Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Jud Brewer on How You Break Out of Your Food Jail EP 408

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on Passion Struck. With anxiety, we learn to worry, but with eating, this is where comfort food comes in. This is where the term stress eating comes in. If we eat some food, our brain says, hey, that tasted pretty good. Why don't you eat when you're stressed? And so we start to learn these habits of eating,

Starting point is 00:00:19 not when we're hungry, but when we're stressed, when we're bored, when we're angry, or just simply when we see food. Because it're bored, when we're angry, or just simply when we see food, because it's like, oh, that looks good, boom. We often lose the ability to really check in with ourselves to ask, am I actually hungry? That's what habit is all about, is automatic behavior. The joke is about this. I'm on a seafood diet.

Starting point is 00:00:41 I see food and I eat it, that type of thing. Well, that's our survival brain that's been co-opted in modern times. Welcome to Passionstruck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turned their wisdom into practical advice

Starting point is 00:00:59 for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs,

Starting point is 00:01:21 creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 408 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple, as the number one alternative health podcast. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, be better, and make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, be better, and make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member,

Starting point is 00:01:52 and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize in a convenient playlist that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, last week we had three phenomenal interviews. We kicked off with the return of the incredible Dr. Mark Hyman, who delved into the transformative world of personalized medicine and its impact on the future of healthcare. In a special bonus episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with developmental psychologist Dr. Elisa Pressman, discussing her two decades of

Starting point is 00:02:25 experience and her new book, The Five Principles of Parenting. Wrapping up, we explored leadership and team building with the esteemed entrepreneur and author Mike Michalowicz. Mike offered valuable insights from his latest book, All In, emphasizing the creation of invincible teams. Be sure to catch these insightful conversations. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. If you loved today's episode or any of those other three, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners. Today, I am so excited to welcome back Dr. Jetson Brewer, a New York Times best-selling author, internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and a professor in the school of public health and medical school at Brown University. In this interview, we're diving

Starting point is 00:03:08 into the complex world of our eating habits. Our discussion today revolves around his latest groundbreaking work, The Hunger Habit. This book isn't just about understanding our eating patterns, it's a 21-day journey towards transforming them. Ever found yourself inexplicably reaching for that extra bag of chips? Or indulging in stress eating? Dr. Judd, as he's foundly known, takes us through the intricacies of why we eat the way we do. The hunger habit is the only mindfulness-driven behavior change curriculum approved by the CDC, boasting a scientifically proven track record of reduce and craving related eating by 40%. Dr. Judd leverages over two decades of habit change research, offering insights into how our brains form habits and why they're notoriously difficult to break. He outlines

Starting point is 00:03:50 a three-part challenge identifying eating habit patterns, interrupting them through awareness, and leveraging the power of our brains to cultivate nurturing habits. The approach is unique, no calorie counting or restrictive eating. It's about working with our brains and fostering self-kindness over self-judgment. Our conversation also delves into the food industry, with its chemistry-like food designs and bliss points. Manipulates our cravings, turning eating into an addiction rather than a nourishing activity. Dr. Judd explains the science behind our brain's misfiring in relation to eating and offers a structured 21-day challenge to help rebuild a healthier, more rewarding relationship with food. Don't miss this transformative episode where we explore a path to becoming habitually

Starting point is 00:04:30 healthy eaters. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome my friend Dr Dr. Jed Brewer, back to Passionstruck. Welcome back, Dr. Jed. Thanks for having me. So the last time you were on the show, we did an in-depth exploration of how to overcome anxiety, something that you're well known for. And in today's episode, we're going to discuss your brand new book, which I was one of the few

Starting point is 00:05:05 privileged to get an advanced reader copy of. And it is absolutely awesome. And it's called a hunger habit. And in it, you explore why we eat when we're not hungry. Can you explain what prompted you to write about this? Well, it was not on purpose. Let's start there. And I say that because I was developing a smoking program as an addiction psychiatrist was really struggling out my patients quit smoking. And so I was looking at alternative ways to help. And the willpower approach hadn't really worked for a lot of my patients. So we were developing this program called Craving to Quit. And it's an app-based program. So I was having people pilot test it. And when they were pilot testing it,

Starting point is 00:05:46 they were saying, oh yeah, I'm changing my eating habits. And I was thinking, well, most people gain weight when they quit smoking because they substitute eating for smoking. So I'd made an assumption that they were just substituting eating for smoking. But somewhere in there, somebody said, no, no, we're actually, I'm using these same tools to change my eating habits

Starting point is 00:06:08 in a good way, where I'm not snacking as much, for example. As I pulled my jaw back off the floor, because, wait a minute, I almost missed something huge here. That actually got me looking into how eating has shifted from an evolutionary mechanism that helps us survive, that one's still in place. But in modern day to where we eat for all sorts of reasons, but none of them having to do with hunger.

Starting point is 00:06:34 So we developed this Eat Right Now program in long story short as a researcher, as a neuroscientist, I wanna understand how this stuff works. So we started studying it and learning all sorts of fascinating things. As you and I talked about at the beginning of the program, I'm going to offer myself up as a guinea pig today because I think like many people who might be listening to this, I am someone who, although I look really fit today, I have had a lifelong struggle with my weight that started as long as I can possibly remember.

