#260. The Neuroscience Behind Food Addiction (And How to Beat It)

You’re Not Broken—Your Brain’s Just Addicted: The Truth About Food, Cravings, and Control
In this eye-opening episode, Dr. Glenn Livingston reveals how the food industry hacks your brain to keep you hooked—and why your cravings aren’t your fault. From years of consulting for Fortune 500 food companies to overcoming his own 300-pound binge eating struggle, Dr. Glenn explains the real neuroscience behind food addiction.

We dive into how processed foods manipulate the “bliss point,” why emotional trauma isn’t the root cause of overeating, and the powerful brain-based method he used to take back control. If you’ve ever felt like you have no willpower or can’t stop eating junk, this episode will give you practical tools and hope. You’ll learn how to retrain your brain, silence the inner sabotage voice, and finally feel free around food.

If you liked this episode, watch it on YouTube! 👉🏻 https://youtu.be/qHi32vsOmGk

Chapters:
0:00 - Food Addiction Isn’t About Willpower
6:54 - Why Junk Food Hijacks Your Brain
22:08 - Rewiring the Reptilian Brain (The “Inner Pig” Method)
34:13 - 7-11 Breathing and Writing to Break Cravings
41:18 - Free Tools to Stop Binge Eating for Good

If this episode helped you feel less alone in your food journey, share it with someone who needs it. ❤️

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Transcript

My Food Addiction Almost Ruined My Life… How I Finally Took Control

(00:00)
Dr. Tabatha: Like my body just chose all of those quick processed foods over anything that was real and healthy. And I got to a point where I realized that I had an addiction.

[Music]

Oh my gosh, I'm super pumped about this episode. I've been wanting my guest on here for a while because the food industry is duping us, and I didn't realize this—even as a physician. We are not taught any of this about how food is created in this country, how it's manipulated, and how it's really manipulated in a way to create addiction.

(00:35)
Dr. Tabatha: And so my guest today has the inside scoop on all of that. And more importantly, he has figured out how to stop the addiction and how to break the cycle of binge eating and eating the garbage foods and always reaching for the potato chips or eating the food without thinking and then feeling guilty afterward.

(01:17)
Dr. Tabatha: And all of it. All the shame around food, all the emotional eating that we do. And he comes from a traditional world of psychology where you try to, you know, heal all the emotional stuff and figure out why you're overeating and making bad food choices and all of this stuff. And it’s—it’s very much powerless for you. It's like you have to work through all this trauma and all the things that happened and figure out why you're making bad choices.

(01:54)
Dr. Tabatha: And what he is saying is no, that is not the problem. The problem is what the food industry has done to our food and how it has taken over our body and how we can take back control of it. And so it's super powerful. And like when I heard him the first time, I don't know, six or eight months ago, I was like, "Yes, this makes total sense."

(02:18)
Dr. Tabatha: And everything he talks about is a version of what I did to break up with sugar and get off my sugar addiction. So, I'm just really excited to bring you this information today because it's a game-changer. And I think we all have a little bit of disordered eating every now and then depending on if we're overworked, overstressed—

(02:41)
Dr. Tabatha: Uh we're sad, we're frustrated, or we're happy. You know, most of us have these issues. And then some of us have it like it's controlling our lives. We really can't break up with sugar. We really can't give up the potato chips or the pop or different things. And my guest today is going to help you with that. It's amazing what he's created through his journey of figuring all of this out and losing a ton of weight himself and just getting control of this.

(03:12)
Dr. Tabatha: So, let me tell you about him because this is a great episode and you need to hear it. So, let's get on with it. So, Dr. Glenn Livingston is a PhD veteran psychologist. He was a longtime CEO of a multi-million dollar consulting firm which serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. So he had the inside scoop of how food is made in this country.

(03:40)
Dr. Tabatha: So Dr. Glenn's work, theories, and research have been published in major periodicals like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun Times. He was disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer for overweight and food-obsessed individuals. So, Dr. Livingston has spent several decades researching the nature of binge eating, overeating, and all of the above through his work with his own patients and a self-funded research program of more than 40,000 participants.

(04:13)
Dr. Tabatha: So, he knows what he's talking about, you guys. Most important, however, was his own personal journey out of obesity and food prison to a normal healthy weight and a much more light-hearted relationship with food. So, you're going to be touched by his story. And unfortunately, I think a lot of us have similar stories and we get into these scenarios and these cycles of having food issues.

(04:44)
Dr. Tabatha: And I like that he says he was food-obsessed. You know, I think I had a sugar addiction. Whatever you want to call it—we need to take care of it. So, Dr. Glenn teaches why binge eating and overeating is such a popular problem, and he focuses on the food industry and how addiction medicine really fails to give us back our power and help us take care of this issue.

(05:12)
Dr. Tabatha: So, he's actually going to give you real tips on how to start changing this and shifting this right now. He has amazing programs and all kinds of stuff. You can get his book for free. The links are in the show notes, but he's going to literally tell you right now how you can take control of this and change everything.

(05:32)
Dr. Tabatha: So, let's get on with it. I'm super excited.

(05:36)
Dr. Tabatha: Well, welcome Glenn to the Gutsy Gynecologist show.

Dr. Glenn: Thank you. I couldn't wait to be here and I enjoyed telling people I was going to do this.

Dr. Tabatha: Good, because I need you to get your message out to the world. When I first heard you, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is everything that I've lived and experienced with myself and my patients."

Dr. Glenn: Oh yeah.

Dr. Tabatha: And I just think the majority of people don't really know that the food industry is duping them and that food addiction is real, right?

