Something You Should Know - The Trouble with Thinking Outside the Box & What Hunger is Really Telling You

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Ever feel your phone buzz in your pocket—only to check and find nothing there? It feels completely real, and it happens to just about everyone. But it’s not your phone—it’s your brain playing a trick on you. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rewired-the-psychology-technology/201305/phantom-pocket-vibration-syndrome We’re constantly told that creativity comes from “thinking outside the box.” But what if that idea is actually holding you back? It turns out that constraints—rules, limits, and boundaries—often lead to better, more innovative results. David Epstein, bestselling author and former Sports Illustrated senior writer, explains why. David is author of the book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better (https://amzn.to/48c69lO). He reveals how structure can sharpen thinking, improve performance, and lead to better outcomes than unlimited freedom ever could. Hunger feels simple—you’re hungry, you eat. But it’s not that straightforward. There are different kinds of hunger and they don’t all come from physical need. Dr. Jason Fung, expert in body weight and metabolism is author of The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body’s Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food (https://amzn.to/4vRAaBr). He explains how hunger actually works, why it can drive overeating, and how understanding it can help you take better control of what—and how much you eat —and still feel satisfied. If a first date doesn’t go great, it’s easy to assume there’s no point in trying again. But unless it was truly awful, passing on a second date might be a mistake. That second date might go better than you expect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16866745/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AQUA TRU: Take the guesswork out of pure, great-tasting water. Head to https://AquaTru.com now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back. POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 RULA: This Mental Health Awareness Month, don’t just think about your mental health - actually take the step to take care of it. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your everyday with luxury you will actual use! Go to ⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES : We love the Planet Visionaries podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you are listening to this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know you like interesting and thought-provoking conversations and ideas because you listen to something you should know. So let me recommend another podcast I know you will enjoy. It's the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan has a real talent for getting his guests to share stories and offer thought-provoking insights. Over the years, I've sent a lot of people to listen, and I get feedback from people who are so glad I introduce them to the Jordan Harbinger Show. Recently he discussed Scientology and the children who are raised in that organization. It's a fascinating conversation. And he talked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick about how to protect your mind and body from the modern world. And it's tougher than you think.

I've gotten to know Jordan pretty well. We talk frequently, and I tell you, he is a very smart, insightful guy who does a hell of a podcast. Check out the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. to podcasts. Today on something you should know why you sometimes think your phone is buzzing when it isn't. Then how many times have you been told to think outside the box? No boundaries, no limits. That may be bad advice. Boundaries and limitations force us to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration. We think we want more freedom, but in fact that leads us to just do basically the same old thing and in many cases isn't good for our work or our well-being.

Also, if the first date wasn't great, should you try a second date? Probably. And understanding why we eat and overeat. Sometimes it's just conditioning. For example, like it's breakfast time, you eat, it's lunchtime, you eat, it's snack time, you eat, you go to a sporting event, you eat. But it's not the physical hunger. It's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise. All this today on Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages.

But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hi and welcome. I want to start by addressing something that comes up fairly frequently in the comments in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

where someone will get upset and accuse me of ripping off another podcast, stuff you should know in coming up with the name for this podcast, something you should know. And that's not the way it happened. Something you should know was a radio show that I hosted for years and years on hundreds of radio stations around the country. And it started long before podcasting was even a word or a thing. And so we just evolved the radio show into a podcast, and at the time we didn't even know about stuff you should know.

So they're two very different podcasts. Stuff You Should Know is a wonderful podcast, does very well. But we didn't rip off the name. First up today, have you ever felt your phone buzz only to check it and realize nobody called, nobody texted, nothing? It's often called phantom vibration syndrome, and it's not about your phone, it's about your brain. Researchers have found it's especially common in people who are highly connected to their devices, like heavy textures or people who feel the need to respond quickly. In other words, your brain gets so used to expecting a notification that it starts predicting one,

and occasionally gets it wrong. Earlier research did link it to anxiety, especially social or social, relationship anxiety, but newer studies suggest it's more about habit and anticipation than it is about insecurity. It's a bit like hearing your name in a noisy room when no one actually said it. Your brain is constantly scanning for important signals and sometimes it just jumps the gun. The interesting part is that it's usually harmless, but frequent phantom buzzing has been linked to higher stress levels and even burnout. Basically, a sign your brain may be a little, little too tuned in. And that is something you should know. You know, we're always told to

think outside the box, break the rules, keep your options open, the more freedom you have, the better your ideas will be. Well, but what if that's exactly backwards? What if having too many choices actually makes it harder to think, harder to decide, and harder to create anything useful? And what if the real breakthroughs, the ideas that actually work, often come from working within limits, not escaping them? It turns out constraints aren't just something to overcome, they can be a powerful advantage. My guest argues that the right boundaries can boost creativity, sharpen your focus, and lead to better outcomes than unlimited freedom ever could. David Epstein is a best-selling author and former senior writer for Sports Illustrated.

