Georgie Fear: Welcome back to the Breaking Up with Binge Eating podcast. As always, I'm your host, Georgie Fear. And today I actually have with me a special guest. Now, a lot of podcasts that's not unusual, but on mine, that is pretty darn unusual because usually you're just hearing me and sometimes one of my colleagues here at Confident Eaters making the content. And it's not because I have not had requests. I receive emails probably three to five a week from people that want to be on my show, that want to take advantage of the listenership that I have, that want to usually sell their thing. But I'm very protective of my audience. don't want people coming on to say things that I don't believe are in my listeners best interest. Um, and so yes, I'm very protective of you guys. Uh, but I received a request from somebody who asked me if I would be interested in having Doctor Glenn Livingston on my show. And I was like, well, that gives me pause because I know his stuff and I know his stuff's really good. So I decided to pivot on my no guest policy And I would like to introduce Doctor Glenn Livingston to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

00:01:33 Speaker 1: Thanks. I hope you'll call me Glenn. And um, that's got to be the best introduction I ever had. So I want you to follow me around and introduce me at parties and stuff.

00:01:41 Georgie Fear: Well, I'll be like your hype man. We can get a soundtrack and. Yes, please, it'll be great, but I do. I really, really appreciate people that are doing good work. And I sound cynical when I say I don't think there's a lot of them in this space, but I just, I think there's a lot of places where people who are intending to do good actually do harm. And so, uh, yeah. So you have a background in psychology or a licensed psychologist, is that right?

00:02:05 Speaker 1: I am, yeah, in New York and Florida, I'm licensed. Yeah.

00:02:07 Georgie Fear: And I think that probably the training for that goes a long way toward not doing things that will harm people.

00:02:15 Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we don't take the Hippocratic oath, but definitely first do no harm. Definitely.

00:02:20 Georgie Fear: Yeah. And, and most people who listen to my show, they've struggled with binge eating or emotional eating or compulsive overeating or whatever we want to call it for a long time. And some of the help that they have sought has actually harmed them. Sometimes it's doctors that just are trying to put them on a weight loss program because they all they see is a weight problem. Um, and I also think your lived experience, you know, the things that you have shared publicly about what you've gone through that have helped educate you in finding what worked for you and seeing how that helped other people is really pertinent. So can you just for anybody that's not familiar with you, uh, tell people a little bit of your background and how you came to where you are now in your expertise?

00:03:01 Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Yeah. So, um, I'm not just a doctor that wanted to work with overeaters. I used to be almost three hundred pounds. And, you know, if you got to the Woodbury Country Deli after me, there were probably out of pizza and pop tarts and muffins. I mean, I'm six four. You can't tell on the on the video, but I'm six four. I'm broad shouldered. I'm not trying to brag. I'm just saying that if I worked out a couple of hours a day, I could eat whatever I wanted to when I was a kid. I mean, five six thousand calories a day was no problem. You know, multiple pizzas, boxes of muffins. And I thought it was great. I thought it was the best thing ever. I didn't think it was a problem until I got a little older. And I was twenty two, twenty three and I was married, and I was commuting a couple of hours each way to go to school and get my degree and see patients and, and, um, then I'd come home and God forbid, my wife wanted to talk to me. Um, you know, there was just no time to work out for hours a day. Yeah. So I couldn't rely on what we kind of sort of call exercise. Exercise, bulimia. It's not a formal diagnostic category, but, you know, I couldn't I couldn't get rid of the food by overexercising. And my metabolism was slowing down and I started gaining weight, not all at once, but, you know, I wasn't really that big, but, um, I recognized it was a problem. And having been raised in a family of psychologists and being a psychologist myself, I thought, well, the problem must be that there's a hole in my heart that I could heal that metaphor, right? And if I could love myself, then I wouldn't have to fill that hole in my heart. I wouldn't have to keep filling the hole in my stomach. So I went that route. And it's a very seductive route because there's a lot of personal growth that occurs when you, you know, investigate what's making you sad or angry or, you know, the traumas that you've been through. And emotional trauma can be one of many cues in the binge eating process, but it doesn't, quote unquote, cause binge eating. We'll get into that later because it's really important. But I thought it did. And so I was trying to put out that fire for all those years. For twenty years, I went to the best therapist and I confessed all my sins. And I cried and I screamed and I went to overuse Anonymous and I had a spiritual awakening. And I became this really enlightened person who was really like a really enlightened fat guy. I just, I just kept on eating and eating and eating.

00:05:30 Georgie Fear: Enlightened, but no lighter.

00:05:32 Speaker 1: Enlightened, but no lighter. Um, I did love myself more because a lot of the self-hatred went away, but I, I love myself more as a, as a big guy.

00:05:43 Georgie Fear: Um, which is no small victory. I just want to add that in there. Like, you know, eating issues are about so much more than, than body weight. And I think a lot of people that changed being kind to ourselves and looking after ourselves, uh, may be as big or more of a life quality improvement than whatever physical changes also come down the road. But anyway, I'll let you finish your story.

00:06:06 Speaker 1: Well, no, but learning how to love yourself before you arrive is at least a third of the battle. Yeah, it's it's part of the process. Um, your life is not going to start when you get to your goal weight. And if your whole purpose in life is to get to your goal weight. Then you're going to feel like you have no purpose when you get to your goal weight, right? So you kind of have to have a life in the meantime. so I was also, um, I married a marketer. Okay. And I was, um, she traveled for business and I was home with a lot of time on my hands. We didn't have kids, I didn't commute. So I started a second business consulting for, um, big industry, the food industry and pharmaceutical industry, mostly food, uh, on the side. And in my twenties and thirties, I was on the wrong side of the war. And I was working with these companies that were engineering these hyper palatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins. And yeah, you know, it's, it's all designed to hit the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you the nutrition to feel satisfied. And I saw all kinds of things going on there. And eventually it came together for me. And I realized that, if this is targeted at the reptilian brain, The reptilian brain doesn't really know love like I'm here. I am trying to love myself. Well, the reptilian brain.

