152: Never Binge Again

Transcript of Episode 152: Never Binge Again

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Glenn Livingston

Meredith:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 152. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course. Today we welcome special guest Dr. Glenn Livingston.

We’ve a really fun topic for you guys today. We’re recording now during the holiday season. You probably aren’t listening to this show—you’ll probably listen to this show a few weeks after the holidays. Dr. Glenn is an expert on over eating, binge eating, and all kinds of food issues that a lot of us struggle with, so this is going to be a really important topic today we’re going to discuss. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Glenn.

Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. is 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 him or his company’s previous work, theories, and research in major periodicals like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun Times, The Indiana Star Ledger, The New York Daily News, American Demographics, and other major media outlets. You may also have heard him on ABC, WGN, and/or 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 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 of obesity and food prison to a normal healthy weight and a much more light-hearted relationship with food.

Welcome, Dr. Glenn Livingston, to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you very much. It’s a delight to be here, and I look forward to talking to you and your listeners to learn anything that’s going to be helpful to them for the new year.

Dr. Pompa:
We thank you so much. Timing couldn’t be better this time of year. We know that so many people—this is the time of year they just pack it on, right? The older they get, the harder it becomes, supposedly, to take off. I’ve got to jump into your story because obviously that’s where your passion came from. So many people that we have on this show, it’s from pain to purpose, including myself. Tell us that. Start there.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, well that’s the most embarrassing part, so we might as well get it over with.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s our goal here, Dr. Glenn. We just want to embarrass people.

Dr. Livingston:
There you go. I suppose when I was younger, I could have been diagnosed with what today you’d call exercise bulimia. What that means is that I eat an awful lot and I exercised it off. I didn’t like to put my finger down my throat. That was always abhorrent to me. I figured out that as a six-foot-four, fairly muscular guy, that I could eat more or less whatever I wanted to if I worked out enough.

The problem was that as I got into graduate school, and started to have patients, and when I was married, and I had responsibilities, I just couldn’t make two or three hours a day to work out all the time. I started to get heavy because I found that it wasn’t easy to adjust the food the way that I really wanted to. I was a real eater. I could eat two pizzas. I could go into a delicatessen and dislodge my jaw. I had a real thing for chocolate.

It was something to joke about at that age. Because I’m tall, I wore the weight reasonably well. It wasn’t having a lot of people telling me that I looked horrible. I did have a lot of doctors yelling at me for my triglycerides and telling me I was going to have a heart attack in my 40s or maybe sooner. I had bad blood lipids, and cholesterol, and everything like that.

More importantly, I was very obsessed with the food. I found that as I took progressively more responsibilities in my life, like I would be sitting and working with couples who were in the midst of some very serious issues, and I couldn’t be 100% present because I was thinking about when am I going to get to eat again? When can I get to the deli? When can I do X, Y, and Z? That bothered me because my dedication to being a psychologist always was first and foremost in my life. I come from a family of 17 psychotherapists and psychologists. If you say Dr. Livingston at a restaurant, we all turn around. It’s pretty funny.

Coming from that family, I went the psychological route to try to figure it out. I was very successful at my practice. I was very successful as a consultant, so I had a lot of resources. I went to some of the best psychologists and psychiatrists. I went to Overeaters Anonymous. I learned a lot about the psychology of eating, and I learned a lot about the personal choices I was making. As a matter of fact, I even developed a study. We wound up having 40,000 people go through it over the course of several years. Not quite as impressive as it sounds because it was online, but still.

We figured out that, for example, people that are really craving chocolate tend to be experiencing some sort of loneliness or broken heartedness in life. I really thought when I saw those correlations that I was on to something. I dug really deep inside my own soul to figure out well, where does that come from for me? I kind of figured out that my dad was scared about going to Vietnam, and my mother was overwhelmed that maybe he was going to go. She couldn’t quite take care of me the way that she should have when I was really little, no fault of her own. She gave me chocolate or she gave me Bosco. She used to keep a little bottle on the floor. If I was crying and I needed her and she couldn’t be there, she’d point me to the chocolate. I developed a lifelong patter of running to chocolate when I felt lonely.

That’s a very soulful and intriguing thing to understand except it didn’t cure the problem because what would happen—and this is what I found in my patients also. What would happen would be there’d be this little voice inside of me that would say you know what, Glenn? You’re right. You’re mother didn’t love you enough. Until you figure out how to fill those big holes inside of you and stop being so lonely, you’re just going to have to keep on eating that chocolate. You know what, chocolates kind of like a vegetable anyway because it grows in a cocoa bean or a cocoa bean is a plant. It would say all these crazy things to justify no matter what I did, right?

Some of the other interesting things, as long as we’re talking about that, are people who are craving salty, crunchy things tend to be stressed at work. There are a lot of correlations like that. What I would find is that there was this mediating voice. Even though you could trace food preferences, and you could find the patterns, and you could learn an awful lot about yourself—and I think that we all should be compassionate to ourselves, and those are things we should figure out, and we should learn, and figure out how to fix the loneliness and the stress in our life. It’s not really the solution in my estimation to a food problem.