Starting point is 00:07:07 It's interesting because you write in the book that the patients that you see as a psychiatrist are so helplessly out of touch with their bodies that they can't even tell if they're hungry or simply eating with their emotions. How prevalent do you think this is today? Oh, wow. It is so prevalent. And I'll just highlight, this is, I learned so much from my patients. I didn't realize how prevalent it was until I started working with a group of women who all had binge eating disorder. And I went in with

Starting point is 00:07:38 the assumption that they could at least tell when they were hungry. And long story short, that assumption was completely wrong. I don't know a single person in that room. I'm just thinking back to them. I can't think of a single one that actually could tell the difference between what's now called homeostatic hunger, which is actual true physiologic hunger, and hedonic hunger, which is a term that's a misnomer in one sense, but also the scientific term that we use to study this phenomenon because it is so common. And hedonic hunger just means that we're eating because of something that is emotional, like pleasant or unpleasant, that's what hedonic is all about. Yet it has nothing to do with actual hunger. So that's where it's a misnomer.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Yeah, so it's on the treadmill, but to eating all the time. Yes. So I am probably like most of the people out there that as I've seen dietitians or as I've gone to fitness programs, I remember doing the Orange Theory Challenge, which is one of the most recent one.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Almost all of these things have been about people telling me that I needed to simply count the calories that I'm putting in and putting out, and that's going to make all the difference. But according to your research, that doesn't work. Yes. Now, to be clear, the formula is true.

Starting point is 00:09:01 I learned it in medical school, students still learn it in medical school, just calories out versus calories in. The way I learned it in medical school. Students still learn it in medical school, just calories out versus calories in. And the way I learned it in medical school was like it was a Newtonian law. Well, this is just what you do. And the lecturer just stated it as though it was fact. It is true. Yet they didn't say how you actually go about that. So if we look at all of these, and it generally tends to be some flavor of calories and calories out just with a new wrapper or a new label. It's like, oh, this year it's this diet.

Starting point is 00:09:36 This year it's this diet. This year it's this diet. Yet all of them share some common element which is just use your willpower and do it. When it comes to doing it, one of the things that keeps coming up on this podcast as a barrier to maintaining our weight are the simple things of sugars and breads or starches and also processed foods. How much do you think those are playing really into the problem,

Starting point is 00:10:06 or is it really a behavior issue? I would say it's both. So to set the stage, we have, and let's start with those pieces, but then let's go to how our brains are set up, because those two interact with each other. So in modern day, there's all of this engineering of food. I hesitate to call it food in some cases.

Starting point is 00:10:28 Do you remember the onion? That's a Turricle journal. They had a headline that says, Dorita celebrates its one millionth ingredient. We get a sense for how engineered this stuff can be. And in fact, RJ Reynolds merged with Nabisco at some point because their tobacco engineers could then shift their focus to food when the tobacco industry got in trouble in the 80s.

Starting point is 00:10:52 So this has been around for a long time. Their entire books dedicated to how people engineer things like bliss points and vanishing caloric density, which is just a fancy term. If you think of a Cheetos or something that melts in your mouth, you put this thing in your mouth and your body says, Oh, I just ate something. And then it's gone. And then I just eat something. No, it's gone. I didn't even chew it.

Starting point is 00:11:14 And so to try that again. And then suddenly a whole bag of these things that's designed to melt in our mouth is in our stomach. And so the calories are there. It's just that our brain has been fooled. So I won't go on and on because there are people that dedicate their lives to describe this, but you get a sense of it. There's the bliss point is perfect, marriage, let's say, of salt, sugar, and fat, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:11:39 So that's the context in which we are living. Another contextual piece that's important is the ready availability of food. We have food delivery. We have 24-hour restaurants and diners that are open for people that have the privilege of being able to eat whenever they want. They can eat whenever they want because in the Western world, at least the food is there. So we've got ready availability of food and we've got engineering of food to make us want more. Somebody put it beautifully to me the other day,

Starting point is 00:12:12 they said, they were talking about some type of candy and they said, it tastes like more. As in couldn't really describe the taste because their brain didn't have a good category for it But they knew that they wanted more when they ate one and that's certainly been the case I'm happy to talk about my addiction to gummy worms at some point if that's helpful I think we've all run into those types of things Okay

Starting point is 00:12:38 So we've got the taste like more and we've got the ready availability of taste like more and also I'll just add to most of These things have a shelf life of about a thousand years and we've got the ready availability of taste like more. And also I'll just add to most of these things have a shelf life of about a thousand years. So we can put them in our drawer, we can put them in our car, we can put them anywhere so that we have ready access to them. So that's the modern context. And we're gonna pit that against our ancient brains.

Starting point is 00:13:00 And our ancient brains were set up to help us survive with two main flavors. One is we've got to remember where food is because there isn't food delivery. We had to go actually walk. We couldn't even drive to get the food. We had to go walk somewhere and find it. And then we had to remember where it was. And this general flavor, I'll just go through it quickly.

Starting point is 00:13:23 You and I have talked about this before with, because the same mechanism is at play with anxiety. It's called positive reinforcement. Three elements that trigger a behavior and result. So let's say we're walking around in Savannah, we find the food, there's a trigger, we eat the food, there's the behavior, and then our stomach sends this dopamine signal to our brain

Starting point is 00:13:40 that says remember what you ate and where you found it. So it's that set up as the place marker that says, hey, here's the food. When you come back tomorrow, this is where you'll find it. The negative reinforcement flavor of that works the same way. It's just that it helps us avoid things that are unpleasant. So if there's danger and we see that there's some, a bunch of tigers over at this certain food source, we can remember, hey, let's avoid that. There's the behavior. And then our reward is that we survive. We don't become their lunch. So that's our ancient brain. Okay. Now,

Starting point is 00:14:15 when you bring these two together, let me just highlight that the ancient brain is set up to help us get calories when we need them. And it also has this mechanism to pack on calories in case we can't find food for a while. So when there's something that's a high calorie source, our brain says, okay, pack it in. And then so with sugar, for example, that's a really good source of calories. We'll take sugar in and then we'll store it as fat.

