Turo Virta: 1:08

Welcome back to the Fit Me Turo Fitness podcast. Most people know what they should eat. They know vegetables are healthy. They know protein matters. They know eating an entire pack of cookies probably isn't helping their goals. And yet, knowing what to do doesn't always stop us from doing the opposite. So why can cravings feel so powerful? Why can someone be disciplined in almost every area of life and still feel completely out of control around certain foods? And what you should do after overeating, so one mistake doesn't turn into an entire weekend, week, or even month. My guest today is Dr. Glen Livingston, a psychologist, author, and expert in cravings and overeating. Glenn spent years researching pinch eating and overeating through both clinical practice and a large self-funded study, and his work focuses on helping people understand why willpower alone often isn't enough. Today we are going to talk about the psychology behind cravings, why diets fail even for disciplined people, and how to recover after overeating without guilt when moderation works and when abstinence may work better. And what people misunderstand about pinch eating and food addiction. Glenn, welcome to the podcast. Would you mind? I thought a little bit, but could you just share first some just some normal, like who you are, where you are living, what else you are doing?

Unknown: 2:44

Sure. Well, I am a 62-year-old single psychologist living on the beach in Florida, and I'm also a former binge eater who used to be about 300 pounds. I hover around 220 to 225 these days, and I'm also a former consultant to the big food industry. I consulted for Fortune 100 companies on the wrong side of the war. I was doing the wrong thing in my 20s and 30s, helping to sell sugar, and also big pharma and things like that. But mostly big food. And long story short, I I thought it must be a depth psychological problem. I thought there was something wrong with me, like I must have a hole in my heart, metaphorical hole in my heart. And I thought if I could fill that, that maybe I'd stop filling the hole in my

Turo Virta: 3:37

stomach.

Unknown: 3:38

And so, coming from a family of 17 psychotherapists, I went that route, and I saw the best psychologists and psychiatrists, and I took medication. I went over it as anonymous. I had a spiritual awakening. I did all of these, you know, confessions and different types of therapy, and every time I'd get like a little thinner, a lot fatter, a little thinner, a lot fatter, a little thinner, a lot fatter. Somewhere around oh 2004 or 2005, when I when I turned 40, I realized that I might be going about it entirely the wrong way. I said I said to myself, "Well, okay, what's happening in these big food companies is they're engineering these hyper palatable concentrations of starch and sugar and excitotoxins and you know fat and salt and it's all designed to hit the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you the nutrition to feel satisfied, and the result of that is we bury our heads in these bags and boxes and containers and you know these men in white suits with mustaches laugh all the way to the bank. I'm only half kidding, but they're targeting the reptilian brain, and the reason that was important was that, like, think of this as the brainstem, the reptilian brain. It doesn't really know love. Love is not really that important to the reptilian brain. What's important is survival. Eat, meat, or kill. It's like a bad college drinking game. Love comes into play in the mammalian brain, which either evolved or God put it there. But it's it's on top of the reptilian brain, and it has the ability to inhibit the reptilian brain, but only if there's no perceived emergency. And it and it says before you eat, mater, kill that thing, what impact does that have on your tribe, on your family, on the people that you love? And then it's your neocortex on top of all that that says, wait a minute, before you eat, mater, kill that thing, what impact does that have on your long-term goals? But this thing here is very primitive. It doesn't know love. So I'm spending 20 years trying to solve my eating problem in the mammalian brain and the in the neocortex when the real problem was probably down