The solution has to do with addressing that crazy voice inside of you. Unfortunately, it took me until I was about 40. I’m 52 now. It took me until I was about 40 to figure that out. I was about 260 pounds. I’m 200 pounds now. I ran across some alternative addiction literature. The 12 steps were fascinating, but they didn’t really work for me. I came to understand that they aren’t really scientifically backed up. As a matter of fact, the only two controlled studies seem to suggest that they’re either a parody or worse in doing nothing at all. That frightened me.

I looked very aggressively into the alternative research. I came across a book called Rational Recovery. He’s fairly protective of his books, so I don’t like to say too much about it. Suffice it to say that he was talking about this crazy voice inside of you as the really primary cause of addiction. He developed a methodology for separating from that voice.

Essentially what it says is that look, that voice is the lizard brain. That voice is our survival drive, and unfortunately our survival drive has made a mistake. It’s gotten corrupted by alcohol or drugs. He really works with the black and white addictions. Everybody else is telling you you need to love yourself well. When you have an addictive craving, everybody’s saying well, where is the loneliness? Where is the isolation? Where is the stress? How can I love that inner wounded child back to health?

He said you know, that’s really the wrong approach. It’s more like caging a rabid animal. It’s more like getting control of the lizard brain which seems to overtake us during addiction, whereas all of our goals—you can interrupt me whenever you want to. All of our goals, and aspirations, and everything that we think of as ourselves—love, and meaning, and relationship, and hugging your kids, and going to school, and losing weight—those all live in the higher brain, the mammalian brain, the neocortex.

Thankfully, if you would look at a — and you could do a much better job at this than I can because I’m bastardizing this. If you look at a map of the brain, the lizard brain is the earlier evolved part of the neuroanatomy. Where we live is later evolved and is actually superior to it and able to control it. All of these notions of powerlessness and that there’s really no defense against an addictive impulse, it’s just not true. It’s fine to have a spiritual pursuit. You should do that to fill up your life, but it has nothing to do with can you control this addiction.

I really had to study that carefully and make a lot of modifications to deal with food whereas Jack Trimpey was working with the black and white addictions where you can actually quit, food is something where you’ve got to take the lion out of the cage a couple of times a day and walk it around the block, right? I had to figure out how do you draw this really clear line. The methodology has to do with being able to hear that crazy voice which is coming from the addictive part of ourselves, from that lizard brain. In order to hear that, you have to very clearly define what’s healthy eating and what’s addictive eating.

That led me to a whole series of insights having to do with thinking differently than our culture tells us we should think. Do you want me to pause for any reason?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think pausing right there. I know myself and many of my doctors watch this program, too. We would all say we have so many of these clients and patients that are stuck right there. They know they’re doing emotional eating, addictive eating. They know that. We make decisions in that primitive brain, is what we call it. Because of that, it’s so hard to fight. Right now, you’re speaking to thousands of people that battle this right here.

Just in review, this can absolutely come from different traumas in our life. I had an episode, I had someone—it was one of my friends. My son identified this. He had this emotional thing happen in his life, this moment, and it was girl related, not the point. She made him a bunch of cookies and took the cookies over to him. My son said now wait a minute, that explains everything about him because now he was severely overweight. Meeting my son, he had lost a lot of weight. My son taught him things, but he still struggles with that emotional addictive eating. No doubt, I realized, I’m sure that happened throughout his life. Mom made cookies every time life got a little hard or whatever. Now this thing of struggling in emotional times, he reaches for the cookies because his brain says well, that worked. I feel better. He associates it with love.

That’s kind of what you’re saying. I just put a story to it. Is that true? Then we want to know the solution. What the heck’s the solution?

Dr. Livingston:
Yes, there is that etiology. There is that development of the story and the associations. However, every day we can choose to remake ourselves. The solution that I’ve found—and I’m not saying this is the only solution. The solution that I’ve found is not really to delve deeply into what was the emotional trauma and then—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you said that. That’s what interests me. Who cares? Here’s the solution.

Dr. Livingston:
The solution in your son’s friend’s case would be something like well, what would healthy behavior and cookies be? When specifically do you want to eat them? When specifically do you not want to eat them? Don’t feel any judgment from me. This is totally up to you. You can talk to your doctor. You can talk to your nutritionist. Let’s say you decide I will only ever want to eat cookies on the weekends again. You know that if you only have cookies on the weekends, it would be under control for you. For whatever reason, that’s a balance for you. Now you have a really clear line in the sand.

You’ll notice that you could even say I’ll never eat cookies during the calendar week again, during the weekday again. You’ll notice that’s a very, very strong statement. It’s almost heresy to say something like that, say I will never do this or I will never do that, because what our culture will tell you, what the addiction treatment specialists will tell you, is that well, you’re setting that person up for a binge. That perfectionism is a setup because eventually they’re going to screw up, and they’re going to binge. I think that’s a big problem.

