174- Break Free From Binge Eating Prison with Dr. Glenn Livingston

[00:00:15] Bryan Carroll: Have you ever found yourself eating, even though you know, that you weren't actually hungry? For some reason, the food just keeps calling out to you and you keep going after it, even though it doesn't satisfy you and you know, you don't.

[00:00:28] Well, if, so this episode is definitely for. What's up everyone. I'm Bryan Carroll and I'm here to help people move more, eat well and be adventurous. And today I have Dr. Glenn Livingston on the show to teach us all about what binge eating does to us and the psychology around it and how to break free of.

[00:00:47] So Glenn was disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer overweight and or food obsessed it individuals. And so he spent several decades researching the nature of bingeing and overeating via work with his patients and a self-funded research program with more than 40,000 participants.

[00:01:04] But more importantly, he actually went through his own journey of binge-eating and food obsessions, and that journey led him to discover a way to reach a healthy way. I feel like he broke free of that food prison and had a much better relationship with food. But before we dive into this episode, if you haven't checked out my store [email protected], we just added some new products over there.

[00:01:31] We added elderberry and fused raw honey, and that raw honey comes directly from my own honeybees. And I've also added different flavors to our very popular windbreaker lip balm line. So now we have peppermint as an option as well. And also we have that in a chapstick version. So if you want to get any of those products, then head on over to mountainside, herbals.com.

[00:01:53] All right. Let's dive into my conversation with Glenn. Thank you, Dr. Glenn Livingston for coming on the. 

[00:02:00] Glenn Livingston: Thank you so much for having me, please call me Glenn. Of 

[00:02:03] Bryan Carroll: course, Glen, I'm very excited to chat with you because we're gonna be talking about food addiction and just that that desire to always want to be consuming food and how it can be really difficult to break free of that, especially if you are trying to get healthier and you're just being succumbed by that.

[00:02:20] But before we dive into that, let's learn a little bit more about you, what your background is and what is your preferred. 

[00:02:27] Glenn Livingston: I professor professors clinical psychology. My background is as a child and family psychologist actually didn't work with food addiction because I, I had one had a very bad binge eating problem.

[00:02:40] And if you had ever visited a deli or a pizza place on long island and you found the route of pizza, it was probably because of me. I'm only half kidding, but I, I, I I'm six, four, and I'm just like genetically modestly muscular. And so I discovered when I was about 17, that if I worked out for a couple of hours a day, that I could eat whatever I wanted to, you know, whole pizzas or more than one boxes of Pop-Tarts multiple boxes of.

[00:03:13] You know, munchkins and donuts and multiple chocolate bars and anything that wasn't nailed down was fair game when I was young. And I didn't think that was a problem. I actually thought it was a really cool thing. Kind of like a superpower as Doug Graham says, I. With just eat a lot and poop a lot and sleep a lot.

[00:03:32] And I was thin and handsome and enjoying life as a teenager. And then when I got married and I was 22 or so, and I'm getting a little older and I went to graduate school two hours away. So I was commuting two hours away to see, to see patients. Work in classes and and I'd come home and have to work on the business.

[00:03:55] I didn't have like two minutes a week to exercise much less two hours a day. And I found that the food still had a hold on me. I just kept, you know, I'd be sitting with a suicidal patient and thinking, when can I get my next pizza? Or a couple of. Discovered in a fair and like very high risk situations.

[00:04:14] It, I joke around a little about this whole background, cause it seems like so long ago now, but, but the truth is it was very painful to me because more so than the wait, I. Probably almost 300 pounds, 2 8300. I stopped weighing myself. My triglycerides were awful. The doctors were yelling at me telling me I'm going to die by the time I'm 30.

[00:04:34] But, but besides that, it was the food obsession that was driving me crazy. I, I would be sitting with patients and I, I really. Being a great psychologist was the most important thing to me. I come from a family of 17 psychotherapists and yeah, if you something breaks in the house, everybody knows how to ask it, how it feels, but no one knows how to fix it.

[00:04:57] But all kidding aside, it was a very soulful existence and it's all I ever wanted to do. I want it to be a really great psychologist. But I wasn't because. Wasn't fully present with these people. And psychology is not really an intellectual endeavor. You have to know a lot of things, but more so you have to lend people your soul so that they love and trust you enough to think new thoughts and take chances in their life and, and readjust their theirselves.

[00:05:24] So. I tried to love myself thin for years being from the family I was from, I figured there must be a hole in my heart. And if I could fill that hole in my heart, then I wouldn't have to fill the hole in my stomach. And so I went to the best psychologist than it did all this soul searching and they went to Overeaters anonymous and tried to have a spiritual awakening.

[00:05:46] And I saw a psychiatrist that took medication. I even. Because I had my ex-wife was traveling for business at the time. And I had a lot of time into my hands. I didn't have kids that worked at home. So I had a second career as a consultant, largely to the food industry also to big pharma and things like that.