Starting point is 00:14:49 And the idea is that's going to help us survive. And in fact, in not even super ancient times, being fat was actually a sign of prosperity, right? Because you're going to be more likely to survive a famine over somebody that's skinny. So that's the lay of the land. Now let's bring these together. This positive and negative reinforcement process that is very much at play in everyday life, this is how things like anxiety get set up because something unpleasant happens. Let's say that we get anxious or stressed. And so with anxiety, we learn to worry,

Starting point is 00:15:25 but with eating, this is where comfort food comes in, this is where the term stress eating comes in. If we eat some food, our brain says, hey, that tasted pretty good. Why don't you eat when you're stressed? And so we start to learn these habits of eating, not when we're hungry, but when we're stressed, when we're bored, when we're angry,

Starting point is 00:15:45 or just simply when we see food. Because it's like, oh, that looks good. Boom. And we eat it. We're not even thinking about, oh, I'm hungry. We often lose the ability to really check in with ourselves to ask, am I actually hungry? That's what habit is all about, is automatic behavior. The joke is about the seafood, I'm on a seafood diet, I see food and I eat it, that type of thing. Well, that's our survival brain that's been co-opted in modern times.

Starting point is 00:16:14 Yeah, it's a really interesting discussion because what you're really talking about is that the traditional approaches of willpower measuring self-control that we hear all the time are not how we're going to address the issue. It's instead to get rid of these unhelpful habits. And you're right, through centuries, we were hunter-gatherers. And that's how our metabolism was created. And now

Starting point is 00:16:38 we have so much readily available to us that we don't fall into that pattern anymore. It's something for me that's worked. I think to counteract this is I've been doing intermittent fasting now for about seven years. And, but it's interesting because I am in a couple group of friends where we like to go cycling and they like to cycle for about 10 miles, stop and get breakfast and then cycle back, which I don't understand the reasoning behind it because I don't want to cycle with food in my belly. But I've been sitting there for years now

Starting point is 00:17:08 as they eat having a cup of coffee or a glass of water. They're like, aren't you hungry? Doesn't it drive you crazy watching us eat? And I'm like, no, I'm actually not hungry. So I don't break the fast until I feel hunger. I'm still hunting and gathering. But it's interesting because except for one of them, the rest of them have these unhealthy eating habits and probably eat too much, which we fall into.

Starting point is 00:17:34 So can you maybe take us down another scientific element of this on explaining the process of how food habits are actually formed in our brains? We'd be happy to. And so if we look at this survival mechanism, the healthy habits are the ones where we're in touch with our physiology and we've learned basically all we need to learn is what food is going to give us calories and what food is going to kill us. So we have a very good mechanism for detecting rotten or poison pretty quickly. I'll just geek out on this a little bit because I love this. So let's say that we eat some chocolate or some berries or something like that. And if you think

Starting point is 00:18:17 about eating chocolate, if you're really paying attention, you just let it melt in your mouth and you taste it and you're like, there's this note and this note. And then let's say that we eat some food that is rotten. That is ejected from our mouth before we're even consciously aware of it. And then our consciousness comes online and it's like, that was rotten. And so notice just the time scale of that where it's, what's the one that,

Starting point is 00:18:43 is it cyanide or arsenic that tastes maybe it's arsenic that tastes like almonds or something. So it's like, oh yeah, cyanide does taste like almond. Wow, that's so interesting. That's out of our mouth because of its very bitter flavor that says, hey, don't be ingesting us. We don't have time to even think about it. So I just love how exquisitely evolved or designed our brains are to be able to detect all of these things to help us survive. That mechanism is at play. And then, so that's the healthy habit, right? The other part of the healthy habit is that when we pay attention when we eat, we stop when we're full because our stomach and our

Starting point is 00:19:23 body tells us, hey, that's enough. Okay. The unhealthy aspect of things are when we start to lose connection with our bodies. So whether it was a clean plate club that we learned as a kid, eat all the food on your plate before you get dessert, our parents were unknowingly actually training us to overeat. And the reward was that we'd get dessert, where we got to eat even more. Everything on your plates before you get this treat. So we've learned to overcome our natural body signals so that we are eating beyond satiety,

Starting point is 00:19:59 we're eating beyond fullness, and we're also eating in the absence of hunger. So we go to the movie, and it's not like our we go to the movie and it's not like our parents, when we're kids, it's not like our parents were saying, okay, don't eat anything because we're gonna go fill up on popcorn, you know, at the movie theater. They were like, most of us didn't go to the movie theater

Starting point is 00:20:16 with an empty stomach. So we go to the movie theater and we learn to associate like the butter and the salt and the flavor of popcorn with a good time. Cause we're at the movie theater. It was a big treat for me to go to the movie theater. And I still remember they asked you, how many squirts of butter do you want on your popcorn?

Starting point is 00:20:32 And they'd go, squirt, squirt as they turned the tub around. And as well, popcorn was more like a butter delivery vehicle than anything else at that point. And so I have certainly learned to associate the smell of popcorn, like movie theater popcorn with like really good times because I got to see some amazing movies as a kid in the movie theater.

Starting point is 00:20:53 It was a big treat. There's no such thing as like a 4K big screen television. It was amazing. So we start to drift from the survival mechanisms to, hey, this is good times, whether it's the movie theater popcorn or whatever. And then that drift happens even more when we learn to associate eating with the alleviation of unpleasant things. So we learn, hey, when you're stressed out, when you're bored, when you're angry, when you're mad, when you're sad, whatever the emotion is, we learn to associate that with eating as well. Again, none of these have to do with actual hunger. So that's how the habit gets set up. As an example, you feel

Starting point is 00:21:29 stressed, there's a trigger, you eat some chocolate or some ice cream, it tastes good. So you distract yourself, you might feel a little bit better for a moment. And then the result is you don't feel as bad. And that's the simple mechanism that gets set up over and over and over and over to the point where it's automatic, where stress, we're running, we're headed to the refrigerator and we're not even aware of it. So it sounds like what you're talking about is our eating habits are just like any habits that we have. It would be just as bad as you are sining the very aspirations that you have by continuing