Turo Virta: 5:56

here. It's

Unknown: 5:56

probably down here, and I came up with this really weird method, and I wasn't going to teach it. And people will have heard my credentials. By this point, so I'm sure that you know I'm a sophisticated psychologist, and I've been on all these TV and radio and newspapers, and you know I've done all kinds of things. But this was the one thing that I couldn't solve. This is the one thing I couldn't solve, and the first thing that gave me a little bit of a breakthrough was very embarrassing. I decided I had an inner pig inside of me. I said I have to know when this thing is awake. I'm going to call this thing my inner pig, and I'm going to draw a really clear line in the sand. Like I'm not going to have chocolate on a weekday again. I'll tell you why I decided a clear line in the sand was necessary. And that way, if I was at a you know coffee shop, and there's a chocolate bar on the counter, and I hear this little voice in my head that said, "You know what, Glenn? A little's not going to hurt. You worked out hard enough. You're not going to gain any weight. I know it's Wednesday, but start your silly rule again tomorrow. It'll be just as easy. Yippee! Let's have some chocolate now. I would say, wait a minute! This thing is waking up because I I made a rule when I was of sound mind and body, and I had the you know fortitude and intellectual presence of mind to to say I know what's good for me. I'm not going to have chocolate during the week, so this is obviously my pig squealing for slop. This

Turo Virta: 7:24

is

Unknown: 7:24

totally private. I was not going to teach this. And don't worry, you don't have to call it a pig. You can call it your food muscle. You can call it whatever you want to. But I would say my pig is squealing for slop. Chocolate is pig slop on a Wednesday. I don't need pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. And what happened was not a miracle, but it gave me those extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to start to deautomate the process, and sometimes I could make a better decision. I could breathe for a second and make a better decision. I eventually was able to pull that space apart a little further and have longer to make a decision. And when I did, I would ask myself what was wrong with what the pig was saying. I said the pig is lying to me because this never works. So it's never just a little. I never do wind up starting tomorrow. And then I learned that, according to the principles of neuroplasticity, what wires together, what fires together, wires together. So if you have a craving and you say,"I'll just start tomorrow, and you indulge the craving. You're going to reinforce the craving and reinforce the thought that you'll start tomorrow. You'll have a deeper craving tomorrow. You'll be more likely to say,"I'll start tomorrow, tomorrow. So you can only ever use the present moment to be healthy. I'm wrapping this all up in a tight little package. Something that took me 10 years to figure out. You can only ever use the present moment to be healthy, and if you're in a hole, you better stop digging. And I would fix my thinking, and that's that's largely how I got better. It took me a couple of years. It doesn't take years anymore because we learned a lot about it in the meantime. But yeah, so that's that's basically who I am, and there are a lot of things that have happened since then. But yeah, why?

Turo Virta: 9:07

Of course, I I bet you are you are very disciplined at work. Most likely exercise also regularly, and those people who are exercising regularly, disciplined at work, high achievers. Why can someone like that still lose control around food, in your opinion?

Unknown: 9:30

Well, there's a perfect storm of conditions that that facilitate that. What one is the big food industry, like we talked about? You know, there there are chemicals in these packaged goods, which often interfere with your ability to know when you're full, and to know when you're hungry. So everybody says, "Well, just eat mindfully. You know, eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. But what if there's something biochemically that's stopping you from knowing when you're really full, or stopping you from knowing when you're really hungry? That's one thing. The second thing is that we think incorrectly about cravings in our culture. We think that it's a sign of illness or disease. When, if you think about it, 100,000 years ago on the savanna, the people who had the strongest cravings were the ones that survived, because you had to be motivated to go find food. And so, what's happening today is that those strong motivations, those ancestral gifts that we have, are being taken advantage of by industry with the advertising and the packagings and these, you know, incredibly hyper palatable foods, and they're pushing those buttons. And believe me, they know what those buttons are. Believe me, there are 10s of millions of dollars of research. You know, for for example, let's take. I'm not going to name a brand because I don't want to get sued, but let's take meal replacement bars. I and or or replacement candy bars like low carb replacing. Candy bars or things like that. I remember a company executive coming to me and saying, "You know, Glenn, the most profitable thing that we did was to remove the vitamins from the bar and put the money into the packaging instead. We'd make it multicolored and vibrant and diverse and shiny. And I thought to myself to myself, "Well, what's happening there in nature, if you came to a multicolored field of fruits and vegetables, and you made sure that you ate a variety of different colors, this is why they tell you to eat the rainbow. You would get a variety of micronutrients, and you'd be more likely to survive. And so, we're very hardwired to appreciate color in that way. Color equals nutrition. That's what that's what our brains think. Well, in this case, it's almost predatory because they lower the nutrition and increase the color, so they're they're kind of faking you out, and as a result, your reptilian brain jumps at it almost automatically, and you get hooked because you don't have the actual nutrition to feel satisfied, so you have that replacement bar, and you're still hungry. This is why, on a practical basis, by the way, when people are eating meal replacements three times a day, I find that they eventually binge because I think there must be something missing, you know, that you can't replicate from from nature. So there's that. There's the problem that people believe that they shouldn't make very clear targets. You know, there's a whole philosophy of overcoming overeating that says there are no good foods or bad foods, and you have to allow all foods. And rules are bad. Rules make you feel rebellious, and the moment you make a rule, you're going to want to break