His latest book is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Hey, David, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here. So the idea that constraints are a good thing sort of flies in the face of what many of us have come to believe, which is freedom is better. Constraints are a bad thing. We should be able to think and do without constraints. So why are constraints a good idea?

Boundaries and limitations force us to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration in a way that nothing else does. We think we want more freedom in our personal and professional lives, but in fact, that leads us to just do basically the same old thing, and in many cases isn't good for our work or our well-being. So give me a couple of examples of how constraints are better and that lack of constraints is not better. If we look at things like creativity, for example,

there was a recent international survey by psychologists looking at known creativity myths. So these are things that we know from psychological research are not true. And the most popular one was that people are most creative when they are most free. And in fact, psychologists have something called the Green Eggs and Ham effect, which is named for Dr. Seuss, who famously wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words.

And that forced him to experiment with a rhythm in a way that nobody else ever had. And the reason psychologists call it the Green Eggs and Ham effect is not so much because they care about Dr. Seuss, but because our brains, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham said, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly.

And so if we are given full freedom, we only go down what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance, meaning we will only do things that come easily, basically, meaning solutions we've seen before. So in many cases, in order to be creative, you actually have to have constraints. Otherwise, you'll just go down that path of least resistance

and do the same things that you've always done. So that's a case where if we want to be more creative in our work, in our lives, we usually, the quickest thing to do is to block, use what's called a preclude constraint, preclude the previous solution. You block the solution that you're familiar with, and that drives creativity. Well, when you think about it, I mean, we kind of crave those constraints, because if you're supposed to do something and you have no limits, well you don't even where would you even start like go if i i i crave constraints because at least i know

what the rules are i profile this company called general magic that basically saw the future you know they were building the iPhone 20 years early basically i mean they really saw the future and they had everything talent resources but because they had so much they could do anything and so they did do anything. They didn't really define the problem they were solving, who their customer was, what the boundaries were. So when I would interview people who worked there, they'd say, we just had so much trouble figuring out what not to do. An emblematic interview was an engineer there, a guy named Steve Perlman, where, so this is again, they were making a personal communicator, basically, starting in the late 80s. And he had to write the calendar app for the

communicator, and he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096. He checks it in, thinks he's done. And then someone comes to him from another team and says, hey, somebody might write, you know, historical applications. You have to make it go farther back than that. So he writes it to go from year one. And then he thinks he's done. And then another team comes to him and says, why are you starting with that arbitrary religious context? Make it go back all the way to the beginning of astronomical time. So he writes it to go from the beginning of the universe into the future. And if he had stuck with 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code. And instead, it dragged on for months. And this was just emblematic where there were no defined boundaries early

in the project. And so everything just grew, everybody that had a cool idea, they just did it. And the project ended up becoming a disaster. I mean, it went, it was the first so-called concept IPO. I mean, Goldman Sachs took the company public before they had a product just based on the idea because it was so visionary, and it turned into an absolute disaster because they did not have a helpful boundaries in place. And yet, we have all heard the phrase, which is the opposite of the title of your book, that you need to think outside the box. And that's kind of become a very dated phrase now because it's been so overused.

