Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Why "Moderation" Fails and What Actually Stops Binge Eating (Dr. Glenn Livingston) | Ep 442

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Why "Moderation" Fails and What Actually Stops Binge Eating (Dr. Glenn Livingston) | Ep 442 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you struggle with food, you eat past fullness, you often give in to your cravings, or you find yourself reaching for foods that you told yourself you wouldn't eat, this episode is for you.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: Today we're going to uncover why the idea of eating in moderation doesn't work for most people.
• 0:17
  Philip Pape: How to stop binge eating and emotional eating for good by understanding the science of your brain.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: My guest used to consult for the food industry and spent decades researching overeating with more than 40,000 participants.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: He knows exactly how cravings hijack your brain, and more importantly, how to take back control without relying on willpower.
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: Maybe you don't, but that is binge eating, emotional eating, the cravings that seem to override even your best intentions.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: My guest today is Dr.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: Glenn Livingston, who is on the show in episode 30.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: We're talking way back in the archives, and we're having him back because he is a psychologist.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: He's former CEO of a consulting firm that worked with Fortune 500 food companies.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: So a little inside information and author of the best-selling book, Never Binge Again, and his latest book available for free called Defeat Your Cravings: The Backdoor to Weight Loss.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: Glenn spent years on the inside of the food industry learning exactly how companies engineer products to be irresistible.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: Then he turned that knowledge around and conducted research with over 40,000 participants to figure out what actually stops overeating.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: Today you're going to learn why the advice to just eat in moderation often backfires, how your brain creates false survival signals around food, and a framework for building rock-solid rules about food that don't require constant willpower.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: So whether you've struggled with binging, emotional eating, or feeling out of control around certain foods, Glenn's here to share some practical tools grounded in psychology and neuroscience.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
• 2:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Thank you so much.
• 2:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's a delight to be here.
• 2:17
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And hey, let me just say that the book to read, if you want to, is the The Future Cravings book.
• 2:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The first book is more popular, but it's 10 years old and not really updated for the science and experience with 2,000 clients and whatnot.
• 2:30
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So just wanted to clarify that.
• 2:32
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I'm happy to be here and talk about any and all of it.
• 2:35
  Philip Pape: Well, then I'm glad I mentioned it.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: So listeners have context in case they do go back to our old uh episode that maybe some of that is out of date.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: So let's move it forward, which I appreciate too, Glenn, because I'm always skeptical and wanting to question my own knowledge of things.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: And I'm glad you do the same.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: And we've discussed hunger a lot on this show, physical hunger, emotional hunger, uh, habit-based hunger, all of that.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: And I invited you on specifically to discuss cravings, which can be very, very intense for some people.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: I'm, you know, we have clients, we have people, of course, now taking GOP1s who talk about food noise and talk about just the incessant uh voice in their head.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: So let's start with definitions, right?
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: What is a craving?
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: What do we mean by that?
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: And then we can go from there.
• 3:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, a craving is an intense motivation to go get a particular food stuff.
• 3:23
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it could be a real food stuff or it could be uh food stuff that's faking us out from some of the, you know, processed food engineering companies.
• 3:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it's usually linked to a specific trigger, a specific cue in the environment.
• 3:37
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But if you just as on a very practical basis, it's important to recognize that cravings are actually a sign of a healthy brain doing its job in a sick food environment.
• 3:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: A hundred thousand years ago, when we, you know, there were no chocolate bars and Doritos on the savannah, and food was probably a little bit scarce.
• 3:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It was the people who had the strongest cravings that were going to feel most motivated to do what it took to go out and get the food to survive.
• 4:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So a craving brain was a surviving brain.
• 4:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And this is why I tell people that your brain actually thinks it's keeping you alive by binge eating.
• 4:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And this is why it can be so pernicious and difficult to overcome.
• 4:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: However, it's easier to overcome once you recognize that you are dealing with health and not disease, because there's a lot of misinformation in our culture that suggests that it's a disease brain that has these overwhelming cravings, but it's it's just not true.
• 4:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's the same mechanisms that develop intense cravings in the brain, are the same structures that will kill the craving or label it dormant or extinguish the craving is the term we have in the behavioral literature.
• 4:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So got cravings, good.
• 4:52
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You have a healthy working brain.
• 4:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's the first thing you you need to know.
• 4:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The second thing is that it's usually linked to a specific trigger.
• 4:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And the reason for that is our brain was set up to efficiently find food.
• 5:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So a caveman, let's call him Thag, T-H-A-G, because I like the name.
• 5:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And say Thag 100,000 years ago runs into a monkey, and he follows that monkey to a banana tree, gets a whole bunch of bananas, his family survives a little better, he's nice and full, gets all this nutrition.
• 5:23
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So Thag's brain says, that was a good deal.
• 5:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I think monkeys are a good thing.
• 5:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Let's look for monkeys, and when we see them, let's get all excited and let's go, you know, get motivated and go find another tree.
• 5:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Thag follows another monkey to a tree, thag follows another monkey to a tree, it's always leading to bananas.
• 5:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Now Thag has a cue.
• 5:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The monkey is a food cue and a reward, the banana, and it's reliable.
• 5:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So that that saves Thag uh time, energy, and resources.
• 5:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It takes time, energy, and resources.
• 5:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so his brain looks to automate that.
• 6:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The brain doesn't want Thag to be thinking, gee, maybe I should follow the monkey, maybe I shouldn't.
• 6:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It wants to say, monkeys, go, you know, get excited, go get the bananas.
• 6:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So it dumps out a whole bunch of dopamine, uh, sometimes in serotonin also.
• 6:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And if Thag sees a monkey and he doesn't follow that monkey to the tree, Thag's reign punishes him by dipping the dopamine and making him very uncomfortable and miserable.
• 6:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So that's how cravings work.
• 6:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And the modern-day equivalent is you are driving home and you see the donuts for a sign, and you know that signals the availability of thousands of calories of donuts for not that much money right around the corner.
• 6:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so you drive into the store and you almost automatically go into the store and pick out the donuts and pay the nice lady behind the counter and get into your car, drive from the back of the parking lot, and you know, it's it's almost like you're not even there.
• 6:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It feels like it's all automated.
• 6:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's your brain doing its job.
• 6:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's having a bad impact in our sick food environment, but that's your brain doing its job.
• 7:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Nothing wrong with your brain for doing that.
• 7:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And that's good news because it means that you can extinguish that craving.
• 7:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So that's what a craving is.
• 7:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Cravings could be linked to internal events like emotions.
• 7:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It might be that when you felt depressed, your mother noticed and gave you a chocolate bar like mine did, right?
• 7:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Or, you know, when you were agitated like the women in the Golden Girls would frequently get to say, okay, I'll go get the cheesecake.