Now, I do think that people that pursue a perfect rule when they make a mistake, they have a tendency to over castigate themselves, and get involved with the guilt. That can make a binge more likely, but if you look at the psychology of winners—let’s take an archer. An archer poises, focuses on the bull’s eye of the target, knows exactly where that bull’s eye is, takes every ounce of their being, and poises towards the bull’s eye, sees the arrow going into the target before they release it, and then they release it.

If the arrow doesn’t go into the bull’s eye, then they do the same thing—and I am so sorry about that. If the arrow doesn’t go into the bull’s eye, they do the exact same thing again, and they refocus with determination. Knowing where the bull’s eye is 100% allows them to purge all that doubt and insecurity from their mind because if there’s something that comes into your defense—well, you might not hit the bull’s eye this time. Why don’t you aim a little to the side? Aim a little to the side of the bull’s eye. That’s better because you’re never going to get to the bull’s eye. That’s not the psychology of winning. The psychology of winning is see the goal with 100% clarity. I say—

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say, that’s a great analogy because if you know anything and maybe some of our viewers and listeners don’t, but the ability to hit that target really is your certainty, your visualization, and just knowing it’s going there. It really is. Whether it’s throwing a dart or not, it is that visualization. For one second you visualize something else, it’s not going into that target.

I’m with you so far. I’m with you so far. Keep going. Keep going.

Dr. Livingston:
I think that there are two separate mindsets required: before the shot and after the shot. After the shot, it’s necessary to be reflective, analytical, and kind to yourself. You wouldn’t say I missed it. I missed the target. I’m an f-ing idiot. I’m never going to hit the target. There’s something wrong with me, and I might as well just give up and -inaudible-, right? That’s what people can do with food.

In our culture, when they say go for progress and not perfection, have guidelines and not rules, I think they’re telling you go shoot at a blurry target. I don’t think that that really works. I think if you aim at the center of the target with determination, and you simultaneously know that after the shot, if you happen to make a mistake, that you’re going to be forgiving, you’re going to figure out what you did wrong. Maybe the wind was going this way or that. You’re going to make adjustments, and you’re going to aim for it again.

I would coach your son’s friend to say okay, if you say you never want to eat cookies during the week again, then you can say you’re never going to eat cookies during the week again. That’s your bull’s eye. That’s your bull’s eye. That’s the first modification that I had to make to the way that things were done today.

Dr. Pompa:
We want to hear more ideas. Basically then, what you’re doing is you’re tapping into the conscious mind, the intellectual mind, to basically intellectualize it. You’re saying look, I know if I did this, it’s healthy. Darn it, that’s my goal, and I’m going to hit that goal. It’s simply making an intellectual decision, saying this is what I’m going to do. Am I right so far?

Dr. Livingston:
That’s a part of it. The enforcement of it is more emotional, but you do want to use your best thinking and your reason in order to determine where the bull’s eye is.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. We actually have something I call diet variation, and we talk about why purposely increasing your carbs one or two days a week can actually be a strategy that actually helps you, by the way. We’re talking about healthy carbs, usually not cookies. Point being, if you’re going to do it, you can have a very good reason why doing it on this day of the week would actually help you. Because there’s a really good scientific reason for that, that helps the process. It helps your brain be more determined to do it or succeed in doing it. Is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Livingston:
Yes. For me, it’s largely about clarity. For me it’s largely about having clarity. I think people walk around with a fuzzy goal. They don’t quite know where they’re going, and they wind up some place else, like my grandma used to say.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the key, then. I’m not going to eat cookies. Dang it, I’m just not going to eat cookies. I’m only going to eat cookies on Saturday.

Dr. Livingston:
For some people, never is easier than sometimes, but I purposely use that example—

Dr. Pompa:
My point is it could be I’m only eating cookies once a month. My point is it’s specific, whatever it is.

Dr. Livingston:
Whatever it is, it’s—yes. Because if there’s ambiguity, your lizard brain will barrel through and find the teeniest, tiniest whole in your rule. The guideline I use—I don’t know if you studied research methodology, but there’s something called an operational definition. When they’re trying to measure squishy things like love, or intimacy, or something like that, what they did is they would get ten people to rate the level of love or intimacy using this scale and they’d see to what degree they’d agree with one another. The guideline I used for this work is that if there were ten people that followed you around all month long, using your rule, would they all agree that you followed it or not.

I think if ten people followed your son’s friend around, and your son’s friend said my rule is I’m only ever going to eat cookies on the weekends again, these ten people would agree at the end of the month because it’s real easy to see did your son’s friend eat cookies on the weekend or not, right? As opposed to I’m only ever going to eat when I’m hungry and I’m always going to stop when I’m full. That’s a good guideline. That’s a good thing to do, but it’s not never binge again. It’s not this game that I’m talking about because you can’t measure it objectively from the outside. People could never agree. Make sense?

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely makes sense because they would be saying well—there’s so many rationalizations involved there that you would arguably—at the end of the day, they’d probably tell you that they always just ate until they were full, but really they didn’t. You can’t measure it. Unmeasurable. Once a week, once a month, that’s measurable. Got it.