[00:06:07] Okay. And so I knew how to do these big studies. That's what I was doing for them. And I conducted my own study with 40,000 people to figure out what types of stress seemed to lead to what types of food addiction. I discovered that people who. Started with chocolate. If they felt like they couldn't stop getting chocolate, they were usually lonely or hearted or a little bit depressed.

[00:06:29] And that was my thing. I was always going to chocolate and I, you know, it wasn't a great marriage or anything. I called my mom and I said, what could this possibly mean? She, she, I said, you know, you know, I am stressed and a little lonely and I'm not happy about the way things are going. Why do I go to chocolate?

[00:06:46] As soon as I feel like that. And she gets this horrible look on her face and she says, you know what, Glenn, I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. And I said, mom, you know, it's okay. You were a kid. She was a very young mother. So you, you were a kid. This is 40 years ago. I just, I just want to know what happened. She said I'm so sorry, but when you were one year old in 1965, your.

[00:07:10] Dad was a captain in the army and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. And I was terrified that I was going to be this young widow with, you know, one small kid at another one on the way at the same time, my father, your grandfather just got out of prison. And I idolized him my whole life. I didn't know he was doing these things I'm he was, he was guilty.

[00:07:30] And so basically when you would come running to me for food for love, I was horrifically, depressed and anxious, and I'd be sitting and staring at the. So I, I would say, Glen, honey, I kept a bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup in a refrigerator on the floor and say, honey, go get your Bosco. And you'd go crawling over to the refrigerator and you'd open the refrigerator and you'd suck on the bottle and go into a chocolate sugar coma.

[00:07:55] And then I could continue staring at the wall and I thought, wow, this has got to be up. This is the problem, but I didn't get better. I actually got worse and I realized. The paradigm I might be working with with rockers. What happened was it's like there was this little voice in my head and little voice says, you know what, Glenn you're right.

[00:08:18] Her mama didn't love us enough. And she left a great big chocolate sized hole in your heart. And until you can get out of this marriage and find the love of your life, you're going to have to go right on bingeing on chocolate yippee. Let's go get some right now. It was this voice of justification. So I started to sing.

[00:08:34] Maybe loving myself and isn't the right approach. Maybe there's something more about this voice of justification, more so than figuring out how to fill the hole in my heart. At the same time I was consulting for industry. Cause I had all this extra time on my hands and I saw. What the big food companies were doing, and they're spending millions, if not billions of dollars to engineer these hyper palatable food-like substances that are concentrations of sugar and salt and fat and excitotoxins and it's all, it's all designed.

[00:09:06] It's all engineered to hit the bliss point of the reptilian brain without giving you. Nutrition to feel satisfied. And when you do that, you create this desire for more, it actually kind of hijacks your survival drive and it makes you think that you can't live without this stuff. At the same time, the advertising industry, which I was also working with, I was an advertising consultant.

[00:09:29] It was kind of on the wrong side of the war, like in my fifties now. And when I was in my thirties, I was in the wrong side of the war. And I feel contrite about it, but I'm trying to make up for it. But, but they people think that advertising doesn't affect them, but it actually affects you more when you think that, because your sales resistance is down, they, they know what they're doing.

[00:09:49] They really know what they're doing. And they're expert at fooling you into thinking that this is where the good stuff is. So for example, I remember. I became very friendly with I'm a vice-president of a major food bar manufacturer. And as he was leaving the company, he kind of hung his head in shame and said, I have to tell you something.

[00:10:12] The most profitable thing we ever did was take the vitamins out of the bar. Cause they were making it taste bad and we could then put the money into the packaging instead. So they made it look vibrant and multicolored, but the vitamins weren't really in there, a vibrant diversity of colors in nature.

[00:10:28] Would represent that diversity of micronutrients that are available. So our evolutionary brains have evolved to think that this is where the good stuff is, right. That's what you say, eat the rainbow. And if you have a salad with green lettuce and blueberries and yellow carrots and red tomatoes, you're getting a diversity of micronutrients.

[00:10:48] They. They were very facile at fooling our brains into thinking that these things were nutritious when they really weren't. And I don't mean to single them out. This goes on all across the food industry. There's just, and we, we could go on and on and on it, but the kind of things that they do, but the bottom line was, these were two very powerful forces that had nothing to do with the fact that my mom didn't love me enough or left the chocolate sized hole in my heart.

[00:11:12] Right. Th these were forces of industry. Worked with the reptilian brain. And then the final straw was the straw that broke the camel's back. Was when I realized that the reptilian brain, which seems to be the source of a thing that gets involved with food addiction with all addiction, but food addiction in particular it's, it's the seed of their survival response, which is, it makes sense.

[00:11:37] The reptilian brain doesn't know love. The reptilian brain is more or less engaged in a bad college drinking game. It looks at things in the environment and it says. Do I eat that thing? Do I meet with that thing or do I kill that thing? Eat mate or kill that's what the survival instinct is about.

[00:11:55] There's no love, love is more of a function of the mammalian, Brandon than neocortex, which say before you eat mate or kill that thing, what impact will that have on your tribe? What impact will that have on the people that you love? What impact will that have on the kind of person you were trying to be on your long-term goals and dreams, including weight loss and fitness and things like that.