Dr. Glenn: We have a perfect storm in our country—really the whole world—for people to get hooked with their lizard brain, the reptilian brain, on these hyper-palatable food-like substances. These concentrations of starch, sugar, fat, excitotoxins, and salt are all aimed at hitting the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied...

(06:31)
Dr. Glenn: …And there are probably billions of dollars that go into hiring rocket scientists and engineers to put this all together so they can turn off your hungry and full meters. And every time you're looking for love at the bottom of a bag or a box or a container, there's some fat cat in a white suit with a mustache laughing all the way to the bank—which is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

Dr. Tabatha: Yeah, not really. I mean, I will tell you, I am a conventionally trained physician. I went through medical school. I went through residency. We learned minimal about nutrition, and we learned nothing about how food is actually created in this country. And just hearing you talk about it, you know, just makes so much sense to me.

(07:19)
Dr. Tabatha: So I was an OB/GYN. I was sleep-deprived, delivering babies all night, running around all day trying to crank out patients and doing surgeries. And so it was very common for me to grab whatever was available on the run and just eat it on the go. And I got to the point where literally I was living on donuts and bagels for breakfast, coffee, Mountain Dew, M&M’s at the nurses' station, licorice...

Dr. Glenn: Yep.

Dr. Tabatha: Like my body just chose all of those quick processed foods over anything that was real and healthy. And I got to a point where I realized I had an addiction, you know? And some people would laugh and be like, “Oh, you can't, that's not a real addiction,” and things like this. But I would love for you to explain to my listeners, like, how the food industry has manipulated our food and it really does create an addictive habit for us.

(08:19)
Dr. Glenn: So, I—I don't know if I’m the ultimate expert at that, but I—I did consult for the food industry for a lot of years in my 20s and 30s, and I saw what was happening. They know where our evolutionary buttons are. I feel like I was on the wrong side of the war.

They know, for example, that if they manufacture a bag of chips, they have very slight variations in flavor. In nature, we’ve evolved to seek variations in flavor because there will be variations in micronutrients that are available, and we’re more likely to acquire the micronutrients we need if we look for a variety of sources.

(09:05)
Dr. Glenn: So when they manufacture a bag of chips, they do it on multiple assembly lines, and it kind of all goes into one bag. People have no idea that this is what’s going on. And it’s not like there is a plethora of micronutrients in a bag of potato chips, right?

Dr. Tabatha: Right.

Dr. Glenn: There’s not really any difference in the micronutrients from chip to chip to chip. It’s just kind of faking out the brain.

Dr. Tabatha: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Glenn: The advertising industry—I remember a food bar manufacturer I worked with. The guy became kind of a friend of mine. He was VP of marketing. As he was leaving the company, he kind of hung his head in shame, and he said, “I gotta tell you something, Glenn. The most profitable thing we ever did was take the vitamins out of the bar.”

(09:51)
Dr. Glenn: “We took the vitamins out of the bar and we put them in the packaging instead. We made it multicolored and shiny and diverse.” Because also in nature, you’re told to eat the rainbow for a reason. If you find a multicolored source of fruits and vegetables, the odds are that you’re going to get a variety of good micronutrients, right?

You know—a yellow carrot and green lettuce and blueberries and cherry red tomatoes. You put that all on a plate, you're probably getting some really good nutrition.

Dr. Tabatha: Yeah.

(10:08)
Dr. Glenn: Well, in this case, they actually took the nutrition out of it, and they're faking you out and pretending like it's there instead.

Another thing they do is take advantage of what you’d call “plausible deniability.” People don’t necessarily want to eat healthy. They want to believe they’re eating healthy while they’re eating a whole bunch of junk.

So, you put a little bit of vitamin E oil in potato chips, right? Then you can advertise “now with vitamin E” as if that makes up for the flood of carcinogens from the heated oil, acrylamides, and all the things created when you make potato chips.

(10:53)
Dr. Glenn: I don’t mean to ruin potato chips for everybody forever. I think that society makes some very flavorful things. And if you want to indulge once in a while, more power to you.

But these things do contribute to the greasing of the chute—to the justification of the idea that you can eat this. And people start to think it’s nutritious. People start to think they’re not really doing themselves that much damage. But they really, really are.

And when you take into account the fact that the nervous system goes through a phenomenon called downregulation and upregulation...

(11:26)
Dr. Glenn: …Which means that when you overstimulate your senses, they turn the volume down. They don’t respond as thoroughly.

So for example, I used to sleep underneath the subway in graduate school. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t sleep at all. A couple of months later, I didn’t even know the subway was there. My brain turned down that supersized stimulus.

The pleasure system will do the same thing with your food and your taste. If you have a chocolate bar every single day, by the end of the month, you probably don’t like the taste of an apple anymore.

Dr. Tabatha: Yes. I remember that clearly. When I gave up sugar, I substituted with fruit because I couldn’t quit cold turkey. And that fruit was not that great. I didn’t enjoy it that much. But I just thought, “Okay, just eat the fruit. Don’t eat that other stuff.”

(12:19)
Dr. Tabatha: And after a few weeks, the fruit got a lot sweeter. And I got to the point—I remember eating my first piece of cake after like two months—and I could only have one bite. It was literally that sweet.

Dr. Glenn: Yeah.

Dr. Tabatha: It was very eye-opening to me that I had gone through that downregulation and shift of everything.

Dr. Glenn: And the good news is that you upregulated also when you stopped eating sugar. You got to the point that the apple tasted good again and the cake didn’t taste so good.

Dr. Tabatha: Right. Yes.