Still, we're told that, you know, you've got to think differently. You've got to come up with something no one's ever done before. you've got to, you know, eliminate the constraints and just let yourself run wild. And I've always thought, well, I don't get that because of what you just said, then people will go nuts and nothing ever happens. And it's interesting. I mean, when you mentioned outside the box, obviously I'm playing on that cliche, the quickest way to get people to think in a new and unusual way is to box them in,

Not to say, go think outside of, you know, just go be creative, is to take something away. So, for example, I've spent a lot of time interviewing people at NASA for various projects, and they had a mission once called L Cross. It's an acronym, obviously, but the team for this mission ended up with half the time and half the budget that they expected to have. And so first they complained a bunch. And then they said, hey, if we were still going to get this done, how would we do it? And that led them to start repurposing other technologies. So they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors, like right out of NASCAR,

and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And they just never would have bothered to do those kinds of things if they weren't forced. So you might say, well, that's outside the box thinking. But really, it comes from these limitations that disallowed the tools that they were used to. So it's actually being blocked in productive ways is the quickest way to make people creative or do what we often refer to as out-of-the-box thinking. Yeah, well, if you can do anything with anything,

then you end up doing nothing. But like you say, if you constrain people and say, you need to solve this problem and here, it's, I remember the whole TV show, McGiver where he used to be. Oh, yeah, yeah. He used to have to use bubble gum and a twill to make, you know, the car start.

And somehow he'd figure it out because that's all he had to do. Yeah, absolutely. Or people often think of the, I mean, I think he made defibrillators out of like candlesticks, a microphone and a placemat once or something. But people think of that scene from Apollo 13,

you know, where they have to do the square peg in the round hole trick. And it's just dump out all the stuff and here's what we have to use. And they figure it out. And that is so similar to this body. of research that shows that if you pick different pieces and force people to create something, they get incredibly creative. I will say in that body of research, there is certainly such

a thing as too much constraint. So there are all these studies where say there's a set of a hundred pieces that people can use to make some kind of invention. And if they're just left up to their own devices, they don't do very creative things. But if they're told, you have to, you Instead of choosing from these hundred, you have to use these 20, and you have to use all of them, and you have to build a piece of furniture or something like that. They become much more creative. But if they're told you have to use these pieces

and you have to make a chair, so they're told the specific things they have to use and the exact thing they have to make, then they will often become less creative. So I think if you're prescribing what someone has to do and the way they have to do it, so if you have a constraint and you say, is there still room for me to surprise myself?

If the answer is no, then I think it's gone too far. Well, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. If your constraints are too constrained, then you can't move. Yeah, it has to be very constrained, though. You basically have to be prescribing pretty, you can get there. And maybe people have experience with bosses who not only tell them what to do, but also all the ways they have to do it. But people continue becoming more creative until they really, really don't have much wiggle room left. like much, they thrive with much more constraint than I think they would guess, basically.

I'm wondering what besides creativity, this topic of constraints, applies to, I want to ask you about that next. We're talking about constraints and how they make us better. And my guest is David Epstein, author of the book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. So, David, mostly we've been talking about creativity, is it related? to constraints, but what else does this apply to? Having constraints makes us better. There's a lot about productivity and personal well-being and ability to focus. So if we think about a few of those buckets, let's say there's one organization I write about where they did this exercise where they decided to make all of their current commitments visual. So they put

all of their current projects on post-it notes on a wall. And immediately, by virtue of doing that, they realized that they had way too much stuff in progress. There was no way they could finish all the stuff they were doing, no matter what timeline they were on. And so it immediately caused them to prioritize really ruthlessly. And that happens, that's a really good exercise for individuals to make all of your current commitments visible. And then maybe even ask, if I had to cut one of these out in the next 90 days, what would it be? Because people, we have a hardwired bias that psychologists call subtractive neglect bias, which means we are hardwired to overlook solutions that involve taking things away. So we always add more commitments, more meetings, more

features, whatever it is. And so it's really useful to do these sort of subtraction audits where you make all of your personal or professional commitments visible and force yourself to take some things away. Maybe you just put those in a holding pattern and they come back later. But doing those subtraction audits regularly can help people battle the feeling of overwhelm that I think almost everybody has nowadays.

So that's one way to do it. But there are also other aspects of constraint that interact with personal satisfaction, if you want to talk about those as well. Yeah, please, go ahead. Well, let me give you an acronym that I use for myself. Some of the things that I learned in research

about constraints that I apply to myself. The acronym is BCS. It's easy for me to remember because I'm a sports fan, and BCS means bowl championship series in college football. But the B is for batching work. So we now know that multitasking, toggling between things, multitasking isn't really possible. You actually have to drop one thing and start another.

That's how your brain works. And you just toggle between them quickly. And it makes you less productive because your brain's like a whiteboard where when you switch tasks, you erase, but there's still a residue, what's called attentional residue, is still left there that interferes with the next thing.