Starting point is 00:22:02 to do harmful habits that are keeping you from your goals. So I think what you're saying is that if you want to break these eating habits, and I know you don't like to call habits bad, but if you want to break eating habits, it requires that you use awareness is what I think you're saying and not willpower, which is what so many of us have been taught to do. Is that correct? Absolutely. As a clinician, I'd been struggling helping my patients with smoking, eating anxiety. As a neuroscientist, this fascinated me because I was thinking, what lecture did I miss in medical school? What did I sleep through? Because I'd, for whatever reason. And so I started looking at the question from a neuroscience standpoint,

Starting point is 00:22:45 and I was blown away because there are these very clear equations that have stood the test of time for decades now. For example, back in the 70s, these two researchers named Russ Gorla and Wagner came up with a reinforcement learning formula, which basically describes habit formation to a T. And it also describes how to change habits. And this equation has nothing to do with willpower. Absolutely, there's no variable in there for willpower. Neuroscientists don't even talk about it. The closest they come to willpower is talking about cognitive control. And when you look

Starting point is 00:23:22 at these formulae, it's really about awareness. And what I mean, let's use a concrete example, and then tell me if this fits with your experience. So again, our brains are set up to help us learn. And they're also set up to help us learn habits so that we can set a habit today and then open up the space to learn something new. I think of it as set and forget. Habits are there to be automatic so that we don't have to relearn everything every day because our brains just don't have the energy and capacity and the time for it. So we set up an eating habit. Let's say, well, for me, chocolate cake. I have a certain reward value set up in my brain for chocolate cake.

Starting point is 00:24:02 And there are different types of chocolate cake. There's the flowerless twerp that's really, it's basically like a chocolate bar. You can think of all the different types of chocolate cake. And so I've got a reward hierarchy in my brain for which types of chocolate cake I like the most and which I like the least. Like the chocolate cake from a box where you just add water in an egg

Starting point is 00:24:21 and mix it and cook it low on my list. Let's just put it that way. If a new bakery opens up in my neighborhood and I see that they've got some chocolate cake that looks pretty good in their window, I go into the bakery. I've no idea how good it is. So I buy some cake, I eat it.

Starting point is 00:24:36 And if it's like the best chocolate cake I've ever had, my brain sets off this dopamine firework show where it says, boom boom big dopamine spritz And I remember hey, this is a good bakery. These folks know what they're doing It's called a positive prediction error from a neuroscience perspective And that just means that my brain was expecting it to be this good Right because I've got a an idea of how much chocolate cake should be good and it was it beat the expectation Chocolate cake should be good.

Starting point is 00:25:04 And it was, it beat the expectation. On the other hand, if I eat the cake, I'm like, these guys have some work to do. I also get a dopamine spreads because I learned this, hey, not so good. And that's called a negative prediction error, meaning that it was worse than expected. Notice how both of those cause dopamine firing my brain. and in both scenarios, I learned this one's good, this one's bad. This one I prefer and this one I don't prefer.

Starting point is 00:25:32 Like you said, good and bad are just ways that we judge the world. And so I think of it as our survival brains are out there trying to say, hey, this is helpful for survival and this is not helpful for survival. And it helps us not just label things as good and bad and then we're really good at judging things anyway. So let's not judge ourselves for our habits.

Starting point is 00:25:50 Okay, so notice how that only requires one thing, which is awareness. So if you pay attention as you eat, your wise brain and body are gonna tell you everything that you need to know. Now that might sound overly simplistic, and I'm not saying it's as easy, but from a neuroscience standpoint, this is critical. We have to know how our brains work.

Starting point is 00:26:16 If we don't know how our brains work, we're not going to be able to work with them. And just as one example, we did a study. So we developed this Eat Right Now program and done several studies on this now, which is part of the foundation of the book. We asked this simple question, like, how quickly does somebody's reward value change in their brain, in their experience? Basically what we did was we had people, we dealt with what we call a craving tool. When they're craving a food, like an amount or a type of food,

Starting point is 00:26:46 we have them basically pay attention as they ate the type or the amount of food that they were craving. And then we could measure how quickly that reward value changed. So ready for this? It only took 10 to 15 times of somebody overeating for that reward value to drop below zero.

Starting point is 00:27:05 So for people who habitually overeat, all they had to do was pay attention. As they paid attention, their wise body told them, hey, this is not so good. Are you sure you want to overeat? And it's not about thinking because everybody knows that overeating is not healthy for them. But this was doing something different instead of thinking. They were feeling what it felt like. They were feeling the results. And that's exactly what these equations predict, that if you pay attention, the reward value changes, and this can happen pretty quickly. Our brains are tremendously plastic in the

Starting point is 00:27:44 sense that they can change. They can rewire, they can change synapse strength, they can change dendritic density. All these types of things with receptors on our axons and our dendrites, where we can, that's how we learn, that's how we change behavior. And it makes sense. From an evolutionary perspective, we don't have time to be chased 20 times by the tiger to learn that it's dangerous. We have to learn things pretty quickly. And the critical ingredient there, again, is awareness.

Starting point is 00:28:14 So, Judd, I just wanted to ask you that through a different lens. So I think one of the biggest issues I personally have, I think it started when I was at the Naval Academy, is I eat way too quick. When I was a plebe, what we end up doing is you're sitting there and you're having to in a right angle, put the food in your mouth and like every time it gets right to your

Starting point is 00:28:35 mouth, the upper classman asks you a question. So you put it down and you get about two minutes to eat once they leave the table and you're just jamming as much as you can get in before you have to go to class. But it's set up this pattern for me that I eat, I think way too quickly, especially as I observe others. I'm sure this is something that maybe it happens to other people. How can you break that habit? Yes, it's very common. Here, I think once we understand how our brains work, we can learn to work with close to any context in which we're put. So, for example, you just may not have time to eat at a pace that allows your body to register how much you've eaten.