00:07:25 Georgie Fear: Survival, right?

00:07:27 Speaker 1: It's just all survival. It's like eat, mate or kill like a bad drinking game, like a bad college drinking game. And then on top of that is your mammalian brain, which says before you eat, mate or kill that thing, what impact does it have on the people that you love and your tribe and everything like that? And then there's the neocortex that says, before you eat, mate or kill that thing, what impact does that have on your long term goals? Like weight loss, like your body image, like your work at the gym, but also spirituality and music and art and contribution and all your general work. And what I could say is that for those twenty years that I was getting heavier and heavier, I was really focused much more in the neocortex and a little bit the mammalian brain. Um, and so when I would have an urge, you know, when I would be at a coffee shop and there'd be a chocolate bar in the counter and it was calling to me. And even though I said, I'm not going to have, I'm not going to have chocolate during the week, it would say, well, you worked hard enough. It'll be just as easy to start tomorrow, so go ahead. Sure. Um, I would, I would kind of think, well, oh, I must be needing love at this point. I must, I must be one of my early traumas is activated and I need to give myself more love. I didn't know that what I was actually doing was like giving this thing permission to do whatever it wanted to because it reinforced.

00:08:47 Georgie Fear: Yeah.

00:08:47 Speaker 1: I was, I was reinforcing that, um, and it's true. I needed more love. It's true. There were traumas that were triggering me, but I don't even like that word trigger because it's a very passive word. You know, I do it. It's like you're not part of the process. Um, so there was that and I eventually did a study, um, where I, when the days of when Netflix were cheap, I had forty zero zero zero people take a survey and they told me what they were craving and what foods they had trouble controlling and what emotional issues they had, what was really stressing them out. And I found some interesting things. I found out that, um, people that are craving chocolate are more likely, a bit more likely to feel lonely or brokenhearted or depressed. And I was in that category. People who were craving salty, crunchy things tended to be more stressed at work, and people who were craving starchy, chewy things like pizza or bread or bagels, they tended to be stressed at home. And I was like, aha, this is it. Now I'm going to know.

00:09:50 Georgie Fear: I'm onto something.

00:09:51 Speaker 1: I'm onto something. So I call my mom, who's also a psychotherapist. And I said, look, I'm not really thinking about talking publicly about this. I'm just trying to figure it out. Why do I go to chocolate when I feel lonely or brokenhearted? Like the marriage was kind of going bad at that point. And, and I said, but I really, I always go to chocolate. Why is that? And she gets this awful look on her face, this just horrible look. And I said, mom, it's okay. This was forty years ago that we're talking about. I love you, I forgive you. I just want to find out what happened. And she said, well, honey, you know, in nineteen sixty five when you were a one year old, because this was twenty years before today that we were really having this conversation. Twenty twenty one I guess when you were one year old, your dad was in the Army and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. And I was terrified because, you know, your sister was on the way. We're trying to get pregnant. And I thought, I'm going to be an Army widow with two small kids. And at the same time, your grandfather, my dad had just gotten out of prison, and I didn't know where he was for two years, and I was horribly depressed. And so when you would come looking for love and, you know, wanting to play or cuddle or, you know, just have some healthy food, I, I didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And I was just sitting and staring at the wall feeling anxious and depressed. So what I did was I kept a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup in a refrigerator on the floor. And I say, honey, go get your Bosco. Go get your Bosco. And I go running over to the Bosco, and I go into a chocolate sugar coma. And my mom could resume sitting and staring at the wall. Well, okay, this sounds like a movie story. It sounds like at that moment, if this were the movies, my mom and I would have this big hug and a big cry, and then I'd never have trouble with chocolate again.

00:11:36 Georgie Fear: Right, right.

00:11:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. And it was a great conversation to have. I don't regret it. Um, but, you know, it actually made my chocolate eating worse.

00:11:44 Georgie Fear: Yeah. It doesn't, uh, it doesn't get rid of the established pattern or the established, you know, thing that you've rewarded for so long. But I bet a lot of people listening are like, yes, there was that time when I was young or most of my clients tell me about memories of like, I used to steal sticks of butter from the fridge and go upstairs and hide in my room and eat the butter.

00:12:03 Speaker 1: Right, right. No, the birth of the food monster inside of you. When you suddenly realize there was an inordinate amount of pleasure available in a very small package that you could get for yourself.

00:12:13 Georgie Fear: And that's the only thing you can get for yourself when you're a kid. A lot of the time.

00:12:16 Speaker 1: Right?

00:12:17 Georgie Fear: You can't move out. Can't really, you know, stand your ground. And in some households, it's not even safe to communicate openly or have emotions. So a lot of times turning to food is the only option of a really young child.

00:12:28 Speaker 1: And so yes, that was the spark that lit the fire. Um, but not only does it establish the pattern, it actually made it worse in some ways because there was this voice of justification inside me that said, you know what, clan? 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 figure out how to fill that or fix the marriage or find love, you're going to have to just keep filling it up with chocolate. Yippee! Let's go get more. And now I had this great excuse. I really am wounded. I really deserve chocolate? That was bad news.

00:13:08 Georgie Fear: Totally.

00:13:08 Speaker 1: Yeah, that was bad news for me.

00:13:10 Georgie Fear: Yes. Those justifications. It's amazing how creative our brains can get when they're, trying to convince us that it's okay to do something.