• 7:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, your brain gets used to the fact that if you're agitated or depressed, that these rewards are available, and people say, Well, they're emotionally eating.
• 7:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The stronger force there, there is an anesthetic force, an anesthetic impact of overloading your digestive system, it makes it difficult for the nervous system to conduct emotions.
• 7:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But the stronger effect, by my estimates and what I've seen, is that you've taught your body that cheesecake is available when you get agitated, and you're actually teaching your body to get more agitated so you can get more cheesecake.
• 8:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: People think that it's a one-way relationship, but actually emotional leading goes both ways.
• 8:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um, if you get really anxious and then you get sugar, then your body's going to learn to produce more anxiety to get more sugar.
• 8:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This kind of blows people's mind sometimes, but it's part of what's happening that goes, it gets covered over by the idea of emotional leading or eating to numb out or eating for comfort.
• 8:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Where that's what I tell people, we're not really eating for comfort, we're eating to get high with food.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: I am processing.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: I'm listening carefully because I want the listener to take it all in.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: Let me just recap real quick before I get the thoughts out.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: It's a healthy brain doing its job.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: So that's what you said.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: It's a healthy brain doing its job in a sick food environment.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: And that's important, right?
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: Because a lot of folks struggling with the food noise that again, I constantly bring up these medications today because that's where a lot of the uh marketing is around today.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: It is marketed as a disease, and it you're saying that's not the case, and that the same mechanism that causes that can extinguish the craving.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: So that's one thing.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: The other that it is linked to triggers and cues uh because it's more efficient for us to do so, given our the way our brain evolved, and it's an automated thing, but it's bi-directional, and it's not necessarily okay, this emotion causes this, it could go both ways.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: So that's a really good thing to understand.
• 9:23
  Philip Pape: My question is like, if I go to get some gas and I walk into Cumberland Form farms, I see the bakery uh rack with the beautiful glazed donuts and the muffins, right?
• 9:32
  Philip Pape: I have certain responses, but I see different responses in different people, kind of like a spectrum.
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: And I see these responses change over time.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: And I'm sure we're gonna get into what we can do about this.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: What I've seen is like the response, like you said, you're literally on autopilot and you just get the thing and you can't help yourself.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: There's the opposite extreme of that's feels like you can't.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Or feels like that.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: Okay, yeah, yeah.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: The perception of it or the expression of it, right?
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: And then the other side is that's gross.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: I don't even feel like it.
• 9:57
  Philip Pape: I have no appetite for it, whatever.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: And then kind of in between, you know, and I've always considered myself personally in between, where depending on how hungry I am and depending on the situation in my life, I might go for it and I might not.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: And there's an element of we a lot of us think willpower, right, which we want to address.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: So given that spectrum, I don't know if you were gonna go to a next thought before I uh stopped you here, but practical terms, right, Nat, we want to understand the actions or the interrupt, I guess we can take, given that psychology.
• 10:27
  Philip Pape: I assume that's the next step.
• 10:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah, it would be a little more helpful if I helped if people understood how the cravings are extinguished.
• 10:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Great so that because most people make mistakes and they just try to go code turkey or um they they don't really understand what they're getting into when they do that.
• 10:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And or they'll try to moderate when they're not really able to moderate.
• 10:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So, but yes, I'm going to tell you how to eliminate that.
• 10:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I'll I'll I'll keep an eye on the time also so that we have time to do all of the things.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: Oh, we'll get there.
• 10:54
  Philip Pape: No worries.
• 10:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um and okay.
• 10:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So the important thing I want people to understand is you're not powerless, it's not a disease.
• 11:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If you think that you are powerless and diseased, then it makes you much more prone to saying, Oh, I'll just I just give up.
• 11:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just might as well be a happy fat person because there's no way to beat this, right?
• 11:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So there is a way to beat this, and there's a difference between something being impossible to resist and something being very difficult to resist.
• 11:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like if there are there are well-worn paths up this mountain, and you still have to hike up the mountain.
• 11:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's not a cakewalk to use all puns intended, but you there are well-worn paths and easy ways to get up the mountain.
• 11:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you until you get there.
• 11:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So there's a difference between feeling impossible and something being impossible.
• 11:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And that's why I interrupted in the way that I did.
• 11:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Okay.
• 11:46
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So what's important from the food stimulus conversation is to understand that the cravings are specific to food stimuli.
• 11:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So if you're struggling with donuts, it's not just the donut store that's a problem.
• 12:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It could be that maybe you played poker with the guys and your friend's wife brought donuts over.
• 12:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so you associate the poker chips and hanging out with the guys at the table with any donuts.
• 12:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Or it's the you know, visit to your mom's house on Saturday mornings and she was always and that's important because when you go to extinguish a craving, people will often extinguish it in the situations where the trigger occurs frequently and they forget about those other infrequent triggers.
• 12:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So if I decide I'm not going to stop at the donut store, whatever it takes, I'm not going to stop, I'm going to extinguish that.
• 12:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I do that for 30 or 45 days, and then my brain labels it dormant, so it's not bothering me anymore.
• 12:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And all of a sudden, my mom invites me over and it's Saturday morning, and there are donuts on the table.
• 12:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Why do I have this horrendous donut craving on Saturday morning?
• 12:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I must have failed.
• 12:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is too hard.
• 12:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just give up, right?
• 13:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's what happens to a lot of people.
• 13:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But you didn't fail.
• 13:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You succeeded at extinguishing the donut store sign as a stimulus for donuts.
• 13:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You did not extinguish your mother's house as a stimulus for donuts.
• 13:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You kind of have to make a list of where you're going to encounter this.
• 13:17
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then it's a matter of having enough exposures, you know, day by day, week by week, to those stimuli and not rewarding it so that you can extinguish the problem.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: I want to connect this to something we do talk about on the show a lot, which is having if-then strategies and knowing that everybody everyone's life has a unique set of circumstances, but those circumstances tend to be repeatable or patterns, or you do things a lot over and over again.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: And if you just take the mindfulness to sit down and say, what where are these situations that usually do a roadblock or friction?
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: I can inventory them and cover 80, 90% of my life that way.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: That's what comes to mind for me.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: Yep.
• 13:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right.
• 13:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And what that might look like is okay, I know that I go into my mom's house at the end of the month on Saturday, and that's a trouble spot for me.
• 14:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So I'm going to send a reminder to myself.
• 14:08
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: One of my favorite things to do is set a Gmail to send me an email three weeks down the road.
• 14:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right.
• 14:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Snooze it.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: Schedule it.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 14:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just send a reminder to myself and I say, it's going to be tempting at mom's house for breakfast.
• 14:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Make sure you eat something substantial beforehand.