Starting point is 00:29:22 And that timeframe from the research suggests that it's 15 to 20 minutes to register fullness, basically. In an ideal world, we'd eat slowly enough so that we could start to register, we'd give our bodies that time to say, hey, okay, you've had enough. And for any of us that have had time to do that,

Starting point is 00:29:42 it's pretty straightforward, right? Our body says, okay, that's enough, assuming that we're paying attention. In the situation where we don't have time, and I think that's a great example of one, we can actually use the, I call this in the book, we talk about retrospectives, where we look in the rear view mirror and we ask, okay, what and how much did I eat? And was that enough? Not enough or too much? And so if you had to run off, if you had to eat your food in two minutes and run off

Starting point is 00:30:12 to class 20 minutes later as you're sitting in class, your stomach could tell you, hey, that wasn't enough. Hey, that was too much or hey, that was just right. We still have the ability to check in and then learn from it. We have to learn to associate this called reinforcement learning. We've got to learn to associate the behavior with the results. So again, that takes awareness, but that awareness can come in retrospectively as well.

Starting point is 00:30:35 So do you think something like that would apply if you'd known this, something like that could apply to your situation? Yeah, I think it would. And oftentimes I think because I eat quickly, I don't allocate myself the time to eat slower. Meaning I know how long it typically takes me to eat. So for me, a lunch break is probably shorter than some people because I know I'm gonna consume the food faster.

Starting point is 00:31:01 And I'm wondering if I just set a longer period for me to do it, if it would start changing my outlook on how quickly I am consuming it. Yes. And so if not, everybody has the opportunity to do that. So I just want to highlight a lot of people, they don't get a lot of time for lunch, or sometimes they're not even given a lunch break. If you were able to allocate your a little bit more time, you'd see it doesn't mean that you have to take a two hour lunch break. If you were able to allocate your a little bit more time, you'd see it doesn't mean that you have to take a two hour lunch break. It can happen if we know how the process works. Probably 30 minutes is plenty to give ourselves time to consume and also to wait to check to see,

Starting point is 00:31:40 is that the right amount today? Because it also changes, right? If one day we're exercising more or didn't get a chance to workout or something like that, those caloric needs can vary from day to day. Well, what you and I have just been discussing is the beginning aspects of your book. And then in it, you go through a 21 day challenge, which you separate into three different parts of the book,

Starting point is 00:32:04 days one to five, days six to 17, and then days 17 to 21. And I was hoping we could start by maybe having you introduce an overview of the 21 day challenge and what it aims to achieve. I'd be happy to. So this is really based on a lot of work we've done over the last decade in my lab where we've done qualitative research and focus group interviews because we'd seen, so for example in one study, this is led by Ashley Mason at UCSF. With our Eat Right Now program, there was a 40% reduction in craving related eating and we were seeing pretty good results. In fact, the Eat Right Now program is now a CDC recognized diabetes prevention

Starting point is 00:32:45 program, the first one that's really based pretty exclusively on mindfulness training and awareness. Certainly, it includes all of the required elements for the DPP, but the diabetes prevention program, for example, has for the last four decades, I think, has been largely based on willpower-based approaches. So it's really nice to see that the CDC is open as long as there's research behind something and data to support it, that they're open to alternative curricula. So what we had done is some of our research behind this program was to just start asking people, like, well, we're seeing that you're changing your eating habits. A lot of people were losing weight when they just by paying attention because they're like, oh, I don't need to eat as much.

Starting point is 00:33:29 And there's the calories and calories out thing, but it's very different than saying, I need to force myself to restrict. Because with that, our brains say, oh, is there a famine here? I need to hold on to calories. Which is, that's very different than saying, hey, do I need

Starting point is 00:33:45 this much? And showing our brains and bodies like we've got plenty there if we need it, and we don't need to over consume. So we done these focus groups and started asking these questions. And what we found that was that it breaks down to three pretty clear steps. The first step is just becoming aware of the habit loop or even breaking that down or simplifying it even more. What's the behavior? Am I eating because I'm hungry or because of some other hedonic reason, an emotion or boredom or whatever? Second step leverages what we've actually talked about in terms of the neuroscience, where it brings in awareness to help us ask ourselves,

Starting point is 00:34:26 what am I getting from this? So we literally have people ask that question, and we can go into that in detail in a minute, but that's the basic premise, is we're helping our brain get those positive and negative prediction errors, which then helps us shift the behavior. We think of it this way, if it's an unhelpful habit,

Starting point is 00:34:43 we become disenchanted with the behavior. We think of it this way. If it's an unhelpful habit, we become disenchanted with the behavior. The third step, I call finding these bigger, better offers because we're again, leveraging this same reward-based learning system in our brain, and we're giving our brains something better. So as an example, for me, I shifted from eating entire bags of gummy worms to eating blueberries, because for me, blueberries just

Starting point is 00:35:06 tasted better and then I felt better afterwards and then they didn't taste like more. And the last thing I'll say about the overview of the program is that I set it as a 21 day program because one of the biggest questions that I get that is based on an internet meme as in a false statement on the internet is somebody asked me how long does it take to break a bad habit or form a new habit and if you put that into the internet ask whatever your favorite search engine is almost invariably it'll come up with takes about 21 days and I do this as a tongue-in-cheek nod to where that meme comes from, which was a 1960s book written by a plastic surgeon who, in a very unscientific way,

Starting point is 00:35:56 just started noticing, observed that it took about three weeks for his patients to get used to their new nose jobs. So it's not to say, well, certainly we've found in our research, 10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention as they overeat, that reward value drops below zero and they start to shift behavior. So this can happen pretty quickly, but it's not to say it's guaranteed if here's the thing, here's the formula, it's guaranteed to work. That just sets people up for failure. What I can say is this is all based on our science. And the guarantee there is that we all have awareness and that we all have very wise bodies that will tell us all that we need to know. None of that has to do with willpower. One of the first things that you talk about in the days one through five is effectively

Starting point is 00:36:47 setting a baseline and a map of food habit loops. How does one go about approaching that? It's pretty simple. Again, not necessarily easy, but it's pretty simple in just asking a basic question like, why am I reaching for food? So I break it down a little bit more like the why, the what and the how of eating, but it can start with why am I reaching for food? I'm actually hungry or not hungry. And that helps to identify the behavior.