00:13:17 Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I had a, um, I always remember a client who was convinced himself that it was okay to substitute an equal amount of cake for fish. And he said, well, it's because cake is like fish, right?

00:13:32 Georgie Fear: It's a hundred shades of gray in the middle. And it's like, yeah, you know, chocolate comes from a, a bean, which comes from a tree, therefore it's a plant.

00:13:40 Speaker 3: Or I can have chocolate.

00:13:41 Georgie Fear: Instead of the vegetables my dietitian told me to eat.

00:13:44 Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly.

00:13:46 Georgie Fear: Eating salad.

00:13:47 Speaker 1: So anyway.

00:13:48 Georgie Fear: Yeah. So that cognitive approach was that where you, uh, first started.

00:13:52 Speaker 3: Where I started to get better.

00:13:53 Speaker 1: That's where I started to get better. So I, this was very private. I was not going to share this publicly. I wish I used another word for it when I started to share publicly, but I called it my inner pig. It was not a food. I wish I called it a food monster. It works just as well to call it a food monster.

00:14:10 Georgie Fear: But now we're calling it the Food Monster.

00:14:12 Speaker 1: I try.

00:14:13 Speaker 3: To, yeah.

00:14:14 Speaker 1: I try to it's I, you know, I have two million listeners who or two million readers who, um, are used to calling it the pig. So people call the pig all over the internet. But, um, anyway, that's another story.

00:14:27 Georgie Fear: It's the curse of authorship that as soon as you put something to write, like in writing, you realize.

00:14:33 Speaker 3: The life of its own.

00:14:33 Georgie Fear: I really wish I had worded that differently and now I can't unwrite it.

00:14:37 Speaker 3: Right.

00:14:38 Speaker 1: Right. And if you worry about every little thing that you publish, then you never publish anything.

00:14:42 Speaker 3: So it's better to publish and regret anyway.

00:14:46 Speaker 1: So so what I did was I said, okay, this thing, this reptilian brain, I'm going to have to figure out when this is awake. This is not a love yourself thing thing. I'm going to have to take control of this thing. So how do I know when this thing is waking up and taking control? And I said, well, I'm going to have to have really clear lines so that I can identify the thoughts that suggest that I cross them. So one of my first lines was that I will never have chocolate on the week, only on the weekends, and no more than two ounces at a time. Um, and I think at one point it was only after a workout also, and that way if I was in a coffee shop and I heard that little voice in my head that says, you worked out hard enough, it'll be just as easy to start your diet tomorrow a little bit. It's not going to hurt you. I could say, wait a minute, that's not me. This is so embarrassing. When I tell this the first time. That's not me. That's my inner pig. Chocolate on a weekday is pig slop. I don't eat pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. That's what started to work for me.

00:15:45 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:15:45 Speaker 1: You know, like I'm a sophisticated, like.

00:15:47 Speaker 3: Go on.

00:15:48 Georgie Fear: I was just thinking, if I can interrupt you for one moment there, where you started is so far ahead of where most people start because you had the presence of mind to know that I don't want to be completely black or white about this, and it's not realistic to say, okay, I'm just never eating chocolate again. Because how many times do we hear that from people? They have repeated loss of control experiences with any particular food. And they're like, that's it, no more chocolate. The only answer is abstinence. Um, and you said you went to oh, so I'm sure you've had some experience with attempting abstinence. And I really like that. You said, you know, maybe what's going to work for me here is just to have some guardrails in place to keep me out of the ditch, like some definitions or contingencies.

00:16:29 Speaker 1: And I find two out of three people can do that. And what really facilitates that is the, is the guardrails. It's, it's grounding it within a certain context. When we talk a little bit later about cravings and how you extinguish them, um, we can talk about how if you set up a slot machine that only paid off at ten o'clock on Saturday mornings, the casino would empty out during the week.

00:16:53 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:16:53 Speaker 1: Because your brain would recognize that the reward is only available at a particular time in a particular place. It's it's only when you don't know when it's going to pay off that you get stuck at the slot machine, pulling it all the time, all the time, all the time. That having been said, I think there are some situations where that neurological groove is driven so deep that there are some foods you just can't, you just can't do. I think people make mistakes almost no matter what. So I don't want to give people the impression that they should expect to be perfect. But I do believe that it's necessary to aim with perfection at a very well defined target. So when an archer is aiming at the bull's eye, they're not thinking, maybe I'll hit or maybe I won't. I'm just going to try to come close. All of their energy is focused on the bull's eye so they can. So they're not drained by doubt and distraction and uncertainty. Um, I'll talk about that a little more when we get to the cravings, if that's okay.

00:17:49 Georgie Fear: Sure, sure. Yeah. Before we get to the cravings, I'm thinking. So you mentioned you have you set up this system for yourself. And so to continue the story. Did that system work for you? Did you end up adjusting it or adding to it?

00:18:03 Speaker 1: Slowly, slowly it did. Yeah. Um, it wasn't a miracle right away. What was a miracle is that the mystery disappeared. I no longer felt like, you know, in a way, I'd been told that there's a chronic, mysterious, progressive disease inside of me, and nobody understands it. But it's going to get worse and worse, and it's doing push ups in the closet. And that never really made sense to me. I couldn't find evidence of it. I looked in the scientific literature. I couldn't find evidence of it. Um, you know, there are a couple of little studies that people reference about brain changes, but it seemed to me that that was just illustrative of learning, not necessarily a disease process. Um, because you, you couldn't identify the disease in a corpse, you could identify the results of the overeating, but you can identify the disease. There was no microbe or pathogen or no pathological change that occurred. So, um, that's another story.

00:19:01 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:19:02 Speaker 1: Remind me what the question was. Did it work for me immediately?

00:19:04 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:19:05 Georgie Fear: I'm curious how your methods developed.