[00:12:15] So, Saying, wait a minute. I spent, you know, 25, 30 years trying to love myself, Finn, but this thing doesn't know anything about. So at that point, I did something kind of crazy. And I remember this was just for me. I wasn't trying to be a psychologist to help everyone. I did read a really bad book about 10 years before it never binge again.

[00:12:35] It's, I'm not even going to tell the name of, because they don't want people looking up. But, but. But I really wasn't trying to be a psychologist, so trying to figure this out for myself. So I decided that I needed to know when the reptilian brain was active and it was going to have to take more of an alpha Wolf approach than a love yourself fend approach.

[00:12:55] And if you think about. When an alpha Wolf is challenged for leadership by another member of the pack, it doesn't go, oh my goodness, someone needs a hug. I better love you more it snarls. And it growls. And it says, get back in line. I'll kill you girl. Right. So I decided I needed to take a superior approach.

[00:13:14] Kind of like you take with your bladder. Or, or your testicles, like if, if there is an attractive woman on the street, you don't just go run out in the street and kiss it. Right. I hope you don't. And I certainly don't cause I'm kind of shy, but, or, or if you really have to pee in the middle of a business meeting, you don't just drop Charro and go, you say you tell your bladder, look, I'm in charge.

[00:13:34] What are your testicles? I'm in charge and there are civil civilized ways to go about these things. And in the case of the business meeting, you kind of either finished the meeting and then politely excuse yourself and go. Or if you really have to go, you pull out you excuse yourself, in the case of the woman, you, you know approach in your own time and your own way.

[00:13:51] And I said, why can't this be any different if what's happening? Is that there are these. You know, fat cats and white suits with mustaches that are laughing all the way to the bank. Every time I look for love at the bottom of a bag or a box or a container, and what they're doing is they're stimulating this, this thing inside of me.

[00:14:10] Well, why can't I just take control of that thing? The same way that I do when I feel stimulated to peer to go and, you know, go with an attractive woman, why can't I take control in the same way? And the truth is you can, you just have to know. When it's waking up and you have to be able to jump out of that reptilian brain response, that feast or famine response, you got to jump back up into your rational mind.

[00:14:33] So with a lot of credit, for some other people who did this with other addictions, like Jack trampy for rational recovery, I decided I'm going to think of my brain in two parts. There's me. And then there's this reptilian brain, which I called very insensitively my inner pig, because this was not going to be public.

[00:14:52] So I said, this is my inner pig. And I, I said, I'm going to have to have a very clear line in the sand. So I know. When I'm acting healthy and when I'm not. So I said, okay, I will only ever have chocolate on Saturdays and Sundays. I won't have chocolate during the week. That way, if I'm in a Starbucks and there's a chocolate bar at the counter, that's calling my name as I'm approaching to pay for my latte.

[00:15:15] And I hear this little voice inside that says, you know, You worked out hard enough. You're not going to get any witness justice, easy to start tomorrow. And you know, besides chocolate grows from a cocoa bean and that's really a vegetable. If I, if I hear that little mice, they said, wait a minute. That's not me.

[00:15:31] That's my inner pig. And my pig is squealing for slop. Chocolate is pig slop. I don't need pig. Slap on a Wednesday. Chocolate is pig stuff. I don't need pig slop. I don't let farm animals. Tell me what to do this inner ridiculous thing. And I'm, I'm a sophisticated psychologist. You're hurting my credentials and I'm all over the place.

[00:15:51] And you know, we've got a PhD, but, but none of that stuff worked for me. This ridiculous premise. Technique with, with wake me up at the moment of impulse and give me a few extra microseconds to make the right choice. If I wanted to. Now, I wish I could tell you that it was a miracle and I immediately got the, and I didn't make him steak after that.

[00:16:10] That's not how the story goes. What did happen? Was it cleared away? All the confusion now it's just me versus my pig. Pig was saying crazy stuff. And as I learned to disempower that crazy stuff, when I learned what was wrong with the crazy things that was saying, I began to feel like I had more and more power to make the right choice.

[00:16:30] So for example, if the pig says, it'll just be just as easy to start your diet tomorrow, the truth is that that's not true. The print, the way the brain works. The principle of neuro-plasticity says, if you have a craving and you indulge it today, that craving will be stronger tomorrow. If you're in a hole, stop digging, always use the present moment to be healthy.

[00:16:51] It's the only time you can feed yourself. Right. So I would I, I. I would keep a journal of all of the crazy things my pig said and what was logically wrong with what it was saying over the course of many years. Over the course of about a year, I really started to get it. But over the course of many years, that came down to within weight.

[00:17:12] I really kind of reflected it. I learned that there was a lot more. To getting out of that reptilian brand. It's like once I woke up, then I realized there were things that I could do to activate the other part of my nervous system. The part that says it's okay to rest and digest and problem solve and think as opposed to act on emergencies.

[00:17:33] I discovered that there were ways to program in these counter thoughts. On a regular basis so that they would automatically pop up if the pigs tried to say something crazy, but, but essentially I just drew a line in the sand. I would listen for the pig to try to get me to cross it. I accepted that it was going to try and I said, have at it, pig have at it.

