinkle stacking.

Speaker 1: 34:29

I call it sprinkle stacking, sprinkle stacking, going to do no matter what and you really want to do.

Speaker 2: 34:32

Sprinkle stacking.

Speaker 1: 34:29

I call it sprinkle stacking, sprinkle stacking, sprinkle stacking. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 34:33

And then you define your productivity pig as any voice that says that you should break that rule, and then you can start to refute that and you can use the breathing techniques and everything else that we talk about. So there are ways to use these techniques to improve your entrepreneurial productivity and that's part of why I've accomplished as much as I have over the years. Productivity.

Speaker 1: 34:52

And that's part of why I've accomplished as much as I have over the years. So rad, that rule of I love your rule I don't know if that's a rule that you do, but I never open my email until I drink my coffee that's a great rule, yeah, yeah, because it's like we all love to have the coffee, so it's like you can really anchor in on that. I also another thing that you shared that I just want to underline for everyone is what would I be proud of? Because there's so much shame around food and I think this question is so good for a number of situations in our lives, and to apply it to food is incredibly powerful. What decision would I be proud of? It's such a huge reframe that takes that shame away.

Speaker 2: 35:30

There's another way to work with shame, which is really important. Do I have another minute or two to talk?

Speaker 1: 35:34

You have another minute or two. If you've got something good to share, we want to hear it, okay.

Speaker 2: 35:38

Okay, think about an archer aiming at the bullseye. When they aim at the bullseye, they're actually committing with perfection. They're not thinking progress and perfection. They're actually committing with perfection. They want to become one with the bullseye before they lose the arrow. They're not thinking maybe I'll make it, maybe I won't. If they miss the bullseye which even Olympic archers do more than 50% of the time, they switch their mindset and they say well, by how much and in what direction did I miss, and what adjustments do I need to make? What they don't do is they don't say oh my God, I'm a pathetic loser of an archer. I might as well shoot the rest of the arrows up in the air, right when it comes to food, because there's pleasure involved, because there's a toxic pleasure involved, there's all this secondary motivation to not take that very practical human learning approach to things.

Speaker 2: 36:28

If you have a food bullseye and you aim at it and you miss it, and you take assessment and figure out what went wrong and you learn whatever you can from it, and you get up and you aim again, you're going to get better. We're learning organisms. We learn by practicing and assimilating. What happens, though, with food, is that our pigs want to flip the mindset. When you're aiming. They'll say don't aim for a perfect target, you can't be perfect, just progress, not perfection. What that actually means is I'm going to try for a little while until I don't feel like it anymore when it comes to regulating toxic pleasure. But then, when they miss the target, their pig will say see, you're not perfect, therefore you're nothing, therefore you might as well shoot the rest of the hours off. Or when it comes to food, you might as well just binge until tomorrow morning and then we'll start over again. So they're actually. I say that the energy of perfectionism should neither be ignored nor abused. You want to leverage it when you're aiming at the target, but you want to let it go when you've made a mistake. Commit with perfection, but forgive yourself with dignity.

Speaker 2: 37:25

The perseveration on guilt and shame is really because the reptilian brain is trying to make you feel too weak to resist more binging. So it's actually there's a secondary gain which gets the guilt stuck inside of you, and once you recognize that and you tell yourself, it's almost impossible to keep binging. If you refuse to yell at yourself, you'll find it hard to keep binging. So last thing about shame is that it's very common for people to say what's wrong with me? Why am I such a sicko that I can't stop eating?

Speaker 2: 37:58

Now, the questions that you ask determine the evidence that you collect. So if you say why can't I stop eating? What's wrong with me? Why can't I stop eating? You're telling your brain to look for evidence that there's something wrong with you and you can't stop eating. If you look hard enough, you're telling your brain to look for evidence that there's something wrong with you and you can't stop eating. If you look hard enough, you're going to find it and you're going to start to feel powerless and hopeless and helpless. You're going to say I'm broken, I'm sick. I can't stop eating. If you ask instead what can I improve? How could I do it differently, you're going to ask your brain to find evidence that there are things that you can improve and do differently. You'll develop a success identity, and so that's really critical. Are you going to adopt the lens of success or the lens of failure? And when you adopt the lens of success, shame starts to drop by the wayside.

Speaker 2: 38:47

And also we live in a perfect storm. First of all, there are no prisons for overeaters. You're not going to wake up in a cell with four gray walls and your new husband blah blah because you had too many donuts. It's just not going to happen, right? Overeaters tend to be nice people whose drug of choice is food rather than alcohol and drugs. We don't get behind the wheel of a car and mutilate people. We tend to take it out on ourselves. We tend to be nicer people who will feel depressed and despondent rather than taking it out on other people. And when you live in a world where tens of millions of dollars are spent, or hundreds of millions of dollars are spent, to overcome your reptilian brain, and there's all this advertising, research on plausible deniability, so that, gee, these avocado chips are good for you because they're made with avocado oil, right? Does anybody really think potato chips are good for you?

Speaker 1: 39:31

Air-fried potato chips. That for you, Air fried potato chips. That's the latest one I saw.

Speaker 2: 39:34

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah, there's a difference between something being less bad for you and something being good for you. And then we live in a world where everybody kind of tacitly agrees to slowly kill ourselves with food, while we laugh it off and say you know ho, ho, ha, ha, a little in moderation.

Speaker 2: 39:52

You know, like when you want to eat really healthy, people call you a health nut. Doug Graham says he's not a health nut, he's a health enthusiast, and I agree I'm a health enthusiast, I'm not a health nut and I'm done harming myself with food to make other people feel better, but anyway. So when you think about it, there was this movie called Network in the 70s where this advertiser said I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore to get everybody yelling it out their windows. I think we should turn shame into anger. I think that what the industry is doing is atrocious.

