Never Binge Again - Interview with Dr Glenn Livingston

welcome back to another episode of christian natural health today i am excited to have dr glenn livingston with

us glenn is a veteran psychologist and was the longtime ceo of a multi-million

dollar consulting firm which has serviced several fortune 500 clients in the food industry he has sold 30 wait 30

million of marketing consulting for consulting services over the course of his career disillusioned by what

traditional psychology had to offer overweight and or food obsessed individuals dr livingston spent several

decades researching the nature of binging and overeating via work with his own patients and a self-funded research

program with more than 40 000 participants more important however was 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 so glad to have you thank you so much please call me glenn glenn absolutely for sure so tell me a little

bit more of your own story so what was your previous relationship with food like and how did you change that

well have you ever tried stopping by a pizza place or a 7-eleven on long island in new york

no i can't say i have if you did and you found that they were out of pizza or pop-tarts the odds are

that i was there before you it if it was in the night

if it was in the 80s or 90s um i had a problem let's just say i'm not just a doctor that worked with

overweight people i had a problem i had a serious problem myself right it started when i was about 17

and i'm you know i'm 6'4 i'm modestly muscular muscular without doing much about it and

figured out if i worked out for two or three hours a day i could eat whatever i wanted to and multiple pizzas boxes of muffins

boxes of chocolates lattes they didn't call them lattes back then and um

i didn't think it was a problem i thought it was like doug graham says a superpower and

it really wasn't a problem until i i mean i wasted a lot of time and energy i think but i was only 17 and you know by the time i

was 22 i was married and i was commuting two hours each way to go to graduate school and see

patients and take classes and then i would come home and i would have to um you know have to work on the business

and then god forbid my wife wanted to talk to me i just didn't have more than a you know

half hour a week to work out at best oh my but i found that the food still had a

had a hold of me it was like it had a life of its own yeah and i was still eating like that

and i got to start to get a little heavier and then a lot heavier but that wasn't really the major problem

but the major problem was that i got obsessed with the food i would be sitting and talking to some

suicidal adolescents and i'd be thinking when can i get the next pizza right boy yeah and

you know when you're being a psychologist is always exceptionally important to me because i come up from a family of 17 therapists

and yeah everybody um something breaks in the house we all know how to ask it how it feels nobody knows

so it was very very important to me to be a good psychologist that's a joke but it was a very soulful life it was really

the most important thing to me and in order to help these people

you have to lend them your soul you can't you can't just intellectually figure stuff out you know yeah

so so i wasn't as effective as i could have been i never lost anybody because i i

made up for it by studying hard and really working hard at it but i i wasn't as effective as i could have been and it

really bothered me and um over the years i worked with couples and children and and there were there

were just so many times that i felt like i could have been doing so much more and being a psychologist i figured that

the problem was in my heart and my soul it wasn't really a physiological problem it was in my heart and my soul

and so i tried to love myself then i went the traditional route right like i went to see

other psychologists i went to see you know the best psychiatrists and nutritionists and dietitians and doctors

that specialize in obesity and i went to orb readers anonymous and then i even did that 40 000 person study

because my she's my ex-wife now but she was traveling for a business

and i i had a lot of time in my hands so i had this dual career there was also consulting for the big food industry

uh which i feel kind of like the marble man towards the end of his life where he was contrite

and felt like he was on the wrong side of the war i i was definitely on the wrong side of the war right but but that's what i did

um and it's relevant because eventually i figured out that this love yourself thin

stuff didn't work at least not for me um i would kept trying to fill the hole in my heart and then i wouldn't have to

fill the hole in my stomach and i'd get a little thinner and a lot fatter and a little thinner and a lot fatter and i

got progressively more obsessed with food and i really wasted 20 25 years trying to do that it's a

soulful journey i learned a lot about myself i'm sure um but in terms of curing the food problem it really didn't

so here's what it did eventually i realized that i needed another paradigm

that i needed to to flip the paradigm and make it more like an alpha wolf tough love approach

with my own impulses and the reason i thought of that was first of all

in the consulting work i was doing i saw that there were millions if not billions of dollars and lots of rocket scientists