• 14:23
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I might actually even plan out what I'm going to eat.
• 14:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And maybe even the day before that, I'll say you have to go shopping for this and make sure you have inventory on hand.
• 14:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Let today's Glenn take care of tomorrow's Glen.
• 14:35
  Philip Pape: Hold on, I have to laugh about that because if people saw the reminders in my phones, I've got a reminder every day for fiber and berries.
• 14:40
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean?
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: Like I want to be eating more berries now.
• 14:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So these help.
• 14:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: These help.
• 14:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, no, and this is part of what's newer in my thinking, because originally I was all about fighting it out at the moment of temptation.
• 14:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You know, it was me versus my inner, you called out my inner pig.
• 14:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's kind of embarrassing, but that's what I called it.
• 14:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I would figure out what it was saying, and then I would take a deep breath and I would say, why is that wrong?
• 15:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Uh, you know, my pig would say, you can just start tomorrow, have the silly chocolate today.
• 15:08
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You worked out hard enough, you're not going to gain any weight.
• 15:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I'd say, wait a minute, I can't start tomorrow because the way neuroplasticity works.
• 15:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If I have a craving for chocolate and I eat it today, and I say I'm just going to start tomorrow, then I reinforce the craving and I reinforce the thought.
• 15:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So I'm more likely to say, start tomorrow, tomorrow, and I'm going to have a deeper craving tomorrow.
• 15:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I can only ever use the present moment to be healthy.
• 15:32
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I call that fixing your thinking or a cognitive refutation.
• 15:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's what my early work was about.
• 15:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's how I originally recovered and got from 300 pounds down to about 220, which is somewhere around where I hover.
• 15:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: However, over the next 10 years working with 2,000 people, I saw that that wasn't enough for a lot of people because we got really good.
• 15:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We had an agency, we had 10 coaches working with us, and you know, we work with thousands of people.
• 16:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And within a month, we would get them down in their binge eating by about 89%, 89%, 90%.
• 16:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But at six months or a year, there were two groups.
• 16:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There was a group that'd go all the way back up and just forgot about it.
• 16:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then there was another group that was down at like 70 to 80% of you know of the success that they had.
• 16:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And when I investigated that, what I found out was that it was because they eventually said, oh well, what the hell?
• 16:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just really want to screw it, just do it.
• 16:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I don't have any excuses.
• 16:32
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You eliminated all my excuses, but I just really want that cheesecake.
• 16:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it turned out when I investigated that, that that phenomenon seems to be driven by what I would call a fancy word is organismic dysregulation.
• 16:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Another word for it is stress, where you don't get enough nutrition regularly, reliably, where you don't get enough sleep, where you don't have enough social contact, where you are making too many decisions over the course of the day and wearing down your willpower.
• 17:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You're allowing yourself to become organismically distressed.
• 17:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then this brings us back to the original conversation, which is that more and more I'm finding that the problem starts upstream.
• 17:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Uh Publius Cyrus said that rivers are easier to cross at their source when they're a trickle rather than a roaring stream.
• 17:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When you find that you can't resist having a bag of potato chips or five, probably you got dysregulated somewhere upstream.
• 17:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so if you have reminders to have berries and fiber, if you develop structure and systems that make you do your food prep and food shopping on Sundays and Wednesdays, if you, you know, have a little email to yourself that says, hey, it's nine o'clock, you ought to get to bed soon, you know, and you put these structures in your life that keep you more regulated, not that it's possible to be totally regulated, but if you do that, you'll find that your brain allows you to be rational about food and stick to your best-late plans much more frequently.
• 18:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Our brains are also set up to seize what it believes are very scarce resources or to deal with false emergencies, what it perceives to be an emergency.
• 18:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And when you get dysregulated, when you don't have enough nutrition or sleep or whatever or social contact, you start to feel like you're in an emergency situation.
• 18:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And you know, that chocolate bar in the counter looks better and better no matter what your rules were for how and when you wanted to have chocolate.
• 18:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So, which is all to say that's a really big part of eliminating cravings, is developing systems and structures to keep yourself regulated and to understand that an extinction event, when you're deciding that you want to quit going to the donut store as you pass it on the way home from work, because you're developing a punch would be the word.
• 18:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If when you decide that you want to do that, that's actually going to put some stress on your body.
• 18:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You're going to have really intense cravings.
• 19:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The only way out is through.
• 19:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So look to support yourself in every other way.
• 19:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It takes 30 to 45 days to extinguish a regular daily habit.
• 19:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And during that time, you're going to feel stressed otherwise.
• 19:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So get some more sleep.
• 19:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Look at your nutrition.
• 19:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Don't try to lose weight during that period of time.
• 19:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It might happen anyway, but don't try to lose weight during that period of time.
• 19:23
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Look at your sleep, look at everything else you can do.
• 19:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Baby yourself by 30 to 45 days saying, look, this habit is killing me, right?
• 19:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is the most important health thing that I need to change about myself.
• 19:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is the most important habit that I need to engineer your habit.
• 19:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so I'm going to do everything, whatever it takes, to get through that.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: I would say, in the time since you and I last spoke, you know, my thinking has coalesced around systems and engineering.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: I mean, in fact, it's in my tagline for the show of having structure.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: And it's funny you mention all of this because we talk about avoiding calorie deficits as much as you can until you set up, you know, your strength training and your sleep and your other lifestyle habits to give you the best metabolism, firing on all fronts, but also the best mental state and also the extreme of what happens to physique competitors and how negative, you know, all the negative aspects of that on the other end of dieting.
• 20:16
  Philip Pape: So we focus on that a lot.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: And also talking about upstream root causes having more costly outcomes downstream is a great concept as well, because it definitely takes a lot less friction and effort.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: And it's that one step at a time mentality now in small ways that pay off in big ways down the road.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: I was talking to somebody yesterday, he's Chinese and he loosely translated a Chinese proverb.
• 20:40
  Philip Pape: It said something like, beware the cost of standing still or accept the cost of moving forward and beware the cost of standing still.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: Something like that.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: It's like taking one step forward.
• 20:50
  Philip Pape: I butchered that.
• 20:51
  Philip Pape: I butchered that.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: But no, no, no, but but but if you're going to be serious about it, be serious about it.
• 20:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It requires some time and effort to build the structure to change.
• 21:00
  Philip Pape: So we love all of this.
• 21:01
  Philip Pape: And and I'll be honest, you know, the philosophy, like you said, your your own thinking has evolved along the way, was probably a little more obtuse to get someone's head around.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: I don't know if you found that to be the case, or the fact that people, the recurrence rate of the binge eating, you know, increased and came back and gave you the information to say maybe this isn't the approach.
• 21:20
  Philip Pape: What we really need is structure.
