Ep. 140 – The Nature of Bingeing: How to Break Out of the Food-Prison with Dr. Glenn Livingston

We are excited to have Dr. Glenn Livingston joining us on the show today. Dr. Glenn Livingston is a veteran psychologist and was the long-time CEO of a multi-million dollar consulting firm that has serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. You may have seen his or his company’s work, theories, and research in major periodicals, like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News, American Demographics, or any other media outlets. You may have also heard of him on ABC, WGN, and our CBS Radio or UPN TV. 

Disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer overweight and/or food-obsessed individuals, Dr. Livingston spent several decades researching the nature of bingeing and overeating via his work with his patients and a self-funded research program. Most importantly, his personal journey led him out of obesity and a food-prison to a normal healthy weight and a much more light-hearted relationship with food. Be sure to stay tuned today to hear his story and find out how to stop overeating, stress eating, or binge eating and how to stick to any diet.

“I’m a former binge-eater.”

Dr. Glenn Livingston

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

• Dr. Glenn shares his story and explains how his journey influenced where he is today.
• How Dr. Glenn’s book, Never Binge Again, came about.
• Dr. Glenn dives into the concept of binge-eating and cravings-cycles and explains why some people are more susceptible to those types of behaviors than others.
• Dr. Glenn believes that decision-making wears down your will-power.
• Dr. Glenn talks about why people have different types of cravings related to different kinds of stress.
• Dr. Glenn looks at the idea of moderation versus abstinence.
• Dr. Glenn unpacks the societal pressures around sugar and alcohol.
• Dr. Glenn talks about why some people tend to binge-eat when breaking an intermittent fast and how they can overcome it.
• Dr. Glenn explains why you need to watch out for asking why certain things are the way they are.
• Why flour is so intoxicating.
• Dr. Glenn explains what the phenomenon of down-regulation is and how it works.

Connect with Dr. Glenn

On his website – Click the big red button

On Facebook

On Twitter

His blog

On LinkedIn

Books mentioned:

Never Binge Again by Dr. Glenn Livingston

Sugar Fat Salt by Michael Moss

Connect with Cynthia Thurlow

• Follow on Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn
• Check out Cynthia’s website 
• Check Out Dry Farm Wines: www.dryfarmwines.com/cynthiathurlow

About Everyday Wellness Podcast

Welcome to the Everyday Wellness podcast with Cynthia Thurlow! Cynthia is a mom of 2 boys, wife, nurse practitioner, and intermittent fasting and nutrition expert. She has over 20 years experience in emergency medicine and cardiology, but pivoted to focus on food as medicine. She loves to share science-backed practical information to improve your overall well being and is grateful to be interviewing leaders in the health and wellness field.  Her goal with Everyday Wellness is to help her listeners make simple changes to their everyday lives that will result in improved overall wellness and long term health. 

TRANSCRIPT

Presenter: This is Everyday Wellness, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve your health and wellness goals and provide practical strategies that you can use in your real life. And now here’s your host Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow.

Cynthia: Today, I’m delighted and excited to have Dr. Glenn Livingston. He’s a veteran psychologist and was the longtime CEO of a multimillion-dollar consulting firm, which has serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. You may have seen his or his company’s previous work theories, and research, and major periodicals like the New York Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News, American demographics or any of the other major media outlets you see on this page. You may have also heard of him on ABC, WGN, and CBS radio, or UPN TV. Disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer overweight and/or food obsessed individuals, Dr. Livingston spent several decades researching the nature of bingeing and overeating via work with his own patients and a self-funded research program. Most importantly, his own personal journey out of obesity and food prison to a normal healthy weight and a much more lighthearted relationship with food. Welcome, Dr. Livingston. It’s a pleasure to have you.

Dr. Glenn: Oh, thank you. I’ve been looking forward to it all week, Cynthia, and please call me, Glenn.

Cynthia: Fair enough. Now, I would love for the listeners to get a better sense of what background has brought you to this space that you’re in. I was talking on social media last week about your book, and the fact that we were connecting, and a lot of the listeners were adding, and suggesting some concepts to cover questions that they had for you.

Dr. Glenn: Sure.

Cynthia: Tell me about your own journey and how that has influenced where you are today.

Dr. Glenn: Well, there are a couple of things professionally, but what I think is most important to know is that I’m not just a doctor who decided to work with binge eaters. I’m a former binge eater myself. So, if you ever passed by the Woodbury Country Deli in Syosset or Woodbury, I guess, Long Island, and they were out of pizza, and pasta, and Pop-Tarts. There’s a good chance that I got there just before you.

[laughter]

Dr. Glenn: You can’t tell from this. But I’m 6’4″ and I’m modestly muscular. When I was a kid, that added up to being able to eat whatever I wanted to if I worked out a few hours a day and I took advantage of that. Multiple pizzas, boxes of doughnuts, boxes of muffins, multiple lattes, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. If it wasn’t nailed down, I was eating it. But I didn’t really think that was a problem. I was relatively thin, and I went to the bathroom a lot, and I slept a little more than most people, but it didn’t bother me at all. When I got a little older, is in my early 20s, and I was married, and I was commuting two hours a day to go to graduate school and my metabolism slowed down a little bit. It started to catch up with me because I couldn’t work out for two minutes a day, much less two hours a day. I was doing like a half hour twice a week. I was sitting an awful lot more. The muscle that works the most in graduate school is your butt because you are sitting more than anybody else. I was getting fat but more importantly, I found the food had a hold of me.

See, clinical psychology is not something that’s just intellectual pursuit. I originally thought that maybe people will come in, and they would present the puzzle of their life to me, and I would rotate this piece here and show them the missing pieces, and they would say, “Thanks, doc, I’ll get right on that.” That’s just not how it works. You have to lend people your soul. You have to be 100% emotionally present and go through it with them, so that they love you enough, and feel safe enough to think new thoughts, and leave their comfort zone, and take risks. I guess, I was pretty good anyway because I grew up in a family of therapists, but I wasn’t there. I was sitting with suicidal patients and thinking, “When can I get to the deli” or sitting with a couple that just discovered an affair and were trained to hold the marriage together, and I’d be thinking, “A big box of Pop-Tarts would be really good right now.” I just felt like the mental obsession was overtaking me. That bothered me more than the physical problems at the time because I could deal with a bunch of weight because I was tall. As the years went on, it got a little worse and my triglycerides went way up. Like I have a test over 1000 someplace, I think.