busy engineering these hyper palatable concentrations of starch and sugar

and fat and excited toxins and salt and and it's all designed to hit the bliss

point in the reptilian brain without making you feel satisfied it doesn't give you enough nutrition to feel satisfied yeah

now the reptilian brain is the thing in and of itself this was another insight the reptilian brain which seems to be

the seat of addiction seems to be the seat of this feast and famine response that says

forget everything else you're starving you have to have this now right the reptilian brain

doesn't know love the reptilian brain looks at something in the environment and it's like a bad

drinking game it says do i eat it do i mate with it or do i kill it

those are the only options yeah like this is the reptilian brain it's

the mammalian brain that kind of evolved on top of that or maybe god put it there i don't know but but for whatever reason

it sits on top of there and it says before you eat mater or kill that thing what impact does that have on the people

that i love what impact does this have on my tribe and my family and you know more extended civilization to a certain

extent and then it's the neocortex on top of that that says wait a minute before you eat mate or kill that thing

what impact does that have on your long-term goals what impact does that have on your not only diet in weight loss but the kind of person you're

trying to be in society your contributions your work your music your art your spirituality that's all in the

upper brain and so essentially what i was doing was spending 20 years trying to fix the upper brain when the problem

was down here right yeah so i eventually i eventually decided

that i was going to have to be an alpha dog an alpha wolf when an alpha wolf is challenged for

leadership of the pack by another wolf in the pack the alpha wolf doesn't say oh my goodness somebody needs a hug right

the alpha wolf says you know girl get back in line or i'll kill you right

and i said so this is more like this thing inside of me this is more like a bodily organ

inside of me and there are lots of bodily organs inside of me that

press with for impulsive discharge of their of their needs like my bladder

will say you know you really really really really have to pay and lauren i don't right now but if i did

i'd hear it if i did i would tell my bladder i'm

sorry but i'm talking to lauren now this is a professional call you're going to have to wait until later i'm not going

to ignore you it's not like i'm saying well i'll schedule on the on the calendar for next thursday sure i'll take care of my authentic needs but you

know later right right or if there's an attractive person outside you don't run down and kiss them because your

reproductive organs are generating those impulses right um and we can go on and on and on so i said well why is this

impulse to eat generated by the reptilian brain any different it's just just because i'm i'm

i'm confused by all this you know depth psychology about it but really it's just an impulse and it should be

able to do the same thing so here's what i did and it's a little embarrassing because you've got my

credentials i'm a sophisticated um am i over talking do you want to say something no you're fine keep going okay

so so you you know i'm a sophisticated psychologist and i've been in all these

periodicals and journals and papers and tv shows and stuff but the way that i recovered from

overeating is not sophisticated at all i decided that

my reptilian brain i wasn't going to publish this this was um this was just going to be my private recovery it was

just all internally okay i'll say it i i wasn't i had this my reptilian brain i

decided to call it my inner pig i wish i called this something different i wish i called it a food monster or a food demon

because i wouldn't have taken all the heat that i get now for calling it a pig but i said that's my inner pick

i can imagine how that would go over now it's been a rough ride um

and then i said i'm going to draw very clear lines in the sand

so that i know the difference between healthy behavior and a healthy behavior because if i'm going to be able to manage this thing i have to know when

it's awake i'm gonna have to know i can't be confused about when it's talking versus when i'm talking absolutely so so i

decided that i would create crystal clear rules for example i will never eat chocolate on a weekday

again i'll only ever have chocolate on saturday or sunday crystal clear that way if i'm online at starbucks

and there's a big hairy chocolate bar in the counter that's calling my name and it's and i hear this little voice

inside that says glenn you worked out hard enough and you're not going to gain any weight you might as well just start

tomorrow it'll be just as easy yippie let's have some right now i would say wait a minute that's not me

that's my inner pig squealing for pig slop i don't know wednesday is pig slap i don't need pigs up i don't know where

mine will tell me what to do yep why'd you find this this was your inner dialogue that was my inner that was me