And so if you're toggling all day, you'll be less productive, and we now know it raises your stress. And this is measured by physiological measures like heart rate variability, that you can basically look at the number of toggles someone does in a day and predict what their end of day stress will be.

And so the B is for batch your work. If you can, put your work into blocks. You may have to answer a lot of emails, but try to do it in one or two or three blocks over the day instead of toggling all day between one thing and another. So the average psychologist named Gloria Mark showed that the average office worker checks email 77 different times a day. That's not what you want to be doing. You want to batch it and batch your other work if you can. So B, the C is what I just talked about, making all your commitments, commitments visible,

making all your commitments visible, and then periodically taking something away. And the S is satisficing, which is a word created by the Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon. And it's a combination of suffice and satisfy. And what it means is setting good enough rules for things. So a lot of us want to optimize or maximize, as psychologists call it, which is get the best of any of our decisions. But it turns out that we usually can't really do that because we can't evaluate all the options and decisions very well anyway, but that people who have maximizing tendencies, and there's evidence that is on the rise around the world, are less happy with their decisions, they're less happy with their lives, they're more prone to regret, and there's not much

evidence to actually make better decisions. So what Simon advised was setting satisfying rules, where before you start something, a work project, whatever it is, before you make a purchase, set good enough criteria. And when those are exceeded, go with it and move on. And people who have those kind of satisfying rules end up just happier and having a lot less regret. So I think everyone should take some time to think about what those are before they start something. Wow. Well, I want to, you said a couple of things. First of all, the average office worker checks their email 77 times a day. Yep, 77 different times. So that doesn't mean opening and closing an email. That means, going from some other task into email 77 different times a day.

Oh my God. So when Gloria Mark started studying this, when she started studying in the early 2000s, she was sitting behind people at work with a stopwatch. Later, her methods got more sophisticated, and she was monitoring people's computers remotely and all these sorts of things. And when she started, the average worker was spending, about three minutes on a task before they would change. And then around about 10 years in, around

2012, she found it was down to more like a minute and a half. And by 2022, it was 45 seconds. And that's about where it's leveled out. It's stated about 45 seconds between people switching windows or tasks or whatever they're doing. And again, that toggling predicts lower productivity and higher stress as measured by heart rate variability. There's even some evidence now might affect your immune function if you're toggling a lot.

It turns out to be a very stressful thing for the human brain to do. You may have to do a lot of different things over the day, but the extent to which you can monotask during any given block, you'll lower your stress and you'll improve your work quality. I know that's hard to do.

It sounds impossible for the way a lot of people work, but maybe even if you just start with half an hour where you're monotasking and not checking phone, not checking email, and, you know, just see if you can expand from there. So talk about the problem of maximizing, because I do that. I do this. Well, explain what that is. So maximizing, again, is this tendency to try to always make the best decision, whether you're buying something on Amazon, whether you're dating, whatever it is, whether, you know, finishing a work product. Or even maybe something that feels more personal, if people are flipping through Netflix or something like that and you find something good,

but could there be something better still out there? They're like less satisfied with good enough, essentially. And it's insidious because since the introduction of infinite scrolling on our phones, international surveys show that people have been getting more bored. And researchers who've tried to figure out why that could be, did experiments with things where they would give someone, say, a set of 20 videos and they could pick and watch whichever one they want. Or they would give other people just one video from that set, and that's the one they had to watch. And the people with the option to flip through the 20 looking for the best one were more bored than the people who were just given one to focus on.

And so there's some evidence that it's just this endless ability to compare all of your decisions that's making people want to be kind of more perfectionist in their decisions, but also ruining the experience of the moment they're actually in. Yeah, what I do, what I do is I, like, I'll go on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and I'll just keep looking for something better. I'll find something and think, well, I could watch that, but what could be better? Maybe there's something better. And you end up spending more time looking for something better than you actually spend watching a show or a movie.

Totally. And this is, there's stronger research in this area about dating apps, but I think that's I think it's a similar phenomenon. I'll bet. Where people can't be satisfied with someone with whom they have a wonderful connection. Because you know what? If you just swipe a little more, there might be something else out there. And I had this problem where with my last book, I found it so all-consuming that I said,

I'm never doing this again unless I find the perfect topic. And so I spent the next two years dipping my toes into different topics, say, gosh, this is interesting, but maybe there's something better. And then I came across this quote by the psychologist Mihai Chicksin Mejai, who's most famous for coining the term flow to describe the feeling of total immersion in an activity. And the quote was about marriage, but you could apply it to basically anything, where he said one of the great things about being committed and committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living. All this energy gets freed up for actually living instead of wondering how you should be living. As soon as I read that quote, I said, you know what? I'm taking the topic I'm interested in right now and I'm writing a book proposal on it.