Dr. Glenn: So, the lesson is—it takes a while. But it’s good news though because the body does upregulate. I think there’s research that says within six to eight weeks, if you remove the supersized stimuli from your taste buds, they double in sensitivity about six to eight weeks later.

(13:07)
Dr. Glenn: So there’s hope. People get stuck in the addictive cycle because they then believe that they don’t like fruit and vegetables, you know?

Dr. Tabatha: Yes. Oh my goodness, yes. “I’m never going to lose weight because I just don’t like fruits and vegetables.”

And everybody knows—regardless of whether you’re ketogenic, or whole-food plant-based, or high-carb or low-carb—everybody knows you have to eat more whole foods and at least vegetables to get thin.

Dr. Glenn: And people think it’s impossible because they don’t like fruits and vegetables. Well, your senses have been downregulated. That’s why you don’t like them. There’s hope—but the only way out is through.

Dr. Tabatha: Yeah. Exactly.

(20:02)
Dr. Glenn: …I'm sorry, do you want to say something? I get all excited about this stuff.

Dr. Tabatha: No, I—I couldn’t agree more. Like literally, that’s how I gave up sugar. I just made the decision that I don’t eat that crap anymore and I’m going to be a healthier person. And so I couldn’t agree more.

Dr. Tabatha: And I would love for you to explain to my listeners how you went through this and made this discovery, because your story is so powerful. Like you—you’ve done it. You figured it out.

Dr. Glenn: Yeah. So I’m—I’m not just a doctor that worked with the food industry and decided to work with overeaters. I am—I used to be probably almost 300 pounds. I stopped weighing myself at 267, but odds are I was close to 300.

(20:26)
Dr. Glenn: It started when I was a teenager, and I’m 6'4", I’m modestly muscular just kind of naturally. And I figured out that if I work out really hard for a couple hours a day—at least back then—that I could eat whatever I wanted to.

Dr. Glenn: And I didn’t think it was a problem. Like Doug Graham says, I thought it was a superpower. Multiple pizzas, boxes of muffins, boxes of chocolate bars... Mostly I started with chocolate and then I would go on to pizza and muffins and things like that.

Dr. Glenn: And coming from a family of 17 psychologists, when I got a little older and it started to bother me, I went the psychological route. I figured there must be something bothering me. There must be a hole in my heart, and if I can figure out how to fill that hole in my heart, then I’ll stop filling the hole in my stomach.

(21:09)
Dr. Glenn: And I went on this decades-long journey to figure that out. I saw the best psychologists and psychiatrists. I took medication for a little while. I went to Overeaters Anonymous for many years.

Dr. Glenn: I even conducted a very large study on my own. I got 40,000 people over the course of many years to take a survey on the internet—back when internet clicks were cheap. It was all about what they were stressed about and what they couldn’t stop eating.

Dr. Glenn: Over that period, I learned an awful lot about myself. I think it made me a more compassionate person. I think it dissolved a lot of the self-hatred. So it was a worthwhile journey—but it didn’t solve the problem.

(21:48)
Dr. Glenn: I would get a little thinner… a lot fatter… a little thinner… a lot fatter.

Dr. Glenn: Finally, there were these three things that happened around the same time that made me flip the paradigm. So instead of trying to nurture my inner wounded child back to health and love myself thin, I decided it was more of a tough love approach.

Dr. Glenn: I had to be like the alpha dog of my own eating brain. When an alpha wolf is challenged for leadership, it doesn’t go, “Oh my goodness, someone needs a hug.” It growls and snarls and says, “Get back in line or I’ll kill you,” right?

(22:25)
Dr. Glenn: It asserts its superiority.

Dr. Glenn: And I said, well maybe this is the same thing with food. Maybe there’s this organ in my brain—not dissimilar to how my bladder would say, “Hey, Glenn, you really have to pee now.”

Dr. Glenn: And I would say, “Well look, I’m talking to Tabatha. I can’t do that now. I’m the superior entity here. I’ll take care of you when we’re done with the interview because I’m living in a civilized society and I have other commitments and things I’m trying to accomplish.”

Dr. Glenn: Why is this really any different? Why isn’t it just a bodily urge?

(23:04)
Dr. Glenn: Well, what got me to that paradigm—and that’s the paradigm that started to work—and I’ll tell you something kind of embarrassing, which is how I actually got it to work for me...

Dr. Glenn: The way I got there was partially from the food and advertising industries, because I would say these are very powerful external forces that have nothing to do with the fact that I was in a bad marriage or that my mama didn’t love me enough.

Dr. Glenn: This is an outside force—having nothing to do with me.

Dr. Glenn: Then I studied a little bit of neurology, and I actually read some alternative addiction treatment literature. A guy named Jack Trimpey wrote a book called Rational Recovery that taught me that the reptilian brain doesn’t really know love.

(23:48)
Dr. Glenn: And it’s the reptilian brain that’s the seat of the feast-and-famine response—you know, the “just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt” response.

Dr. Glenn: It’s a misfiring of the emergency system inside of us that’s designed to protect us from dying. So if we go through an environment where there’s a lot of famine and suddenly there’s food available, we’re supposed to hoard as much as we can. That’s where this response comes from.

Dr. Glenn: And we still have that reptilian brain—even though we have a frontal brain, we have critical thinking abilities, we are advanced—we still have that in our nature, right?

(24:19)
Dr. Glenn: And if the emergency system is activated at too strong a level, all that other stuff goes out the window.

Dr. Glenn: If there’s a hungry bear chasing you, it doesn’t matter what diet book you read yesterday. It doesn’t matter what your plans were.