00:19:08 Speaker 1: So what happened immediately was that I had some extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to make a different choice. That happened immediately. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. It cleared away a lot of confusion. Um, I found that there were literally dozens of justifications that my pig would use. Your parents were fat. You're doomed. You might as well. Well, no. Uh, about half the variance in overeating is in. Obesity is caused by genetics. The other half is diet and lifestyle. And if I was dealt a bad deck of cards, it doesn't follow that I should just eat as badly as possible. You know, if I if I'm dealt a bad deck of cards, it's like if you're born poor, you can still ascend.

00:19:52 Speaker 3: Yeah. Your future's.

00:19:53 Georgie Fear: Not written.

00:19:54 Speaker 1: Right. You don't have a silver spoon in your mouth, but you can still make it happen. Um, and so I had all these, these things that my pig was saying that I had to disempower, I had to. And what that did is it took away my excuses and it gave me a sense of cognitive dissonance or just mental discomfort when I would go to, to overeat because, um, being a man of my word is really important to me. And I, and I'm a, I'm a rules based person and I'm really, you know, I was raised in a neurotic Jewish family, so I feel guilty if I'm doing the wrong thing. And so I, what happened is I just started feeling like I was doing the wrong thing and I didn't have an excuse for it. And for me, it took eight years to really lose the weight and, and stabilize. And, um, you know, in retrospect, it wasn't just the cognitive fixes. It wasn't just fixing my thinking, but I actually was learning to eat healthier. I'd make myself a banana smoothie instead of a chocolate bar. And, you know, I would have some brown rice with avocado and a little sea salt if I wanted pizza or like, I would have all these substitutes. Um, but it wasn't until I published the book when I, when I got divorced, I took that journal and I basically published the book of all my excuses and why they were wrong.

00:21:17 Speaker 3: Nice.

00:21:17 Speaker 1: Me versus my inner pig. Um, that got really popular. We were flooded with clients and we saw over two thousand people over, over ten years. And I learned that like, I'm a little bit unusual in the extent to which I have to rationally justify everything. Most people reach a point where they say, oh, what the heck, you know, screw it. Just do it. I just really want to.

00:21:44 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. I.

00:21:48 Georgie Fear: But I think the people that we work with are also unique in their own ways. Like some of them come from like very far logical. Like I can tell you the engineer after like halfway through the assessment, I'm like, this person's an engineer. The people that are like just ruthlessly logical and that's how their brain operates. And it's, you know, neither a flaw nor a, you know, malfunction. It's just the angle that they come from. And then other people who have, uh, just very, the, the logical approach doesn't work as well. And so we end up going more into the emotional sides and those things. But yeah.

00:22:20 Speaker 3: So.

00:22:20 Speaker 1: Well, and, but no matter how logical a person you are, the way that the brain is wired, if your lower brain perceives there to be an emergency, it will override the upper brain. Like if a if a tiger is chasing you, you're not going to be contemplating your navel.

00:22:38 Speaker 3: It's going to get right.

00:22:39 Georgie Fear: I'm not writing pros and cons when it's survival or urgency and. Yeah.

00:22:43 Speaker 1: And so the thing is that in our modern food environment, there are all sorts of perceived emergencies. If you're skipping meals, if you're not getting enough sleep, if you're making too many decisions over the course of the day, if you're not drinking enough water, if you feel too isolated from your tribe, all of these things can be perceived as an emergency. And so at those times, the rational, the reptilian brain, the lower brain, really pressures the rational brain to get out of the way. And this is why you also get people who could be an engineer or a scientist or, you know, even a rocket scientist in their real life and be very successful at it. But the moment there's that chocolate bar at the counter, it all goes out the window.

00:23:23 Speaker 3: Totally. Yeah.

00:23:24 Speaker 1: And so ultimately, what I found the solution is for most people is to have really clear tripwires. So, you know, what's a healthy behavior and what's not. Because like this paraphrasing Yogi Berra, if you're, if you don't know what you're aiming for, you're probably going to hit something else. So you you really have to know what you're aiming for. By the way, if you if you have a really clear bullseye, you also know by how much and in what direction you missed. So you can use the feedback from every miss to aim a little bit better the next time. Um, so rather than rather than saying progress, not perfection as a general philosophy, what I say is that progress, not perfection, is the right philosophy when you're analyzing your mistakes. You're only human. You're aiming at a target you missed. Um, you know what, what's the best you can do? How do you, how do you be kind to yourself? I had five cupcakes instead of fifteen. How did I stop? You know, I, I ate a whole pizza, but I didn't eat the box. How come? Um. I'm only half kidding with those kind of things. There's an energy in perfectionism that we want to harness. Because when you talk to professional athletes, they're, they're not thinking maybe they'll make it, maybe they won't. But they're also not talking about what an idiot they are. Every time they make a mistake, they take it in stride and they harness the natural trial and error learning mechanism that's in the brain with the minimum of interference. What I've discovered over the years is that that self-hatred, that, oh my God, you're pathetic. You can't resist anything. You're going to do this the rest of your life. You might as well just be a happy fat person. I, I've discovered that that energy is designed to get you to binge more. You could think of it like your pig trying to make you feel too weak to resist the next binge.

00:25:19 Georgie Fear: Um, yeah, I call that like the sort of futility category of sabotaging thoughts. So, you know, everybody has their own thing that they call their cognitive distortions or, you know, their automatic negative thoughts. And I tend to call them sabotaging thoughts. But the things that you're, you know, food monster, whatever you call it would use to try and convince you that this behavior that goes against your stated goals is actually a good idea in this instance.

00:25:47 Speaker 3: Right? And.