[00:17:57] I'm stronger than you. And I don't eat pig stop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do slowly but surely I got better. So that. Yeah. When I was getting divorced in 2016, I I decided that I was going to close my every businesses and I was going to write a book. I was a minor partner, a publishing company already, and I gave it to the CEO who says, oh my God, this is fantastic.

[00:18:22] I don't eat donuts, donuts or pig slop. I don't live farm animals. Tell me what to do. And then he proceeds to lose a whole bunch of weight. He lost almost a hundred pounds now. And we were good at, you know, we both in marketing, we were good at knowing how to contact the right people and get it started.

[00:18:36] And it took off by itself. And now we've got more reviews than the DaVinci code has got over 13,000 reviews. And people don't quite know my name, but they recognize me. And sometimes I find them a bookstore. If I'm in a bookstore, they, they walk up to me and they go, Hey God pig guy. So that's, that's my claim to fame now.

[00:18:56] That's awesome. 

[00:18:57] Bryan Carroll: Yeah. So lots of questions there. So, first one, when you were drawing the line in the sand. How did you know where to draw that line in doesn't matter? Or do you just need to find a spot to start from? 

[00:19:11] Glenn Livingston: The answer is really both. It, it does matter in many ways but it's better to start with something than nothing.

[00:19:18] So the way that it matters is that most people who struggle with overeating are also very good dieters. So with those things both have in common overeating and dieting is they're part and parcel of a feast and famine environment. And if you tell your brain that you live in an environment where calories and nutrition may be scarce, which is what happens when you're doing.

[00:19:45] Quote unquote, good dieting. And you're losing weight quickly. And you're then you're also telling your brain that when you find the harvest, when calories and nutrition are available, when you, God forbid break your diet on a Monday or something like that, that you better hoard up and there's, then there's this response that people have where they feel like someone's holding a gun to their head and tell them to eat as much as they can.

[00:20:08] And so you want to choose a rule. That's going to get you off of the feast and femme it out of the faith, feast and feminine. We'd like to start people with one simple rule. So it's something that's, it's not too burdensome. It doesn't restrict your calories and nutrition too much. Like you won't lose more than a pound a week doing it.

[00:20:26] And it's something that you could and would do that would prove to you that you're going in the right direction without without being too hard to implement. So examples might be, I knew this guy. And he had to eat at fast food restaurants. Three times a day. He says, I'm not going to stop doing that, but I'll tell you what, I won't go back for seconds.

[00:20:49] That's an example of when simple role are there. People will make one simple rule that support and mindfulness like oh, I'll always put my fork down between bites or I'll never eat in front of a screen again. Other people will make conditional rule. So it'll say I'll only have chocolate on Saturday or Sundays, or I'll only ever read pretzels, major league baseball games.

[00:21:08] What all the rules have in common is that they're tolerable. They're very clear. There's no ambiguity whatsoever. You know, you know, if you're having a pretzel outside of a major league baseball game, you know, if you're having chocolate on a Wednesday and you said you wouldn't do that, there's no ambiguity whatsoever.

[00:21:26] So it's, it's not something like well I eat when I hungry and I stopped when I'm focused. There's a lot of ambiguity with that and the can say. Oh, I think you're hungry, baby. I believe me. I think you're hungry or you're not really full yet. Are you right? But the line is ambiguous. So we say there should be a 10 observer acid test.

[00:21:46] If you take your role and you say, if 10 observers followed me around all month, would they all agree or not? Whether we broke the rule, if they couldn't agree, then you don't have a never binge again, enforceable rule. You have just kind of a guideline. So one simple. Not too restrictive. The, the goal is to take your spirit back from the pig, show yourself that this is not hopeless.

[00:22:08] You are not powerless. You don't have to keep eating out of control. There's no alien entity that's really taking over your hands and your arms and your legs and your mouth and your tongue. You can do this thing. You are the master, not the slave. That's, that's what you want to do. 

[00:22:22] Bryan Carroll: So do you worry about.

[00:22:25] People drawing that line in the sand, like, we'll take the chocolate only on weekends example, and they won't have chocolate all week and they get to the weekend and then they just consume chocolate like crazy. Or is it once you draw that line in the sand, do, does your desire for that food start to dwindle?

[00:22:44] So by the time the weekend does come around, it might take a few weeks, but you're not getting. Or I can assume as much of that, not wanting it as much. 

[00:22:52] Glenn Livingston: That's a good question. Usually when people draw conditional rules where they're going to moderate the tree, rather than give it up, usually they draw boundaries with that, with those real soft.

[00:23:04] So if you think of it like an archery target, so the bulls-eye during the week is I don't eat chocolate, but then there's that second rung around the. The archery target that says, well, on the weekends I can, but maybe I won't have more than three ounces a day or something like that. So there's, there's a specific boundary and it's very important to aim it, clear goals because when you're aiming at an archery target with a very clear bullseye and very clear rungs around it, you know, when you miss the target by how much and in what direction, and you can use that feedback to readjust your aim, the next.