Starting point is 00:37:15 Is it automatic snacking? Is it stress eating? Is it overeating? Because I'm used to finishing everything on my plate. So just identifying the behavior is the first step. And then how do you help people to understand, to differentiate between genuine hunger and urges? That's a critical question. And this is one of the things that they discovered when I started working with my group of binge patients with binge eating disorder. And so the way that they described it was that they had an urge and they just

Starting point is 00:37:49 ate. And I at first assumed that this was because of homeostatic hunger. Well, an urge, it can be a grumbling in our stomach. It can be a loss of concentration. It can be irritability. There are a number of things that tell us that we're actually hungry, have that homeostatic we're actually hungry, have that homestatic hunger. Yet, unfortunately, there's a large overlap between a number of these and hedonic hunger, where we're eating outside of hunger.

Starting point is 00:38:15 For example, if we can't concentrate on something or we're irritable, well, that could actually be true homestatic hunger or it could be hedonic hunger because there are a number of other things that make us irritable. And so we can see that there's overlap, but it's not complete overlap. And we can also add emphasis to different aspects of our experience based on how recently we've eaten. So if we just ate and were irritable, well, that's probably not because we're hungry. And so we can start to bring these things together, asking simple questions like, hey,

Starting point is 00:38:52 how recently have I eaten and what did I eat? Because if we eat a bunch of carbohydrates, that can give us that sugar rush and crash versus for me, eating a good blend of especially if it's like whole food, based food where it's non-processed, especially with a fair amount of protein. And I found that for me, protein helps me stay full much longer than if I eat something with a vanishing caloric density, for example. And so we can start to ask, okay, what's going on in my experience? And I can give a checklist of a bunch of different things in the book.

Starting point is 00:39:25 And then we can pair that with how recently did I eat? And that starts to give us a sense for whether we're actually truly hungry, or if we're just mad, sad, angry, lonely, tired, or bored. One of the things I love to talk about, Judd, on this podcast is the power of intentionality and that set intentionality that drives behavior change, which I call intentional behavior change. But it seems like what you're talking about here,

Starting point is 00:39:50 and this gets into days six through 16, is that paying close attention or, said otherwise, being intentional about your eating behaviors will allow you to interrupt the habit loops that you've put yourself into. Is that a good way to understand? Yes. And I think intentionality can be supported, bolstered and fostered with awareness. And the reason I say that is that the strongest learning mechanisms in our brain are the ones around reinforcement learning. And knowing that, we can leverage that. And for example, we can ask the question,

Starting point is 00:40:32 well, why do I wanna exercise? And we can say, well, some social media influencers said that it's a good idea or they look good. So we can base it on external things, like, oh, I think I should exercise. This is where the shoulds come in that joke we should all over ourselves, right? I should exercise more.

Starting point is 00:40:50 Or we can also ask this question, well, what was it like the last time I exercised? And that can help us draw on our own direct experience and our own direct learning. And for me, when I exercise, it feels pretty darn good afterwards, especially, and even during the active exercising. And for a lot of people, they're like, well, I make it through it, and then I feel better. So it really depends on the person and also the exercise. So ideally, we find something that we really love to do, and it fits with our lives

Starting point is 00:41:22 and our circumstances. But let me ask you that question, like after a bike ride, and even during a bike ride, how does it feel? Well, that's one of my favorite activities to do. So that's something that I look forward to doing. Sometimes it's painful while you're in the act of doing it. I'm not gonna lie there. Right, right.

Starting point is 00:41:40 But then afterwards you feel great because you've accomplished something that you put your mind to, but even more than that, for me, I get the anxiety out of my system. I like to get that sweat in. But there are days, like today, I did a 6 a.m. spin class, and it sometimes is hard to get yourself motivated to do it. But once you push through, what is it? Set your day up better? Yeah. So notice how the setting your day up better is a great way to motivate you

Starting point is 00:42:12 and provide that intentionality simply through your own direct experience, right? So you set yourself up, we call this, and a woman that I highlight her story in the hunger habit describes it as setting up a, you develop a disenchantment database or data bank, she describes it, where you become disenchanted with unhelpful habits, but you can also deposit those gold coins in an enchantment data bank that says, wow, exercise feels pretty good.

Starting point is 00:42:45 That actually goes right into the third step, which is finding these bigger, better offers. It could be if we're comparing not exercising to exercising, we can see how crummy we feel when we don't exercise, and then we can also compare that to how greatly feel when we do exercise. Again, just takes awareness and and recollection, right? So we've got to be aware of how it feels afterwards,

Starting point is 00:43:09 or we won't actually have that information or those data points. And then we also just have to recall it, like, well, how did it feel the last time I did this? We can also do the same thing with food. For me, it was gummy worms. I started paying attention as I ate gummy worms and they literally taste like more, right?

Starting point is 00:43:28 I have a craving for the next one before I've even finished chewing and swallowing the one that's in my mouth. They're overly sweet. They've got this weird feeling, mouth feel that's just not natural, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't feel good, especially because I feel like I gotta eat the whole bag because I'm just so addicted.