Dr. Glenn: Like Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” If there’s a real emergency, your brain is set up to take over and say, “Screw all that rational stuff. Forget who you are in the world. Forget your family. This is survival time.”

(24:58)
Dr. Glenn: And I think that’s what’s happening at the moment of impulse.

Dr. Glenn: So the reptilian brain doesn’t know love. It’s the mammalian brain on top of that that says, “Wait a minute, before you eat, mate, or kill that thing…” Because that’s how the reptilian brain assesses stimuli in the environment: should I eat it, should I mate with it, or should I kill it?

Dr. Glenn: It’s like a bad college drinking game, right?

Dr. Tabatha: Haha, yes!

Dr. Glenn: But then the mammalian brain says, “Wait a minute—what about the people you love? What impact is this going to have on your tribe and your family?”

(25:24)
Dr. Glenn: And then the neocortex says, “Wait, before you eat, mate, or kill that thing—what about your long-term goals? Your health and fitness? Your contributions to society? The kind of person you're trying to be—your spirituality, your music, your art, your work?”

Dr. Glenn: And I said, what was happening was at the moment of impulse, this thing was getting a lot stronger, and all the rest of the stuff was going out the window.

Dr. Glenn: So it didn’t matter how much I loved myself—or hated myself for that matter. It didn’t matter what my long-term goals were. The problem was there was this event which revved up the reptilian brain and made it want to override everything else.

(26:05)
Dr. Glenn: So the last thing that kind of brought this together for me was the survey that I told you about.

Dr. Glenn: When I analyzed the survey—40,000 people—I found out that people who struggled with chocolate, who said they couldn’t stop eating chocolate when they were stressed, they tended to be stressed in their relationship. They felt a little lonely or brokenhearted.

Dr. Glenn: People who struggled with salty, chewy things—like bread, bagels, pasta, or pizza—they tended to be stressed at home. And people who struggled with crunchy, salty things like pretzels and potato chips tended to be stressed at work.

Dr. Glenn: It’s very interesting. Not a perfect correlation. Not a perfect study either. But definitely something there.

(26:50)
Dr. Glenn: So I called my mom because she was a therapist, and she happened to have raised me, and she also has a problem with chocolate. And I said, “Mom, can you please help me understand what could have happened to get me to run to chocolate when I feel lonely or brokenhearted? Because, you know, I’m not in a great marriage. I’m not happy. And I know you have trouble with chocolate also.”

Dr. Glenn: And she gets this horrible look on her face and says, “Honey, I’m so sorry.”

Dr. Glenn: And I said, “Mom, it’s okay.” This was over Skype. I said, “It’s okay. I’m 42 now. Whatever you’re talking about, it was 40 years ago. I forgive you. I love you. I just want to know what happened.”

(27:24)
Dr. Glenn: And she said, “I’m so sorry, honey. But in 1965, when you were one year old, your dad was a captain in the army, and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. And I was terrified. I was a young mother, another one on the way—we were trying to get pregnant—and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. I thought I was going to be an army widow.

“At the same time, my father—your grandfather—had just gotten out of prison. And I didn’t know that he was guilty. He had disappeared for two years, and I had idolized him prior to that, and my whole world fell apart.”

(28:06)
Dr. Glenn (as mom): “So half the time when you came to me for love or to play or just to get a hug, I didn’t have the wherewithal to give it to you. I was sitting and staring at the wall, feeling anxious and depressed.

“So what I did was, I got a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup and I put it in a refrigerator on the floor. And I would say, ‘Glenn, go get your Bosco.’ And you’d go crawling over to the refrigerator, take out the bottle, open it up, suck on the bottle, and you’d go into a chocolate sugar coma. And I could resume staring at the wall.”

Dr. Glenn: Very sad.

Dr. Glenn: It was a good conversation to have. I learned a lot about my mom. And I stopped torturing myself as much at that point. But my chocolate eating got worse.

(28:45)
Dr. Glenn: You’d think if it were a movie, we’d have this big hug and a big cry and everything would be okay. But, you know, I learned a lot—like I said—about my mom, and I forgave myself.

Dr. Glenn: But my chocolate eating got worse.

Dr. Glenn: And the reason it got worse is for kind of a crazy reason, which is embarrassing as a sophisticated psychologist with credentials. I was not going to talk to anybody about this.

Dr. Glenn: I decided to do a little experiment. The experiment was I was going to draw very clear lines in the sand. For example: I will never have chocolate on a weekday again. That was one of the first things I did.

(29:18)
Dr. Glenn: And I decided that if I was at Starbucks and I heard a little voice in my head that said, “Go ahead, you worked out hard enough. One chocolate bar’s not going to kill you. You’re not going to gain any weight. It'll be just as easy to start again tomorrow. Besides, chocolate comes from a plant and therefore it’s a vegetable…” I would say:

Dr. Glenn (firmly): “That’s not me. It’s a Wednesday. I don’t eat chocolate on Wednesdays. That’s not me. That’s my inner pig.”

Dr. Glenn: I called my reptilian brain my inner pig. I should have called it something different, but I called it my inner pig. I said, “That’s my inner pig squealing for pig slop. Chocolate is pig slop on a Wednesday. I don’t eat pig slop. I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do.”

(29:51)
Dr. Glenn: As ridiculous and crude as that sounds, it would wake me up at the moment of impulse.

Dr. Glenn: And I wish I could say it was immediately better. It wasn’t a miracle. It took some time.

Dr. Glenn: What was immediately better was that all the confusion went away.

Dr. Glenn: There was no longer this voice of justification. I didn’t think I had some mysterious progressive chronic disease. I didn’t think that I was struggling with food because my mama didn’t love me enough or because I was in a bad marriage.