Turo Virta: 12:49

it.

Unknown: 12:50

Now, here's the problem with that. Let's say you try to go along and say, "I'm just going to eat when I'm hungry and full, and stop when I'm full, and I'm going to try to eat healthy 90% of the time and indulge myself 10% of the time. Well, nobody tells you how to discern which is the 10% and which is the 90% As a consequence, you're up against constant food decisions, and willpower is not a genetic gift. It's not a God-given trait. It's something we all wake up with with a certain amount in the morning, and we wear it out by making decisions over the course of the day, even non-food decisions. By the way, people have trouble resisting marshmallows if they if they do math problems beforehand. And so, one of the first things I unwittingly discovered was that if I say I'll never have chocolate on a weekday again, only two ounces on the weekend after a workout, I what I actually did was I made all my food, my chocolate decisions for the week, so I eliminated the need to rely upon willpower all week long, because those decisions were made for me. Rules make decisions for you. Rules also paint a very clear bullseye. Think about think about the natural learning mechanisms of human beings, we all learn by trial and error. There are very few things that we're capable of learning in a single trial. It all require requires trial and error, and the more feedback we get from the errors, the more likely we are to learn. Now, if you can't draw a very clear line about what you're aiming for, then how do you know when you miss the bullseye? By how much did you miss, and in what direction? And how do you know what adjustments to make? And so people are playing blind archery; they're just kind of sort of aiming in that direction, and they feel like it's dangerous to draw clear lines. But without the clear lines, you've removed the feedback mechanism that allows you to develop your eating in the first place. So you know there there is that. There is the idea that you should be frightened of the rule because it makes you feel rebellious. But what I tell people is that you want to make only about the most difficult food decisions you have to make only about the dangerous, you know, foods that you you struggle with. You want to make intellectual decisions. You want to think with your head about what you're going to do in those areas, and so you want to be able to sever the link between emotion and overeating. You don't necessarily you don't have to solve the emotions to do this. You you want to be able to say, well, I'm capable of feeling very anxious without overeating. I'm capable of feeling very depressed without overeating. I'm capable of feeling very tired without overreading, and I'm capable of feeling rebellious without overreading. I don't have to reify that inner rebel inside of me. It's just another feeling. I decide, I decide my major eating routines with my head, not with my feelings. I'll pause there. I'm talking up a storm, and it looks like you're deep in thought.

Turo Virta: 15:59

It's it's all good. This is I'm I'm at least I'm so excited to learn and listen what you. Have to say, because what I what I wanted to talk a little bit about cravings and ask you like that, what is actually happening phyologically when a craving hits? Like you,

Unknown: 16:17

well, I mean neurologically, there's generally a hit of dopamine. Your your dopamine, sometimes your serotonin, it's raised to a higher level, which feels really, really good, and if you, the the craving is usually a response to a food stimulus. The stimulus can be something external, like the ice cream store on the beach in a hot summer's day, or the bakery that you pass in the smell of the brownies, fresh bake coming out of the oven, or it could be an internal feeling, or it could be a memory. But there's something that stimulates the desire to go get food, and