00:25:48 Georgie Fear: Uh, one of the studies that I did was to collect lots of data from people on what their justifications were. And I was like, what's your excuse? I want all of your excuses that you've ever used to overeat, eat unhealthily. Uh, skipping workouts was a separate one, but same vein. And they do fall into really interesting categories. And the, the futility one just feeds right on the back of I'm never going to succeed anyway. It's type of fortune telling. There's no point doing this. My mom's fat, my sister's fat. I'm going to be fat too. I might as well just order another pizza.

00:26:23 Speaker 3: So I would love.

00:26:24 Speaker 1: To hear you talk about all of those. Someday, I'd like to have you on my podcast and hear you talk.

00:26:28 Speaker 3: I'd be happy.

00:26:29 Georgie Fear: To.

00:26:30 Speaker 3: Happy to.

00:26:31 Georgie Fear: Um, so yeah, I can understand, and I do think it's a massively helpful to just have some self awareness to be like, what am I telling myself? What am I? And I think probably you're All the work you did in therapy really helped you see. Okay, hating myself isn't working. It's actually part of this problem. Right? And I can change these thoughts. I can tell myself a different story. If I call something pig slop, I'm like actually sort of conditioning an aversive frame to it.

00:26:59 Speaker 1: That's the idea.

00:27:00 Georgie Fear: Yeah. I tell people when they're, let's say there's a break room at work where they have glass jars of like trail mix and granola and all these other like high calorie, very tempting things. It's a perfect setup, like high calorie foods for free in like ad libitum portions and no supervision. It's like a really troublesome circumstance for people. I say, okay, I need you to imagine your grossest coworker goes to the bathroom, does not wash their hands, and just goes all in. They're all in there. We have to put some sort of aversive imagery.

00:27:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree, I am. There was a lady I knew who worked in a bakery and she was very successful. Avoiding sugar and flour.

00:27:43 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:27:43 Speaker 1: And I said, how in the world do you do that? And she said, oh, because I said, you have to not only be around this all day, but you have to make it seem sexy. You got to sell it. You got to make it. You're going to be talking about it. How do you avoid it? She says, oh, that's easy. I just look at it and I say, that is not my food. That is not my food. It's just like furniture to me.

00:28:03 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:28:04 Speaker 1: And it's like she's drawn a line between herself and particular types of food, and she's able to abstain because of that.

00:28:10 Georgie Fear: Yeah. Interesting, interesting. So, uh, what other ways have you found that? And I'm thinking we could talk about this two different ways. One, we could talk about when people have cravings, how to manage them, or we could sort of stay upstream. And how do you decrease the amount of cravings that you're getting hit by?

00:28:27 Speaker 3: Mhm.

00:28:28 Speaker 1: You know, um, so there's this Roman philosopher, Publius Syrus. I think I wrote to you about him and he said that rivers are easier to cross upstream.

00:28:40 Speaker 3: Yes, I agree.

00:28:41 Speaker 1: When there a trickling stream as opposed to roaring river, then much easier to cross. I often think that the way that I recovered was like hopping rocks when the river was roaring down the stream and I developed that skill. I got injured a lot along the way, and it's a great skill to have because inevitably you forget to cross upstream sometimes, but it's much easier to fix the problem before it starts.

00:29:07 Speaker 3: Sure.

00:29:08 Speaker 1: Um, what that looks like is having systems in place to be sure that you're nowhere without food. You know, when I go to my yoga studio to do my power vinyasa workout in the morning, I take I take a big sweet potato with me and it's kind of silly. But you know, the first thing I do when I get back in the car is I have my sweet potato. I don't want to have to drive the fifteen minutes home feeling so hungry for my workout. I know that there's a critical period after you work out when your muscles need to be refueled. I don't want that to translate into uncomfortable cravings. If they did translate, would I, you know, go have six chocolate bars? No. Um, but I don't want to deal with that discomfort.

00:29:48 Speaker 3: Totally.

00:29:49 Speaker 1: And, and so you can look at the places in your life where you tend to become dysregulated when you're out of the house without enough food. What about when you go to a restaurant, you know, do you always have some nuts or seeds in your purse so that if they don't have something healthy enough for you to have in your and your food plan, that you can throw them in the salad and have enough calories. Some people, depending upon their dietary philosophy, and I work with all different dietary philosophies, and I'm plant based, but a lot of carnivores come to work with me. You know, they might have some jerky with them, or they might have an apple in the car. Um, so set up systems so that you, you know, don't get caught. Um, you don't get caught being really hungry for the first four to six months. I find it's much better not to do intermittent fasting. I believe in the physical benefits of intermittent fasting, but I find that people who are really stuck in binge eating don't do well with it.

00:30:50 Georgie Fear: You're more gracious than I. I have, like a hard no.

00:30:53 Speaker 3: Oh, really? Yeah.

00:30:54 Georgie Fear: Yeah. I feel like, you know, there's just it's very difficult to. And again, like the client goal being the the most important thing, not Georgie's goals. But if people want to learn to stop binge eating and be able to eat in accordance with their hunger and satiety cues, like I don't feel like it's fair to say I'm going to deny and ignore my hunger cues, but I want to get really good at obeying my satisfaction cues, right? I feel like these are two sides of the same coin, and the interoceptive awareness and responsiveness is going to go up or go down in tandem. Um, and many people who binge eat tell me how great they are at ignoring their hunger cues. I can go all day long, but then I eat way past, past, full past pain, past satiety. And so I'm like, yeah, I kind of want to kind of like the idea of, uh, honoring and responding to both of those body signals as legitimate.

00:31:46 Speaker 3: Um, and then.

00:31:48 Speaker 1: Sorry to say it. No, I'm sorry. I just, I just wanted to appreciate you for what you're saying. It's a brilliant.

00:31:52 Speaker 3: Way to say, oh.