in her dialogue um and it's really weird but that's the first thing that started to work it

wasn't a it wasn't a total miracle it's not like i got in the next month right of course yeah but but what happened was is it

wiped away all the bs all these notions that my mama didn't love me enough and i can

tell you a story about that too yeah and and all these notions that um you know i was comfort eating or eating

to numb myself out and there's some truth to that but it's really not it's really secondary to

the very bad habit and understanding the mechanism of action and i would get these extra microseconds

at the moment of impulse to make the right decision so i was no longer confused or powerless then i started

playing with the rules and i realized i had to make rules that i was willing to follow there was no point trying to follow a really strict diet as a matter

of fact the stricter the diet the harder it was to sustain oh sure

right yeah absolutely and i've subsequently learned that's because

binging is is an erroneous activation of that survival response when you signal the brain

that you're in a feast and famine environment if you are on too strict of a diet your body thinks that calories

and nutrition are not available and if you think about the way we must have evolved there were environments like

that and as soon as there was food available if there was a harvest you got to hoard it right go all out yeah for

sure yeah so that's what worked for me over the course of eight years i would keep notes

about what the pig said and why it was wrong for example when the pig said you can just start tomorrow it'll be

just as easy that's actually a lie yeah absolutely for several reasons it's a lie because

when you have a craving and you indulge that craving by

the principle of neuroplasticity what fires together wires together and you are more likely to have the

craving tomorrow and you're more likely to indulge it tomorrow also secondarily when you have a thought

and you reward that thought with sugar or starch or some concentrated form of calories your brain

is set up to figure out what thoughts lead to food rewards absolutely

so you're more likely to have the thought i will start tomorrow tomorrow so when you're in a hole you got to stop

digging always use the present moment to be healthy your pig says one more one more bad day you say no one more

healthy day okay so i would keep i would keep notes and scrupulously analyze the

pig's false logic and i found that what was that was like was like pouring sawdust on the

previously greased shoot between impulse and response wait what was that analogy

doing what well well it used to be that i would have the craving for

chocolate and then i would just do it i'd have the impulse to read um and there would be this little voice

of justification in my head that would say well you can just start tomorrow it'll be just as easy but then when i disempowered that voice

of justification the only thing that i could say would be eff it you know

screw it i'm just going to do it anyway sure and then of course spirit you already blew it you might as well yeah just spin your face off until the end of

the day and yeah yeah um and there i could go down a whole list of things that people's pigs like

like to say sure and over time i i evolved the system i learned um

i learned a lot more about how to switch nervous systems like when that erroneous emergency response is activated that

says you know you got to eat as much as you can i learned more about how to disempower that for for example

when you recognize that that's happening if you take a deep breath with and breathe out

for longer than you breathe down lori hammond calls them 7 11 breaths breathe in for seven out for a count of

11. you're you're actually activating your parasympathetic nervous system which is

a you're a doctor right i'm sorry no well well but please yeah keep going well

we actually have two nervous systems one is one is for resting and digesting and problem

solving and sitting and thinking and relaxing and another one is for running away from hungry bears for right you

know dealing with emergencies and so when this emergency response system is erroneously activated and it says eat

eat eaten just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt that then if you can before acting on

that take a deep breath and breathe out for longer you're signaling the brain there's not an emergency and if you

think about it in nature if we were running from a hungry bear we wouldn't have time to breathe out for longer than

we breathed in and that's why this seems to work so so we would do that and

i say we because this evolved into a whole movement um so we would do that and then we also

have people carry around a piece of paper and a pen or their smartphone and they just write

down exactly what the pig is saying like when you when you recognize it once you cross the line you say wait a minute

why do you want me to break my rules and binge pick we we call it a binge if you're going to cross over a lot yeah why do you want me to break my rules pig

and then you write it down the act of writing is also enough for brand activity like productive writing and so

that also kind of moves the battleground to the place where logic greens create so you're switching from the low ground

to the high ground by doing that i gotcha okay yeah yeah and so you do all that disempowerment

and then you ask yourself well why am i why do i feel like a happier better person