Speaker 2: 40:23

I think that 100% of the population has some problem with eating because of what's normalized in our culture and the type of eating and the fact that everybody jokes about getting cheesecake when your boyfriend breaks up with you, and I think that how could you not have a problem with food in our culture? You might have a good metabolism, you might have found some way to stay thin, but virtually everybody that I talk to there's not an interview that I've been on that someone doesn't say something like you did, jen, like I have this problem. Can you help me with this problem. It's 100% incidence.

Speaker 1: 40:58

I think it's wonderful that you're out here and talking about it and that you're angry about it. We have to get passionate about the things that we really care about, and it's obvious that a change needs to be made, and so thank you, thank you for coming and sharing also what you shared about shame. I know that people are going to go back and rewind and listen to that like six times, because I'm going to as well.

Speaker 2: 41:20

It really works. It really works too, when you understand it's a piercing insight. It really helps you.

Speaker 1: 41:24

Yes, incredibly. All of this so good. Thank you for coming on. There is one last question that I want to ask you. That will seem somewhat unrelated, but it's also so related. I ask everybody who comes on the podcast where do you see the magic in the world?

Speaker 2: 41:38

Where do I see the magic in the world? I see the magic when people adopt the principle of being the change that they want to see in the world. Like Gandhi said, rather than just getting angry. Rather than just getting angry I wrote a book about it I get up and I talk about it. I walk the walk. I live this every day. Even if I make a mistake, I get back up and do it again. I forgot the other person that had this quote. They said be the person that you needed when you were younger. So, instead of being angry and bitter, ask yourself what did I miss out on, what did I need, and how can I be that for other people? And that really heals you inside. It's a magical experience. So that's where I see the magic in the world when people are willing to be the change that they want to see and be the person that they needed when they were younger.

Speaker 2: 42:46

Something you just threaded through for me, dr Glenn, is that so often the magic that we see is the magic who people come on this podcast. It's the magic that they're being. I've never noticed that before until you just said it the way that you said it. It's so true. Thank you for person on an organized, passionate mission to change the world, because that's actually the only people who ever did.

Speaker 1: 42:58

Organized. That's a key word.

Speaker 2: 42:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 43:01

Thank you so much for coming on and sharing today and doing the work that you are doing. Where can people get your book? Where can they connect with you? Where are the best places? So I've got three free things for you.

Speaker 2: 43:12

If you'll go to defeatyourcravingscom, click the big blue button, the free reader bonus button and sign up for the free reader bonuses, you'll get a copy of the book in Kindle, nook or PDF form absolutely free. The electronic formats are free, generous, thank you. Thank you. If you would like the traditional formats, or Audible or paperback or hardcover, there's a traditional charge but it's absolutely free in the electronic formats. If you go to defeatyourcravingscom and click the big blue button, you can also get a set of food plan starter templates. So we've been at this a long time and we've seen people with a variety of dietary philosophies. This is a diet agnostic methodology means you can do it with any dietary philosophy which doesn't involve starving yourself. You've got to be able to get enough nutrition or this doesn't work. So we created potential food rules for people who were trying to eat low-carb or high-carb or plant-based or carnivore or point counting or calorie counting or just about anything you could think about. It's all at the futurecravingscom.

Speaker 2: 44:13

And the last thing is I know this sounds a little weird and almost cold in the abstract, like people are thinking why in the world does Jen have this? Dr Arno has a pig inside of him. It's really not a cold process. It's a life-giving, compassionate process which takes people from feeling despairing and hopeless and confused to feeling confident and hopeful and enthusiastic in just one session most of the time, and I recorded a whole bunch of those sessions so you could hear it. You'll get that also. It's all free. At thefuturecravingscom, if you need coaching, if you need other services, we periodically open our enrollments and we have a couple of coaches on board, including me, but those have a charge for them and they'll find out about them too, guess where. At defeatyourcravingscom, click the big blue button.

Speaker 1: 45:00

We love easy.

Speaker 1: 45:02

The easy button at defeatyourcravingscom. Thank you so much for coming on, dr Glenn. We really appreciate you. Thanks, it was great to be here. I appreciate you like smacking my forehead saying why is this something that we have never talked about on this podcast? So thank you for Dr Glenn, for coming on and talking about this and if there's any tethers, anything that you're going through in your life that you would love to hear talked about on this podcast that you're like I really you know what is really really something I'm struggling with, you can email me anytime at hello at genliscom and let me know If there's somebody who you're like I would love to hear from this person. Or on this topic. I'm so down to dive into any corners and you might have noticed in this season I've gone down a lot of different avenues with a lot of different kinds of people really expanding, because there's so many different people in this world who have been through all these experiences and there's so many different people in this world who have been through all these experiences and there's so much for us to explore here. So let me know if there's anybody who you would love to hear from I'm so down to go down those avenues in the second part of this year.

Speaker 1: 46:25

You can find all of the links to Dr Glenn's offerings. Of course, it's that one link that he shared defeatyourcravingscom. You can find that link in the show notes. Go and connect with him, follow him. I know that you're going to want to learn more about his research. Thanks again, so much for listening. Stay tuned for Thursday, where I'm going to pull a little thread out of this episode and we'll dive a little bit deeper. So stay tuned for Thursday and I will see you then. Until then, you just keep shining your magical unicorn light out there for all to see. I'll see you next time. Bye, thank you.