00:31:53 Speaker 4: Thanks.

00:31:53 Georgie Fear: And sometimes it's a matter of like, yes, that would be nice, but what are the costs of doing it? Um, and so like people who have disordered eating, I just feel like, you know, figure competitions and intermittent fasting are just probably things that aren't in your best interest. So for somebody who has an alcohol use disorder, like do you really need to pursue a career as a bartender? Like, it's just probably not in your best.

00:32:16 Speaker 3: Interest, right?

00:32:17 Speaker 1: Right. Right. It's fascinating how we come to the same conclusions working with so many people. Because if I had my druthers, nobody would ever fast. Anybody that's had a binge eating problem, they would never fast.

00:32:30 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:32:30 Speaker 1: I've had people that are able to work it out. But, um, I, I do find that nobody really works it out immediately. Like you need four to six months of flooding your body with regular nutrition. And if you need to lose weight at a slight caloric deficit, um, I always say the fastest way to lose weight is slowly. Yeah. Because yeah, because every time somebody pushes it, I find they bounce back the other way. Um, I once interviewed Melanie Avalon from the Intermittent Fasting podcast, and she said that it made sense what I was saying, because if your body is flooded with flour and sugar and like packaged products that you're not really fat adapted. And for what the fasting tries to do is get you fat adapted, and it makes it more possible for you to go for longer periods of time. And so she kind of agreed that it was better to get that stuff out of your system for six months first. But I don't want to play with fire. Like I don't intermittent fast. I don't, I don't fast at all.

00:33:30 Georgie Fear: That's my feeling too. I'm like, uh, when you describe taking your sweet potato to practice and you're like, you know, this might not be what the average person does, but for me, this is what works. This is what keeps my challenge level at a, it keeps the bar at a level at which I'm soaring over it and not smacking my face against it all the time. So watch me bring my sweet potato with me to public places. I feel the same about a lot of things. Like friends. Don't be afraid to be weird if that helps your recovery. Like be weird.

00:33:57 Speaker 1: I am I, I'm done harming myself with food for the comfort of other people, right? Like I'm, I'm just done. I, I remember I had a date once and we went out. We went out to. It was Christmas Eve. We went out to dinner with my, my dad and his wife and um, at the end of the dinner, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, I think you need to have the tiramisu or something so people don't feel guilty about getting something indulgent. And I was like, why?

00:34:29 Georgie Fear: Why is it my responsibility?

00:34:30 Speaker 1: Why is that my responsibility? And if I love these people, don't they want to have an example of someone who can opt out of the social pressure? And why can't we all just get what we want? Like, I want to get some blueberries. Can I eat blueberries? I don't really like terms. So what? Why can't I just get some blueberries? So no. I'm done. I'm harming myself for the benefit of other.

00:34:50 Georgie Fear: Yeah, I'm fully on board with that, uh, that ethos. And yeah, I think it's a, a commonality among people who struggle with binge eating or emotional overeating. And the reason I use all of these words interchangeably is because I'm not super hung up on definitions. I feel like anybody who's Eating is stressful to them. That's a great reason to work on it. And you deserve.

00:35:13 Speaker 3: Help. Yeah, yeah.

00:35:14 Speaker 1: Do you eat beyond your own best judgment? And would you like to figure out how to intervene without pills and potions and powders and needles?

00:35:22 Georgie Fear: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I feel like there's a lot of personality traits that correlate very highly with people who struggle with food. For example. Um, I entertained the idea for a while of going back to school and seeking licensure as a counselor because, you know, my credentials are dietician. And yet I have taken so many courses and read so many books and done so much in mental health. I was like, you know, maybe I want to be a therapist, but then somebody who's in that space talked to me more about the types of clients that I would be working with. And I was like, nope, I'm going to stick with my overeaters and binge eaters because you know what? They're all really nice people.

00:36:00 Speaker 1: Mhm.

00:36:01 Georgie Fear: I don't get self-serving, arrogant People. They're all just like really kind people. Possibly they're too accommodating of others and that's why they develop food issues.

00:36:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think that, if you compare it to, an alcoholic or a drug addict, like we don't have too many donuts and get behind the wheel and maim or kill somebody.

00:36:25 Speaker 3: I know. Yeah. Right.

00:36:27 Speaker 1: And so it's like there's a little bit more of a conscience. I don't mean to say we're better than other people, but and certainly you can make an argument that you're slowly killing yourself or abandoning your family or whatever. But, but it's, it's more of a, um, harm yourself versus harming other people.

00:36:43 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:36:43 Speaker 1: Addiction.

00:36:44 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:36:45 Georgie Fear: People who aren't going to choose violence, people who aren't wanting to inconvenience others or harm anybody else, or the sort of people that develop, um, food, food issues. And I actually, I have a bit of a, a list here that I think you might find interesting.

00:36:59 Speaker 3: Sure.

00:37:00 Georgie Fear: so problems that I identify in people that can be causative of binge eating. And so that would be things like over restriction of food. So people who are simply not eating enough, they're dieting too hard. Um, is that one that you see as well?

00:37:15 Speaker 1: Oh, one hundred percent. I, I think that if you think about how we evolved one hundred thousand years ago, if food was scarce, then when it was available, we'd better hoard it. And so when you get overly restricted with your diet or food rules or, you know, exercise, when you you're teaching your brain that you live in a feast and famine environment. And the moment that you, you know, have a little bit of indulgence, you're going to want to disinhibit and eat whatever you can. Consume mass quantities, as the Coneheads would say.

00:37:51 Speaker 3: Yes. Yeah.

00:37:53 Georgie Fear: Uh, another thing that I've noticed is, uh, people who are sort of prone to over productivity and just not resting. Sometimes it seems that food has become the rest or the brake or the, the only time I get to stop trying so hard is when I'm eating.