• 21:21
  Philip Pape: I just kind of wanted to close the loop on on you.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: And then using the word engineer your habit, thank you for doing that.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: That's exactly what we want to do here.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 21:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
• 21:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, I mean, like in retrospect, if you get to the moment of temptation and you're thinking effort, then you failed before.
• 21:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You failed way way something failed way before then.
• 21:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so all the effort at the moment of temptation, as useful as those tools can be, um, because emergencies do occur no matter how much structure you put into place, but as useful as that is, it's much more useful to put systems in place that prevent you from experiencing that in the first place.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: So that your brain has fewer of these, what you call False emergencies.
• 22:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yes, exactly.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: Which then also makes me think of when people are wondering when they hear this, then do my cravings, by putting all this structure in place, are my cravings diminishing over time, going away?
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: What's the risk of them coming back?
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: What's the risk of one of my old triggers retriggering?
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: You know, those kinds of thoughts, I'm sure, are fears that people have.
• 22:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Your brain doesn't want to waste energy.
• 22:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So if you do this right and you, for example, I recently discovered that my blood pressure was going up despite eating really healthy.
• 22:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I had to give up getting soup at the hot bars.
• 22:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It was just too salty, even though it was lenthal soup and good ingredients and vegetables and everything.
• 22:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I had to give that up.
• 22:46
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And man, did I have cravings.
• 22:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I had a really strong habit established.
• 22:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I would stop at Whole Foods and I would, you know, I go in and I say, I'm, I don't think I'm going to get the soup today because it's going to be too salty.
• 22:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then before I knew it, I had a not just a small container, but a big container of soup to go out in the parking lot and have it.
• 23:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And um, you know, and then I decided that I needed to extinguish that.
• 23:08
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so I made myself a rule that says I never buy soup from hot bars.
• 23:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just never do that.
• 23:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And, you know, it after just a couple of months of not doing it, it was really torture for a little while.
• 23:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But after a couple of months, my brain said, we are wasting our energy trying to get Glenn to go get the soup because he's obviously resolved he's not going to do it.
• 23:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Let's figure out how to find other caloric resources.
• 23:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Let's find nutrition elsewhere.
• 23:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You know, it's kind of like if you were to put a prisoner in jail with a life sentence, they don't really want hope after a while because they feel like hope makes them waste energy.
• 23:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's just very disappointing and torturous.
• 23:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And your brain is like that.
• 23:51
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We don't crave things that we never do.
• 23:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There's one more thing that's really important about this, and then we can talk about all the practicalities that you that you want to.
• 24:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There's an extinction mechanism, but it doesn't fire in a straight line.
• 24:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So when I stop having the donuts as I'm passing the donut store, this is not what happens to my cravings.
• 24:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Most people think that's what it should be.
• 24:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The worst should be on the day that you quit, and then it should get better and better every day.
• 24:17
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But that's not what happened.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: You're showing a straight line with your finger for listeners.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 24:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah, I'm showing a straight line going from the top left to the bottom right, like a mountain would go.
• 24:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like a mountain, like a very geometrically appropriate mountain.
• 24:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um what actually happens is there's a little bit of a honeymoon period where it seems like it's easier than you thought it was going to be.
• 24:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then somewhere for a daily habit, somewhere around the four to 10 day mark, there's a bigger spike in cravings than you ever had before.
• 24:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If you get through that and you don't reward that, then it goes down.
• 24:52
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then somewhere around the 21 to 30 day mark, there are a couple of little more, we call them extinction bursts.
• 25:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So why does the brain do that?
• 25:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is really, really important.
• 25:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The first and primary reason that the brain does that is because it doesn't want to give up the food cue.
• 25:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Remember, food was scarce, it took an awful lot of energy to find food on the savannah.
• 25:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So when Thag found the monkey that brought him to a banana tree, just because one time a monkey doesn't lead him to a tree that has bananas, maybe it's later in the season, maybe there are other monkeys around taking the bananas, Thag's brain doesn't want to give that up.
• 25:30
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's saying, okay, maybe the reward has become available at random.
• 25:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Maybe it's intermittently available at random.
• 25:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So I'm going to try even harder to get it because maybe we have to work a little harder.
• 25:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But you know what?
• 25:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If we could find a monkey that led us to a banana tree 40% of the time, that would be better than having no monkey at all.
• 25:52
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: As a matter of fact, if we could find a monkey that led us to a banana tree 20% of the time, that would be better than just wandering around the savannah.
• 25:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Do bananas grow in the savannah?
• 26:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I always wonder if I have this metaphor wrong.
• 26:04
  Philip Pape: Uh in a jungle, I have no idea.
• 26:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Okay.
• 26:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, well, you you you got the job.
• 26:07
  Philip Pape: I love bananas, so now you're making me hungry.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: That's what my cue.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: Sorry.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: Sorry, man.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: No, it's all good.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: It's all good.
• 26:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um and so I call this the WTF reaction or the extinction verse, like where the F are my bananas, where the F is my donut.
• 26:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Excuse me for being a little bit crude, but people remember it that way.
• 26:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And the reason that's important is that what usually happens when you get to the extinction verse, somewhere in the four to 10 day range, and you feel a worse craving than you ever had before, you think, oh, I can't, I can't deal with this.
• 26:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I can't deal with this.
• 26:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is going to be torturous forever.
• 26:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I can't go, I can't go through that.
• 26:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Therefore, what do you do?
• 26:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You give in, you have the donut.
• 26:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Now what have you done?
• 26:52
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You've told your brain that it's right, that when you try to extinguish something, that it only has to try harder and make you crave more, and you're going to reinforce that.
• 27:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So now your brain is going to have an even worse addictive response.
• 27:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So, what you want to remember is somewhere in the four to ten days for a daily habit, and the reason I keep qualifying that is because it's really exposures, it's not days, but most people have daily habits that are a struggle for them.
• 27:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: All you need to do is get through.
• 27:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Tell yourself, this is not forever.
• 27:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: These few weeks of pain are worth an eternity of freedom.
• 27:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm willing to go through.
• 27:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The only way out is through.
• 27:30
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then what happens is when it when it goes all the way down and the brain is about to label it dormant, people think to themselves, I got this.
• 27:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I got this.
• 27:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I this is not a problem anymore.
• 27:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I don't know why I thought this was such a problem.
• 27:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm going to try to have one donut.
• 27:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I could probably just have one donut, right?
• 27:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then they go back in and they reset the extinction curve and they're going through the problem all over again.
• 27:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So you want to make an intellectual decision.
• 27:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You want to kind of ignore your feelings for all this, make an intellectual decision that for the next 45 days, I am not going to stop at the donut store on the way home from work.
• 28:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Period.
• 28:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: End of story.