Dr. Livingston:
Exactly. When I guide people about—let me just finish the construction of a set of rules. When I guide people about them, I tell them there are four categories of rules. There’s things you’ll never do, things you’ll always do, things you will do conditionally, the rule that we just came up with was a condition because it had -inaudible-, and things that you’re going to do in an unrestrictive way because I think that it’s good for people to know that there are some things they can do without restriction so that they don’t walk around feeling starved. That’s just a very basic template. We can talk about more. We can find some more templates to use later on if you want to.

The enforcement of this becomes kind of like a game. Remember, it’s more like capturing and caging a rabid animal. I like people to give their inner lizard brain, their destructive food self, a name. It should be a name of something that they’re going to feel a little disgusted with and superior to. You’re actually going to cultivate a sense of contempt and disgust because you’re going to need that emotion at the moment of impulse to jump back up into your right brain, okay?

I call mine my inner pig. It doesn’t sound like a very sophisticated psychologist—

Dr. Pompa:
Inner what?

Dr. Livingston:
I call it my inner pig. I call it my pig. I call the things that my pig says pig squeal, and I call the things that my pig is squealing for pig slop. I don’t eat pig slop, and I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. I know this is not what you’re expecting from a sophisticated psychologist with my credentials.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I get why this would work. I understand how brains are predictably irrational. I get where you’re going with it. Go. I get it.

Dr. Livingston:
You get it because at that moment of impulse, you need something really primitive. What’s happening is the lizard brain really thinks on three levels when it sees something -inaudible-. The lizard brain sees a stimulus, it says do I kill it, do I meet with it, or do I eat it? That’s how the lizard brain is operating. That’s the level at which you have to react to the lizard brain to get your thinking back in place because when the lizard brain is powerfully activated, it pushes all this out of the way.

You need to be like an alpha wolf that snarls at a challenger and goes I will f-ing kill you. I don’t listen to pigs. I don’t listen to pigs and farm animals tell me what to do. I will f-ing kill you. Get back in your cage. That’s the level of emotional response that you need to get those microseconds to say wait a minute, chocolate’s not a vegetable or wait, it’s Thursday. I can’t have a cookie on Thursday. Why, because I never eat cookies during the week.

That’s why I’m 200 pounds instead of 260 pounds right now. That’s what’s worked for me. It’s worked for 100s and 100s of people. There are a number of other elements to making it work. It’s a little bit of an art. That’s what I did, and that’s what Never Binge Again is about. I call the book Never Binge Again because I think if you’re aiming squarely for that archery target, you’re going to say I’m never going to make a mistake again because admitting the possibility of a mistake is admitting that little bit of doubt into your mind. I think it’s—

Dr. Pompa:
Dangerous.

Dr. Livingston:
Yep. I define the binge as one step off of your carefully constructed food fight.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, knowing what I know about the brain, how the brain works, I can see this being an effective strategy. Obviously, you’ve proven it. Tell us a little bit about—okay, yeah great. It was 40,000 people online. What did you get from that study that you did?

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, I have not proven this scientifically. I have not had the resources and time to prove that this is scientifically what is necessary to happen. Of course, that’s in my plans as things are growing. This is now the best seller for eating disorders on Amazon, so we’re starting to get some attention. We’re going to be moving in that direction. At the time I did that 40,000-person study, I was looking at the relationship between food preferences, particularly those things people felt that they couldn’t control, and personality. I had a personality questionnaire. I had a questionnaire about the different types of addictive foods that people are having trouble with. We did a lot of factor analysis, and we came up with these core set of insights. Like I said, it was kind of in the wrong direction. It was a valid study. We had a lot of press for the study way back when. It wasn’t really answering the problem. It was just really interesting.

Dr. Pompa:
Cool. Meredith, I know you have some questions. I’m going to turn it over.

Meredith:
Alright. I know I always have lots of questions, and I love this topic, too, because it’s something I’ve definitely personally dealt with a lot in my life was overeating, emotional eating, things of that nature. We can continue that more, but I just wanted to get your opinion, too, on rigid diets and things like that. I’m guessing that you’re not a fan of strict diets and people following a specific regime but being a little bit looser about it?

Dr. Livingston:
It depends upon the person. What I am absolutely against is over restriction. I haven’t seen the scientific proof yet, but I firmly believe that there’s some evolutionary mechanism in our brains that says if you go through famine, you must go through feast when food is available. I’ve talked to so many binge eaters who’ve talked to me about their history of dieting and how thin they used to be, and I’ll tell them well, I think this is why you are having this trouble now. They’ll tell me that it’s almost like someone is putting your gun to your head and saying you have to keep eating. You have to keep eating even if you’re full. I think that that’s an element of the lizard brain that it loading up on calories and nutrition because it’s anticipating another famine. I think part of overcoming binge eating is a regularity of nutrition and calories.

The particular diet that people have used—you know, I have people who have just used behavioral rules like I will always get up from the table and walk around outside for two minutes before going back for seconds. Everything is really about stimulating mindful eating, but they draw these lines in the sand to make sure that they are mindful eating.