Cynthia: Wow.

Dr. Glenn: And the doctors were telling me, I was probably going to die by the time I was 30, and serious stuff, and very bad cardiovascular risks in my family, and I didn’t like that. But being from a family of psychologists, I figured that the problem must be that I have a hole in my heart. If I could figure out how to fill the hole in my heart, then I could stop trying to fill the hole in my stomach. So, I went to the best psychologists in the New York area because we knew them, because my family was part of that whole circle. I went to nutritionists, I went to Overeaters Anonymous, I took medication from a psychiatrist for a little while, and it was a soulful journey. I learned a lot about myself. Along the way, I stopped hating myself as much as I did in the beginning for the problems that I had. But I would get a little thinner and then a lot fatter, and a little thinner and a lot fatter, a little thinner and a lot fatter.

I’ll kind of speed things up to where I found the solution, but I’m going to tell you, it wasn’t until I was in my 40s. I found the solution in a totally different paradigm. There were three things that happened that made me flip the paradigm on its head to be more like an alpha wolf in charge of my own drives and desires to eat versus trying to nurture my inner wounded child back to health. The first thing was that I had a dual career. I, not only had a clinical practice, I was a child and family psychologist. So, I was not working with overeaters because I was one. I served as a child and family psychologist and I was also consulting for industry. So, I’d work with big food companies and big pharma companies. I was kind of on the wrong side of the war. I wish that I never did it but I did. One of the things that I saw in those companies was that, they’re engineering these hyperpalatable concentrations of starch, and sugar, and fat, and oil, and excitotoxins, and it’s all designed to hit the bliss point in your reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied. I know you’re a scientist. So, you’re probably going to run circles around me. [laughs] But that’s what they’re doing. They’re spending billions of dollars to figure that out.

Then the advertising industry, who I also worked with were expert at making you feel like you needed these things to survive. They were tricky. So, for example, I remember the VP of a major food bar manufacturer pulled me aside as he was leaving the company and said, “Glenn, I have to tell you something I’m kind of embarrassed about.” This was actually a good friend of mine from high school. And he said, “Our most profitable insight in the company was to take the vitamins out of the bar and put the money into the packaging instead.” So, we made it look vibrant, and colorful, and in nature, a diversity of vibrant colors, signals, a diversity of micronutrients and antioxidants that are available, where we sold to eat the rainbow. You know what, red cabbage, and green lettuce, and blueberries, and carrots were supposed to eat the rainbow. So, they’re preying on our evolutionary buttons. It’s not just this company, this goes on across the industry. They’re preying on our evolutionary buttons to make us think, “This is where the good stuff is, this is what you need to survive,” but then the good stuff is not there.

People think that advertising doesn’t affect them, but what we know as experimental and research psychologist which was clinical, but it did a lot of experimentation, we know that advertising affects you more when you think it doesn’t affect you because your sales resistance is down. So, they got you right where they want you to, right? So, I said to myself, billions of dollars to override my evolutionary protections in the big food and the big advertising industry, then the big addiction treatment industry is saying that you can’t quit even if you want to, the best you can do is abstain one day at a time, there’s no such thing as a good food or a bad food, everything in moderation, you shouldn’t use hard and fast rules. You should only use guidelines and try to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. But in the meantime, the big companies are breaking our hungry and full meters. I just said, this is a perfect storm. These are all forces entirely outside of my psychology. They have nothing to do with the fact that my mama didn’t love me enough when I was a kid or what she did. She just had some problems [laughs] or that I was in a bad marriage or anything like that. These were powerful forces outside of myself to realize that, “Okay, maybe the answer is not in loving myself more.”

Then it turned out when it looked into the neuropsychology a little bit, a lot, but not as much as you would know, of the reptilian brain, which is the seat of the feast and famine response, which is the part of our brain that says, “Just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt,” when you to go on a diet Monday morning. It’s the thing that overrides our better judgment because it’s a survival mechanism. The reptilian brain doesn’t know love. With the reptilian brain in our evolution or whether God put it there or not, but the reptilian brain knows eat, meet, or kill. It looks at something in the environment and says, “Do I eat it, do I meet with it, or do I kill it?” There’s no love there. Love is a function of the higher brain. The part of the brain that says, “Wait a minute. Before you eat, meet, or kill that thing, what impact does that have on the tribe of people, organisms that you love? What kind of impact does it have on your spirituality, your art, and your music, and the kind of person you want to be in the world and your contribution?” This is just eat, meet, or kill. I said, so, here I am spending 20, 30 years trying to love myself in, trying to nurture my inner wounded child, but the thing that seems to be broken doesn’t know anything about love. So, there’s something wrong.

The last thing that really convinced me was the study that I did myself. I was getting paid a lot of money to do these big studies. I know how to do them in the days when internet clicks were cheap, I got 40,000 people to take a survey, and I intercepted them when they were feeling particularly stressed out, and I asked them what things they overeat on when they were feeling stressed. They kind of fell into patterns of chocolate, crunchy salty things, and chewy starchy things like pizza, bagels, and bread. It turned out– This is very interesting. It didn’t solve the problem, but it was very interesting. People that struggle with chocolate like me, I always started with chocolate, my binges always started with chocolate and progress toeverything’s. We tended to be a little bit lonely or brokenhearted or depressed. People who struggled with crunchy salty things tended to be stressed at work. People who struggled with soft, chewy starchy things like bread, and pasta, and bagels, or pizza, they tended to be stressed at home. I thought that that was really interesting. So, I went to my mom. Before I’m going to start talking about this publicly or anything, I’m going to go talk to my mom. She’s a therapist also. I said, “Mom, I go to chocolate when I feel lonely, or brokenhearted, or depressed, and I’ve got this big study that proves it now. But why? What’s this all about?” My mom gets this horrible look on her face and this horrible sound on her voice. She goes, “I’m so sorry, honey.” [laughs] I said, “Mom, what?” She goes, “I’m so sorry.”