if i stay with my original role so for me it would be i'm one step closer to um

medication-free super active lifestyle or i'm one step closer to you know

being able to climb mountains faster and enjoy more time on top i have my whole list of reasons okay so you you bring

some happiness into the present to replace the short-term gratification you would have you would have gotten right

and you link it to the character you're trying to develop to the kind of person you're trying to be with food

um you know and then i'll fast forward eight years after having kept that journal and had you know dozens of

squeals and dozens of corrections um i'm getting a divorce in 2015 and i'm

a minor part of a publishing company and i'm on the phone with the ceo and he says you know glenn we

we really need to write a book of our own so we can prove that we know what we're doing and attract better authors

and i say well i have this crazy journal that i kept and it was really effective because i i went from like probably

around 280 down to about 200 like really 15 these days but uh yeah

but my triglycerides went down and my psoriasis went away and fabulous yeah all types of stuff was fantastic so i

have a success story and you know i'm a psychologist and a consultant for the industry i kind of have a good position to have a platform

so he says write a book just i said okay i spent the summer turning into a book

i send it to him i sent him the first draft he calls me back two weeks later he says oh my god glenn donuts are pig

slap i don't need doughnuts i don't like fire bundles tell me what to do i love it

and he proceeded to lose 100 pounds wow that's amazing yeah fantastic wow so so we published it

along the way and the rest is history now we have more reviews than the da vinci code and um millions of readers and it's it's crazy

that's incredible wow so just to clarify it sounds like what you were saying the original idea of traditional psychology

with respect to binge eating is essentially love yourself figure out where the root is try to you know from from you from

history as opposed to just tell yourself no with you know the higher brain rather

than the lower is that essentially it in a nutshell there's not enough emphasis on practical techniques i'm not saying

that mindful eating and self-love is a bad idea it's a good idea um

can i tell you one more story yeah please so part of that 40 000 person study was

like the last vestige of my trying to figure out um how psychology impacted my overeating

and i would intercept people on the internet when they were typing for stress solutions searching for stress

solutions and i'd say what foods can't you stop eating when you feel stressed and then i asked them what they were

stressed about and i found a couple of patterns people who were feeling lonely depressed or

broken-hearted they would drive towards chocolate and chocolate was always my thing right

people who were feeling stressed at work they tended to drive towards crunchy salty things and people

who were feeling stressed at home they came just to drive towards soft chewy like bagels pasta

that kind of stuff and i said this is fascinating that was something i thought i might write about but before i did i called my

mom who's also a therapist and raised me and i'm also a chocoholic she is worse than me with chocolate

so i called my mom and i said mom i have this really interesting thing and you know i was not in a great marriage i was not super

happy i was lonely and brokenhearted i said it kind of makes sense but why how did this pattern get set up

and she gets this horrible look on her face she says i'm so sorry honey i i'm so sorry i said mom it's okay whatever

it is it's 40 years ago and you know i love you i forgive you i just want to figure this out

she said well when you were one year old in 1965 your father was a captain in the army

and they were talking about sending him to vietnam and i was terrified i thought i'm gonna be a you know a widow with two

small kids and because we were trying to get pregnant with your sister and at the same time

my father your grandfather had just gotten out of prison and we didn't even know where he was for a couple of years and i didn't know he

was guilty and he had been my whole life i was horribly depressed and anxious all the time and half the time when you came

crawling over wanting love or to play or you know some healthy food i didn't have the wherewithal inside of me i was too

busy staring at the wall so i kept a little bottle of chocolate broccoli syrup and a refrigerator on the

floor remember you're not old enough for that no but but i know i see where this is going

yeah okay and she'd say go get your bosco glenn and she said you'd go crawling

over to the refrigerator you take out the bosco and you go into a chocolate chip coma oh wow

and which is sad and you know and so we had kind of a moving moment and a little cry and we forgave each

other and and the result of that you would think if figuring out why you're overeating is

the root to solving everything right you would think that that would be better after that you think we'd have