Turo Virta: 16:57

it,

Unknown: 16:58

in the past, it was a signal about the availability of scarce resources. So our brains developed this mechanism to compel us to go chase it. For example, I'll go back 100,000 years again. Let's say there's a caveman. Let's call him T H A G Thag because I like the name. And let's let's say Thag sees a monkey, and he happens to follow the monkey to a banana tree. So Thag goes bananas and eats lots of bananas, and his brain goes monkeys equal bananas, right? And you should be thinking, you know, you pass the donuts for a sign on the way driving home, and you go mmm donuts, and you drive into the back, and you give the lady the money, and you, you know, order your donuts, eat them in the in the parking lot. Your fag's brain learned to crave bananas when it saw the food stimulus of a monkey, and when he gets there, he gorges himself. He has her survival advantage. He brings back some for his family. So now his brain says, next time I see a monkey, I'm going to start Thag feeling really good, thinking about you know eating bananas, and if he doesn't go chase the monkey to the banana tree, I'm going to make him feel really bad. I'm going to drop his dopamine, mean below normal levels, and he's going to feel really cranky and irritable and and mildly tortured. That this is why people have trouble. What people don't realize is that you can extinguish these connections. There's a lot of literature. Look up extinction and the and extinction curves in the behavioral literature. You'll find it. But in essence, most people mistakenly think that if they have a donut store habit, to stay with the same example, and they just drive past the store and they tough out the cravings, that day by day the cravings are going to get better, right? Just in a very straight line, kind of looks like a mountain going downhill. But that's not how it works. What happens is the brain has a little bit of a honeymoon period, and then it spikes the cravings like crazy, like worse than you've ever had before, and then it starts to go down if you don't give in, and then it spikes it a little bit around the 21 to 30-day mark, and then it will label those cravings as dormant in response to that food stimulus. So if I stop going into the donut store when I pass the donut store sign day after day on my way home, after four or five days, I'm going to get this insane craving. What most people do wrong at that point is they say, "Oh my God, this is going to last forever. I'm just going to give in. Why is that bad? It's particularly bad because what's actually going on with this extinction burst? That's that's the that's the spike you feel. This is why people have trouble giving up their cravings. What's actually going on is the brain is saying, no, you have to keep following the monkeys because I'm not ready to give up monkeys as a signal that helps me to find food. 100,000 years ago, food was scarce, and if Thag followed a monkey to a tree day after day, it was working. And then one day there was no, there were no bananas. His brain would not give up at that point. His brain would double down because as the season wears on, there might be more monkeys that found the tree. There might be that it's just not as many ripe bananas are on the tree, and Thag's brain knows that, and he says,"Well, look, having a monkey that leads you to a food source half the time is much better than no monkey at all. Because remember, food was scarce back then. As a matter of fact, having a monkey that leads you to a food source 20% of the time, is better than having no monkey at all. Let's see if this reinforcer, if this food, has become intermittently available at random. So let's push really, really hard and make Thad go chase this monkey, even though we didn't get the bananas last time. And so. So this is the same phenomenon that gets the little ladies to keep pulling the the slot machines at the casino because they don't know when it's going to pay off, so they have to be there. They have to do the work. So your original question is: What's actually happening when the cravings going on? Is your brain is testing to see what if if the signal is still a reliable signal for the food source that you taught it it what it to have? The problem in the modern environment is that it's not really always a food source. I mean, there's cardboard in the food system. There are all these flavor enhancers in the food system. There's not enough nutrition in the food system, and so that you know compounds the problem. But if you just know, like, don't don't give in to this because if you give in to the craving, you told the brain that it was right, that binging was keeping you alive, that you were right to generate this horrible craving. So the next time it's going to be even worse. And then when you get down towards the bottom, don't get cocky. When it starts to seem like you're not craving at all anymore, don't say, "Oh, I've got this. I can just have donuts whenever I want to, because you're going to you're going to struggle with that. So that's a big part of what's going on and why people get confused about how to over overcome it.