And of course, two weeks later, I was 10 times as interested in it. But I realized I was basically doing that app-dating thing with different topics where instead of diving in and spending energy living with one and being fascinated, I was just always thinking about is there something better around the corner. And I think we do that with so many things now because we can see so many different options. Well, I think everybody relates to this. There are things in life where, you know, this endless ability to do something paralyzes us, and then we don't do anything, and we spend all our time trying to think of what we're going to do instead of doing it.

I've been talking with David Epstein. He is a best-selling author, former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and the name of his book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And there's a link to his book at Amazon and the show notes. And David, great to have you here. Thanks. Thanks for coming back. Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. A lot of people struggle with their weight.

In fact, more than ever before. And now, with the rise of these new weight loss drugs that help people eat less, it would seem we finally have a solution. But if it were just about eating less and having more willpower, wouldn't this problem have been solved by now? Because people have been dieting for decades. and yet the pattern is familiar. You lose weight, you regain it, and then you start over.

So what's really going on? Why does the body seem to fight back against weight loss? And why has the problem gotten so much worse? My guest says we may be asking the wrong question. It's not just what you eat or even when you eat, but why you eat. Dr. Jason Fung is a medical doctor and best-selling author who studies the biology of weight and metabolism. His latest book is The Hunger Code,

resetting your body's fat thermostat in the age of ultra-processed food. Hey, Dr. Fung, welcome to something you should know. So it seems, you know, people talk about weight loss a lot. Like, it's very top of mind, and yet the problem seems to be worse than ever before. So what are we getting wrong? Well, I think that people have focused on the wrong issue. So for years and years, decades really, people focused on calories.

You know, this idea that like a calorie is a calorie, so therefore all calories are equally fattening. But it's actually not true in any way when you eat different foods. They may have the same number of calories, but they produce different hormones in your body. Your body responds to cookies, for example, with certain hormones and his response to, say, eggs with different hormones. And therefore, the effect is totally different because for every calorie that you eat, your body

could store it or it could burn it. And which one it does is very important because, of course, one of them, you're going to have lots of energy, you're going to feel great, the other one, you're just going to get fat. So, you know, those hormonal responses are very important. So, you know, beyond the number of calories, it's also the types of food that you eat, the processing, and so on. But the other thing that people haven't focused on a lot is sort of the underlying reasons why people eat. And if you think about it, it's really about the hunger because we eat when we're hungry and we stop eating when we're full.

Therefore, the sort of driving force behind most eating behavior is hunger. So we need to understand the different types of hunger, what drives it, what you can do about it. Because really, if we didn't have hunger, none of us would have trouble losing weight, right? And that's the lesson that a lot of these new weight loss drugs have. When you squelch the hunger, weight loss isn't all that difficult. Right, sure. But when you say there's different kinds of hunger, what do you mean? Because when I'm hungry, I'm hungry.

I don't feel different. It just feels hungry. Yeah. So there's different reasons we eat. So most of us think about the physical hunger, which is in scientific terms, is called homeostatic hunger. And this is driven by hormones. So if you think about it, people think about that they're hungry, you know, they think it's because they haven't eaten in a while. But that actually isn't the case because if you think about body fat, it's a star of calories.

So if you have body fat, say you have 50 pounds to lose, you have 375,000 calories sitting on your body. So why can't your body simply release some of those to take care of the hunger? If hunger is simply you needing calories, right? So therefore, it's clearly not the case. Certain hormones produce more hunger. Certain hormones reduce hunger. So there's two other types of hunger. There's something called, which is something called hedonic hunger,

which is sort of an emotional hunger because we eat because it feels good. We like it. And there's a lot of people, you know, if you think about it, eat for emotional reasons. They're bored. They're feeling a little low. So therefore you eat to feel better. And we know that eating is pleasure.

is one of life's great pleasures. It releases dopamine and stimulates our brain reward systems, you know, all these sort of things. And this is the, you know, this is the whole idea of dessert. You're not eating it because of the physical hunger. You're eating it because of the sort of pleasure of eating, the emotional side of things. And that's important because a lot of the reasons we eat can be tied back to this sort of hedonic hunger, particularly for ultra-processed foods, which have been sort of engineered. to maximize the pleasure of food while minimizing the sort of satiety.