Starting point is 00:43:50 So I became, I really just started paying attention and became disenchanted with that. We actually have some gummy things in our cupboard right now, totally not interested. Like my wife doesn't even ask me anymore if I want something. Because I'm just not interested. So there's that second step of just paying attention. And then the third step for me was finding the blueberries were that bigger, better offer. Love blueberries, love blueberries.

Starting point is 00:44:12 So food, exercise, even the way we interact with people, we can look to see if I'm short with somebody all the time, what's the result of that? If I bring kindness in, if I even just pause and notice some irritation or irritability or something like that, and pause and bring some kindness to an interaction, how does that result in my connection with that person? So there are lots of ways that we can bring these principles forward and eating is a big part of our lives. So there are lots of ways that we can even use that as a way to start to learn

Starting point is 00:44:47 how our brains work and then learn to work with our brains. Yeah, man. It is one of the biggest pleasures we have. And I don't realize how important it is to me until I have a head cold and I can't taste anything. Or once I had COVID, I think I went for six or seven weeks without being able to taste or smell anything. Man, it was horrible. Yeah. The one thing it did teach me is I did lose a lot of weight because since I couldn't taste anything I was eating, I ate the healthiest things I could get my hands on. But I also wasn't as hungry either because you didn't smell the smells in the house and the other

Starting point is 00:45:20 things that I think were triggers to make you want to consume something. Yes. Yeah. So one of the things I often talk about on the show is the need for us to reconnect with it's our self-awareness. A lot of that is doing mind work. But one of the things that you talk about in the book is that we need to reconnect with our body. How do you suggest that people reconnect with their bodies to better understand their eating habits? Yes. And this is not a strictly modern phenomenon, though I think it's getting worse. The more we have Cornel West put described phones, our smartphones as these weapons of mass distraction. So we have all of these ways to distract ourselves from our direct experience.

Starting point is 00:46:06 So for stress, we can grab some food to distract ourselves, or we can go to our phone to distract ourselves. And that every time we do, that actually distances us from our own bodies and our own experience. I highlighted a, there's a quote from a short story from James Joyce back from over 100 years ago, 1914, I think, the story is called The Painful Case and he described Mr. Duffy as living a short distance from his body, right? So this is common, especially in modern times

Starting point is 00:46:38 where we have the ability to distract ourselves from ourselves. So the way that we can start to reconnect, there are a number of different ways that we can do it. And I think of the main tool is through curiosity, and then there are a number of techniques that can help us use that tool. And so for example, a common one that I talk about

Starting point is 00:46:58 in the book is called the body scan, right? Where we just start to bring curiosity to physical sensations as we scan through our body, whether it's head to toe or toe to head. And what that can do is just help us start to awaken to all of these myriad of different sensations that our bodies have from all the time that we're not even aware of. And even if it's not hunger or something like that, that just helps us start to reconnect with our body to say, hey, a lot of signals here, maybe I can start listening to them again.

Starting point is 00:47:31 Okay, and one thing I have to go into is something that you call pleasure plateaus. What is a pleasure plateau and how does it relate to our eating habits? So basically this is the second step of the process where we're paying attention and checking to see is am I eating more because it's a habit or am I eating more because I'm actually hungry. And so I think of it this way, when we're hungry and you can take any food, ideally it's not

Starting point is 00:47:58 some highly processed sugary type of thing because they mix up the signals and make it harder to really pay attention. So let's say dinner. If've cooked some dinner. It's not fast food and we're starting to eat. And we can ask ourselves with whatever the food is, does this taste better than the same as or worse than the last bite? And the reason I say that is that at the beginning of the meal, let's say green beans, for example, or broccoli or whatever, or potatoes, that first bite is going to be like, oh, yeah, this is so good. And then the next bite is going to be like, yeah, this is good. And as we eat to satiety, our brain is going to say, well, it's not quite as like delectable as that first bite. Same food, right? But we start to hit, we go up the hill,

Starting point is 00:48:45 that's why I call this the pleasure plateau, and then it starts to plateau out because our body is signaling to us you've had enough. Again, assuming that we've had time to process the calories, et cetera, we're not just scarfing it down. We're scarfing it down, we're not paying attention anyway. So we actually coast to a stop

Starting point is 00:49:03 in terms of how much we eat simply by paying attention and asking simple questions. Oh, do I like this? This tastes better, worse than or the same as the last bite. Basically do I need another bite? Right? I have a friend who's a food researcher at Yale, Dana Small. She actually did this with chocolate for her PhD thesis.

Starting point is 00:49:21 I just grabbed this in the book a little bit where she basically fed chocolate. She had people pick out their favorite chocolate and then just started feeding it to them as she scanned their brains. And long story short is that as people eat more chocolate, it goes from tasting delicious to terrible because they're overstuffing themselves. And that was part of the experiment to see what that was like and how people's brain activity changed. So that's the pleasure plateau. Often if we're not paying attention, we go off, we do one of two things. One is suddenly we're like, Oh no, I ate too much. And we try to slam on the brakes so that we force ourselves to stop eating. And often we go over the, I call it the cliff of overindulgence where we just

Starting point is 00:50:04 go off the cliff and we're like, man, why did I do that? I ate way too much. Anybody, I know very few people who have, where they can't relate to some holiday meal where there's been so much food and especially so much dessert and so many varieties of dessert, where they've gone away like in the food coma.