Turo Virta: 22:25

And what is then like? What if somebody like let's say that I walk now I pass at the donut store and that craving hits, what would you do? Would would it be just to tell that I just don't have it, or or what what somebody would do in that moment?

Unknown: 22:43

Several things, several things. So first of all, I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't have donuts. If you you you first have to start with the idea of what's the goal behavior. It's a goal to have it once a week on Saturdays. It'll not have any donuts at all. So when I coach people, I ask them,"Well, what role would you like donuts to play in your life? Not what, not necessarily what your doctor says, although you should consider their input. Not what Doctor Glenn says. What role would you like to play donuts to play in your life? So let's say you say I only want to have two donuts on Saturday mornings, and otherwise I just want to be able to resist the cravings. Your brain can learn to do that. Most people's brains can learn to do that. If you if you've dug a really deep groove, then sometimes you know one is not enough, and you you go crazy. But most people can learn to do that. So make yourself a rule. Write it down. Read it out loud every day. I only ever eat donuts on Saturdays, and no more than two. That way, you know if you have a craving or a thought that suggests you should get a donut other than on a Saturday, that that's your inner food monster. That's not you. So the first thing is to set those. It's almost like a tripwire to set an alarm, because if you don't know what cravings are in support of your goals and what cravings are not. You won't be able to make decisions about those. That's the first thing. The second thing is when you have the craving, say, "Okay, my food mustard awake. Let me calm my brain down. It turns out that this thing takes over and it pushes your rational brain out of the way when it perceives an emergency. Perceives is the key word, and when it thinks there are key resources available that will keep you alive. That's what's going on, and why it feels like everything else goes out the window. It pushes your rational brain out of the way, so you're going to have to learn how to keep yourself calm at those moments. So the moment it starts to get excited and wakes up, you want to breathe in for a count of seven, and breathe out for a count of 11. I'm not doing it now because it takes a lot of time, but you want it to take some time. Breathe in for a count of seven, out for a count of 11. Maybe do that two or three times if you need to. That has the capacity to take you out of your reptilian brain, the emergency response system, and put you back up here. Why is that? Well, this system, the emergency response system-it's called the sympathetic nervous system-and it's designed to rev up your breathing and your heart rate and your galvanic skin response and get you to get into action. It takes hold when there's a hungry bear chasing you or a hungry tiger chasing you, and you have to go get into action quickly. There's no time to rest and digest and think and strategize and coordinate your actions towards your goals. If you breathe in for a count of seven and out for a count of 11, you're telling your brain there's no hungry bear chasing me right now. I have time to do this, and it's called parasympathetic breathing in the literature, and it gets you back into your rational brain. It shows your emergency response system that it was a false alarm, and that it's time to do this. At that point, I like to ask myself, what is my pig saying, or my food monster saying, and why is it wrong? So maybe it says, "Oh come on, your parents were fat. You're doomed. You might as well just enjoy yourself. And then I'll take another breath and I'll say,"Well, wait a minute. Yes, my parents were fat, but just a little less than half of the variance in obesity is determined by genetics, diet, lifestyle are actually a little more important. And so, you know, if my parents were fat, then I've got a slightly higher mountain to climb. But that doesn't mean I should just lay down and roll all the way down the mountain. Let me get to climbing it step by step. I'm going to have to work harder at this than most people, but I'm not going to just give in, and it's entirely possible to be thin. I mean, I'm living proof of that. So that's called a rational refutation, and that's how I got better. I kept a journal of those type of things for eight years, and that's why I'm pretty facile with all the things that your food master could say. However, so you know, I published my book, 2 million copies in distribution, and I wind up with 1000s of clients over the course of 10 years. Those 1000s of clients, we largely focused on the rational refutations, fixing their thinking, taking away their excuses, and it worked really well for a couple of months. But not everybody would maintain it, which was puzzling to me. And when I asked them what was happening, they would say, they would say, "Well, Doc, you took away all my excuses. I don't have any excuses anymore. I feel awful, but I just really want to. I say, "Oh well, what the hell? Screw it, just do it. And I say, well, what causes that? And it turns out that what causes that is what we would call organismic distress, colloquially stress. So if you don't have enough nutrition, you're more likely to say, screw it, just do it. If you don't get enough sleep, if you feel too isolated, if you're not drinking enough water, if you have to make too many decisions over the course of the day, so we started helping people, especially when they were planning to extinguish a craving, when they decided they wanted to go through an extinction curve, like I don't want to stop at the donut store anymore. What once you do that, if you pay as much attention as possible to minimizing the rest of the stress in your life for those 30 to 45 days, this is for daily habits. It's much easier. So if you drink a little more water, get a little more sleep, pay really careful attention to the rest of your nutrition, I'm not a big fan of intermittent fasting while you're trying to extinguish things later on. Maybe, but you're trying to extinguish a really bad habit. I'm not a fan of that because your body can think it's too long to the next meal, and then this thing is more likely to to take over. So ask people to wait about six months before they go back to that. But so if you take care of all those things, you look for alternative sources of dopamine. You know, like sunlight or hugs or puppies or pictures of your kids when they were little or your favorite music or just a little time outside or yoga, And you pay attention to flooding your body with enough dopamine from non-food sources. So if you do all those things, then the cravings are not nearly as difficult, and they're certainly not as difficult to resist. So