It was 40 years ago– this is when I was in my 40s. It’s 40 years ago, whatever it was, I forgive you. I just want to figure it out. She said, “Well, when you were about one year old, your dad was a captain in the army. My husband, your dad was a captain of the army. They were talking about sending him to Vietnam and frankly, I was terrified because you were when you’re one year old, and we were trying to get pregnant with your sister, and I thought I’m going to be an army widow with nobody to take care of you guys and have my hands full as it was. At the same time, my dad– your grandfather, Glenn, he just got out of prison, and I didn’t know that he was guilty. I’d always adored this man, was doing some really bad things, and I was devastated. So, I was anxious and depressed all the time when you were little, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to hug you, and love you, and hold you when you came running to me for affection or for healthy food to cook you something healthy. So, what I did was I put a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup in a little refrigerator on the floor, and I’d say, “Go get your Bosco. You’d go crawling over to the refrigerator, and you take out the bottle, and you’d suck on the cap, and you’d go into this chocolate sugar coma. And then I could resume staring at the wall.” You know, Cynthia, if this were a movie, then at that point, mom and I would have this big hug and a big cry, and I would never have a problem with chocolate again. Right?

Well, it was a good conversation to have. It helped me along the road to self-forgiveness, it helped me learn an awful lot about my mom, I certainly forgive her. It was a good conversation to have. But my overeating got worse after that point because I found there was this little voice in my head, this voice of justification that would say, “You know what, Glenn, you’re right. Our mama didn’t love us enough. She left a great big chocolate sized hole in our heart, and until we can get out of this marriage and find the love of her life, we’re going to have to keep on bingeing. Yippie, let’s go get some more chocolate right now.” So, was this voice of justification. At that point, I said to myself, “Okay, I’ve got the paradigm wrong here.” Let’s say that the emotions are like a fire. You could have a roaring fire in a well-contained fireplace in your living room and that’s an asset, not a liability. That becomes the center of hearth in home, people gather around, and they tell stories, and they laugh, and they cry, and they hug, and they make memories. It’s an asset, not a liability. It’s when there’s even one hole in the fireplace that would let an ash seep out and burn down the house that you’re in trouble. I said, “What if this voice of justification– What if the problem isn’t that I have to solve the emotional conflict?” Because you know, finding the love of your life could take a lifetime. I’m still single, by the way, ladies.

[laughter]

Dr. Glenn: Just in case I ever meet somebody and I really do. Maybe I don’t have to solve that problem that could take a lifetime. Maybe what I want to do instead is figure out how to fix the holes in the fireplace. So, I put this all together, what was happening in the corporate world, these outside forces, the fact that maybe the emotional problems weren’t the problem in the first place. Yes, they’re associated with overeating but maybe I could build a better fireplace, and then deal with all the emotions in a much better way like sever the link between emotions and overeating. Maybe that was the goal instead. It turned out that worked but the way that I did it was embarrassing. So, what I did, and I was not going to publish this, I was not going to talk about it, this is going to be my private thing to recover is, I decided that my reptilian brain that base part of the brain that was responsible for the feast and famine was causing all the trouble, that was going to be my inner pick. I wish I picked a different word for it, I wish I called it a food monster, I think that pigs in the world are sweet animals, they need our help, but I call that my inner pig. I’m sorry, but I did.

I decided I would draw very clear lines, very clear boundaries between healthy and unhealthy eating. Because I didn’t know what I was aiming at then I could never get there, I’m going to hit something else, right? So, a simple rule that I made to start with was, I will never eat chocolate on a weekday again. And that way, if I was in Starbucks, and there was a chocolate bar at the counter I was getting my coffee, and I heard this voice in my head that said, “Hey, Glenn, you worked out hard enough today, you could afford a little chocolate even though it’s a Wednesday.” Besides chocolate grows on a cocoa bean, and that’s a plant and therefore it’s a vegetable. When I heard that voice in my head, I would say, “Wait a minute, that’s not me, that’s my inner pig. Chocolate is pig slop on a Wednesday. I don’t eat pig slop. It’s squealing for pig slop. I don’t like farm animals tell me what to do.” All private, all in my head, I wasn’t a crazy person, I knew what was happening, just the game I was playing.

It wasn’t a miracle. But it’s the first thing that really woke me up and gave me those extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to make the right decision. At that point, I was feeling very powerless and confused. I was feeling like there was this overwhelming force and it didn’t matter what my plans were. At some point, they just all went out the window. Over time, I would play with the rules, I would add things that I was always going to do as opposed to what I was never going to do, I would have things, I’d say, I’m only going to have pretzels in a Major League Baseball game. I realized I was making the rules. So, there’s no point in breaking them. So, it kind of like reestablished my sense of free will and responsibility, and over time I get better. I went from 280 to about 215, and my triglycerides came down, and over time I became more and more plant based. I just found that I did better with that kind of a diet. I don’t preach any particular diet. I just teach people how to structure their mind so that they can stay with their diet.

I kept a journal for eight years. Of all the different crazy things my pig said and how I could prove that it was lying. For example, how many people in the audience have an inner pig or an inner food monster that says, “You could just start again tomorrow. It’s just as easy to start again tomorrow.” Turns out that it’s not. Turns out that the pig is lying when it says that because by the principle of neuroplasticity, what fires together wires together. If you have a craving and you indulge that craving, then the craving will be stronger tomorrow. So, you’re actually making the problem worse by indulging it today. If you’re in a hole, the best thing to do is to stop digging. So, I would keep lists of all the things my pig would say in this journal, and then I would look for the logical fallacies within them, and I thought of that as plugging one hole after the next in the fireplace. The pig told me it was going to have an unlimited number of holes that it could poke, but it really didn’t. After a couple of dozen holes, there were no more holes that it could poke and I found myself in control.

So, when I was 52 and getting divorced, I was a minor part of a publishing company, and the CEO said that, he wanted us to write a book. He wanted us to write a book so we could do some experiments and attract more high-profile authors. And I said, “Okay, well, I have this crazy journal that I kept for a year.” He says, “Great. Turn it into a book.” So, that summer, I turned it into a book, and I sent it to him, and he said, “Glenn, this is great. Doughnuts are pig slop, I don’t eat doughnuts, and all that farm animals tell me what to do.” He proceeded to lose almost 100 pounds. Along the way, we decided to publish the book. Like I said, I had to dual career in marketing and psychology. So, I kind of sort of know what I was doing but I had no idea it was going to take off the way that it did, and we have about a million readers now, and it’s published in all these different languages, and we’ve got 8,000 reviews, and it’s crazy. I go into a bookstore once in a while, people recognize me without knowing my name. They just kind of point at me and go, “Pig guy, pig guy.”

Cynthia: [laughs]

Dr. Glenn: [laughs] So, that’s my story.