I have other people who’ll say I will never eat sugar, or flour, or chocolate, or candy. They have a long list of things that they just never eat. I don’t really see a problem with that unless the things that they’re never eating are really essential nutrients. Usually they’re industrial foods. In all the years that I worked for the food industry, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that there’s a lot of money putting a lot of calories in a small space, getting a really pretty package, and spending billions of dollars to advertise that it’s good for you. I think that’s how we all got messed up. There were no chocolate bars in the Savannah. There were no potato chips in the Savannah. If people want to get those out of their diet, I don’t see a reason why they can’t cut those out of their diet. If people want to enjoy them once in a while, I think that’s an artifact of society that’s not getting them into trouble then what’s the big deal?

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say I have to admit that people that—my clients even that have had eating disorders, when they say I’m just never eating that food again, I find that they actually succeed in doing that. They literally have never eaten it again. It’s almost like the alcoholics that succeed, right? I’m just never doing it again. Then they don’t. If they did once, then they’re probably back on the wagon.

Dr. Livingston:
There’s this phenomenon where—I run into people who try 17 different ways to conditionally control something. I’m only going to have chocolate on the weekends. I’m only going to have it after a big hike. I’m only going to have it when I’m with my wife. I’m only going to have it after a meal with some type of a glycemic slowdown. For a year or two, they go through all of these different permutations, and it just keeps kicking their butt. Eventually they say you know what? It would just feel like such a relief not to have this at all, and it works so much better for them. There are a lot of people like that.

Dr. Pompa:
There are. I’m sure it’s not for everybody, but there are people like that. Go ahead, Meredith. You had something.

Meredith:
What do you think about specific diets? I’m curious about the Paleo diet or the ketogenic diet. Do you have any thoughts on that because that can really affect—when you’re eating so much good fat in your diet, it can really affect your satiety which can really decrease binges and cravings I’ve found personally. What are your thoughts there?

Dr. Livingston:
I’m weak on medical knowledge. I do read an awful lot about nutrition. I kind of know things. I have opinions about it. I’ve taken the position that I’ll help you with any diet. If it’s nutritionally complete and sound, I’ll help you with any diet. I will tell you that I tend to get two camps of people that want to work with me, or read my stuff, and hang out on my forums, and stuff.

One camp are Paleo people, and they do very well. They tend to need to be really strict, I find. I find that when the Paleo people are moving into processed sugars and grains and trying to do that conditionally, it doesn’t seem to work for them. I don’t really know why. I think maybe it triggers a carbohydrate craving that’s just too strong and they’re not going to have enough something. I don’t know.

Then I get the whole foods, plant-based people. If you read my book, it’s no secret I’m a little bit more on the whole foods, plant-based side myself. Those are the two camps that I get. I try not to judge the specific diets that people are going through because I’m not a medical doctor or nutritionist.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t think that’s your point because in any of those groups you have someone who fails because they end up binging or does some emotional eating. You’re point is let’s stop that and then you’ll be successful at whatever diet seems to be working for you or you like for whatever reason.

Dr. Livingston:
What I do find is that whether or not you include animal foods that the emphasis on whole foods and the elimination of industrial processed foods tends to correlate with success. I don’t think we’re meant to have these hyperpalatable foods that industry has created.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. Look at what these processed foods are. There’s even chemicals in them that stimulate dopamine receptors. Come on. It’s like saying I’m going to take these drugs and not get addicted. You’re right. If you’re still eating processed food, you’re asking for trouble. It’s highly addictive. Pure sugar is highly addictive. Shifting to just wholesome food is step one.

One of the things that I talk about, Dr. Glenn, is diet variation meaning that I don’t need to make the argument that this is the perfect diet for everybody. We use and I teach how to use ketosis, how to use what I call a cellular healing diet, no grains. Different diets, moving in and out of different diets, actually creates adaptation at the cellular level that’s amazing.

I believe if you look at every ancient culture on the planet, they ate different diets at different times for multiple different reasons, for whatever reason: they ran out of certain food, seasonal changes, droughts, environmental pressures, what’ growing, what’s not. I can go through many reasons of different reasons why ancient cultures were forced into diet changes, just even getting sick of certain foods because they had to eat it in the winter and now they have different, more carbohydrate foods in the summer.

Point being is that I think getting away from this is the diet that everyone should be on isn’t the argument. I love what you’re saying because I don’t care what diet you’re on. There’s emotional reasons, primitive reasons, that we all fail. We’re all pulled into these bad foods, and you’re giving us a strategy on how to deal with it.

Dr. Livingston:
That’s very interesting what you’re saying. You advise periodic bouts of ketosis in order to trim the body fat and then varying the diet so that you’re not in long-term ketosis. Is that what you’re recommending?

Dr. Pompa:
I fell into it. I have a love for studying ancient cultures and history there. We put people into ketosis, which you’re forcing the cell to burn fat as its primary source of energy. How could someone not lose weight? Yet there will be people who go into ketosis and they don’t lose weight. As a matter of fact, worse than that, they don’t even get into ketosis, and yet they’re eating 20, 30 grams of carbohydrates a day. How is that possible? The mitochondria is that broken.