Turo Virta: 30:03

awesome. And then, like one thing, like what is it? Like then those cravings, you know, they hit, and as many of us or all of us, I would say that at some point you give into it. And pattern, what I see consistently is that people say that I already messed up, so today is ruined. So why does one mistake so easily become like kind of the whole day is ruined.

Unknown: 30:32

Well, because remember, food was scarcely available a long time ago. A lot of a lot of a lot of these mysteries get cleared up when you think about the situation we evolved in, and food was very scarcely available. So when you found it, you had to eat a lot of it, right? You kind of had to to hoard it, and so what most people do is they they they follow the poet Henry Long Henry Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said he talked about a little girl and when. She was good. She was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid, and that's how most people eat. They they go through these periods where they're being really, really, really good, and then they're like, "Oh my God, I can't take it anymore. And if you think about it, what you're doing is you're signaling your brain that you live in a scarce food environment because you're not eating enough to really meet your nutritional needs. You're trying to maintain a deficit and trim down and everything, and then all of a sudden this food is available, and your brain says, "Oh, we better hoard it. So if you instead adopt a philosophy of flooding your body with nutrition on a regular basis at a slight deficit, if you want to lose weight, then that's much less likely to happen. The other thing is that people don't recognize that the way you talk to yourself after a mistake is critical, and most people become very self-critical after mistake. What's wrong with me? I'm a pathetic overeater. I'm never going to get this. What's really interesting is people don't do that with other forms of pain and mistakes. If if you touch a hot stove by accident, you go you don't go oh my goodness I'm a pathetic hot stove toucher I might as well put my whole hand down on the on the stove, right? That's that's just not even a second thought. What you do is you say you turn the guilt into responsibility and say, "Ouch! That hurt! How did I manage to miss the stove? How am I going to avoid doing in the future? What concrete systems do I need to put into place? Turn guilt into responsibility, and then let it go. It's much easier to let go. Your inner pig would much rather that you chastised yourself and and made yourself feel too weak to resist the next binge. It's all part of the screw and just do it. The whole day is ruined philosophy. So those are some of the reasons that that happens and how to fix that. You you want to commit with perfection. Like when you're when you're aiming at the bullseye, talk to an Olympic archer and they'll tell you that they can see the arrow going into the bullseye before they let go of it. But if they miss the bullseye, the best the best archers don't chastise themselves. They they they forgive themselves with dignity, and then they turn guilt into responsibility and say, "What adjustments do I need to make? And where's the feedback that's going to help me make that. So commit with perfection, forgive yourself with dignity, and you'll find things go much better.