Cynthia: I think, it’s really powerful to hear the stories that when I bring on guests because it gives the listeners some perspective and obviously, I may have known quite a bit of that, but to hear it in your own voice, there’s so much to unpack from what you just said. So, I want to touch on a couple of things. You know, talking about the power of persuasion, not only the hyperpalatable foods that the processed food industry is peddling, but understanding and a lot of people heard me talk about the book, Salt Sugar Fat that was my first foray-

Dr. Glenn: You read it? Yeah.

Cynthia: -[crosstalk] understanding food science being horrified, the bliss point, meaning, they put adults or even children in rooms and try to decide how much sugar they needed to add to this processed package of junk in order for people to not– to get to a point where they literally can’t they want more and more and more, it’s that bliss point. But to recognize that there is true psychology behind those strategies, not just with the marketing, but with the actual development, the food scientists work very, very hard to make sure we are as addicted as possible.

Dr. Glenn: I do.

Cynthia: And then, your own personal journey, even though, you’re a clinical psychologist struggling with these food binge tendencies and for anyone that’s listening, when I talk to my patients about what foods they are drawn to, it’s exactly what you’re referring to. It’s chocolate, it’s salty, savory, and then the trifecta of pasta, and bread, and pizza is like the perfect combination of fats and carbs together, and it becomes highly addictive, and then recognizing that you had this whole process of reframing the thoughts that were in your head, the pig, I mean, that’s what I loved when I was reading the book, this discussion going back and forth between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in the brain trying to override these urges, which are profoundly powerful. I think for anyone that’s listening that struggled with either food addiction, binge eating, or just having cravings in general, it is profoundly powerful when this inner working of your brain is ongoing. So, let’s dive a little bit into the whole concept of this binge eating, cravings, cycles that go on, and I could– in my mind I can say, “Oh, it’s you’re missing certain macronutrients or micronutrients in your diet, and that’s what’s driving it.” But how are some people more susceptible to these types of behaviors than others? What is it about those specific individuals that makes them more vulnerable to the power of this food addiction?

Dr. Glenn: So, first of all, what you’re saying about the authentic biological needs is really critical. Youcan’t make a rule that goes against your body’s needs. So, I couldn’t make a rule that says, “I’m never going to pee on a weekday again-“

Cynthia: [laughs]

Dr. Glenn: -because at some point, my bladder would tell me otherwise, right? Similarly, you can’t make a rule that says, “You’re going to neglect a critical nutritional need for a period of time because your body will tell you otherwise.” One of the less known aspects of my recovery was experimenting what those authentic biological needs might be. When I would crave the chocolate, I would not just wait knuckling it and saying, “Wait chocolate is pig slop, I don’t eat pig slop, and I don’t like farm animals tell me what to do.” I was looking for what I might actually be craving physiologically. I eventually settled on kale banana smoothie. If I would make myself a kale banana smoothie, maybe you could tell me scientifically, why that is? But I would no longer crave the chocolate, I would not get high with the food the same way you get high with chocolate. I think people get high with industrial products, industrial foods because there was not a chocolate bar on the savanna. This is something that’s an artificial concentration of pleasure that we’re not prepared for. So, I think we really are getting high with food.

The kale banana smoothie would not give me that same high, but it would kill the craving and I would feel even and okay. And that made it much, much easier to tolerate. So, similarly, when I was craving salty things, I found that I needed more raw, leafy green vegetables. I don’t really understand, I think there must be some minerals in leafy green vegetables [unintelligible [00:22:56] curious what that is, by the way. So, there are authentic biological needs that underlie these errors. So, part of what makes some people more susceptible is they’re just nutritionally uneducated, and they don’t know what they’re missing, and they’re listening to what the big food companies say we should be eating, and as a result they’re incredibly deficient. So, that’s I think a big part of the problem of what creates that.

The other thing has to do with parental upbringing, and what food was associated with, and what the original training was. I think that’s less important, Cynthia. I’d like to discourage people from going down that path too much because it leads you to believe that if you knew why, then it would be better. And like I told you in my story, I know why I go to chocolate when I feel lonely. I know why it didn’t help so. I needed some very practical steps to disempower that link and–

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Dr. Glenn: Why is a soulful psychological growth conversation to have, but it’s not really a curative conversation to have? That’s what I think.

Cynthia: Yeah, and I think that makes sense on so many levels. So, when you’re drawn to particular cravings, when you’re drawn to dark chocolate for example, sometimes, your body needs more magnesium and in our overstress pandemic field lives, a lot of people are losing more electrolytes and magnesium happens to be one of them. Plus, magnesium depleted soils can definitely exacerbate that. So, I know around– oftentimes around a woman’s cycle, sometimes they need more magnesium rich foods and that can help blunt some of those cravings.

Dr. Glenn: What are more magnesium rich foods?

Cynthia: Oh, I start thinking about pumpkin seeds, I start thinking about some of the green leafy vegetables, I start thinking about the other pieces that sometimes you need some more fatty acids. So, you know, salmon and tuna, things that have got those fatty acids that are going to be more satiating, and that’s a lot of what it comes down to. It’s like we’ve lost as a culture how to create satiating meals and so that’s part of it. The recognition that if we’re fat phobic or we’re saturated fat phobic, and we’re just eating plain chicken breasts with no sauce on them and no butter on our vegetables or we’re not getting enough healthy fats in our diet, I mean, that can drive a lot of cravings. I see that from the other perspective. But I also think that it’s really important to acknowledge that, when we’re looking at obesity within a culture, and people don’t always think about it in this regard, when I’m thinking about obese patients or obese clients, people that are really struggling, they’re very inflamed. The obesity is a sign of an imbalance in the body. And the recognition that if they’re eating these highly processed, highly palatable foods, they may be getting synthetic vitamins. So, they’re not even getting the real thing. They’re getting something that’s made in a lab. So, their bodies are so macro and micronutrient depleted, they’re literally starving all day, they don’t look like they are.

I think that’s this huge misnomer when I’m working with people or talking about the whole nutritional piece, I was like, “You’d be surprised to know that most people who are obese and overweight, they’re actually so nutrient depleted, their bodies are so incredibly inflamed from the processed sugars, the seed oils, which to me are probably about the worst thing on the planet that we can ingest, which we know drive this carbohydrate addiction, which drive insulin resistance, and you start making all these parallels.” But let me back up, I appreciate that you acknowledge that we should pull from the narrative how we you know, the situations in which we grew up. I grew up with one parent who probably [unintelligible [00:29:32] anorexia and other parent who emotionally ate. I’m somewhere in the middle, I have a healthy relationship with food. My parents both openly talk about how they have unhealthy relationships with food.