• 28:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm going to extinguish the donut store cue from my life.
• 28:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And do everything that you can to support yourself through that period.
• 28:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And once people start doing this, they're really amazed.
• 28:17
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They, because those two little mistakes can keep you stuck forever.
• 28:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The third problem that people have with cravings is that they think that rules are evil.
• 28:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like hard and they're very frightened of hard and fast rules.
• 28:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like when I wanted to extinguish the donut store habit, I made made a rule for myself that says I will never stop at a donut store on the way home again.
• 28:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I have come to learn that I present things to my food monster as if it was a little kid and I present it as if it's set in stone.
• 28:45
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I could easily change that rule later on if I want to, but I tell my food monster it's forever because it's not mature enough to deal with the idea that maybe someday we're going to have more control and be able to do it.
• 28:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And because people are frightened of these hard and fast rules, they'll say things like, I'm just going to try to avoid the donut store on the way home.
• 29:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm going to avoid it 90% of the time.
• 29:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Okay, but you can do that.
• 29:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You can moderate in two out of three situations.
• 29:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Sometimes the craving is just too strong and you have to give it up.
• 29:19
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But if you're going to moderate, it has to be specifically bound in context or time, because otherwise, you have to make donut decisions all day long.
• 29:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Willpower is the ability to make good decisions.
• 29:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If every time you're passing the donut store or you're at or at the coffee cooler and there are donuts there, you have to make another donut decision, you're wearing down your willpower, wearing down your willpower, wearing down your willpower.
• 29:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Whereas if you were to say, I only have donuts on Saturday mornings after a good workout and no more than two, then you've context and time bound it so that your brain can interpret this is the only time that it's available.
• 29:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm not going to generate the cravings at any other time, right?
• 30:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Think of a casino.
• 30:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You all think of all the little old ladies pulling the handle, pulling the handle, pulling the handle because they gotta be there.
• 30:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You never know when it's gonna pay off.
• 30:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's what you're doing to yourself when you say, I'm just gonna try to have less donuts, right?
• 30:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because your brain says, well, I'm gonna keep pulling the handle because I don't know when it's going to be available.
• 30:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And if you look up in the literature, in the behavior literature, what's the most potent reinforcement schedule is something called variable ratio reinforcement.
• 30:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's like a slot machine.
• 30:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You don't know when it's gonna pay off, so you just keep pulling the lever, pulling the lever.
• 30:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But if I set that slot machine to only pay off on Saturday mornings at 10 o'clock, you can bet that next month those ladies are not gonna be there on a Wednesday afternoon.
• 30:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because our brains know when we interpret those contexts.
• 30:46
  Philip Pape: No, this is a very, very important point for the listener that decision fatigue and willpower is avoided when you take this intentional step to make the rule.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: Because I was gonna ask that.
• 30:58
  Philip Pape: You already answered.
• 30:59
  Philip Pape: I was gonna say, well, what are those who think, okay, go to the hot bar, but choose to replace it with a salad?
• 31:05
  Philip Pape: And what you're telling us is the cue is still there, right?
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: To potentially trigger you to have the lentil soup or whatever the salty soup was for you.
• 31:13
  Philip Pape: And it's a much easier to just create a rule, an abstinence rule or an avoidance rule, than to constantly have to make the decision when you haven't created that rule, right?
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: And that's that's a key distinction I want people to understand when we talk about that.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: And the the idea that the brain is seeking safety, let's just simp oversimplify a lot of what you said, makes me think of all the other ways that our brain seeks safety in our lifestyle, like eating at the same time, sleeping this, waking up at the same time every day, you know, our circadian rhythm.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: Like you even said the five days and the 30 days made me think of moon cycles.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: I'm like, I wonder how much of this evolution is deeply embedded in our the earth rotating around the sun.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: But that's just my nerdy brain.
• 31:53
  Philip Pape: And so it's the same concept.
• 31:54
  Philip Pape: So I like that.
• 31:55
  Philip Pape: Context and time bound, very specific.
• 31:57
  Philip Pape: Have a certain rule that takes away the trigger for at least 45 days.
• 32:01
  Philip Pape: Okay, I think that recapped what you just said.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 32:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
• 32:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So then you want to evaluate you want to make a list of your cravings.
• 32:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Which ones are worse, which are making the most trouble for you.
• 32:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And after you look at all of your cravings, what you don't want to do is dive in and fix them all all at once.
• 32:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like unless there's a real emergency and your doctor says you're going to die next week if you're, you know, you don't lose 20 pounds or something.
• 32:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I mean, I I can't override what your what your doctor tells you because I'm not a medical doctor, but what I've seen is that people do better starting with one simple rule.
• 32:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But like it could be um, and it doesn't have to be something that restricts your food.
• 32:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It could be that I never go into a restaurant without writing down what I'm going to have first, right?
• 32:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Or I always put my fork down between bites, or I take three deep breaths before a meal, right?
• 32:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Or I knew this truck driver who lost 150 pounds starting with one simple rule.
• 33:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: He says, I tell you what, I'm not going to give up fast food.
• 33:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I got to eat it at fast food places three times a day, but I won't go back for seconds.
• 33:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And when you set the bar low like that, what happens is you start to observe yourself jumping over the bar every day.
• 33:19
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When you read a diet book and you get all motivated and you set up a whole diet for Monday morning that's, you know, so much different than what you're doing every day.
• 33:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's great when you have your mojo.
• 33:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But I guarantee you within a week or two, you're going to wake up one day without your mojo, you're not going to want to do it.
• 33:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So you start with really low bars that you can execute every day.
• 33:37
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You know, I always put my gym clothes out before I go to bed.
• 33:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, you have a little, it's like a little identity function in your brain that's observing what you do and looking for shortcuts.
• 33:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I seem to put my gym clothes out every day before I go to bed.
• 33:52
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I must be someone who wants to go to the gym.
• 33:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I wonder what else people who want to go to the gym do.
• 33:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Maybe they drink a big glass of water before they go.
• 34:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Maybe they just drive to the gym and look at it before they go to work, right?
• 34:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And you can kind of start the behavior chain and build things on that.
• 34:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it becomes automatic.
• 34:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It becomes not something that you're doing because there's a Nazi food policeman in your head, you know, looking over you.
• 34:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It becomes something that you do because it's who you are.
• 34:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When I ask people, could you give up chocolate forever?
• 34:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They go, uh, I could never do that.
• 34:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I say, could you become someone who doesn't eat chocolate?
• 34:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They go, well, maybe I could do that.
• 34:32
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Maybe I could.
• 34:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because we were accustomed to having these shortcuts that, you know, relate to who we are as a matter of character.
• 34:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And really, all the character is, is what we habitually do at the moment of temptation.