this catharsis you know a big hug and a big cry and i would never struggle with chocolate again but you know the opposite happened

i mean we had the movie moment i did forgive myself i was less harsh towards myself after that

but but um and i learned a lot about my mom it was a good conversation to have but but what happened after that lauren

was there was this little voice in my head that said you know what glenn you're right our mama didn't love us enough and she

left a great big chocolate-sized hole in your heart and until you can get out of the marriage and find the love of your life

you're gonna have to keep on binging on chocolate yippee let's go get some right now right yeah so it was that voice of

justification yeah i made that connection explicit essentially yeah and it changed my perception of

emotional eating i used to think that these if emotions were the fire then the solution was you had to put out

the fire but then i realized you could have a well-contained fire with a great fireplace in a living room and that's an

asset and not a liability people gather around it they tell stories they hug and they cry and they laugh and they kiss

and they make memories it's an asset not a liability it's the fireplace that's important

and it's this voice of justification what i call my inner pig was poking holes in that fireplace and

that's what allowed the ashes to get down and keep keep burning down the house and so

what i was what i really did with this crazy technique was i severed the link

between emotional upset and overeating i mean i'm still lonely sometimes i haven't found the yeah i'm supposed to be with i

still have the same feeling sometimes and i've learned other ways to deal with them and i've you know had therapy and everything but um

but but i i i never break my rules and binge because of it because there is that solid fireplace in

place now gotcha so we try to sever the link between emotional eating and between emotions

so tell me if this is true or not my understanding of emdr is essentially a similar concept where you're trying to

take a pathway in the brain and change it so that that memory no longer has the

same limbic system emotional overdrive is it a similar concept it's very similar i mean i'm not an mdr expert

right but gotcha okay very similar concept very cool so what would you like

boiling down your story and probably maybe some some highlights of the book what are some tips that you would give

for somebody that's struggling with stress eating overeating binge eating how can they leverage your approach

where would you say they should start okay so first of all forget everything you've heard about overeating and what

to do with it okay okay secondly make sure you have a plan where you're thoroughly nourished and

you know i i very much believe in the benefits of intermittent fasting everything like that but i have much more success with people in the first

three to six months if they can have regular meals throughout the day because they then when you're when your

pig says you're starving there's no real reason for it anymore right right um and then if you want to go back to

intermittent fasting or whatever else you do after that you can you can do that so make sure you're taking care of

yourself first sure then choose one simple rule

now most overeaters are very good dieters and so

they're they live their lives by the nursery rhyme which says when she was good she was very very good but when

she was bad she was hard we want to get out of that nursery right right we want to get out of this feast

and feminine roller coaster so you're going to start with one simple rule that probably won't have you lose any weight

to start with but you're not hopefully you won't gain any weight and you're just going to prove to yourself that you can control

this urge inside of you so one one simple rule which is something you can and would do that doesn't feel too

burdensome um that definitely doesn't restrict your calories and nutrition too much that seems easy

yet it would be a clear signal i'll give you some examples in a moment it would be a clear signal to yourself that

you're turning the ship around and getting on the right track so for example i knew this truck driver

who eats fast food three meals a day every day and he thought about this idea and he

said well you know what i can't stop eating fast food cause i i'm i'm on the right all day long i don't have a choice but i'll tell you

what i won't go back for seconds and he proceeded with that one simple rule to take control he lost a couple of

pounds and then that really he started feeling better and

it's it's not the couple of pounds or um or the rule in particular it's the difference between feeling like the

master and the slave up until people start to adopt this kind of approach the their

pig or their food demon or whatever you want to call it it's really broken their spirit yeah

yeah yeah and and they feel like they're not able to control it they feel like they're powerless about it they're they

often feel hopeless and despairing if they're ever going to fix this and so the difference between doing that

one simple rule and not doing that one simple rule it's not monumental in terms of the physical impact monumental in

terms of the psychological impact like damn i'm the master and not the slave i can be the master and that just means

everything yeah so i tell people to stay with that for you know at least a week or two some people say with it for