But some of us just put blinders on and just look at food as fuel, but that’s not how most of us are. But I love that you engage people with the narrative of the pig. You know, what is the pig saying to you, how can you reframe this so that you’re making better choices, so that you’re giving yourself food rules that allow you to feel like you mentioned the chocolate? Like, “I don’t eat chocolate Monday through Friday, but on Saturday and Sunday, if I want to have a little piece of chocolate, I can enjoy that.” It gives people this opportunity to say, “Okay, timeout. We’re not going to have chocolate today. We can have chocolate in three days,” and people can then go about their lives and not be so fixated on one particular food.

Dr. Glenn: Having the rule eliminates decision making. We believe that decision making wears down your willpower. Willpower is not this God given gift. It’s more like a quantity of gas that we have in the tank every day and it’s worn down over the course of the day with how many decisions that we make. So, if you say, “I will never eat chocolate Monday through Friday,” you’ve eliminated your chocolate decisions all weeklong and so [unintelligible [00:30:43] must rely as much on willpower. That’s why the idea that you should eat well 90% of the time and eat badly 10% of the time can be flawed. Because if I said, “I’m just going to have chocolate 10% of the time, every time I’m in Starbucks in front of a chocolate bar, I have to make another decision.” But if I say, “I’m only going to have that the last three days of the calendar month,” it’s the same outcome but all the decisions are made.

Cynthia: I think that aligns also with the concept and I’m guilty of having said this for a long time. Moderation, not deprivation, same kind of mentality because people then it becomes this decision-making point of what is deprivation versus moderation. What does that actually represent? Does that mean that I have one cheat day a week and then that derails all the hard work I’ve done the other days or does that mean that, I just have a glass of wine and a piece of cake, and I feel terrible the next day, and I’m like, “Okay, I don’t want to do that again.” I’m finding for myself personally, ironically, I was having a conversation with a friend before this podcast recording, and she was saying, “I’m 45 years old and for some reason, even though I haven’t had problems with gluten, grains, dairy, alcohol, all of a sudden last six months, every time I eat any of the above, I don’t feel good the next day.” So, it’s that decision of saying, “Okay, I choose not to consume x because it makes me feel this way or the way that I kind of justify things in my brain these days as I explain to myself the physiology behind why I feel bad and then I don’t want to do it anymore.”

So, I’d love for you to kind of talk about, when you talk about the differentiators between cravings and different types of stress. So, whether it’s personal related stress, if it’s home stress, if it’s work stress, why do you think that people have those different crave– I found that really fascinating when I was preparing for this that they could actually differentiate between you know, if you’ve got personal life stress, so you’re going to crave chocolate, or you’re feeling lonely you’re going to crave chocolate, but if you’re at home at night, you’re going to and maybe it’s an accessibility issue, maybe it’s more accessible to have pizza, and pasta, and things like that when you’re at home then, when you’re out and about, but when you were doing your research, was there any indication as to why those–

Dr. Glenn: We interview some people and we can speculate about it. I do want to go back to the deprivation thing. When we’re done with this, you can make a note. So, we believe that the relationship between the crunchy salty things and work stress has to do with anger. Actually, wanting to– we kind of wish we could bite something, but we can’t. [laughs] Like you can’t bite your boss, so you bite on the chips or something like that. It’s a psychologist speculation, I can’t prove it but that’s speculation. We don’t really know, we couldn’t really figure out what the relationship was between the home stress and the pastas, and pizzas, and chewy bread except that they’re exceptionally filling and that perhaps some people are stressed at home, they’re feeling particularly deprived and empty or maybe not feeling nurtured in the way that they want to be nurtured, and so they want to fill themselves up with these very substantial meals and that the chocolate seems more neurochemical, chocolate seems like more of a dopamine hit, and there are a lot of drugs in chocolate. There’s theobromine and caffeine and I forget what else. So, that’s what we think. Can I go back to what you were saying about deprivation? Because I think there are a couple of important points that I could expand on.

Cynthia: Absolutely.

Dr. Glenn: There are actually two themes in what you were saying. There was the idea of moderation versus abstinence. Are you going to have chocolate on the weekends or you’re going to give it up altogether? And then there is the idea of what is deprivation and how do I make that choice? How do I make the assessment about whether I should be moderating or abstinent based upon how deprived I’m going to feel? So, I will say that about two thirds of my clients seem to be moderators, which means that they’ll want to have chocolate sometimes and will be able to successfully come up with a rule that allows them to do it. Sometimes, it takes some experimentation. About 1/3rd of my clients are people who need to give up a particular substance. It turns out that I had to give up chocolate altogether. I haven’t had chocolate in years. I just became a person who doesn’t eat chocolate. I don’t think about it, I don’t crave it anymore, I just don’t eat chocolate. It’s just not an option. My life is much better. And that varies from substance to substance. So, some people have to moderate chocolate, but they don’t have to moderate flour, or they don’t have to moderate sugar, but chocolate they do.

So, it’s usually sugar, flour, alcohol, caffeine, and chocolate. Those are the key substances people seem to have to make a decision about, some people with roasted nuts, and salty nuts, and cheeses and stuff, too. Okay, so I can’t tell what kind of person you are and a particular substance without talking to you for a very long time. Most people have to make those decisions at their own risk and most people would prefer not to give up the freedom too quickly, so they’d rather not decided that they were going to have to abstain entirely if it’s possible that they could moderate them and I support that. I think, we fight wars in our country for freedom, and I think, you should have as much freedom as you want to have.

When it comes to deprivation, there’s another aspect to consider that most people don’t consider and I need to give Geneen Roth credit for that. She writes a lot about emotional eating. She said that there is a deprivation that you feel from not having chocolate for example. But then there’s also deprivation that occurs in your life from having chocolate. So, for example, because I don’t eat chocolate, I am a tall, thin, confident man. I can walk in the world as a leader who feels like I walk the walk, I don’t just talk the talk. I can climb mountains with time to enjoy the sunset at the top, I can go on a video, I can do all sorts of things which are key to the kind of person I want to be in the world and the life that I want to enjoy for the balance of the second half of my life. If I were to continue eating chocolate, I would be depriving myself of that. If I give up chocolate, I’m depriving myself of the feel and the temporary high of the chocolate. So, to me, it’s a no brainer. To me, when I assess the overall picture, not just the immediate gratification or lack thereof, but the overall picture of deprivation and the choice that I make, then it’s a no brainer.