Dr. Glenn: I just said, “No, there’s this event going on—this thing—where my inner pig, my reptilian brain, is getting activated, and then it’s drawing on all these justifications.”

(30:33)
Dr. Glenn: I thought, “What if I could remove those justifications? It would be like building a fireplace between the fire and the house. I could have a roaring fire, and it wouldn’t matter how emotional I was, what I was upset about, what was going on in my life—I could sever the link between the emotion and overeating.”

Dr. Glenn: So I began to do that by looking specifically at what my pig would say. For example, if it said, “It’ll be just as easy to start again tomorrow,” I’d think—“That’s what everybody’s pig says.”

(30:55)
Dr. Glenn: The problem with that, on a neurological basis, is we have this principle called neuroplasticity, which means that what fires together wires together.

Dr. Glenn: So if you crave chocolate and you eat chocolate today, that association is going to be stronger tomorrow. The craving will be stronger and the association between the craving and the action will be stronger tomorrow.

Dr. Glenn: So you’re actually digging a deeper hole for yourself.

Dr. Glenn: If you’re in a hole, stop digging. The best thing to do is always use the present moment to be healthy. It’s the only time you can eat healthy—in the present moment.

(31:33)
Dr. Glenn: Over the next few years, I played with a lot of different rules. Some things I would try to give up totally. Some things I would say, “I will only have pretzels at a major league baseball park.”

Dr. Glenn: And I got better at it. I’d make some mistakes. I’d write down what the pig said to get me to make the mistake. I’d figure out what was wrong with what it said.

Dr. Glenn: And I kept this journal for eight years. I got thin. My triglycerides went down. My psoriasis went away. Etc., etc., etc.

Dr. Glenn: And then in 2015, while I was getting divorced, I was a minor partner in a publishing company, based on all the little business contacts that I had.

(32:19)
Dr. Glenn: And the CEO calls me and says, “Glenn, do you think you could write a book? Because we need to prove to the other authors that we know what we’re doing with marketing. And I want to do some experiments, and I can’t really do that on just anybody’s book. Do you think you could write one?”

Dr. Glenn: And I said, “I have this crazy journal between me and the pig.”

Dr. Glenn: He says, “Perfect.”

Dr. Glenn: So I rip it up into a book. I think it was eight years in the making. I send it to him.

(32:34)
Dr. Glenn: Two weeks later, he calls me back and he says, “Glenn… donuts are pig slop. I don’t eat donuts. I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do.”

Dr. Glenn: And he proceeds to lose almost 100 pounds over the next 18 months.

Dr. Glenn: We published it. And I’d have to say we both knew marketing really well. He was previously running the publishing company, and so I had a leg up in a lot of ways.

Dr. Glenn: We just plugged away, doing all the things we knew how to do. And then it just took off on its own.

Dr. Glenn: Now we have well over a million readers.

(33:12)
Dr. Glenn: And people don’t quite know me by name, but if they see me at a bookstore, they kind of point at me and they say, “Hey guy! Hey guy!” Which is a lot of fun on a first date, by the way. So… yeah.

Dr. Tabatha: I think it’s just your marketing. I think you cracked the code. You figured out why people are addicted to foods and why their behaviors run their lives—and really how to put a stop to it.

Dr. Tabatha: Because I—I’ve agreed with like literally everything you’ve said. You have to just make a decision and you have to stand by that decision and give your pig or your reptilian brain tough love, right?

Dr. Tabatha: How long did you go back and forth figuring that out until it felt like you had conquered it and were changed?

(33:51)
Dr. Glenn: There were a couple of other pieces of the puzzle I had to put together.

Dr. Glenn: Eventually, I realized it wasn’t just about disempowering the logic but understanding how to shift nervous systems. There was a piece of the puzzle missing—where you had to do some particular kind of breathing and writing at the moment of impulse to shift the system.

Dr. Glenn: So what I tell people to do now is: start with one simple rule. And then when you hear the pig inside telling you that you should break the rule, take a breath. Breathe in for a count of seven. Breathe out for a count of eleven.

(34:13)
Dr. Glenn: It’s important that you breathe out for longer than you breathe in—all those 7–11 breaths. That starts to shift you from the sympathetic nervous system—you can tell me if I have this wrong, I think I have it right—from the sympathetic nervous system, which is the emergency response system, to the parasympathetic system which says it’s okay to rest and digest and use your rational thinking and plan ahead.

Dr. Glenn: That’s what you want to do at the moment of impulse—be able to shift. You want to be able to shift nervous systems.

(34:53)
Dr. Glenn: The reason the breathing works is that if you were being chased by a hungry bear, you wouldn’t have time to breathe out for longer than you were breathing in. You’d be going—[breathes rapidly].

Dr. Tabatha: Right.

Dr. Glenn: So when you breathe out for longer than you breathe in, you’re signaling the brain that there’s no emergency.

Dr. Glenn: Then, if you write down what the pig is saying—you ask the pig, “Okay, I took my 7–11 breaths, I’m thinking a little more clearly… why do you want me to break my rules and binge?”

(35:15)
Dr. Glenn: That’s when it will say, “Well, you could just start tomorrow” or “One bite’s not going to hurt” or—you know, all those kinds of things we talked about.

Dr. Glenn: Write that down in full. Writing is more of an upper brain activity. And binging is more of a lower brain activity—overeating is more of a lower brain activity.

Dr. Glenn: So write it down in full. Then you can dispute what the pig has to say. Then you can rationally disempower and excise that cancerous logic.