Starting point is 00:50:24 That's where that term comes from, because they've overeaten and their body is saying, wow, you overdid it, you overdid it. That was definitely me this past Thanksgiving. And sometimes I'd like to eat Thanksgiving early so that you can eat a smaller amount and then get to enjoy it again later in the day. But man, I did I overindulged

Starting point is 00:50:45 this year and then you feel like crap. Yeah. And so that's good information. So often we beat ourselves up and we're like, oh, I shouldn't do that again. And then we try to force ourselves not to do it the next year. But if we've done that, especially if we've done it a couple of times and we can recall it, that recollection can help us the next time. And we can ask ourselves before we do it, we can say, hey, what was it like the last time I overate like this? And then we can, well, you tell me, when you recall that your last Thanksgiving and imagine it's Thanksgiving again, and if you started with that recollection, would it be easier or harder or the same

Starting point is 00:51:23 to stop to not do that again? I think it would be easier because I have it fresh in my mind of how uncomfortable it made me feel and how it impacted my sleep and everything. Yeah. Yeah. So as long as we can recall it, that information is gold and we can rely on it and we can use that as a way to help us to change these habits. Again, no willpower needed, just recollection, just a memory. So, Chad, one of the things I wanted to end on is you put yourself through this 21-day challenge, you follow the instructions. How by doing so does it help build trust in yourself and your

Starting point is 00:52:01 relationship with food? Well, knowing how something works builds a huge amount of trust, right? Imagine, let's say we walk into a room that is completely dark and we're stumbling around, we're bumbling and we're bumping into things. We have no idea what those things are, right?

Starting point is 00:52:18 That is a lot of uncertainty for our brains. Our brains don't like uncertainty. So imagine that in contrast to walking in the room and flipping on the light switch. And then you say, oh, there's this, here's how I don't bump into things. I think that's a decent analogy for how we interact with ourselves and our own brains. If we don't know how our brains work, and I'm not saying that we've got to know it down to every system in synapse. But I'm saying at a behavioral level, if we don't know how our brains learn,

Starting point is 00:52:48 and if we don't know how they work to form habits, there's no way we're gonna be able to work with them. That's a dark room, and we're just gonna be bumbling around. And we're gonna be making a lot of false associations, where we think we try something, and it works for a little while, and then it stops working, and we wonder why it stops working.

Starting point is 00:53:02 Well, it's probably because we've associated it with working in a correlational manner as compared to a causal manner. Correlation does not equal causation. So here, once we learn how our brains work, it helps us develop, just gives us some ease because we know the system. And I think of that as that first step in developing trust or faith. The next step is really critical, which is having our own experience. So we can say, okay, I learned that this theory, I've got to try it out myself. And so as people start playing with these practices themselves and they start simple questions like, well, what's it when I eat?

Starting point is 00:53:45 Can I actually start to pay attention with each bite and see if that pleasure plateau effect is true? They can read my studies, but that's not going to be as faith or trust building as somebody's own experience. And so here we all have to do this ourselves and see for ourselves that every time we do this, every time we overeat, it feels like this. Every time I eat gummy worms, well, it's been a while, but you can still recall the last time. Every time I ate gummy worms, it was like this. Whereas every time I eat blueberries, it's like this.

Starting point is 00:54:17 And so that ongoing experience just builds our trust because we see that this is a consistent thing. Our brains love consistency, right? This is a consistent thing. It's not magic. It's not some fad diet. It's awareness. It's curiosity.

Starting point is 00:54:35 And it's also the kindness we bring to ourselves because we're truly caring for ourselves as compared to just scratching that itch of indulgence. I think of it as meeting our needs as compared to feeding our wants, which is feeding our wants is all about automatic habitual behavior. Meeting our needs is really bringing that awareness in and asking, what do I need right now? And then looking at the results of how we meet that need. Thank you for being here today and congratulations again on the hunger habit.

Starting point is 00:55:07 I highly encourage the audience to pick up a copy of this book. We've just gone through a small aspect of the jewels that are throughout it. And I always like to give the guests an opportunity to share, where's the best place for listeners to learn more about you? Oh, sure. So I have a website, drjud.com, drjud.com, that has links to the books and a bunch of free resources and to our apps as well. If folks are interested in checking in with those things out, I'm also on Instagram at drperiodjud.com. Thank you so much again for coming on the show. It's always such an honor to have you.

Starting point is 00:55:45 It's really been my pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Judson Brewer, and I wanted to thank Judd and Portfolio for the honor of having him appear on today's show. Links to all things Dr. Judd will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel, at John R. Miles, and also our clips channel at Passionstruck Clips. Please check them both out and subscribe. If you're not aware, we have been running a 50-week

Starting point is 00:56:14 Passionstruck challenge that started at the beginning of the year. It's not too late to sign up for our newsletter and get your weekly dose of inspiration and boundary magnifying challenge that leads you on the road to becoming Passionstruck. You can sign up for the newsletter also at passionstruck.com. Advertiser deals and discount codes are one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. You can sign up for our work-related newsletter on LinkedIn. It's titled Work Intentionally, and I explore all things about how do you intentionally approach your career. And you can find me on all the social

Starting point is 00:56:45 platforms at John R. Miles. You're about to hear a preview of the Passionstruck podcast interview that I did with Robert Sutton, a distinguished Stanford professor and best-selling author. Bob is recognized as one of the 10 B-School All-Stars by Business Week and his influence extends far beyond the academic realm, reshaping contemporary business thinking. In this episode, we dive into his revolutionary new book, The Friction Project, which is about the friction that we all know exists in every single organization. Our discussion guides listeners on how to become

Starting point is 00:57:14 adept friction fixers, enhancing workplace efficiency without exasperating the problems. There's this notion that sometimes there is good friction because it forces you to slow down and think. And other times there's bad friction where you just drive people crazy who are just trying to accomplish something simple they just wanna get done.

Starting point is 00:57:31 So our book is about how to tell the difference between the two and once you figure out whether you want more or less friction, how you deal with that challenge. The fee for the show is that you share it when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who's struggling with their eating habits,

Starting point is 00:57:44 then definitely share this episode with Dr. Judd with them. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you're on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become Hash and Stroke.

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Jud Brewer on How You Break Out of Your Food Jail EP 408

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