I would take them out and just say okay, let’s go back to the diet we had you on, by the way, wasn’t working for weight loss either. All of a sudden, they start losing weight. They even feel better. How’s that possible? What changed? I don’t know. Then let’s do that for three months, and then let’s go back into ketosis. Now all of a sudden we put them back in, and now all of a sudden they go into ketosis. They even lose more weight.

There is something in the diet—

Dr. Livingston:
Could you fix the mitochondria?

Dr. Pompa:
– a change that actually became the magic. Now we have a group of doctors doing this. Even this, people could be in ketosis for a long time. There insulin starts getting so low that their body takes on almost a starvation thing, and they start to gain weight or this weird, odd fat around their belly, or they stop losing weight, either one. Then we throw in these carbohydrate days, healthy carbs though, more fruit maybe, more berries, whatever it is, maybe more potatoes, sweet potatoes, root vegetables, something like that. All of a sudden, boom. They start kicking weight loss again just by randomly throwing in some days. Any type of variation creates some sort of adaptation that gets the body more efficient at the cellular level of using—

Dr. Livingston:
Makes sense. That makes sense.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, it’s part of a strategy that we use not just for weight loss. It’s a part of a strategy that we use for fixing the mitochondria. Even putting people in feast and famine cycles, we fast them for periods of time and then we bring them out of fast. Then again the feast cycles where we have those days where we eat more, all healthy whole foods. I agree with you. Then we have the days, even once a week, where we fast them. Feast and famine cycles is what ancient cultures did. It forces adaptation. Bad cells die. We always say bad cells don’t adapt. Good cells adapt.

We just interviewed Seyfried, Thomas Seyfried. He wrote a book called Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. They discovered with cancer same thing. It’s this forced cycling that actually works and creates bad cells not to adapt.

With what you’re saying really goes with what we’re talking about here because it doesn’t matter where you are in that process. Getting addicted and binge eating is going to ruin it.

Dr. Livingston:
Yeah, so what I’m teaching would help people to stick with the instructions that you’re giving them. I imagine when people say doc, I really believe you, and I want to follow this, but it’s just a little bit too hard to stay with, this will give people more power to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
We all deal with it. All of our doctors, we all deal with people who really have good intentions, but they fall into their wicked ways, if you will. Having a strategy for them, this show becomes really important. As a matter of fact, so important, the strategy, I want you to bring it again with a different scenario and a different direction. People need to hear things several times to get it. I know our listeners right now are going okay, I kind of get it. Bring it another way so they get it. Let’s give them another strategy or the same strategy a different way.

Dr. Livingston:
The way that people get this best is to think about their single worst food trigger or—there’s a really bad echo on my side for some reason all of a sudden.

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe turn down your volume a little bit.

Dr. Livingston:
Turn down my volume.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll turn mine down.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay. Yeah, that’s better. Am I too low?

Dr. Pompa:
No.

Dr. Livingston:
Okay, if people could think about one food or one eating behavior, for some people it’s eating in the car or eating in front of the TV—if there was one thing that they wanted to change that would make a world of difference. I know that there’s this voice inside of them that says you can’t do that. If you ignore that voice for the moment and imagine what if you got that out of your life, whatever that means to you. Maybe it’s overeating on the weekends. Maybe it’s only at social events. What if you got that out of your life entirely? Imagine what would be different in a year.

Think about how your weight might change, how your health might change, how your confidence might change. What about your thinking? Like I told you, I was much, much too obsessed with food early on. Would you be thinking less about it? Would you be more likely to be present with your spouse and your kids? Would you be more likely to take on more work projects, do more fun things outside? Really flush out the entirety of what your life would be like in a year if you could only follow this one rule.

What that does is that really anchors you more in the upper brain because what your pig is going to be telling you, or your lizard, or your troll, or your B-I-T-C-H as a lot of women like to call it—they’re going to be telling you that oh, you can’t do that. You’re going to feel too deprived. That’s awful. It doesn’t tell you that there’s two types of deprivation. The second type of deprivation is what you’re depriving yourself of by continuing to indulge. It’s that whole future that you just laid out for yourself.

That’s what I find people really get is when they think about the single worst problem they have and they allow themselves to imagine that they really could be rid of it even though there’s this voice in their head going on and on that says you can’t. Then what are you going to deprive yourself of if you don’t fix this.

Now let’s listen to that voice really carefully. What are all the different reasons that this voice says that you can’t? Let’s challenge those reasons. Let’s see what’s going to be necessary to ignore those reasons. That’s how I take people through and get them to get it on a more gut level than all the theory and intellectual stuff we talked about today.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s really like you said. It’s caging the animal. It’s really just taking control of it. When you go through that process, you’re controlling it. I think the way the human brain works, if we feel that we have control, we will be successful. If we feel that the beast has us, then we feel like we’re going to lose. You’re basically giving them reins. If you have reins, you’re going to be able to ultimately be successful.