Dr. Glenn: And then finally take another breath like that, and link it to the person you’re trying to become in the world.

(35:57)
Dr. Glenn: What’s going to make you a happier, better person if you stay with your plan now, as opposed to giving in to the impulse?

Dr. Glenn: The other piece to it is that there’s often an authentic physiological or psychological need. More often physiological than psychological.

Dr. Glenn: So people will tell me they get these overwhelming cravings—usually when they skipped breakfast, or had too little for breakfast, or they worked out and didn’t plan their recovery well, or they didn’t get enough sleep, and they’re impinged upon to make decisions all day long.

Dr. Glenn: And so you have to attend to that.

(36:34)
Dr. Glenn: What really got me off of chocolate eventually—because I have it now to the point that I just don’t have chocolate at all—was having a kale-banana smoothie instead.

Dr. Glenn: When I would have the craving, I experimented with all these different fruit and vegetable combinations. And eventually I came to kale and bananas, sometimes with some celery juice.

Dr. Glenn: I think there must have been some type of a micronutrient deficiency that was part of what was driving it.

Dr. Tabatha: For sure. Do you know what it is in the kale or bananas that would be…?

Dr. Glenn: I don’t specifically, off the top of my head.

(37:14)
Dr. Tabatha: But when you were talking about chocolate versus salty versus sweet—it makes so much sense.

Dr. Tabatha: Usually salty goes with overstress and adrenal dysfunction. And so it’s like electrolyte imbalances—sodium, potassium, magnesium, selenium. Whereas chocolate is more chemicals in the brain to make dopamine and GABA and all your pleasure hormones and things like that.

Dr. Tabatha: And so it makes total sense to me—everything you’ve come to understand. And if we can figure out what we’re missing, what we’re lacking, and put that in—it makes perfect sense.

Dr. Glenn: Just as an aside, I figured out that the salt cravings were usually caused when I didn’t have enough vegetables—particularly leafy greens.

(38:04)
Dr. Glenn: If I had enough leafy greens in my diet, and started making a vegetable soup without any salt, then I wouldn’t crave the salt. It was pretty amazing.

Dr. Glenn: The principle is: What’s the authentic bodily need behind it?

Dr. Glenn: If you understand that the emergency response system is making an error—because it perceives itself to be living in an environment of feast and famine—then you have to correct both sides of that environment.

Dr. Glenn: So how are you going to flood your body with nutrition and a slight caloric deficit if you want to lose weight?

Dr. Glenn: I told people—I don’t dispute the benefit of intermittent fasting—but it’s hard to stop binging while you’re doing that.

(38:52)
Dr. Glenn: So I ask them if they can have three meals a day and flood their body with nutrition on a regular basis for four, six, eight months—until the binging and overeating is out of their system. And then if they want to reintroduce intermittent fasting, that tends to work better.

Dr. Glenn: I’ve spoken to some intermittent fasting experts, and they tell me they find something similar. If people have been eating a lot of processed carbohydrates, their body doesn’t get fat-adapted well enough, and it takes longer for them to get used to intermittent fasting.

Dr. Glenn: So they prefer people to get the processed foods out of their system for a few months first.

(39:14)
Dr. Tabatha: Yeah, without a doubt. I think you—you lose that metabolic flexibility and you do need to transition over to whole foods. Like you can eat an entire bag of Doritos and not be satisfied and continue to eat it.

Dr. Tabatha: Yet, you can't eat more than like a cup of broccoli because you feel full. And it's literally because you get those nutrients and vitamins that you need—and your body turns off the hunger signals, right?

Dr. Tabatha: Where you don't get the turn-off of those signals with the garbage.

(39:45)
Dr. Glenn: You have to fill your meals with nutrient-dense food. We have millions of people who are hugely obese but malnourished.

Dr. Glenn: And like—that’s not a picture that we grew up with. We grew up with “malnourished” equals scrawny ribs in Ethiopia. Whereas malnourished, literally in this country, is like—you’re 300 lbs and not healthy and not having those nutrients.

(40:12)
Dr. Tabatha: So yeah, I love the idea of like—get in the nutrient-dense food, clean up your diet, and then we can work on tightening up your eating window or adding in some intermittent fasting.

Dr. Tabatha: But I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t lose weight just cleaning up their diet.

Dr. Glenn: Right. And sometimes people do well—they can’t bear to give anything up. So they’ll start with a rule that says, “I always start my day with a big green smoothie so I fill up my body with healthy goodness.” And then they start to crowd out the bad stuff.

Dr. Tabatha: Yes! I love that. Just crowd out the bad stuff.

(40:59)
Dr. Tabatha: So you’ve done all of this journey on yourself. You’ve come full circle. You’ve figured it all out and now you’re helping other people.

Dr. Tabatha: So I would love for you to tell me about your program—like how are you working with people to overcome this?

Dr. Glenn: Well, we have a lot of resources. If you go to neverbingeagain.com and click the big red button, you’ll get a bunch of resources that’ll help you.

(41:18)
Dr. Glenn: And we usually like people to start with the free resources so they know how we work. It’s kind of odd when I come on a podcast and say, “Hi, I’m Dr. Glenn. I have a pig inside me.”

Dr. Glenn: People think I’m a little crazy and that this is a harsh theory—or that we’re going to call them a pig or something.

Dr. Glenn: So, you’ll get some recorded coaching sessions to download and listen to for free, food plan starter templates, and a whole bunch of free stuff to start with.

Dr. Glenn: You can get a copy of the book in Kindle, Nook, or PDF format there also—that’s all free. There are paid versions and the Audible and paperback if you want them.