[00:23:38] If you're just kind of, sort of aiming in a direction you think is good. You're going to lose out on that feedback and you can't learn from your mistakes. 

[00:23:47] Bryan Carroll: That makes sense. I like it. Yeah. 

[00:23:49] Glenn Livingston: It's, it's, it's better to put a boundary on the on the indulgent days. It's usually better 

[00:23:55] Bryan Carroll: to be free 

[00:23:56] Glenn Livingston: flowing. Well, if you ever thing to understand is that food addiction is the is the.

[00:24:04] Indulgence of whim and emotion over intellect, around dangerous food areas. And, and so what the boundary does is make intellectual decisions about how much you should have at what time so that you're not as vulnerable to the spontaneous whims of your pig. That's, that's what, that's what the boundary does.

[00:24:28] And a lot of people who previously. Couldn't couldn't control a substance like chocolate find that they might be able to, and it's at their own risk because, you know, I don't know who these people are gonna be. But if they were just trying to like eat well, 90% of the time and indulge themselves 10% of the time, but they didn't know which was the 90% in, which was 10%.

[00:24:51] It wasn't specified, they couldn't do that because they constantly had to make decisions about, is this part of the 90% or is this part of a 10% and we'll pack. Yes, the ability to can make good decisions. And it seems to be a finite quantity, kind of like gas in the tank that we get every day. And if you impinge on the brain to make constant decisions all day long, you're less likely to make good decisions as those decisions progress throughout the day.

[00:25:21] If you can eliminate those decisions by saying, I only ever have two ounces of dark chocolate on a Saturday, then your chocolate decisions have been made and you don't, you don't have to use your willpower. Just become the kind of person who was, I says a truck, but on a Saturday 

[00:25:36] Bryan Carroll: does having the, the knowing and the education around how the food industry is creating their foods to sell more product to you, to get you to buy more of their product.

[00:25:48] And that also impacts kind of that desire for that food. Does the knowledge alone help at all with making changes or is that just kind of a. Something that's in your brain that doesn't really make or break anything for you to actually make 

[00:26:06] Glenn Livingston: well, it makes you angry as opposed to ashamed, right? Oh, that's good.

[00:26:12] And maybe shame is like a psychological cancer for people that struggle with food. It, it wears you down and makes you feel like you're too weak to resist the next binge. And when you can stop blaming yourself and say, this is not. They have billions of dollars in all these rocket scientists, figuring out how to override my best judgment to break my hungry and full meters life.

[00:26:38] Shouldn't be like this. Remember the movie network a long time ago in the seventies, this newscaster got fed up and he said, I want you to go to your window, wants you to open the window. Once you say, I mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. Right. It kind of engender that kind of an attitude. And I don't want people to, I don't want people to ride or anything.

[00:26:56] But the anger is mobilizing and the shame is incapacitating. So it, it does help like that. At the same time. What you say is true that knowledge by itself is useless. So you have to use the knowledge and take action to to make these changes. 

[00:27:14] Bryan Carroll: Perfect. Now what about for people that they know they have a problem, but they're not fully ready to make a commitment to make.

[00:27:23] And let's say you are a family member that you're seeing this behavior happening, and you would love to see that person become healthier and start making changes. Is there much that you can do as an outside person or does it have to be come from the person that this is actually 

[00:27:38] Glenn Livingston: impacting you can do is what Gandhi said, which is to be the change that you want to see in the world.

[00:27:46] So be a shining example. Show your kids that mom can we're. Dad can have a banana smoothie with spinach in a couple of dates and carob, as opposed to a milkshake from burger king or something like that, you know you know, let them see you transform, but let them see you glow with your energy.

[00:28:07] And and then you can look, especially with kids. You can look for aspirational models, like a lot of kids watch these ninja sport show. On TV. And sometimes you can find athletes who have a YouTube channel and we're talking about what they eat and everything like that. That's much more effective say, oh, you know, look what Johnny Gogo eats for breakfast every morning.

[00:28:27] Do you want to do that versus saying, you know, it would be really good for you to have X, Y, and Z, and they go, no, no, no. I want my Coco. So that can be helpful to be a shiny example and to look for aspirational models. So the question is how can you change other people? You really can't really camping it and spouses take longer to come along.

[00:28:47] Then kids get kids usually start to make changes about six months after their parents do, but spouses hold on for a couple of years usually. 

[00:28:55] Bryan Carroll: Yeah, that makes a lot of. Yeah, it seems like a lot of a spouse or a couple is that I know the nagging, if one person's, you know, nagging the other about making changes, that never seems to work, but if they start actively making a change for their own selves and then the other spouse sees that happening, then eventually they kind of follow suit.

[00:29:15] It seems to be more 

[00:29:16] Glenn Livingston: effective. Yeah. And it's actually for the first four to six months that you're overcoming your own food struggles. It's actually better not to argue too much about what's healthy and unhealthy and tilt, tell people they really ought to do this. And what you especially don't want to do is go up to other people and, you know, and say, you know, I think you've got a pig inside of you.