And that's actually not even the whole of it because there's a third type of hunger, which is called conditioned hunger. That is, certain things can stimulate hunger just because you associate them with food all the time. So, for example, like it's breakfast time, you eat, it's lunchtime, you eat, it's snack time, you eat, you go get a coffee, you eat, you go to a sporting event, you eat. But it's not the physical hunger. It's the conditioned hunger that's causing. this food noise, which is what a lot of people feel. They walk around and they don't understand

why they have to eat all the time. Well, it's because you've been trained to eat all the time. And so why is this such a problem now when you look back at pictures of people in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, they weren't real big like they are today. So something has changed. Exactly. And that's the thing. This is the story that we've been sold is that weight loss, weight gain is all about willpower and discipline. So therefore, if we are fatter now in 2026, then we are in, you know, 1966, it's because we have less willpower. But that's not true. If you think about the types of hunger, you have the homeostatic hunger, which hasn't changed too much, but think about the hedonic hunger. The level of ultra-processed foods in our diet

has skyrocketed in the last 50 years. And that makes a huge difference because you have foods, that have, you know, there's all these chemicals. You know, you think about how food companies can maximize pleasure. They talk about, you know, it's not by accident, right? They have focus groups. They tweak the recipes. They make sure they have the right amount of salt, sugar, and fat. But more than that, they have artificial colors, artificial sweeteners,

artificial flavors. They have texturizers. They have emulsifiers. Millions of ways to make that pleasure of eating increase. And by increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods, they've sort of maximize this hedonic hunger. Then you think about the conditioned hunger. And you think about the 1970s, for example.

It was not acceptable to eat snacks, for example. So if you wanted after school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin dinner. If you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom said, no. You should eat more at dinner, right? But now it's all changed. Like, we have food everywhere, right? You play soccer. Some parents are like running around chasing their kids with,

sweet drinks, right? And none of this was acceptable in the 1970s. So the social conditions made it easy to not eat because you didn't have all this conditioned hunger. You didn't have all this hedonic hunger. So the problem is really an overhunger problem, not an overeating problem. And so what's the advice? Because I've heard statistics about how many people try to do better, try to eat better, and they fail far more than they succeed. Their weight comes back, even if they take it off in the first place. So what has to change? What is the, you wake up tomorrow morning and what do you do different?

If your problem is that, you know, you have all this conditioned hunger, well, you have to find a way around it, right? You have to redesign your social and physical environment to make it easy to not eat. So, for example, if you go to get a coffee and every time you go get a coffee, you see the donuts, so you get a donut, right? Now you figure it out, oh, what's happening is that I have conditioned hunger. I have, every time I go get a coffee, I want a donut. So how am I going to change that?

Well, maybe you could use an ordering app. So you order the coffee. You don't even see the donut. So you go get your coffee. You pick it up, but you don't get the donut, right? Maybe you have to make rules like, oh, I'm going to, you know, not eat after dinner so that you don't wind up tempted to eat, you know, in front of the TV or, you know, late at night. You have to redesign your physical environment.

So maybe if, for example, you always get hungry at 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock or something like that, well, hey, maybe you need to schedule something. Maybe you have to say, okay, well, at 5 o'clock, I'm going to go for a walk every day, right? That's going to take your mind off and take you away from the eating environment, right? Because if you're just walking around, you might go get something to eat. And you know that, right? And it's not your fault. Well, but it does seem daunting.