• 34:46
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So come up with one simple rule.
• 34:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's the best way to get started with all this.
• 34:50
  Philip Pape: Yeah, a simple rule and set the bar low.
• 34:52
  Philip Pape: And the identity-based behavior change is also an important thing that I've seen in the world of psychology lately, kind of moving away.
• 34:58
  Philip Pape: Well, James Clear in Atomic Habits, a lot of people misinterpret his system, you know, his thoughts about habits.
• 35:04
  Philip Pape: And I think rightly so, people recognize there's actually an identity-based behavior change aspect to it, versus where a lot of people say, hey, a habit is just, you know, do this thing intentionally for X number of days and it becomes a habit.
• 35:16
  Philip Pape: But habits, habits are like the little automated things.
• 35:19
  Philip Pape: What you're saying are the bigger things of you are the type of person that trains every day, and therefore you eat this way, and then therefore you eat protein, and therefore you do all these things because it supports who you are.
• 35:28
  Philip Pape: I don't know if I'm stating it the right way, but it's it's identity-based rather than forcing a habit that isn't you.
• 35:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: A good example I could give of is people are frightened of making rules because they they think they're going to break them and then feel too guilty.
• 35:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We'll talk about that in a second.
• 35:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But, you know, most people, if I ask them what would happen if they walked into a diner and there was a $10 bill on the table that the waitress didn't see.
• 35:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: She says, I'll be right back.
• 35:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I just have to get your menu.
• 35:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And there are no customers up front, there are no video cameras, and nobody would see you take it.
• 36:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Would you take that $10 bill?
• 36:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Nine out of 100 people would say, No, I wouldn't.
• 36:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And tell me why you wouldn't take that $10 bill, Philip.
• 36:09
  Philip Pape: Because I'm an honest person.
• 36:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah, you're not a thief.
• 36:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right.
• 36:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right?
• 36:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You have an unwritten code of conduct that says, I never steal.
• 36:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right?
• 36:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I will never take money that doesn't belong to me.
• 36:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's the same thing.
• 36:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I will never have chocolate on a weekday again.
• 36:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's the same thing.
• 36:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm I'm a person who doesn't have chocolate during the week.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 36:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it becomes a part of you over time, and it's just so much easier to do that.
• 36:32
  Philip Pape: It does.
• 36:33
  Philip Pape: It does to the point where not doing those things now is the part that feels unnatural and a source of friction, which is what you want, right?
• 36:40
  Philip Pape: You want the things that you don't want to do to be things you naturally don't get pulled to do.
• 36:44
  Philip Pape: So you you said we're going to come to this.
• 36:46
  Philip Pape: So when someone does break a rule and then feels guilty, I that was actually going to be my next question.
• 36:50
  Philip Pape: They've set all this up, they've gone through the 45 days and such, or are you talking about during that 45 days?
• 36:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, either during or after.
• 36:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Okay.
• 36:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Most people make mistakes along the way.
• 37:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The confusion that people have is they're frightened of any type of perfectionism.
• 37:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And there's a useful energy in perfectionism, and there's a pernicious energy in perfectionism.
• 37:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And you want to be able to ferret them out.
• 37:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And here's how you do it.
• 37:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I call it committing with perfection, but forgiving yourself with dignity.
• 37:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And if you think of an Olympic archer aiming at the bullseye, maybe the bullseye is, I will never eat chocolate on a weekday again.
• 37:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's useful that that bullseye has a boundary around it, because then if the Olympic archer misses the bullseye, he knows by how much, in what direction, and how does he adjust his stance.
• 37:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And we are really learning organisms.
• 37:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So if you can make use of that feedback, then, and you keep on taking shots and standing up and taking shots and standing up and taking shots, you're going to get better and better and better.
• 37:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And this is why, by the way, the research shows that people who lose weight and keep it off permanently have more failed attempts behind them.
• 38:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Most people will say, I failed so many times.
• 38:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How could I possibly do this?
• 38:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But I'll actually say, good, good, you're more likely to be able to do this because you failed so many times.
• 38:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When you're aiming at the target, it's useful to be able to aim with perfection and purge your mind of doubt and insecurity.
• 38:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because otherwise, if you're thinking, I'll just do the best I can, maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't.
• 38:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's not really the psychology of winners.
• 38:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That doubt gives you a, it takes energy away from focusing on the goal.
• 38:33
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so you ask an Olympic archer, who hits the bullseye about 40% of the time, by the way.
• 38:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You ask an Olympic archer what they're thinking when they let go of the arrow.
• 38:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's called loosing the arrow.
• 38:46
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They'll say, Well, I can actually see the arrow going into the target before we let go of it.
• 38:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm not thinking maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't.
• 38:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When they do miss, they're also not saying, I'm a pathetic archer.
• 38:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Uh, what's wrong with me?
• 38:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How come I can't hit the bullseye?
• 39:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I might as well shoot all the rest of the arrows up into the air and off the target.
• 39:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There's no point, right?
• 39:06
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Or like when you accidentally touch a hot stove, you don't say, oh my God, I'm a pathetic hot stove toucher.
• 39:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You know, I might as well just put my whole hand down on it.
• 39:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You say, Oh my goodness, that was a painful mistake.
• 39:18
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How did that happen?
• 39:19
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How do I learn to make adjustments for my next shot?
• 39:23
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And the whole reason people don't learn, the whole reason people keep repeating the same mistake is because they're scared of rules, they're scared of drawing a really clear bullseye, and they don't take the time to ask themselves, what did I do right when I missed?
• 39:37
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like, look at what you did right, how did you hit the target?
• 39:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How did you have five cupcakes instead of 15?
• 39:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: How did you eat the whole pizza but not the box?
• 39:46
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I'm only half kidding, if you ruthlessly collect evidence of success, you will tell your brain to look for evidence of success, and then you will gather that evidence and you'll get better and better and better.
• 39:57
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so commit with perfection, but forgive yourself with dignity is the only way that I see people get better.
• 40:03
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And there are otherwise these systems out there, which are they'll say that rules are really bad.
• 40:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like, you know, rules make you binge.
• 40:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Rules don't make you binge.
• 40:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They rules make you feel rebellious.
• 40:16
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The moment you say you're not going to have chocolate during the week, there's a part of you that says, you know, the heck with that.
• 40:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We're sure as sure as heck are going to have chocolate during the week.
• 40:25
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Where can we get get us some chocolate right away?
• 40:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But rebellion is just a feeling.
• 40:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It doesn't have to control you.
• 40:31
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Just like depression doesn't have to control you, or anxiety doesn't have to control you, or rage doesn't have to control you.
• 40:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's just a feeling.
• 40:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You can say feelings aren't facts.