[00:29:37] You're going to pick and setting people don't like that. So it's you can give them a copy of the book which is I'll tell you how to get a free, cleaner on and have them read the first couple of chapters in CFL like it, but, but you, you don't, you don't want to people will find it insulting.

[00:29:53] If you tell them that there's a pig inside of them, they will think that you're calling them a pig. This whole system works just as well. If you call it a food monster or a demon or you know, anything else, that's not a cute pet. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to use the word. 

[00:30:10] Bryan Carroll: Yep. Well, I'm assuming there's more to the process and just drawing that line in the sand.

[00:30:16] So are there more steps that are beneficial for people to be able to break free of the food addictions and bingeing and all that stuff? Yeah. 

[00:30:24] Glenn Livingston: Yeah. So we have two nervous systems, essentially. A neurologist might take me to task with her, essentially two nervous systems. There's one that gets us revved up and ready for that.

[00:30:36] Usually emergency action and was one that gets us calmed down and ready to rest and digest and think, et cetera, et cetera. The parasympathetic system is the one that comes us down. This is what's activated by yoga at the end when people are in Shavasana and they're feeling all chilled out and blissed.

[00:30:58] This, this is something you can activate with a particular type of breathing when you breathe out for longer than you breathe in, you're telling the brain that there's no emergency. And if you think about it, if you were what we call the seven 11 breaths, so breathing for a count of seven out for kind of 11.

[00:31:17] And if you were being chased by a hungry bear, then you wouldn't have time to do that. You'd be like getting all the air that you possibly could. So if you're breathing for a count of seven and out for kind of 11. You're going to calm down. So the moment you see that the pig is telling you the pig is squealing and saying, go eat the slop.

[00:31:38] That's the first thing you want to do is take a few seven 11 breaths. Then if you write down exactly what the pig is saying, writing is a function of the New York. Great writing is an upper brain function. Bingeing is a lower pain function. So that also takes you out of the lower brain and into a more resting digestive analytical mode.

[00:32:01] You're moving the battleground to the place where logic reign, Supreme, where the pig wants you to live in a place where it impulses reign Supreme, but you are inserting a space between stimulus and response, activating the parasympathetic nervous system and calming things down. So if you do that and then.

[00:32:20] I think then you write out all the squeals and then you write out why the pig is wrong. And then once you've done that, you should be able to feel demonstrably calmer in the craving should have subsided somewhat, but there might be a confusion with an authentic bodily need. A lot of times people get crazy.

[00:32:39] For something they shouldn't be having when there really is something that they should be having. And so the pig will have framed it as either you have the chocolate apart or starve, but really you can not have the chocolate bar and not starve. You can need something else. So for, for example, I discovered that usually when I was craving chocolate, which was usually about two or three in the afternoon that I needed a dose of energy of some sort.

[00:33:03] And they experimented with different natural foods that would give me that. And they eventually arrived at a banana CALS movie. If I could work it out to have a banana kale smoothie. When I had the Tropic craving, I didn't have to indulge the craving given if I couldn't do this, but it will be a lot more comfortable if I can have a banana kale smoothie.

[00:33:20] And then eventually. I trained my survival drive to look for energy and the banana kale smoothie instead of in the. So that the takeaway is you, you need to flood your body with nutrition on a consistent basis at a slight caloric deficit. If you want to lose weight. If, if you're, if you're losing, we're going to pound or two per week, you're probably going too quickly.

[00:33:45] And it's, there's a pretty good chance it's going to rebound the other way. So flood your body with nutrition, or just like caloric deficit, learn how to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. So you can calm down and get out of emergency mode and then learn how to disempower the pig logically by taking apart the things that it says.

[00:34:06] Bryan Carroll: Wait, did you basically just say that, trying to lose 20 pounds in six days, diets aren't effective in the long-term 

[00:34:12] Glenn Livingston: it's we haven't had success with that. No, we don't 

[00:34:17] Bryan Carroll: weird and weird. I see magazines with that on, at the stores all the time. Huh? 

[00:34:21] Glenn Livingston: I know, I know it's scary. It's what people want that people want to do that.

[00:34:28] So it's not sexy for me to say. 

[00:34:31] Bryan Carroll: Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to the marketing stuff you were talking about earlier, where marketing does a fantastic job of knowing what people want and they can sell you on that. And I kind of trick you into that and it's, it's a scary part of the food industry in general is they know way more about your own psychology than you do.

[00:34:53] Glenn Livingston: Yeah. Yeah. But the fastest way to lose weight is 

[00:34:56] Bryan Carroll: slowly. Yup. Yeah. And then it doesn't feel like a chore. It seems like for a lot of people, if it feels like a tour and they're trying to lose weight, then they fall off the bandwagon. 

[00:35:08] Glenn Livingston: What we find with the people that lose weight and keep it off. And we, you know, we've worked.

[00:35:12] When I say we have got a team of nine coaches and I've got a business partner and a couple of people in the company, what we find with the people that lose weight and keep it off, you know, for the long run is that they actually kind of let go of weight loss as a goal it's paradoxical. And what they focus on instead is the desire to be.