What Geneen Roth said, which I think is very true is that, you never have the choice not to be deprived. You only have the choice of what kind of deprivation you want to choose. You’re going to have to endure one type of deprivation or the other, which one is it going to be. I don’t think that most people make that full evaluation. If you make that full evaluation, you go, “Nah, hand over the chocolate.” Okay, I support you with that. But our inner pigs prevent us from seeing what we’re losing in the future by continuing to indulge in what we’re indulging now. So, my argument is to help people to really evaluate what the future would hold, what’s the opportunity cost of continuing to eat the way that you’ve been eating. So, that’s what I wanted to say.

Cynthia: No, I think that’s such a good point and it aligns itself with a meme that I was starting to see all over social media a few months ago, and it was said, “Marriage is hard, relationships are hard, divorce is hard, choose your hard.”

Dr. Glenn: Yeah.

Cynthia: Meaning, it’s not an all or nothing phenomenon that, it’s a choice and you recognize that by choosing one path versus another, there are blessings that you have in one versus the other and you do have to make that choice and recognize that, it’s not all or nothing, certainly.

Dr. Glenn: People tend to think that our choices in life are between heaven and hell. And often that’s not the case, it’s often between hell and purgatory, or hell and something that’s a little hell likeor something, right?

Cynthia: Purgatory, as someone who was raised Roman Catholic is something that I heard more often than not from my grandparents but yes. For anyone that’s not familiar with the term, it’s kind of this intermediary point in between heaven and hell. It is a way that my mother managed to get us to get our–

[crosstalk]

Dr. Glenn: I’m sorry. I’m not religious at all, just an amateur. That’s not a metaphor I’ve used before. Maybe a better analogy would be between. Because the truth is that, having given up chocolate, I do feel like I’m in heaven. It is heaven for me. It doesn’t feel like heaven immediately. It took a couple of years to really come to fruition, but it’s not purgatory at all. It’s a very nice place.

Cynthia: Well, I think, that’s a beautiful thing to say that you’re at a point where something that you used to derive a lot of pleasure from you gave up and now you are in a position where it has no control over you. That’s one of the things that I hear from patients that they feel like a particular food or foods have control over them. So, the inner working of the pig, which I’m now going to be thinking about when I’m talking with them and obviously referring people to you that really need more support. So, let’s unpack a little bit about the societal pressures about sugar and alcohol. Obviously, we’re now in 2021, we’re still in the midst of a pandemic. At least where I live, there are not a lot of large gatherings of human beings together, but when we get back to that point, I think that there’s a lot of social pressures about certain kinds of food. I know that for myself, I sometimes will eat before I go to parties because it became very challenging to find the kinds of food that I like to eat. Certainly, now, that I’m– and I’ve never been someone that’s had a problem with alcohol, I just choose no longer to drink because I don’t feel good when I do it. There’s a lot of societal pressure to ascribe to kind of this herd mentality. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Glenn: I have lot of thoughts on that and I have a technique you can use to overcome it also. My thoughts are, most people think that’s just because of the taste and convenience of the food and that everybody else wants to feel okay about eating it. I think that’s part of it. I also think that it’s woven into the fabric of society. I think that tribes used to bred together to prove that they were not here to rape, and pillage, and kill, but they were actually friends and allies at this point. I think that there must have been a time when and we know there was a time when food was not plentiful. So, every member of the tribe had to labor in order to produce enough food for the tribe. They probably didn’t [unintelligible [00:40:46] these whole smorgasbords of variety and choice. They probably caught a mammoth or had a harvest of blueberries, and either you eat what was caught or you die. You were probably perceived as being a burden to the tribe if you wouldn’t go along with that. So, it wasn’t this rampant individualism that we’ve had since the enlightenment, it was more like step out of line and we’ll kill you, get back in line or we’ll kill you.

I think that that’s woven into our DNA. Everybody would think that’s kind of silly today. But we can’t evolve for hundreds of thousands of years in a particular way, and then just suddenly shed that because conditions are different. I think that there is this fear that the tribe will fall apart if everybody’s not eating the same way. I think that underlies these social gatherings and there is a sense of relaxation and peace when people are eating the same thing. I also think that in group psychology, there’s a concept called the aggregate versus the group. So, if you walk into an elevator and think even before the pandemic, everybody after pressing the button or saying which floor please, they assume an equidistant position in the elevator, and proceed to look down, and make sure their arms are not touching and there as far as they possibly can be from everybody else, and there’s no interaction, and then you get off.

Sometimes, they make a joke about that and as before I get off, I say, “Let’s all meet back right here same time next year,” just to point out how non-group like it is. But if that elevator were to get stuck between floors, then two hours later, when the repairman came, you’d open the doors and you’d find that people were playing cards, they’d established some norms for how they interact together at a group, they were sitting closer together. If someone had to go to the bathroom where there was a rule that a made or a song that they sang to get them through it, and they had an identity. They develop a little mini culture. That’s what a group is. It’s how then shall we live? How shall we live together? And there are norms and standards for how people do that.

Well, it turns out that, that quality of groups is somewhat fluid. So, when you haven’t seen your family for a month or a year, there is an underlying anxiety that perhaps those cultural norms have dissolved. How will we live together? When you’re walking back into the house and mom comes running up to you with a piece of chocolate cake and says, “I made your favorite, here you go.” There’s more to it than her just wanting to eat what she wants to have. She’s trying to reestablish the groupness of the family. She’s trying to reestablish the coherence of the tribe. To her, she’s loving you back into the family and what we normally do which makes so much trouble for us as we say, “I can’t, I’m on a diet,” or “My doctor says, no,” or “No, it’s not really good. I’ve been having too much sugar lately.” Well, that threatens the reestablishment of the purpose of the gift in the first place. We call it a love gift.

It starts in argument about what’s healthy and what’s not, and how much moderation is okay, and there are all kinds of forces that come into play that make it very uncomfortable to do that. Well, what if instead, you gavemoman alternative way to love you back into the tribe? “Mom, you know what, I had a little too much at lunch. I’m kind of full right now. Do you have any mint tea? I would love it if you had some mint tea.” “Of course, honey. I have mint tea. I’ll get you some mint tea.” Now, mom has another way she can love you back into the tribe. “Mom, I’m really cold. You think I could borrow one of Michael’s sweaters?” Michael was my mother’s husband. Mom– It doesn’t even have to be food or something physical? “Mom, I’m going crazy to find out the score of the Giants game. Okay, could we go turn on the TV for a second, it’s making me nuts. We’ll talk about food later,” whatever it is. You give mom some alternative way to love you back into the tribe and then it’s a non-issue, then you’re okay.