• 40:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And from this point forward, I am choosing to make intellectual decisions about the important food decisions in my life, the places where I've gotten in trouble before.
• 40:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's like installing a stoplight or a stop sign at a dangerous intersection.
• 40:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You've chosen to heighten your awareness and regulate that danger with some safe behavior.
• 41:01
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 41:02
  Philip Pape: I think you're making some really clear, if if subtle to some people, I don't think it's subtle myself, but it's subtle distinctions between restriction and deprivation that sometimes people associate with structure and flex and rigidity or rules, right?
• 41:15
  Philip Pape: And there's there's got to be a clear line there because I take strength training, for example.
• 41:20
  Philip Pape: Nobody complains or nobody says it's rigid or inflexible, or rules that I don't I'm gonna break when I'm gonna go to the gym three days a week and do my program.
• 41:28
  Philip Pape: Like that's a very structured approach that has rules.
• 41:31
  Philip Pape: I mean, we're trying to hit reps and sets and do these exercises.
• 41:34
  Philip Pape: Why do we not see that as structural rules?
• 41:37
  Philip Pape: But then telling ourselves what we want to eat.
• 41:39
  Philip Pape: I think where the problem is, is you're telling letting other people tell you what you should eat and not eat oftentimes, or you're restricting, you know, the energy coming into your body, which then makes you stressful and all this other stuff, which may not be the solution.
• 41:51
  Philip Pape: But the rules and the structure I think are great.
• 41:53
  Philip Pape: I also like the, I don't know if it's optimism bias or whatever that I'm drawn to, the idea of aiming for perfection but forgiving yourself, where, you know, be positive about the future, go after it, make the attempt, and all you can, the worst that's gonna happen is you're gonna learn from it, right?
• 42:09
  Philip Pape: That's the worst that's gonna happen.
• 42:10
  Philip Pape: It's like when someone goes to a job interview, the worst that's gonna happen is you're gonna be where you started, not without that job.
• 42:15
  Philip Pape: Like that's the worst that's gonna happen.
• 42:16
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 42:17
  Philip Pape: So I think that I think it's super empowering to say this.
• 42:20
  Philip Pape: And I hope the listeners are really taking a lot out of it.
• 42:22
  Philip Pape: What I think they might be interested, though, also is how do you deal with nutritional periodization strategies, which we talk about a lot here, where you're intentionally going through bulking and cutting phases, for example.
• 42:34
  Philip Pape: You know, I don't know how if you ever work with physique competitors, athletes, or whatever, what differences might present in those situations?
• 42:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: If you are really a binge eater, I usually ask people not to compete for six months.
• 42:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I dread when someone says, I'm just finishing up a competition and I need to get back to eating regularly without gaining weight.
• 42:55
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And you know what people do after a competition, right?
• 42:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I believe that the binge eating mechanism is an evolutionary survival mechanism that says if we go through periods of famine where enough nutrition and calories are not available, then when they are available, we have to hoard them.
• 43:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so to break the binge eating habit, I tell people to go to flood their body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit if they want to lose weight.
• 43:26
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Three meals a day, day in and day out for four to six months until you get a lot of the crap out of your system and you get a lot of the extinction curves, you know, calm down.
• 43:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And then we can start to introduce, you know, nutritional periodization.
• 43:41
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Is that the word for it?
• 43:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
• 43:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We can start to introduce your bodybuilding protocols if you really want to.
• 43:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But that that's a serious stressor on the body with regards to binge eating urges, and um probably have about half to one quarter of the success rate.
• 43:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: When people insist on doing that right away.
• 44:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So it's not the answer that most people want to hear.
• 44:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But if you have a long history of, you know, getting to 10% body fat and then bulking up to 25% body fat, and, you know, and you're you're really struggling to stop binging in between competitions, then maybe it would be worth a while to take six months off and really beat the binging habit and learn a lot of these tools for dealing with those intense cravings.
• 44:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because if you're going to do something that's going to generate intense cravings, then you have to expect intense cravings and do the things you need that you know how to do to deal with the intense cravings.
• 44:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Being very specific about what your food rules are after the dining competition, for example, I don't believe in cheat days or free days.
• 44:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I believe you could give your pig a longer leash, but you got to keep it on the leash, right?
• 44:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So what that might look like is if you're eating 2,000 calories a day, you know, while you're competing, maybe afterwards you're going to have, you know, three days where you can have up to 3,000 calories, but it's got to include at least X amount of disnutrition and Y amount of that nutrition.
• 45:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's very bounded.
• 45:11
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You have to be the master of your impulses.
• 45:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You can't just let it loose.
• 45:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And people think, well, you know, you need to let loose, otherwise, you're you're never giving yourself a chance to do that.
• 45:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But as a practical matter, I find most people, there's nothing they can't eat if they really want to, but you got to do it in a controlled and bounded way.
• 45:30
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 45:30
  Philip Pape: So you're saying you have to have even more intention, most likely, and you have to go through a some sort of prep to be in the right mental state and habitual state to tackle it.
• 45:39
  Philip Pape: I think people should really take heart of that because you do have a lot of desperation that the marketing industry feeds off of of wanting to lose weight.
• 45:46
  Philip Pape: And the more extreme you push it, like many physique competitors who, by the way, I've met a lot of them, and I'll say anecdotally, the vast majority of them probably shouldn't have done what they're doing, right?
• 45:56
  Philip Pape: They're not in that state to do it.
• 45:58
  Philip Pape: And so, you know, it catches up to them, and there's the rebound binge and everything you were just alluding to.
• 46:03
  Philip Pape: The idea of no more cheat days, too, I think that's a great tip.
• 46:06
  Philip Pape: We did an episode a long time ago called The Freedom of No More Cheat Meals, with the philosophy that there's always structure.
• 46:13
  Philip Pape: Even if you have refeeds, you could use fancy terms for it.
• 46:16
  Philip Pape: We use refeed days or carb-ups or whatever.
• 46:19
  Philip Pape: It's still structure.
• 46:20
  Philip Pape: You're still hitting your protein, you're still getting your nutrition and fiber, but you are just change switching out the uh the balance of your foods.
• 46:26
  Philip Pape: So, all of that said, this is really good stuff.
• 46:30
  Philip Pape: I know you worked on the inside of the food industry for a bit.
• 46:34
  Philip Pape: And one last thing that I guess comes up for folks is the sick food environment you alluded to at the very beginning, the hyperpalatable foods, the ultra-processed foods.
• 46:42
  Philip Pape: Is there something you know about how products are designed that maybe consumers would benefit from or something to deal with that environment beyond everything you've talked about?
• 46:51
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Well, watch out for plausible deniability.
• 46:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: What that is is something like these potato chips are made with avocado oil.