[00:35:36] Off of a diet, they really set by trying to diet hard and then bouncing back for all these years, they've kept themselves on a diet for most of your life and they hate it because being on a diet sucks, that's miserable. So they want to get off of the diet. And more importantly, they want to free themselves from the mental obsession, with food.

[00:35:53] When am I going to have it? How am I going to indulge? How much can I have? How am I going to stop myself? How am I going to make up for the difference? Exactly. What am I going to have? Where am I going to get it? How do I hide the evidence? They, they, that, that constant thinking about food that takes over their thoughts.

[00:36:09] They realize that that was torturous and the have the goal of eliminating the food obsession. And eliminating the dieting and just getting on an even keel with food. And then the weight seems to take care of itself. Assuming they're being reasonable about what their, their food plan is. Yup. 

[00:36:26] Bryan Carroll: Yup. Yeah.

[00:36:28] That's what I've seen. Really successful people are too, as the the weight loss doesn't become the main goal. It becomes a benefit. 

[00:36:36] Glenn Livingston: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:36:38] Bryan Carroll: Yup. Well Is there any final things you want to make sure that we touch on when it comes to binge eating and how to control. Before we wrap up here, 

[00:36:47] Glenn Livingston: there are two quotes that are important to me.

[00:36:50] And then I like to tell people where they can get more information if they want to. Jim Rohn said a life of discipline is better than a life of regret. That's the first quote. I think that's very true. I think most people think that there's this dichotomy between discipline and freedom. Either. You're going to be you know, tight ass and like like a soldier and not really have much fun in life.

[00:37:13] How else you're going to be really indulgent. And there's no interplay between the two it's like, you have to make a choice about living fast and dying young. Living slow and not having much fun, but the truth is that discipline creates freedom. Freedom sits on top of discipline. It's not opposed to it.

[00:37:31] For example, the discipline of the engineers who built your car makes it possible for the steering for the steering wheel to actually turn the real 30 degrees when you turn the steering wheel fair to Chris because of that and because the brakes work exactly as you expect them to, and the gas works exactly as you expect it to in a discipline.

[00:37:51] You have the freedom to roam about the countryside, your radius of locomotion expanded dramatically. Discipline created freedom. A, a jazz pianist is able to improvise and express their soul. Because they spent so many years practicing the scales and they understand the structure of music because they know where the structure is.

[00:38:15] They know how to improvise away from it and how to come back to it so that people still perceive there to be music and just not noise. So discipline creates freedom. And you will find that when you adopt one role and you feel like you've mastered. That you have more freedom, not less. The second thing is that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want.

[00:38:38] Peter McWilliams said that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. And we have to make some choices to, do you want to have a. Lighter sense of physical beings. You want to be free of digestive distress. Do you want to be free of cardiovascular or an excessive health worries with all the dire reversible diseases out there?

[00:39:00] Or, you know, do you want to have donuts every day? You, you can choose either one that you want to, you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. So I think you combine those two things together and you get a very powerful. A powerful life philosophy. That is really the philosophy I try to infuse and never Mingy camp.

[00:39:20] The last thing I'd like to tell people is that we present. The food rules to the pig as if they are set in stone, the same way that you might present to a two year old, they can, that they could never, ever, ever walk into the street without holding your hand, because they're not mature enough to even entertain the image.

[00:39:38] I didn't want my little niece Sarah to dart into the street or even think about it when she was two without grabbing my hand first. But I knew when she got older. But with wisdom and experience, the rule is going to change. It's the same thing with your food roll. You can change the food rule with fart, with, for thought and consideration and experience, but you don't let your pig change the role.

[00:40:00] So you tell the peg that it's set in stone and technically, technically you're lying to. But why can't you lie to, it has been lying to you for all these years, and it's not mature enough to know that, oh boy, we could change the rule if we want to. Why don't we just change it right now? People procrastinate about getting started with this because they're afraid that they're not going to pick the right wool and then we're going to be stuck with it.

[00:40:21] But you don't have to worry about that. That's not how this works. You, you aim with perfection, but you forgive yourself with dignity. If you made the wrong choice. 

[00:40:31] Bryan Carroll: Awesome. I love it. Well, my final question for you is what is your vision of what healthy looks like and what are the three things you do daily to reach that 

[00:40:38] Glenn Livingston: vision?

[00:40:39] Okay. Three things I do daily for me personally, after lots and lots of years of passing as many chemicals and sugar and fat and starch and salt and oil for my, through my body. My, my vision of health is really eating very clean. Mostly what nature has to offer. Not that I don't have any indulgences whatsoever, but I usually plan them out and bound them.

[00:41:01] The way that we talked about. So that, that's my envision for healthy eating. The way that I do that is I start the day by filling myself with healthy goodness. Usually with some type of a green smoothie or some type of vegetable juice. That's usually after I've done Vinyasa yoga or. I live on the beach.