months until you really believe and know how this game is played

then notice your cravings and um and

start to ask yourself if you can wake up at that moment there is a craving

and take that 7-11 breath write down what your pig is saying why i want you to break

the rules um take another 7-11 breath write down why it's wrong and then write down why

you would be happier and feel like a better person if you stuck with your rule right now

keep doing that keep looking for reasons until you feel calm and you no longer want to binge

and the side benefit besides the fact that you'll get control of your binging

is that you'll learn a stress management technique that'll make you calmer this

because this becomes a positive addiction right yeah so those those are the basic steps

gotcha first basic steps and kind of what that sounds like to me in a way

just again by way of analogy is when people are first starting to learn to meditate that recognition that your

thoughts the racing thoughts in your mind are not necessarily you there's a manager above that that can say no no no

come back and once you recognize that you actually have that power as you say that empowers you to make the changes

that you need to make that's fantastic so and so once somebody's done this

they've maybe habit stacked where they've got that one rule like you're describing and then kind of do one more

thing one more thing what would you say is there something that anybody needs to do in order to

start thinking like a permanently thin person from that point forward well well what you

yeah there are a couple of things you need to understand that um

there are some other steps but but you you you need to understand that it's not really about installing these nazi food

police inside of your brand yes right what it's about is becoming a different kind of person

with food so if i ask people no i i eventually wound up making a world that says i'll just

never have chocolate again because it just seemed like the best thing i don't recommend that for everybody two-thirds of my clients are moderators and not

abstainers but for some people certain substances just don't work and it was like that with chocolate with matt

haven't had it maybe 10 years um [Music] that's an exaggeration maybe eight years

yeah so so um i was brought up by a jewish mother so i have to

be very honest yeah i gotta correct myself all the time um

so so so i've lost my train of thought for one second because i talked about my jewish

guilt we were talking about what to do to change the mindset going forward

okay what you then want to do is look for

you want to think about the kind of person you're trying to become with food so if i ask people do you think you could never have chocolate again you

usually say i could never do that that's that's crazy they say do you think you can become the kind of person who doesn't have

chocolate and go oh maybe i could do that right

character is just the habitual way that we respond to temptation without knowing it right

and so what you're really doing is breaking a behavior pattern habitually until it becomes a part of you and then

it's second nature i actually don't have a rule anymore that says i can't have chocolate it's not it's not on my food

plan anymore i don't remember when i took it off because sooner or later i just became a person that never had

chocolate i i did i didn't want it it wasn't part of my identity i i like the benefits of not having

chocolate and i don't feel deprived i don't feel like i'm missing out on some horrible thing in life i look at the chocolate bars in

the supermarket that used to torture me i mean i would stand there for half an hour should i or shouldn't i and i look at them and they

look like a big bag of chemicals to me what this says is that character trumps will power

so you want to recognize that that's the end goal yeah the second thing is you want to start to

take an inventory of all of your trigger foods and dangerous food behaviors

and we don't want to get carried away with this because um it's kind of like if you were a city

traffic planner you're looking at the intersections where you have to protect people from having accidents

you would not want to put a red light at every intersection unless it was truly dangerous because you're slowing down

the you know commerce and and connection in the city on the other hand you don't want to leave an intersection

unregulated which is too busy or too dangerous and there are some places like you know in

the middle of manhattan where there are traffic lights every 42 feet or so

and and there are some places like way out on long island in suffolk county where there are you know 55 mile an hour

speed limits and the roads intersect and there's no stop sign or yield sign at all because you can just see in all

directions and people don't the roads are hardly ever used so that that's what you're really doing with your rules

you're creating your own little city and you're looking for the danger spots and you're trying to balance between

um satiation and enjoyment and freedom with food and

protecting your health and fitness goals just like if you're a city traffic planner you'd be balancing between the safety of the populace and protecting

the ability to to travel around right so you're taking inventory of that i've

got some free stuff i'll give people at the end of the interview they can use to do that yeah yeah so you take an

inventory and you design your own little city um usually comes out between between like two and six rules

and then you play the same game and you keep going and then you experiment

with different things to figure out what your authentic needs might be right so for example