• 47:00
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That's the rationalization your brain wants to eat the potato chips.
• 47:05
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Less bad for you does not mean that they're good for you.
• 47:09
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But your your brain will take it as an opportunity to just go to town because wow, these are made with avocado oil, right?
• 47:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So health food stores are cauldrons of plausible deniability.
• 47:20
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We're going to eliminate, you know, one ingredient.
• 47:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So we're not going to have, you know, uh super fried oil, but we're going to ignore the fact that all the studies done on the what's what heterocyclic amines when you heat carbohydrates to that level, they produce something that's carcinogenic.
• 47:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And every study done on heated oil, every heated oil, suggests that they cause problems down the road, even if it's olive oil or avocado oil or something like that.
• 47:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So watch out for plausible deniability.
• 47:53
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Watch out for packaging that fakes you out.
• 47:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So for example, I don't, I think I might have talked about this in the first episode.
• 48:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I I apologize if I did.
• 48:04
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But I remember this food bar manufacturer who the vice president was a friend of mine, and he kind of walked over me and he said, You know what, Glenn?
• 48:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm a little embarrassed, but the most profitable thing we ever did was to take the vitamins out of the bars and make the packages shiny and diverse in colors instead.
• 48:22
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because the shiny diverse colors in nature signal a diversity of micronutrients that are available.
• 48:29
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But this is actually a predatory thing to do because, you know, there is no nutrition in the packaging.
• 48:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But your brain doesn't know that.
• 48:36
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: They also do things like when they're manufacturing a bag full of chips, they're usually not manufactured on a unitary assembly line, but on a multitude of assembly lines, because if they have very slight variations in flavor, your brain thinks it must have found a field of vegetables or something like that with very slight variations in micronutrients.
• 48:59
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And it keeps you eating.
• 49:01
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There are often chemicals in the packaging, which can make it harder for you to know when you're hungry and full.
• 49:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So a lot of people come to me and say, I want to learn how to eat when I'm hungry and then stop when I'm full.
• 49:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And I'll say, So do I.
• 49:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But we live in an environment which breaks our hungry and full meters.
• 49:19
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You do kind of learn to sense that over time, learn to sense it over time.
• 49:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But for the first four to six months, put objective measures on, accept that your hungry and full meter is broken.
• 49:30
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I mean, you can't you can't expect to eat these super concentrated forms of calories and excitotoxins and you know neurochemical.
• 49:39
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You just can't expect to eat that and rely on your intuition.
• 49:43
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Like we we were we did not evolve, we did not evolve to know when to stop eating potato chips.
• 49:49
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We we just didn't.
• 49:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
• 49:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's a super superhuman ability, and some people can do it, but um, you need to go through these extinctions first, is what I wave it to say.
• 49:58
  Philip Pape: That makes sense.
• 49:58
  Philip Pape: That makes sense.
• 49:59
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna love eating real food at the out of the other end, I promise you.
• 50:03
  Philip Pape: Because I used to be a huge junk food eater myself, and you know, I just love eating whole foods.
• 50:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: There are these studies where they ask people what they think about their diet.
• 50:14
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And no matter what diet people go on, if they stick to it for two years, they love it.
• 50:19
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And why is that?
• 50:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We had to want what we had.
• 50:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We had to want what was available to us.
• 50:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So if we lived in a you know, fruit and vegetable-rich environment, we had to really survive on fruit and vegetables.
• 50:34
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um, later on, when the ice ages came and we couldn't get all this fruit and vegetables, we had to learn how to fish and you know, really crave, you know, fish and meat and the things that were available.
• 50:44
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And so our brains are set up to love what's available, to provide pleasure response to what's actually available.
• 50:50
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: So by continuing to have all the processed food, you're telling your brain, this is what's available, this is what you should crave.
• 50:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But if you take yourself off of it, your taste buds will upregulate, your neurotransmitters will upregulate, you'll get more dopamine from having an apple or having a sweet potato or having a really big salad with nice spices on it.
• 51:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um I love what I eat.
• 51:13
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I'm not unhappy at all about it.
• 51:15
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I love it.
• 51:15
  Philip Pape: Agree.
• 51:16
  Philip Pape: And if you have a really good wife who is married to you and you're a very picky husband like I was, maybe she can help you uh eat those veggies because that's that's the process I had to go through by hiding them in your food and then gradually making them bigger.
• 51:28
  Philip Pape: Anyway, as we wrap up, I mean, this is this is a ton of great stuff, Glenn.
• 51:31
  Philip Pape: I've really enjoyed the conversation, a lot of great techniques and understanding the reason why and how our brain works is is really, really powerful because a lot of these principles can apply to many other aspects of our behavior.
• 51:42
  Philip Pape: Is there anything we didn't cover that you think is super crucial that that you should bring up before we uh conclude?
• 51:47
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: We just ask people to read the free book.
• 51:48
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Also, I'm in the market for a good wife to help me to cook cook my vegetables if you're out there.
• 51:54
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Um, no, no, read the book.
• 51:56
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's it's freely available.
• 51:58
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's available for free on defeatyourcravings.com in electronic format.
• 52:02
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: The traditional paperback in hardcover and audible have a traditional charge, but you can get it for Kindle Nook or PDF absolutely for free at defeatyourcravings.com.
• 52:10
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Click the big blue button.
• 52:12
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And you will also get um a set of full-length recordings of coaching demonstrations so you know how this really works in practice.
• 52:21
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: That way I can focus a little more on the theory here when I talk to Philip.
• 52:24
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: And a set of food plans, starter templates.
• 52:27
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: This is a diet agnostic program.
• 52:28
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I will not tell you how to eat, even though I'm a whole foods plant-based person.
• 52:32
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: You don't have to eat this way to extinguish your cravings.
• 52:35
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: I do ask people to try to eat less processed food.
• 52:38
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's just a whole lot easier when you do that.
• 52:40
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: But um, you don't have to eat like I do.
• 52:42
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: It's all at defeatyourcravings.com.
• 52:44
  Philip Pape: There we go.
• 52:44
  Philip Pape: Defeatyourcravings.com, diet agnostic, the book, recordings, coaching demonstrations, and uh a lot of great tools and tips to be successful.
• 52:52
  Philip Pape: So if you're struggling with binge eating cravings, any of the stuff we talked about, that's what you want to check out.
• 52:57
  Philip Pape: And Glenn, thank you so much again for reaching out for coming on the show.
• 53:01
  Philip Pape: I'm glad to see you know your thinking involved with the science, and that's what we're trying to do here as well, and spread the message.
• 53:05
  Philip Pape: So thank you so much for coming on.
• 53:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Lovely.
• 53:07
  Dr. Glenn Livingston: Thank you so much for having me.