[00:41:20] So I'm micro for a long walk on the beach or something like that. And then after breakfast, I do some journaling journaling. Can I ask myself what the biggest win for the day would be? I've always got a long list of things that I'm never going to get to. But what's the biggest win? Well, if I only got one thing done today, what will be the biggest win?

[00:41:39] And you find that those wins add up over time and they keep me mentally healthy and I'm productive and proud of myself. Yeah. That's I think those are the answers. 

[00:41:50] Bryan Carroll: Yeah. One when in one day doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a year, that's 365 wins. That's a big deal. Yup. Yup. That's a much bigger number.

[00:42:01] Well, people can find more about [email protected] and you also have your book available. Can you tell us more 

[00:42:06] Glenn Livingston: about that? Good and never binge again. Dot com and click the big red button. You'll get three things. You see the reader's bonus list. Sign up for the readers bonus less. You will get a.

[00:42:16] Free copy of the book and PDF nook or Kindle format. The electronic performance are free. The paperback and the audible version are, are, are paid. You will get a set of recorded coaching sessions for free. The reason I did that is that I, I know this sounds really weird. You must be thinking why does prior and have a psychologist time with a pig inside of him?

[00:42:37] It's it sounds really harsh and cruel, and the truth is. Did that in one session, you'll see. I can take someone from feeling hopeless and powerless and confused and desperate about food, to feeling powerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. And I wanted to see you to see that it really is a very compassionate.

[00:42:56] At work and and you'll get a set of food plan starter templates, which are sets of example rules you might use depending upon your dietary philosophy. Cause this is a diet agnostic program. You can, as long as you're eating enough nutrition, you can succeed with just about any diet. So there are sets of rules you might adopt.

[00:43:16] If you were doing keto versus, you know, whole foods plant-based versus. Low carb, high car point, counting calorie, counting what, whatever you're doing. There's there is a set of rules you can adopt for yourself. So never binge again, dot com click the big red button and you'll see what to do. And you'll get led to all of that other stuff.

[00:43:37] From there, we have coaching programs. I've actually written seven books since since we published the first one. But it all starts with never binge again, and you'll get led to everything else from there. If you're interested. 

[00:43:49] Bryan Carroll: Perfect. Glenn, thank you so much for coming on and talking about how people can recover from binge-eating and I hope there's quite a few people that will take you up on that offer.

[00:43:57] I think it's a great opportunity to, for people to reach out to someone that, you know, has been through it just like they're going through it and they can get them out the other side. So just like you I'd rather see a healthier world and I hope people will take advantage of this type of stuff. 

[00:44:12] Glenn Livingston: Okay.

[00:44:12] Me too. Me too. Thanks, Fran. It was fun. 

[00:44:16] Bryan Carroll: I loved having this conversation with Glen. And I think he has a lot of really good insights into different ways to break free of that food prison and stop binge eating and to have a better relationship with your food. So definitely check out what he's doing over at never binge again, dot com and see the resources that he has available over there.

[00:44:38] Next week, I have Jim Hern on the show. Let's go learn who he is and what we'll be talking about. Hey, Jim, what is one unique thing about you that most people don't know? 

[00:44:48] Jim Hrncir: You know, I had developed a nine hour contact hours course for physicians, pharmacists and nurse practitioners that teaches them about integrative medicine.

[00:44:59] And and I love giving that course. It's, it's interesting than when I give that. I'm refreshed at the end of talking for nine hours, I'm refreshed. I'm so excited about that. The, all this information I share, and that was something I'm really proud that 

[00:45:11] Bryan Carroll: I developed. And what will we be learning about in our interview together?

[00:45:17] Jim Hrncir: I'm hoping to help people to appreciate the little known benefits of customized compounded hormone therapy and other types of compounded therapies. We have so many answers. Issues and conditions that traditional medicine has no answers for. And so I'm just hoping to bring light to 

[00:45:35] Bryan Carroll: that. And what are your favorite foods or nutrients that you think everyone should get more of in their diet?

[00:45:42] Jim Hrncir: I'm a big fan of free range, proteins, clean proteins. You know, whether if it's fish cold water wild caught fish, an example, or free range beef, you know, grass fed I'm also a fan of low glycemic index, fruits and vegetables. You know, not keeping the starches out of the picture because of insulin resistance and also going grain-free because grains are inflammatory to almost everybody that eats them.

[00:46:07] Bryan Carroll: And what are your top three health tips for anyone who wants to improve their overall wellness? 

[00:46:14] Jim Hrncir: Let's say start with maintaining balanced bioidentical, hormones, and thyroid. And sometimes that just means optimizing them, you know, balanced and optimized, and also change your eating style from the sad American diet and exercise your brain because your brain is just as important as your.

[00:46:32] Bryan Carroll: I had a great time chatting with Jim and I think compounding pharmacies need to become more of the gold standard for how we supply patient protocols. Because these are designed specifically for you. If you want to feel like you fit into a, a square box, like everybody else, then by all means you can.

[00:46:51] Go get the products that support that. But in reality, everyone is individual and everyone's bodies are unique. Therefore your treatment protocols should be that way as well. So until next time, keep climbing to the peak of your health.