I mean, the statistics say so. I mean, people can start doing this with the best of intentions, but the failure rate is really, really high, which is why those drugs are so popular now because they take the effort out of it. Well, absolutely, because what's happening, of course, is you're using the drugs, and I'm not against the drugs. The drugs, what they do is they use one system,

which is the GLP1 system, which is part of the homeostatic hunger. And it's not like it's a normal, level of gLP one. It's a very big pharmacologic dose of gLP one. And that squelch is your hunger. So if you have emotional hunger, hedonic hunger, if you have conditioned hunger, it will squelch it because you're using the gLP one to squelch it. The problem is if you ever come off of the gLP one, and a lot of people do for various reasons, but if you come off of it and you haven't learned anything, then you don't understand. So if you're an emotional eater, well, yeah, you can use

this drug. It will make you nauseated. You won't want to eat. And therefore, you're not gaining any pleasure from eating, right? Just like when you're really, really full and somebody says, here, have another pork chop. It's not that pleasurable. So yes, you can use that to squelch it, but the problem is that the focus so far has been so much on diet, right? Weight loss is diet, diet, diet, it's not. A lot of it is environmental. A lot of it is emotional. Well, it is interesting to me how this is very much seemingly a Western problem. You don't see this in a lot of other countries. Look at Italy. An Italian has very low risk of obesity in Italy, right? The difference, a lot of the difference, is that they don't eat everywhere they go. You don't see Italians sort of walking on the street eating. You don't see them, you know, at their desk doing work and eating, right? It's different. They have a different food culture where you eat real food, right? The level of ultra-processed food is much lower. So therefore, they don't have the same problems with hedonic hunger. That condition makes them have a much lower rate of obesity, one of the lowest in the developed world.

Now you take that Italian, plop them into New York City or, you know, move them to somewhere else, and their rate of obesity just skyrocketed. What's the difference? It's not the diet necessarily. It's not the person. It's those other conditions, the food environment and everything else. Doesn't it seem to you? I mean, it seems to me as if people, to some extent, are just giving up that bigger is the new normal and that that's okay.

and I really worry about that. Yeah, I do too because there is this whole idea. I mean, first, you have to understand about fat shaming, right? So the reason people were fat shaming was this whole calories. It's really the calorie bullies that sort of led to fat shaming. Because the story that they sold us was, of course, that it's all calories, calories, calories. Since you decide what you eat and you decide how much you exercise, calories is about, discipline and willpower. So if you get fat and can't lose weight, you don't have discipline,

you don't have willpower. So in other words, it's your fault. So we can make fun of you and shame you. That's actually not true at all because again, this is a very simplistic way of looking at it. Yes, you can decide what you eat, but you can't decide to be not hungry. You can't decide to burn fewer calories, right? You can't decide how you metabolize your basal metabolic rate, right? So it's not their fault at all because if you're hungry, that's why they're eating, right? They didn't decide to be hungry. Nobody asked to be hungry so that they could eat more and gain weight, right? So that's what led to fat shaming.

And then the backlash against fat shaming, which is that, hey, some people are big and it's okay. The problem is that the medical evidence suggests that weight loss has a huge number of benefits. You know, heart health is better. Kidney health is better. Metabolic health is better. So this sort of giving up. So what's happened, of course, is that we came through this, you know, five decades of calories, calories, calories, right?

Didn't work, so people couldn't lose weight. Then there was all this fat shaming around it. And now the backlash, which is like, well, maybe people are just meant to be this big. It's like, well, it's not actually true, right? Because there's health consequences to being overweight, you know, knee problems, back problems, and so on. So this sort of giving up was because it was so unsuccessful, this sort of calories, calories, calories thing. Well, it also seems to me, and just my observation,

that a part, one of the factors, and as you say, it's multi-factored, but one of the factors is just how much food people think it takes to make a meal, that portions are huge and that the quality of the food has, you know, people eat out more. They eat out, they eat bigger portions, they eat fattier foods, and they think that's normal. And back in the 50s and the 60s, people didn't eat that way. They ate at home. They ate smaller meals. And in fact, I remember talking to someone about how when they updated the joy of cooking, they changed a lot of the recipes where it used to be serves six, now it serves four. It's the same recipe. Yeah, that actually happens in a lot of recipe books. But you're absolutely right.

So how, and this gets back to the conditioned hunger. That is, you know, when you think about how people eat, there's this whole process. So in terms of social, there's something called social modeling, which is that you base how much you eat, amongst other things, you base everything actually on what other people around you are doing. So if, for example, you eat pork lung or something, pork rectum, you might think it's gross, but in the Filipino culture, it's very acceptable. Why?

Because other people around you have eaten it, and therefore you eat it. How much you eat is the same, right? How much you eat depends on how much other people eat. That's called social modeling. And it's a very powerful influence. So if you eat at certain places, if you eat in Japan or if you eat in Europe, for example, the portions are way smaller. You go to the United States or Florida, and the portions are actually huge. They're massive, right?