And yes, you can eat beforehand, you can make your decisions beforehand, you can find out what’s going to be there beforehand and figure out what you’re going to have and how much you’re going to have. You can bring food with you, you can prepare a whole bunch of questions to keep the conversation going, and make it more about making memories and eating the food, you can create some treat for yourself or leave at home in Tupperware so that you know the whole time there’s a safe treat waiting for you when you get home. There all sorts of things you can do to get through that but it’s a powerful set of sociological factors that are influencing that environment and it’s worth thinking about before you go.

Cynthia: Absolutely and such valuable strategies. Now, there were a couple of questions that came up. Well, there are many questions that came up when my listeners knew that we were going to be connecting, and one of them ties into a strategy that I’m probably well known for intermittent fasting. Touching back on that ancestral health pattern that you were talking about thousands of years ago, people went out, and they would have a kill, and maybe you ate one day and you didn’t eat for a couple of days, maybe you ate bark, and maybe some blueberries or whatever type of berry was available at that time of the year if at all. So, I have some people who are like a duck to water. They do very well with intermittent fasting, they’re able to get through however many hours, 16, 18, 20 hours of fasting, they break with a small meal, they do fine, and they move about their day.

And then I have people who really struggle with overeating when they sit down for that first meal and we strategize. I mean, there’re so many different strategies that we try, and there’s always a few women in particular because I work mostly with women, let me be clear. I’m not designating women as being the only ones that struggle with this that really– they binge. They, you know, maybe it’s the amount of time they haven’t, they’ve gone without eating, maybe it’s fear that they’re not going to have access to food. What is your take on that when you hear about individuals that sit down for that first meal when they break their fast? It could be someone who’s not even intermittent fasting might just be the first meal of the day, and they’re just shoveling food in.

Dr. Glenn: I’ve been evolving my thinking about this over time. With experience we’ve seen like, well over thousand clients at this point.

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Dr. Glenn: And actually, I just had a long conversation with our mutual friend, Melanie, about this. Originally, what I would observe was that people would come in saying they wanted to follow an intermittent fasting food plan and I tell people, “You can follow whatever plan you want as long as it’s nutritionally complete.” If the person had a significant history of binge eating, they seem to fail. Dramatically, lower success rate than all the other clients I work with. I looked into it and [unintelligible [00:49:27] intermittent fasting myself and I knew of the medical benefits of it. I don’t think very indisputable. So, I thought to myself, “What’s going on?” I said, “Well, I think the problem with binge eating is that the feast and famine response is erroneously firing and I’ve observed that the more regularly I can get my clients to eat and the more get them to gravitate towards whole natural foods rather than industrial products, the easier it is for them to stop bingeing.” So, I would advise people against intermittent fasting for the first four to six months so that they could get the bingeing out of their system, and develop some confidence, and usually that meant getting industrial foods out of their diet. They weren’t I overloaded themselves with sugar, fat, oil, excitotoxins.

Then I had some interesting experiences. A lot of people would be mad at me and say, “Well, I thought you said you supported a diet you want to.” I’d say, “Well, yeah, but I’m obligated to report to you the findings that I’m seeing” and it was overwhelming. It’s not just like a couple of clients. It was like almost every one of them. Then, we started a new program where we worked with people like our rehab alternative, people that really felt desperate, and we work with them every day. Those people very quickly got rid of the sugar, flour, and alcohol, and we started to have some, this is just anecdotal, because it’s just a couple of people, but I saw those people that wanted to go to intermittent fasting that were on that program we were able to do it successfully after a month or two. I talked to Melanie about this and she had a hypothesis. I’m curious what you think about it. So, we’re just speculating it. We really don’t know. But the hypothesis is that, there’s a period of time when you begin intermittent fasting, which is difficult because your body has to become fat adapted. Until that point, your blood sugar is a little bit unstable and a binge eaters brain interprets unstable blood sugar as an urgent need to eat.

The reason that I was observing what I was observing is that, the binge eaters brain was not fat adapted yet, and the blood sugar was unstable, and they were interpreting this as a need to eat. But my new hypothesis is that, if you can eliminate the industrial foods first, you can probably get to a point where you get fat adapted more quickly, and then you can embrace the intermittent fasting plan more quickly. I still would like people to have at least a couple of months where they’re eating these three regular meals per day. As a guy who works with binge eaters day in and day out and observes what’s successful, and what’s not, that’s what I see, but that’s my hypothesis. I’m curious what you think.

Cynthia: I actually agree. One of the things, when people enter my intermittent fasting program is we work on satiety first. So, if they’re going from three meals a day plus snacks and goodness knows what else, we go down to no snacks. Then we go down to making sure their meals are structured a particular way, because if you’re setting them up for success and it goes and it ties into the blood sugar piece, when we get people off of a lot of the processed foods, they’re eating whole foods. I think our philosophy is aligned really nicely. I can see that being an issue. What I do believe without question is that, when people have this disorder relationship with food, they do require a lot more touchpoints, whether it’s working with someone like yourself or another talented clinical psychologist really, really critical if they want to fast because without–

I always say to me, a lot of the work that I do is teaching people the method, and then they go out and do it, and they have accountability. But it’s like once a week versus daily accountability for someone with that background is probably really critical given their tendencies, and given the track record that they have that maybe it’s blood sugar instability, maybe it’s this emotional component I’m sure all of them together probably make it a little more tangent– [crosstalk]

Dr. Glenn: [crosstalk] a lot of cultural mythology about what it takes to stop overeating, that has to be deprogrammed. I find that some people can do that with our free materials and other people really need the support. We have different levels of support. We have daily accountability, but we also have group support and depends where people are, what they need. What you have to watch out for, when you’re asking me, “Why are certain people more prone to this or that?” You have to watch out for the idea that asking why is a pig squeal in and of itself. It is because what the pig is saying is, “Until you figure out why, until you go through five years of psychoanalysis, and lie down on the couch and tell the doctor about your mother and figure out why you’re so messed up with food, you’re just going to have to keep overeating.” It turns out to be an excuse. It turns out to be an excuse to keep overeating. You could stop today. It’ll be easier to figure out why after you stop than before you stop.