the pig will present things to you that it's either the chocolate bar or nothing either you're going to starve or you're

going to have the chocolate bar you need to teach the pig that you're not going to starve if you don't have the chocolate bar sometimes that means

eating real food so i experimented with a whole bunch of things and eventually i discovered if i

had a kale banana smoothie when i was having an intense craving for chocolate that was bothering me

i didn't get high the same way i would with chocolate because right you know chocolate is the aubermine and caffeine and all that that stuff it's a drug um

but i would feel content i was looking for energy i'm probably looking for some minerals or magnesium

or something like that and and i would feel content it was like i scratched the itch but there wasn't this

manic up and down it was more like a kind of an even and you'll teach your survival drive to

crave the right thing like that over time that's the essence of the methodology

yeah fascinating so is there anything that i have not asked you that you want to make sure that you leave with our

audience um

i want to be sure you understand that emotional eating is a two-way street most people think that

you know the emotions are the fire and it wants to get out and burn the house down so if they're eating with what they perceive to be

comfort they think it's because there's some emotional problem that's not solved and i think i debunked some of that and i

said well you can you can draw a you can put a fireplace around that and you can make yourself safe no matter what emotion you're feeling so you can

sever a link but people think that the emotion causes the behavior

um the emotion causes the desire which then has to sneak through that voice of justification to the behavior but it's

equally true that the behavior causes the emotion that's the part that people don't know for example let's look at anxiety

anxiety has a lot of physiological correlates right and i'm not a i'm not a medical doctor i just sound like when sometimes

um but but you know perspiration and respiration and galvanic skin response and blood pressure and you know all this

stuff you start to sweat a little bit and there are a lot of animal studies where

they show that those physiological correlative anxiety they can't ask an animal are you feeling anxious but a lot

of those physiological correlates can actually be conditioned by food rewards

so baboons were taught to have higher blood pressure by giving them a sugar reward every time

their blood pressure was elevated oh wow bio feedback yeah okay yeah it's operand

conditioning yeah yeah it's like biofeedback or operating conditioning and and

so people think that the only way to get to sleep when they're anxious is to overeat but

what if overeating is causing the anxiety and what what the study seemed to show was not so much that um

it causes anxiety right at that moment it actually lowers anxiety a little bit but it raises the

there's a rebound and it stays higher yeah you're conditioning yourself to be a more anxious person

so if you can tolerate the slightly lower they slightly heightened anxiety for a little while it's like the

smoking also like smoking will keep you stressed all the time and just make you a little less stressed when you have it

if you get get over the hump you're actually going to be a much less stressed person overall absolutely it goes both ways it

goes both ways yeah and that's just physiology in general like any the the body's always trying to seek balance so

any time you push in one direction you're going to get a rebound in the opposite direction if you're if it's direct like that yeah absolutely

yeah so where can people go to learn more about you okay

so i know they're all thinking why does dr lauren have this weird-ass psychology song with a pig inside of him

and and it sounds kind of harsh and cruel or something like that but i

wanted you to hear that it's really not it's really a very compassionate methodology so i record i

recorded a whole bunch of coaching sessions they're all free and you can download them at nevermind again.com if you click the big red

button but there are two more things you'll get if you do that so neverbingeygan.com click the big red button and sign up for the reader bonus

list you will you'll get a free copy of the book in kindle nook or pdf format oh nice so

yeah so those electronic companies are free we also have paperback and audible but there's a charge for that

um and the third thing you will get is a set of food plan starter templates the

program is diagnostic as long as you are nutrifying yourself you can make this work so we created simple sets of rules for

any dietary philosophy so whether you're you know trying to do high carb or low

carb or vegan or point coloring or counting your calorie counting minute i have my personal feelings about which

ones are healthier but that's not really what the program is about the program is how do you stick to any reasonable

program that you that you want to stick to so you've got a whole set of food plan starter templates so like nevermind

again.com click the big red button fantastic awesome well i will link to that in the show notes and thank you

again so much for your time glenn this has been fantastic thank you so much it was great

okay so uh