(41:57)
Dr. Glenn: We have a free forum where you can talk to other readers and see what people are doing. And then we do have paid programs.

Dr. Glenn: I think I have ten coaches working for me now—I should probably say with me, because they teach me as much as I teach them.

Dr. Glenn: And our results are almost exactly the same. We track results. We’re very careful about only letting coaches stay who get results. And it’s pretty close—pretty close.

Dr. Glenn: So we offer traditional one-on-one coaching, but we have a program where you get one-on-one email coaching. And then we have six online groups a week where people come on and ask for support.

(42:39)
Dr. Glenn: I run one of them, my business partner runs another, and then my master coaches run the others. So you’re never really more than a day or two away from getting the online support.

Dr. Glenn: We have educational lectures and tools that we’ve developed. But it essentially works like this—and you don’t have to pay me for anything to know how to do this.

Dr. Glenn: You start with one simple rule.

(43:06)
Dr. Glenn: Turns out that part of the reptilian brain’s strategy when you’re trying to be good is to say, “Okay, I’ll let you be good—but you better be really, really, really, really, really good.” Kind of like that nursery rhyme: “When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

Dr. Glenn: So the pig will set the bar way too high for you to sustain—and then you’ll crash. And so people get into this binge-restrict cycle. So we want to kill that right away.

Dr. Glenn: What’s one simple thing you could do that would make a difference, but wouldn’t be too onerous or difficult to implement?

Dr. Glenn: Examples might be:

• “I won’t go back for seconds.”
• “I’ll never eat in front of a screen again.”
• “I always put my fork down between bites.”
• “I only eat chocolate on weekends.”
• “I’ll never drink more than one drink at a buffet.”

(44:08)
Dr. Glenn: Whatever your personal nemesis is—find one thing you could do. Go to kindergarten before you go to college. Don’t worry about losing weight unless your doctor says it’s urgent. Don’t worry about losing weight the first couple weeks.

Dr. Glenn: Just set up a line in the sand. Set up a rule you’re willing to follow. Step back and watch your reptilian brain—whatever you want to call it, I still call it my pig—try to talk you out of following that one simple rule.

Dr. Glenn: Learn how to play this game.

Dr. Glenn: Then go through the procedure we talked about: take your 7–11 breaths, write down—pen and paper or smartphone—exactly what it’s saying. Write down why it’s wrong.

(44:43)
Dr. Glenn: Ask yourself: “How will life be better if I abstain from this indulgence the pig wants?” And teach yourself how to use that process and that tool to stick to the rule.

Dr. Glenn: You do that for even 10 days’ time—you’re going to feel so much more powerful and so much more hopeful about what you’re doing.

Dr. Glenn: And then consider—if you want to work with us in the more in-depth programs and have all that support and everything like that.

(45:10)
Dr. Glenn: As of today—this is July 2022—our stats are about a 90% reduction in binge eating in the first month of the program. And it seems to stabilize somewhere around 55 or 60% at the six-month mark.

Dr. Glenn: We don’t have as good data there because it’s harder to reach people. There could be some biases, but we’re doing better, I think, than most programs.

Dr. Glenn: And considering that most people are spending several hundred dollars a month on binge food—and losing at least a day of their life every time they do because they’re bloated on the couch, not productive, not going out socially—we always feel like our programs pay for themselves within a month or two.

(45:50)
Dr. Glenn: But they’re all guaranteed. I usually don’t pitch the program too much. I’d rather people start with the free materials and see if it’s for them.

Dr. Tabatha: Well I just think this is such an amazing resource. Because we’ve been told for so long that—you know—you have to sit and talk about it and heal the inner child and do all this work for years on end to figure out why you’re binge eating or eating your feelings.

Dr. Tabatha: And it sounds like you’re saying—it doesn’t really matter. Just stop the reptilian brain from being in control. Take back some power over what you’re putting in your mouth. And it’s totally doable. That’s really exciting.

(46:36)
Dr. Glenn: You can solve the problem without solving your emotional issues. You can do that.

Dr. Glenn: There is a relationship between emotional discomfort and overeating—and there is a historical relationship. You can trace back people’s particular patterns to things that happened and what went on in their life.

Dr. Glenn: But it’s kind of like… if the house is burning down, you don’t want to be a detective to figure out why the house is burning down—you want to put out the fire.

Dr. Glenn: And you can put out the fire before you know how the fire started.

Dr. Glenn: Later on, if you want to figure that out, more power to you. I learned a lot from my journey like that.

Dr. Tabatha: Yeah. I think that’s an amazing way to think about it.

Dr. Tabatha: And I would love your thoughts on kids—because you were too young to make those decisions with the Bosco and everything else. But what about, you know, 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds who have been trained to eat their feelings by their parents?

(47:31)
Dr. Tabatha: They’ve created these bad habits. All they have is bad options in the house. Where do they even begin to start? Or is this something that you have to have more of an adult brain to be able to comprehend and override this reptilian brain?

Dr. Glenn: The best thing that parents can do is recover themselves and set a great example. That’s the biggie.

Dr. Glenn: And generally speaking, you’ll have more influence on the people that you love by being the change that you want to see in the world than by trying to preach the change that you want to see in the world.

Dr. Glenn: When kids are motivated—like when the mother or father (usually the mom) has made this dramatic change, and there are healthier foods in the house, and they start to get interested—they’re capable of beginning to use this when they reach the stage of formal reasoning, which is somewhere in like the 10 to 13-year-old range.

(48:27)
Dr. Glenn: They’re not quite as good as people in their 20s with fully developed reasoning capabilities, but they’re capable of doing it.