Oh, the other thing I wanted to say about why. Most people walk around saying, “Why can’t I stop eating?” But there’s something we know about questions and the brain. When you ask, “Why can’t I stop eating?” What you’re actually doing is programming your brain to look for evidence that you can’t stop eating. What you should say instead is, “How can I stop eating? Not why can’t I–” So, then you start to look for evidence of success. When you’re asked, “Why can’t I stop?” You’re going to be gathering evidence of failure and that will cause you to develop a failure identity when it comes to food. If you say, “How can I stop?”, you’ll find opportunities to stop and you’ll develop a success identity.

Cynthia: That’s a really important way to reframe. My parents didn’t allow me to use the word ‘can’t’. It was like it had to be framed in just a particular way because they said, it sets you up for this negative outcome upfront. So, that’s certainly very aligned. Now, one question that came up multiple times and I think you’ve kind of touched on it, but I just want to reiterate this for the young women that were asking this question more than once. What is it about flour that allows for it to be so intoxicating? Because there are people that were saying, “I can do without alcohol, I can do without chocolate. But if I have a cookie, or if I have a piece of cake, or if I have a piece of pie, it’s like, I can’t stop.” Well, here you go into the reframe. “I’m unable to stop eating just one piece.” It trips off. So, they have to completely avoid these foods. I think I already know the answer to this, you know, given our discussion, but it was something that came up over and over again. My thought process before you answer is the more processed flour is obviously that’s something that’s processed. You’re not sitting there eating a piece of wheat. It’s been processed to make it easy to bake with. I would imagine you get a higher dopamine hit or you get a higher hit- [crosstalk]

Dr. Glenn: I think so.

Cynthia: [crosstalk] -of that serotonin, or those neurotransmitters, or so that was where I was coming from, but I’m sure you have a much more eloquent.

Dr. Glenn: I’m not sure I do. [laughs] Also cake and cookies, it’s not just flour. It’s flour plus, oil plus, [unintelligible [00:56:17] and fat, and sugar altogether, yeah. Something else that happens over time on our society, when you overstimulate one of your senses, something that occurs is called downregulation. So, when I was in graduate school, I had to sleep underneath a subway. I had no idea how I’d ever be able to get any sleep. But two weeks later, I couldn’t hear the trains go by, and what happened is your brain habituates to a stimulus which doesn’t really have the meaning. At first, it seems like this supersize stimulus, but then it doesn’t really have meaning. So, it stops responding as [unintelligible [00:56:46]. The same thing happens with a chocolate bar. If you have a chocolate bar every day, by the end of a few weeks, fruit is not going to taste very good to you. You’re not going to taste the natural sugars and variations in flavor that you should in different fruits and vegetables. The good news is and this is why everybody says, “Look, I know I have to have more fruit and vegetables in order to lose weight, but I hate fruit and vegetables.”

We’re used to being ridiculously overstimulated not just with food with, you know, all the car chases, and scantily clad people, and explosions, and everything on TV and on the movies. So, we’re used to having our nervous systems overstimulated, and as a consequence, our pleasure response is downregulated, so that we think, we need a chocolate bar to experience anything good. So, there is a period of anhedonia, there’s a period of lacking pleasure that you need to go through when you pull yourself off of these things. The good news is that there’s also a phenomenon called upregulation. So, when I moved away from the subway, a few weeks later, if I went back to visit, I could hear the subway again. If you stop having chocolate every day, I think, it’s six to eight weeks, it takes for your taste buds to double in sensitivity. So, you don’t have to believe me, but you just have to know that scientifically, you will enjoy your food again. Even though, the pig says, “This is going to be torture forever.” It won’t be. Your body will upregulate and you’ll be able to enjoy foodie camp. I, now, get as much pleasure from a banana as I used to get from a Pop-Tart.

Cynthia: That says quite a bit and for anyone that’s listening that is struggling with food addiction or binge eating, Glenn is an incredible resource. Can you share with the listeners how best to reach out to you, what’s the easiest way to connect with you? Obviously, we’ll put links to all your social media and your book, Never Binge Again, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading all about the pig. I will never look at pigs the same way, again.

Dr. Glenn: Yeah, well, if you go to neverbingeagain.com, and click on the big red button, and sign up for the reader bonus list, I’ll do three things for you. I’ll give you a free copy of the book in Kindle, Nook or PDF format. I’ll actually show you how you can get it in paperback or audible if you want to. But it’s free for Kindle looking PDF. So, I’m happy to do that. You will get a set of recordings of full-length coaching sessions. I know that podcast listeners like to listen. The reason that’s important is that this sounds like a very weird concept in theory. You must be thinking, “Why does Cynthia has this guy on who has a pig inside him and it’s some crazy doctor. What’s going on?” This is really harsh. Maybe people are going to lose their self-esteem. “Isn’t he fat shaming people?” I’m not. It’s a very compassionate life giving, enthusiasm, and hope restorative process. I want you to hear it for yourself. So, I recorded a bunch of coaching sessions. This is all free.

The third thing you’ll get is a set of food plan starter templates for any dietary philosophy. We did our best to think through how would you put together a set of rules for plant-based program, how would you do it for a keto-based program, what would you do for macrobiotic versus point counting versus calorie counting? I call them starter templates, because I don’t want to take responsibility for what you’re eating for two reasons. I’m not a medical doctor or dietitian, but more importantly when a doctor gives you a food plan, your pig immediately says, “That doctor’s food plan’s no good. We’re going to have to find another one.” In the meantime, we can go binge. So, I look to poke holes in it and then it’ll want to binge in the meat. time. So, I found that part of recovering from food addiction is taking responsibility for your own plan. You can get advice– I advise you to consult with, Cynthia, if she still does that kind of thing. You can get advice. But in the end, you want to look over the rules and say, “This makes sense. I own this. This is how I’m going to do it. These are my rules.” Otherwise, you’re leaving your pig too much of a hole to [unintelligible [01:00:37]. It’s all on neverbingeagain.com. Click the big red button.

Cynthia: Well, it’s been such a pleasure to connect with you. You were absolutely a name that kept coming up with my listeners. They wanted me to connect with you and certainly with the amount of people that reached out prior to this interview with questions, and comments, and just insights about how their own struggles have been, it makes me profoundly grateful that you carved time out of your busy schedule to connect.

Dr. Glenn: I really appreciate you having me on, this was fun.

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