So I come from Canada and the portions are sort of, I think, reasonable. And then I go to Florida and they're like double what I think is reasonable. So the problem is that if you live in these places, you think that that huge portion is normal. that's a process called social modeling. So again, once you understand that, then you can actually decide to try to do something about it. There's a phenomenon that I've noticed, maybe I heard someone talking about this, but we eat what's put in front of us. In other words, I will sometimes, if I'm in a hurry or don't want to cook, and I'll have a frozen entree. There's always some in the freezer. I'll have it. They're not very big. They're fairly small. They're not a lot of calories.

but when I'm done eating it, I feel satisfied because I have eaten the whole meal. But if I had cooked a whole meal, the servings would likely be much bigger, and I would eat more calories, I would eat more food, because that's what I would put on the plate. So I can feel satisfied with a smaller meal if that's the meal. I will feel satisfied with a bigger meal and eat the whole thing if that's put in front of me. Yeah, that's absolutely, that happens to everybody. So that's this idea that, you know, if you give people bigger portions, they're going to eat more, right?

And a lot of, there's been a lot of studies to show that, even though they're not more full, right? That's the whole point is how do you decide when to stop eating, right? Because a lot of these satiety signals, they take time. So when you're eating, you can keep eating. But if you're to eat a certain amount, stop for half an hour, then you actually won't go back. because, you know, that's what happens. Well, this is a big topic. Lots of people are concerned about it.

And I would imagine that in your work, you've developed some hacks, some ideas that people could use to put to work to make it easier. So what are some of those? Yeah. So it all depends on the types of hunger. But for example, eating later in the day generally is worse for you. And this all gets back to the sort of hormonal balance, sort of rather than just calories, the, how late you eat in the day makes a difference the order of your meal.

So if you're eating the carbohydrates first versus carbohydrates last, like if you're eating bread at the, you know, at the beginning of the meal versus at the end of the meal, that makes a difference. There's a huge difference in the amount, like, how quickly your insulin and glucose goes up. So if you eat carbs first, like, so there's an experiment, for example, where you eat bread and orange juice, and then 10 minutes later, you eat chicken and vegetables. and then they switch it.

So you eat chicken and vegetables first, and then you eat bread and orange juice. The amount of insulin that is released is much lower when you eat the carbs last. So if you're releasing less insulin, you're giving your body less instructions to store the fat. Because remember, insulin is a hormone

that tells your body to store more fat. So the lower you can get your insulin, the better. But it's not simply the food, but the food order makes a difference. The meal timing makes a difference. certain foods that you eat with other foods, so vinegar and fermented foods, they will actually impact how quickly your blood glucose and your insulin go up. So therefore, you know, if you take bread versus bread with olive oil and vinegar, there's a big difference. It's actually much

better for you. You can use things like resistant starch. So if you take rice, you cook it, and then you cool it, and then you reheat it. You get less of an insulin effect. So that's another hack you can use because that's going to make it better. If you have the rice, well, it's better to have this resistant starch working for you instead of against you. Well, those are some great suggestions. And I appreciate the insight into the different types of hunger because I think it helps explain a lot. Jason Fung has been my guest. He is a medical doctor and best-selling author. The name of his book is The Hunger Code, Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the Age of ultra-processed food.

And there's a link to his book at Amazon and the show notes. Thank you very much, Doctor. So here's an interesting question that a lot of us have had to answer at one time or another. Should you go on a second date if there were no sparks on the first date?

A lot of people say no. But modern dating research suggests you might want to rethink that. It turns out attraction doesn't always show up right away. Some connections are what researchers call slow burn, where interest grows over time as you get more comfortable and actually get to know the person. And here's the twist. That instant spark that people chase, well, that can be misleading. It's often driven by things like familiarity, excitement, or even anxiety, but not necessarily long-term compatibility.

That doesn't mean first impressions don't matter. They do. Your brain makes sense. quick judgments in seconds. But they're not always final. So if the first date was not amazing, but it wasn't bad either, a second date might be a good idea. It might be where the real connection starts. And that is something you should know.

That's the end of this episode. If you liked it, please share it. Use the share function on your player and send it to someone you know. They'll appreciate it. And so will I. It sure helps us. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening to today to something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages.

If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or a podcast app or a lot. at longest shortest time.com.