Dr. Livingston:
The key to those reins is the language that you use. It has to do with purging all the sense of doubt and powerlessness. What I’ll typically ask people if they say well, I will never eat cookies again except for the weekends, I’ll say well, how confident are you. They’ll say well, 20%. Where’s the other 80% coming from? Then they’ve got a whole list of reasons: well, you know, Christmas is this weekend, or it’s New Year’s, and I screwed up the last few years, I’m going out with my girlfriend this week, and she makes these great cookies, and I don’t want to offend her. It’s this long, long list of reasons.

We go through those reasons, and we say well, how can you handle this situation? How can you handle that situation? How confident are you now? Then they’ll say something like you know, I’m actually about 60% confident. How come not 100%? They’ll come up with more reasons.

Eventually they get towards 80% or 85% where they can’t give me any more reasons. I explain to them that that’s because your pig is always going to be lurking in the background. You can’t cut this part of you out of the brain. It’s the part that you live on top of. There’s always going to be this sense of doubt. What you want to learn to do in this game is assign that doubt to your pig.

The way that you do that with language is you say I’m 100% confident, but my pig has other ideas. The moment that you’re willing to do that, it’s not going to feel 100% confident, but you can be. You can declare yourself 100%. The moment that you realize that and you realize that all of the doubt and insecurity is coming from your pig, you’ve inserted an algorithm into your brain that will keep pulling apart you and your pig. You’ll hear your pig better, and better, and better. I’m 100% confident that I will never binge again, but my pig has other ideas.

Dr. Pompa:
Part of that, too, is part of that even identifying when you ask them those questions. Really, they’ve already planned to fail. When I go to my girlfriend’s, they already know that that’s going to be a failure. Basically you’re targeting here’s where you just planned on failing. Until you get them to 100%, you’re almost going ahead of them and giving them victory. Where else are you going to fail? I fail here. Now you have victory. Again, you’re talking to the animal.

Dr. Livingston:
That’s exactly it. That’s exactly how you do it. You’re changing the person’s identity. When the person is willing to say I’m 100% confident, that’s who they are. Every day we decide who we’re going to be. Every day that we decide who we’re going to be and we act in concert with it, we’re a little more confident that that’s who we are. This is really a game of character. It’s a game of character building. It all starts with I’m 100% confident, but my pig has other ideas. It all starts with that separation.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, Meredith. What was your pig? Meredith’s successful. She’s disciplined, but she wasn’t, obviously.

Meredith:
Yeah, well, oh that’s funny. Yeah, I had some other things, too. Yeah, just to share personally, too, I definitely for many years struggled with my weight, and overeating, and dieting. It’s better now, for sure, but I still don’t feel 100% fixed. It’s just been Christmas, and I definitely had some binges on cheese and chocolate in particular. It was really interesting earlier in the episode how you shared some of the specific correlations between specific foods we crave and binge on and then the emotional components to them. I think you had said that chocolate can be connected to—

Dr. Livingston:
Loneliness.

Meredith:
– need for love and loneliness. That’s really interesting. I definitely feel like I have made massive strides towards that. I don’t binge much anymore, but I’ve also created an environment where I’m set up to succeed. I don’t keep junk in my house, in my cupboards. It’s just not even there at all.

Another component that I’ve really worked on that’s really helped me is not just what I eat but how I eat it. I wanted to ask you about that, too, if you do coaching in that area. For me, I try not to be distracted when I eat: sitting down, possibly even lighting a candle, playing music, but really honoring the food, and paying attention to cues of satiety and fullness. I’m trying to not eat in the car or on the run but really focusing on food. Can you speak to how we eat and how that can impact binging, overeating, satiety, things like that?

Dr. Livingston:
All of the work in mindfulness is very accurate. If you’re not really present while you’re eating, then you’re not really going to have the experience of being nourished, and supported, and loved by the food. The more that you can create situations in your life where your food intake is in a mindful and loving environment, the less you’re going to crave more, the more you’re going to be aware of whether you’re full, whether you’ve had enough, when is enough enough.

I took an interview with the guy from Cornell. I actually interviewed him. He does all those mindful eating studies. What’s the name of his—I’m going to get that for you because I think your readers would really like it. He’s really quantified most of what you’re saying. This is perfectly complimentary with that because you can set up structures that support that. I will always breathe before beginning eating. I will never eat in front of the TV. I won’t eat in the car. You started to talk about it as you were describing what’s worked for you. It’s just stepping back and memorializing in written form what it is that you believe. How could ten people following you around all month know whether or not you were doing it or not? Everything you say, I couldn’t disagree with anything. It’s wonderful.

Meredith:
Great. I just wanted to follow up, too, with the conversation with diet variation and how that’s been so helpful for so many people, too. It’s adding in a carb day, possibly a protein-load day, having some lower carb days. It also adds in a fasting day. How do you feel about fasting, Dr. Glenn? How does that fit into the paradigm? Do you think that that can be helpful? From a health standpoint, of course, Dr. Pompa and I feel that it can be extremely beneficial. How does that work from your approach and for those who really struggle with—

Dr. Livingston:
From my personal study of nutrition, I do believe in it. I do periodically go through a day or two of fasting myself. I do believe in it. I don’t recommend it for my clients. It depends upon how serious a problem they have. If I work with people who say I eat until my gums bleed, and my entire life is sitting by the refrigerator. I can’t leave the refrigerator. I’m sitting there with a chair, and I want to kill myself. This is not someone that I’m going to encourage to have a fasting day.