00:38:08 Speaker 1: I once worked with a doctor and she was running off to 7-Eleven to, um, you know, get candy bars. And when we really talked about it, she said, well, she just really needs a break. And I said, well, why wouldn't you take an hour and just go take a drive? And it just hadn't occurred to her that she could just take an hour and take the drive. It's like, you know, the candy bar was the rest.

00:38:31 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:33 Georgie Fear: Uh, a lot of times I'll ask people like, could you lay on the couch for five minutes and like, I don't have time?

00:38:38 Speaker 3: Mhm.

00:38:38 Georgie Fear: Well, how much time are you spending going to get your binge food and consume your binge food? You have five minutes if you're spending.

00:38:46 Speaker 3: Half an hour.

00:38:46 Speaker 1: And how much time are you spending recovering from the binge sitting, sweating and bloated on the couch.

00:38:51 Speaker 3: That's the worst part.

00:38:52 Georgie Fear: Yeah, the lost productivity is far more than the actual minutes.

00:38:56 Speaker 1: It's a false dichotomy. Taking care of yourself is something that puts time into your life, not something that takes time away from your life.

00:39:04 Georgie Fear: Yeah, yeah. I think that's one of the lessons that a lot of people come across, you know, realizing like, oh, wow, I actually don't have less to give others because I've given myself some modicum of care.

00:39:15 Speaker 3: Mhm.

00:39:15 Georgie Fear: I actually know one, this is not a zero sum game. And I thought it was all along. I can actually be more generous with myself and end up with more to give to the rest of the world. And we're all better off.

00:39:27 Speaker 1: Because you can't pour from an empty cup.

00:39:29 Speaker 3: Yeah,

00:39:30 Georgie Fear: another one that was on my list here that, you brought up was the perfectionism. And I like how you've separated, the way that we can aim high prior to an attempt or during attempt, and yet still couple that with acceptance and not blaming if we don't hit the exact bullseye.

00:39:54 Speaker 1: It's it's commit with perfection. But forgive yourself with dignity. Commit with perfection, but forgive yourself with dignity. The addictive process is just the opposite. The addictive process will say aim in a kind of wishy washy progress, not perfection way. Which really just means I'm going to try for a little while until I don't feel like it anymore. But that's what it means when you're talking about addiction. And then when you make a mistake, you're a food monster will say, well, you're not perfect, so you're nothing. You obviously don't have the ability you, you need to just go out and binge right now. So it's what's actually happening is you are, you're pig or your food monster is talking out of both sides of its mouth, and it's getting you to use the energy of perfectionism in the exact opposite way than you need to. And you kind of need to flip the switch and say, no, I'm going to aim with perfection and forgive myself with dignity. You want me to aim progress, not perfection, and then torture myself when I make a mistake, right?

00:40:53 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:40:54 Georgie Fear: Yeah, that is a recipe for unhappiness. I like the way you said that. So yeah, definitely a great point. I think everybody, me included, can benefit from that one. It's not dangerous to aim high. In fact, it can be the only way we achieve anything. But also recognizing like if like, not everything is broken, if you don't exactly hit the mark every single time.

00:41:16 Speaker 1: Right. Well, and that's what winners do is they aim high and then they adjust.

00:41:21 Speaker 3: Yeah. Great.

00:41:22 Georgie Fear: Awesome. So you referred earlier to some of the ways that the modern food environment and all of the hyper palatable foods and hyper processed things. Whether exaggerated tastes and colors and flavors can lead to more cravings, and I think that leads a lot of people to the conclusion. Well, probably less processed food is good for me. What other things do you think people can do other than the managing their menu, so to speak? How else can they decrease the amount of times that they're getting gripped by this craving or urge?

00:42:01 Speaker 1: Um, you need to recognize that we're essentially of two nervous systems. There's the reptilian nervous system that they also call the sympathetic nervous system. I think I'm getting this right. I'm not an MD, but but that's preparing us for emergencies. That's the kill thing. And then there's the parasympathetic nervous system, which tells us it's okay to rest and digest and pursue our longer term goals and connect with other people and all the things we think of as valuable as human beings. Well, when you're about to have a craving, there are usually some signals along the way. You might feel goose bumps. Your heart rate might elevate a little bit. Your breathing might change. Your thinking and attention becomes very narrow and focused on what the food might be. Those are signs that you're leaving your parasympathetic system and that the reptilian brain is getting activated. There are things you can do to deactivate it. You can do parasympathetic breathing, which is just breathing out for longer than you breathe in. Like my friend Lori Hammond calls them. Seven eleven breaths. Take breathe in for a count of seven. Breathe out for a count of eleven. And I'm not doing it now because it takes a long time.

00:43:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard to do.

00:43:21 Georgie Fear: All your speaking as.

00:43:22 Speaker 3: Well.

00:43:23 Speaker 1: But but but it'll calm you. It'll calm you down. And very often that's all it takes. Doing three, seven, eleven breaths To to kill the craving. It kind of depends upon the other forms of allostatic load or stress load that you have at the time. You might need to do more. Um, but when you're breathing like that, you're telling your brain there's no hungry tiger that's chasing me. There's no emergency. I can stay in my rational brain.

00:43:50 Speaker 3: Mhm.