Dr. Glenn: We are working on Never Binge Again for Kids. We don’t have it totally figured out. But the two things we know are:

One, sometimes if they think about a school kid that is bothering them or they don’t like, and they think of that kid as being the reptilian brain—that sometimes works for them.

And two, if they have any aspirational models—like if you can find a YouTuber or athlete like an American Ninja Warrior that they’re a fan of, and you can find that person talking about healthy eating—that can light a fire for kids.

(49:13)
Dr. Glenn: So looking for aspirational models and helping them define that inner enemy however they want to define it—just be careful it doesn’t border on bullying.

Dr. Glenn: They have to understand it’s an internal thing.

Dr. Glenn: But mostly, if mom changes—and stays changed—and continues to grow and glow… the kids come along.

Dr. Tabatha: I love that.

Dr. Glenn: A year or two later. Takes time.

Dr. Tabatha: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I love it. Lead by example. That’s all we can do, right?

(49:54)
Dr. Tabatha: Oh my gosh, well—you are just a wealth of knowledge on this. I love it all. And I hope women feel empowered—that if they can figure out what the heck they’re putting in their body, maybe they can actually get some control over it.

Dr. Tabatha: And what are they thinking about what they’re putting in their body? So like you said: take the breaths, write it down, do all the steps—and you can start to create some new actions, which lead to new behaviors, which lead to new outcomes.

Dr. Glenn: Can I say two more things that are particularly important?

Dr. Tabatha: Yes, please.

(50:19)
Dr. Glenn: When you make a mistake, you want to adopt the model that you’re committing with perfection but forgiving yourself with dignity.

Dr. Glenn: It’s like an Olympic archer aiming at a bullseye. When they’re aiming, they’re not thinking, “I’ll do the best I can. Maybe I’ll hit it, maybe I won’t.” They wait until they see the arrow going into the bullseye before they let go of the arrow. They’ve got to see it.

Dr. Glenn: And they have to purge their mind of all that doubt and insecurity. If they miss, they don’t say, “I’m a pathetic archer. I’m going to shoot all the rest of the arrows up in the air.” They make an assessment of by how much did I miss and in what direction—and therefore what adjustments should I make?

(50:58)
Dr. Glenn: Then they forgive themselves with dignity. They don’t beat themselves up. And they get up and aim again with perfection. That’s the way to do this.

Dr. Glenn: You want to collect—you want to pay attention to—the mistakes and failures. You want to learn whatever you can from them. But ruminating on the guilt makes the binging worse.

Dr. Glenn: It makes you feel too weak to resist the next binge. It makes you want to give up.

Dr. Glenn: So to get out of that, collect evidence of success. What, in any way, was better this time than last time?

Dr. Glenn: Did you eat five cupcakes instead of fifteen? You ate a whole pizza but you didn’t eat the box?

(51:36)
Dr. Glenn: What’s the evidence of success?

Dr. Glenn: And then your brain will start to develop a success identity, rather than ruminating on the failure. It’s very, very, very important.

Dr. Tabatha: Oh my gosh—no, I love that.

Dr. Tabatha: And I think it’s like you’re saying: the pig is the one talking. That’s the one who’s beating you up and berating you for your failure—because he’s trying to get fed again. So you stop listening to that guy.

Dr. Glenn: Really!

Dr. Tabatha: Oh my gosh—great advice. I love it so much. So I will have all your resources in the show notes, because I have a feeling there are women who need you. And this is the answer.

(52:23)
Dr. Glenn: Thank you so much.

Dr. Tabatha: This is awesome.

Dr. Glenn: Thank you, Dr. Tabatha. That was very nice. Thank you.

Dr. Tabatha: Oh my gosh, I know you got something out of that episode.

Dr. Tabatha: I went through that sugar breakup—I don’t know—seven years ago now, and I still need reminders. I still need new tools and tricks. But what Glenn is saying works. It literally does.

Dr. Tabatha: I did a little bit different version of that originally where I wrote down everything I was eating, held myself accountable, and stopped to think about, “Do I need to be putting this in my mouth?”

(53:26)
Dr. Tabatha: But I like that he talks through the reptilian brain and just doesn’t listen to it anymore.

Dr. Tabatha: And once you figure out—you take the deep breaths, you get out of that sympathetic mode of “I need, I need, I need,” and you get back into the parasympathetic mode so your frontal brain can actually think cognitively and have advanced thoughts and not be stuck in the reptilian brain—then you're going to make some progress.

Dr. Tabatha: Then you’re going to write down everything that you’re thinking about that food and why you really need it.

(53:49)
Dr. Tabatha: And I would say—if you don’t have it readily available to grab and eat, this is more likely to be successful, because you have time.

Dr. Tabatha: Like I literally wanted to drive to get ice cream two nights ago. And it took a lot to talk myself out of it. But I was having that discussion. And I was so glad I didn’t have it in the house.

Dr. Tabatha: Because what had happened was—for two days before that—I had eaten cookies and crap that my daughter had made. So I had started the cravings back up. I was feeding the yeast in my gut and the bad bacteria and I was feeding the addiction centers in my brain.

(54:14)
Dr. Tabatha: And you have to get mindful. You have to break that process—that cycle—that you get thrown right back into.

Dr. Tabatha: And so I really love the tools that Glenn offered us. And I know he’s got a lot more in-depth help and support if this really is something that you need to tackle with some professionals.

Dr. Tabatha: So check out the resources in the show notes. And hopefully you got some good golden nuggets out of this—I know I did.

Dr. Tabatha: So, alright ladies—go have an amazing, kick-ass week.