Turo Virta: 33:34

Oh, that was awesome! Then what about dieting and restriction? Like, of course, like so many diets work temporarily, and but fail in the long term. When does restriction help, and when does it make things worse?

Unknown: 33:53

You know, on a practical basis, I find people are about twice as likely to binge if they're losing more than a pound a week, and so that that's about what I aim for. I'm not a medical doctor, and sometimes people's medical doctors tell them they have to lose it quicker, so I can't can't override that. But you know, like I've seen and tracked 2000 overeaters, and I you know I can tell you the two biggest practical things are one is if they try to lose weight too quickly, they're more likely to binge, about twice as likely to binge, and two is that the less processed food that you have, the easier it is to overcome your cravings. Every my program is diet agnostic, so I'll work with people whether they're you know ketogenic or low carb or high carb or vegetarian or microbiotic, whatever it is, when counting calorie counting. But the one thing I find we just don't succeed with is if people want to eat like a seven-year-old. You know, if you want to have marshmallows for lunch and cookies for dinner, I probably won't be able to help you because you're destabilizing your blood sugar. You're ingesting these chemicals that make it hard for you to regulate yourself. And could you have some marshmallows and cookies? Probably, could you make that 50% of your diet? Probably not.

Turo Virta: 35:14

Yeah, then one thing I wanted to ask is about because obviously we were talking about overeating, but you also help a lot of people with binge eating. When does overeating cross into binge eating?

Unknown: 35:32

Well, I actually think that's that question. I'd rather people ask a different question. I get asked that question every time, by the way. Everybody wants to know, and you can look up the definition of binge eating. It has to do with how often you do it, and how much you hate yourself, and whether you've lost your perception of self-control. Those, those are the main characteristics of binge eating. You search for DSM five binge eating diagnosis. You can do that. I once read an article for Psychology Today that said, "Look, this is an article that I wrote because." People were asking me that question all the time. I said, depending upon what study you read, between 2% and 4% of the population has binge eating disorder. But the question, do I have binge eating disorder or not, is really a question from your food monster. It's saying, how much more can we get away with before they say I'm too sick, right? How much? How much more can we get away with before I'm really in trouble? And I think that's a silly question to ask. I think a better question is, how can I eat more within my own best judgment? Nobody's going to tell me what to eat. I'm going to design my own my own food system. I'm going to protect myself from the things that get me in trouble, you know the things that get you in trouble are the things you have to recover from tremendously. Where you're sweating and bloated and sitting on the couch for six hours because you have to digest, you know, three bags of potato chips and a whole pizza. How do you eat more within your own best judgment, regardless of whether you're diagnosed of binge eating disorder, or bulimia, or anorexia-all of which can be dangerous, by the way-and I can't promise to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease, disorder, or condition. But regardless of what the diagnosis is, and you can go over that with a licensed psychologist and or psychiatrist and get medication for it and get appropriate treatment. But regardless of what that is, don't. What should I do to get more control? Because being the master of your own fate with food is what it's all about. And if you have the ability to eat within your own best judgment, then you can adjust the the goal, you know, to achieve what you want to achieve, whether that's a you know lower BMI or you know lower percent body fat or you know a little bit of weight loss, a little bit of weight gain, you can make those adjustments. But if you're not able to follow through with the plans that you set for yourself, then why do you care whether you're eating disordered or or not, you you you really require more judgment. So that's that's the situation I try to remedy. I try to give people more control over what they eat according to their own best judgment.

Turo Virta: 38:21

Yeah, no, that's that's amazing advice. So time is flying up. Last question. So, if what someone should do if someone have been struggling for a long time, and where to get started, what you would do tonight, or that you would do things differently tomorrow?