00:43:51 Speaker 1: And then what you want to do is ask yourself, why is my food monster telling me to break my rules? You need to start with at least one simple rule. So you have something to judge things against. Well, why is my food monster trying to get me to break the rule? And pause again. See what the food monster says. Write it down. Carry a little paper and pencil with you. Or put it on your smartphone. Don't try to do this in your head. There are limitations of short term memory that allow your food monster to hide. Ask. Ask your food monster. Why is it doing that? Well, this is free food. I can't pass up the opportunity. You can't pass up the opportunity for free food. Um, and then take another seven eleven breath because paying attention to the food monster is excitatory for the lower brain also. And say, why is it wrong? Well, there's no such thing as free food. If it makes me suffer, I'm going to pay an even bigger price. If I suffer with it, then take another breath and say, why would I feel like a happier or better person if I stayed on my plan? And maybe the answer is I'll be less worried about cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Maybe it's just that I'll feel in control. I feel like I'm a master of my own fate and a person of my word. You know, maybe it's that I'll. I know that I'll be there for my kids. I want to be a good role model for my kids. Whatever the reason is, link it to your why in some way.

00:45:19 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:45:19 Speaker 1: Take it, take another breath and then say, what do I really need? Maybe you need a healthy meal. Maybe you need to stop at a supermarket and get a bunch of blueberries. Maybe you, um, maybe there's something bothering you about a friend that you haven't connected with or a conversation that you had. Maybe you need to write that down. Um, what? What is it that you really need and kind of train yourself to go through that process? Um, keep notes, um, put your insights into writing, you know, eventually you might want to turn them into mantras like, uh, one bite off my plan is a tragedy. Like because my, my pig will say a little won't hurt. You can get away with it. You can afford it. And I will say, well, I don't want to get away with any anything. I want to live an addictive free life. And one bite off plan is a tragedy because it's the difference between who's in charge, you or me. I can only ever use the present moment to be healthy. One bite is a tragedy, and you get these little mantras that stick in your head that you can use at the moment of impulse.

00:46:25 Georgie Fear: So yes. Yeah, that that mirrors my experience quite a lot. I had a client asked me the other day, like, what do you do when you just hate how you look? And I said, my appearance is the least interesting thing about me. And that is just what rolls off my tongue, because that's what I say to myself. If I'm passing by a mirror and there's like something that doesn't look like it's the right shape, it's like, oh yeah, my appearance is the least interesting thing about me. On we.

00:46:50 Speaker 3: Go.

00:46:51 Speaker 1: Can I borrow that? If I quote you, I love that.

00:46:53 Speaker 3: Of course. Okay.

00:46:54 Georgie Fear: Just lots of those, you know, we do we come up with these little mantras or the things that speak to us and then it I think it makes the whole process get easier and easier over time. So that initial, you know, four weeks, six weeks, six months, where the effort level is the highest to do the things that we want to do. I think.

00:47:11 Speaker 3: It's.

00:47:12 Georgie Fear: A message of hope for people. Like, yes, it does get easier even if you have to put in some effort long term. It's, it's really nice to know that your brain will get just as good at not listening to those urges as it got at generating them and following.

00:47:28 Speaker 1: And it will label. It will label them as dormant if you don't reinforce them long enough. Because the brain doesn't want to waste waste energy, the brain is very, very efficient and it's only driving you crazy crazy with cravings because you've been reinforcing them and teaching it that, you know, these calories are available through these cravings and bothering that it does of you. But, um, it, you, you can be largely craving free. Not one hundred percent craving free, but largely craving free and like forty five to sixty days. You can really do that.

00:47:58 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:47:58 Georgie Fear: Fantastic. And so I know you have a lot of your information at defeat your cravings dot com. Did I get that URL correct?

00:48:05 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:48:06 Speaker 1: Defeat your cravings dot com.

00:48:08 Georgie Fear: Yeah, I went there. I signed up myself. I got so much stuff I haven't even been able to go through it. But yeah, lots of free material, which is another reason that I wanted to bring Glenn on the show is he's not in this to like nickel and dime you and be like, get my free PDF and then buy my eight thousand dollars course, you know, he's like, he's trying to do what I'm trying to do, which is spread good information because we all need to eat. I think information about how to eat in a way that keeps us well is like basic human, right?

00:48:39 Speaker 3: So yeah, trying to share.

00:48:42 Georgie Fear: What we have learned through decades of suffering and trying to help other people and figure out our own weirdness. Um, I love his angles on stuff. I think he has a lot of stuff that's refreshing and said in a different way than I say it, but, uh, definitely check him out. I'm sure this will not be the last conversation, since I don't think either he or I want to go, but at some point we have to wrap up the hour. So thank you all for listening. Um, where else should people go if they want to find more?

00:49:10 Speaker 1: To defeat your cravings dot com, you'll get a free copy of the book in electronic format. Can can look PDF.

00:49:15 Speaker 3: Is.

00:49:15 Georgie Fear: That.

00:49:15 Speaker 3: A title you.

00:49:17 Speaker 1: Defeat your cravings is the title.

00:49:19 Speaker 3: Is the title.

00:49:20 Speaker 1: If you get it through, defeat your cravings dot com. Click the big blue button. you get the free ebook. You will get the recorded coaching sessions. First of all, the book has a lot of very practical information. We got excited and talked to a lot of theory today, and you might be thinking, why does Georgie have this weird doctor who has a pig inside of him? Um, it's actually a very compassionate process. And I recorded a bunch of full length free coaching sessions that you can listen to. So you see how it works in practice, how I take people through very specific cravings so they feel more hopeful. Um, food plan starter templates, a whole bunch of stuff. So yeah.

00:49:55 Georgie Fear: Wonderful. Yeah, I think that's, that's excellent to have the where the rubber meets the road. Um, so I'm sure people will be coming over to listen and if you have any other questions, um, you can always drop me a line. I can pass it on to Doctor Glenn Livingston for you. With that I will let you go for another week. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing some of your.

00:50:12 Speaker 3: Findings with us.

00:50:14 Georgie Fear: Thank you and I will see you all next week. Keep taking great care of yourself.