Dr. Pompa:
I would agree.

Dr. Livingston:
I work with a lot of people that feel like binge eating is overtaking their whole life and so on. I’m very cautious. My general philosophy is look, let’s just not binge. Let’s get a regular intake of food going. Worry about fasting and cleansing in five years or something like that when you’ve really got this thing totally under control.

It scares me for people who really struggle with binging or anorexia to go through fasting even though I know on a nutritional basis it really gives the body a break and allows us to cleanse. It’s something that I personally do. I’m very, very careful about that with people who have trouble with that button in the brain that says dislodge your jaw and put everything into it.

Meredith:
That makes sense, just easing into it, as well. You can’t always jump in fully with everything, especially when you have such challenges. Those dealing with such extreme conditions with the over eating and the binging, definitely slow, slow and steady can win the race.

Dr. Livingston:
What would be close to a fast, though, would be a day full of berries and melons or something like that, wouldn’t it? Something that’s really quickly digested but provides some calories so that you’re not necessarily triggering the binge response? I’m asking, I’m not saying.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, a partial fast, partial fasts work well, too, honestly. I’m thinking even that could be a little—for the person who binges. Again, it’s the person in front of you, you have to know that person, right? Even then that could be a little bingy for some people. Who knows?

Dr. Livingston:
Yep.

Meredith:
Many, many different styles of fasting modification, that’s why it’s so important to work with a practitioner. If anyone’s watching, really struggling with the binging eating and the overeating. Having that trained practitioner to guide you along the way is so priceless, really important.

What I’m just wondering, anyone who’s watching who’s been struggling maybe for years or maybe a short period of time with over eating, binging—what are some key tips and techniques that they can walk away with after this show, implementing really quickly into their life to see a difference?

Dr. Livingston:
The most profound thing I could say is to really simplify the whole thing: that all you really need to do to never binge again is never binge again. It sounds crazy, but it’s all you need to do. You need to draw these lines very clearly in the sand about what that means. You need to start listening for that crazy inner voice that talks you out of your best-laid plans. You need to stop trying to love your inner wounded child and kill your inner wounded child to fix this problem. You can do all that to fix other problems. Determine that you’re disgusted, get good and disgusted, with that lizard brain part of you that keeps talking you out of your plans. That’s the most fundamental tip that I can give people is to realize it’s a lot more simple than you think it is.

Kathryn Hansen, who wrote Brain over Binge, is a good friend of mine. She puts it like this. She says you just have to think of all those urges as neurological junk. It’s a miswiring of the brain. You would know about nerve plasticity, but basically he says whatever fires, think of the wires together. If you start dismissing those urges, then those urges will weaken over time.

In plain English, we don’t really crave those things that we know we’re never going to have. If a prisoner has no hope, then the prisoner starts to calm down because there’s no sense banging your head against the wall of a cage. It’s a real simplification, a switch of paradigm from loving your inner wounded child to caging your rabid animal.

I’ve got all sorts of free resources on my site if it’s okay to say that, and you give me the word. Today we’ve talked a lot about theory. I’ve recorded a lot of full sessions so you can hear how I actually implement this with people. I’ve set up a whole bunch of food plan templates so you can get a sense of the kind of rules that work for people and the rules that don’t. It’s all free. The book is free also, by the way. You can download it on—

Dr. Pompa:
Give the resources.

Dr. Livingston:
It’s all at neverbingeagain.com. If you go to neverbingeagain.com, you hit the big red free button, and you sign up for the free reader bonus. You’ll get everything we just talked about including the link to the free book so that you can get a better sense of what we’re talking about and all that stuff. Yeah, neverbingeagain.com

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Look, I know you’re going to get a lot of people going there because so many people that watch and listen to this show to some degree, different for everybody, but to some degree struggle with this, right? It’s part of it, no doubt.

Dr. Livingston:
It’s a very empowering philosophy because it supports your independent thinking. It get’s that negative part of you out of the way that says that you can’t do this and you’re powerless. It gives you a new sense of hope that you haven’t had before. Find one rule. Find one rule. Play with one rule. See how that works. Listen to some of the sessions and see how they do it. You’re going to be very surprised as to what your brain can do that you didn’t know it could do.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Glenn, thank you. I think you’re really going to get a great response from our viewers. Thank you for coming on the show.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you for helping me to reach more people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Meredith:
Yes, thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, Dr. Glenn. Such a message of empowerment for those of us who have struggled for so many years with these challenges, but to know that with the right tools that this doesn’t have to be a challenge that we live with forever and that we don’t have to have this food prison as you called it. I think that’s a really powerful message. There’s hope.

Dr. Livingston:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you.

Dr. Livingston:
Bye.

Meredith:
Thanks so much, Dr. Glenn. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thanks for watching,