Unknown: 38:46

I would ask people to come up with one simple rule: set the bar low to start with, unless there's a medical emergency. Set the bar low. Here's what I mean by that: most people want to start a whole new diet tomorrow and radically change what they're eating so they can be thin as quick as possible. It almost never works,

Turo Virta: 39:07

yeah.

Unknown: 39:08

Because you read the book, you get the coaching session, you, you know, make the plans on Sunday while you're off for the week, and then, you know, on Wednesday you wake up without your mojo, and you just don't have the motivation to keep going. It's too high a bar. But if you ask yourself, what could and would I do? What's one simple rule that I could and would follow that would not feel too onerous, but it would give me a clear signal that I can do this and things are going in the right direction? It could be something like I always put my fork down between bites, or I knew this truck driver who said,"Look, I have to eat fast food three times a day. I'm not going to stop doing that, but I'll tell you what. I won't go back for seconds. That guy eventually lost 150 pounds because because

here's what happens: 39:54

you make one simple rule, something you could and would do, and then you can and do do that day after day. And a few weeks later, you start to think, you know what? Maybe I'm the kind of person who actually cares about himself and can do these kind of things. I thought it was hopeless. I thought I was pathetic. I thought I was, you know, this is just how things were. But maybe I actually can do these things. I wonder what else a person who cares about their health and can make changes would do. Maybe I'll walk around my truck three times before I go in for the morning. Maybe I'll make sure to get a half hour of fresh air and meditation every day. Like, what's what's something else like? And and you start to build onto it, and it changes your identity. So it's it's less of a white knuckling, you know, watching out for the Nazi food police, and it's it's more of a, you know, I've just become the kind of person who does X, Y, Z. Become the kind of person who doesn't eat chocolate during the week. I've become the kind of person who puts his food down between bites, or takes a deep breath before meals, or you know, doesn't have pretzels except for Major League Baseball parks, or those kind of things. So, you you want to take advantage of. That identity function by starting with small low bars that you do consistently, and then build from there.

Turo Virta: 41:12

Yeah,

Unknown: 41:13

and obviously we specialize in helping people to figure that out.

Turo Virta: 41:16

No, that's so good. Like I, I can't say how many people like usually it's same situation with me when people are reaching out. They want to start like they have in perfect amount of workouts or what they all like. Because knowledge is not a problem. You all know all those 20 things, but if you try to do even 15 of them, it's for most people they start way too little. Like as you said, the first thing is to learn to keep promises, what you make to yourself, and usually they are a lot smaller than most people think. That starting like really low, you build that identity that you know you are a person who is able to do things that you promise to yourself. That's I loved it. Thank you so much for telling that. So where can listeners learn more about your work and your book.

Unknown: 42:10

I'd like to give you a free copy of the book in Kindle Nook or PDF format. If you go to defeatyourcravings.com, defeatourcravings.com, click on the big blue button for the free reader bonuses, and you'll get a free copy of the book in electronic format. We also have traditional formats if you wanted to buy one of those, but it's free in Kindle, Nook, or PDF. We have a set of food plan starter templates, so you can see some example rules that support different dietary

philosophies: 42:42

low carb, high carb, whatever it is, point counting, calorie counting, and then I recorded a whole bunch of coaching sessions. This is also free. The reason I did that is that I know there's an awful lot of material here. And frankly, you might be wondering why does Turo have this doctor who has a pig inside of him? Isn't that a little crazy? And I promise you, it's not crazy. It wants you to hear what a compassionate process it is, and how it takes people from feeling hopeless and desperate and confused to feeling optimistic and enthusiastic and like things are possible. So, defeatyourcravings.com. Click the big blue button.

Turo Virta: 43:21

Thank you so much, Glenn. I will put all the links into the show notes, so check them out there. I really, really enjoyed learning from you. So thank you so much for joining. Thanks

Unknown: 43:30

for having me. Thanks for having me.

Turo Virta: 43:33

And talk to you in the next episode.

Unknown: 43:36

Okay.