Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Why You Eat When You're Not Hungry–And How to Stop | Judson Brewer

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Dr. Jud breaks down how habits work and how to change them. Plus, insights on stress, boredom, mindfulness, pleasure, satisfaction, and contentment.Judson Brewer M.D., Ph.D., is an internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist and a bestselling author. He is a professor in the School of Public Health and Medical School at Brown University. His new book is called The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop.In this episode we talk about:The scientific evidence behind Dr. Jud’s approach The difference between satisfaction and contentmentThe difference between hedonic and homeostatic hungerWhy changing behavior may not require you to dig into your past“Unforced freedom of choice”The “bigger better offer”The “pleasure plateau”Habits vs. addictions“The hunger test” The Buddha’s advice on eatingWhether or not we can still eat gummy wormsRelated Episodes:Dr. Jud’s anxiety Q&ADr. Jud on anxiety as a habitDr. Jud on addiction and bad habitsEvelyn Tribole on intuitive eatingFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/jud-brewer-hungerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing? Today we're going to talk about the science of changing your relationship to food. The science effectively of eating or more specifically overeating, eating when we're not hungry. I know this is a huge problem for me even after years of working on it. I want to be clear from the outset here that this is not an episode about how to lose weight after many years of obsessively trying to wrench my body into a certain shape, I have learned through many of the interviews right here on the show, in fact, that this is a toxic enterprise

trying to get your body to look a certain way. Anyway, it's unlikely to work in an abiding fashion. Anyway, my work for a little while. So instead, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about the science of changing your relationship to food, how to eat mindfully. Actually, we're going to do a two-part series on the subject this week as part of a recurring series that we call Get Fit Sainly.

Today's guest is my old friend, Dr. Judson Brewer. He's a best-selling author and internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He's a professor in the school of public health, and also at the medical school at Brown University. He's the author of the forth coming book The Hunger Habit, Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry and How To Stop. And in this conversation, we talk about habits versus addictions, the scientific evidence to support Jud's approach, the difference between hedonic, hunger, and homeostatic hunger, the pleasure plateau, the difference between satisfaction and contentment. Judds take on intuitive eating, which has been hugely influential for me, whether we can still eat gummy worms, mindfully, and the Buddha's advice on eating.

But first, a little BSP, blatant self-promotion, one I mentioned two things. First, over on the 10% happier app, we have our New Year's Meditation Challenge. It's called the Imperfect Med meditation challenge. It's called the imperfect meditation challenge. It's designed for people who beat themselves up about whether they're doing it right. It's hosted by my friend, the great meditation teacher Matthew Heppern. It's free. It lasts for 14 days and you can sign up and join over on the app right now.

Quickly also want to mention that we're doing two more live meditation parties at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. We'll put a link in the show notes, ones in May, ones in October. Come join us, it'll be me, Sabine Salase and Jeff Warren. The last one was a blast. Again, link in the show notes. Sign up. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener.

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while you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money for the trip. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca-host. Dr. Judson Brewer, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Great having you back. So you have spent a long time studying, among other things, addiction, you've worked with people with obiate addictions, people were addicted to cigarettes. How did you get on to food? I was doing a study with smoking and we got some pretty good results. We might have talked about that before we got like five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment

when we did this randomized controlled trial of mindfulness training compared to cognitive therapy. And we were just starting to play in the digital therapeutic space. So we're piloting out how to do something in the digital therapeutic space with smoking. And so we were pilot testing some of our work with the Caribbean Aquidap and getting feedback from users. And they started reporting that they were changing their eating habits. And at first I blew it off because they're the typical person that quit smoking gains on average about 15 pounds because they tend to substitute eating for smoking. So I was thinking, you know, just like my other clinic patients are

probably, you know, substituting food for smoking. And they said, no, no, no, no, we're actually changing our eating habits. Like we're not snacking as much. And my eyes popped out of my head. And I said, tell me more. And they said, you know, these techniques that you're teaching us to work with cravings for cigarettes are actually helping with our cravings for food. So as an addiction psychiatrist, I wasn't planning to morph into looking at eating habits, but the universe was kind of pulling me in that direction, so I couldn't ignore that. And so we, that sent us down the road of exploring how to help people with habitual eating. You make a nod to this in the subtitle to your new book, but let me just ask it to you

as a question, why do we eat when we're not hungry? Where would you like me to start? Evolution, probably, right? Yeah, that's a good place to start. So evolution didn't set us up to eat when we're not hungry. It set us up to remember where food is so we could go find it again. And it also set us up to eat colorically laden foods so that we could back in the calories in times of famine. In modern day, those mechanisms are still at play, yet we have refrigerators and food delivery services,

and we also have engineered food-like objects that are designed to get us to eat as much as possible. So very different environment now, but same evolutionary mechanisms. Food-like objects. What does that mean? Would you call Doritos or Cheetos food? Oat cuisine, I believe, is the French term. Ah, I'll try it. I'll try it, yes.

Yes. Well played or be in a way. Yeah, I get what you're saying. And you talk about this in the book, the idea that there are the more sort of noxious corners of the food industry. They're coming up with foods that are just basically impossible to resist because they figured out how to, you know, engineer it. Yes.

Yes. So, for example, Cheetos, they dissolve in your mouth so that your brain doesn't register that you ate something. So, you'll eat something else, right? That's designed that way. And these foods become harder to resist when we're tired. I mean, I've heard, I've heard it argued and maybe by you and maybe I'm remembering this

incorrectly that when you're stressed or tired food, especially like shitty food or food like objects, tastes better. Yeah, there's this saying that actually learned in the addiction treatment realm, which is hungry, angry, lonely, tired, and that's when people are less likely to be able to resist temptation like cravings.

And the same is true, especially with food when you're hungry. You're gonna be moving toward food, but also it highlights the importance of emotions. And that is an interesting anti-evolutionary mechanism because we learn those behaviors, those aren't ingrained. This is why it's called stress eating, for example. If we learn to eat when we're stressed, that becomes a habit and a kind of a go-to when we are tired, when we're stressed, that becomes a habit and a go-to when we are tired, when we're stressed, when we're lonely. All these things, all these emotional eating habits, they get set up not out of physiologic hunger, but out of emotion. There's a whole new category

that's been described as called hedonic hunger, Which means that eating out of, you know, hedonism, like basically emotional eating. Got it. So you're just, you're using the word habit. That seems key here. And I guess one question, well, I'd like to hear you describe why you're using that word and maybe the difference between a habit and an addiction.

Mm. Sure. If you think of a habit, most habits that we have are helpful for survival. So imagine when you wake up in the morning, if you had to relearn how to walk, how to put on your clothes, how to make coffee, we'd be exhausted before breakfast. So habits are set up as a very helpful mechanism to, I think of it as set and forget, where you set a habit and you forget about the details. And then you just do it.

That's what a habit is. It's automatic behavior. You can do it without having to think. So along the spectrum of habits, the far end of that spectrum is addiction. And the simple definition that I learned in residency was continue to use despite adverse consequences. So we can have a habit. And often people think of smoking as a habit and their addiction, they'll say, oh, this, you know, my habit. But the continued use despite adverse consequences is where it gets into the realm of addiction.

consequences is where it gets into the realm of addiction. That makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. And so why is the word habit so important? Why are you using in the context of food? And how do I know whether my habit of occasionally overeating something has tipped over into addiction, even though there are occasionally adverse consequences, you know what I mean?

Yeah. So here, I'm using habit deliberately because it helps to differentiate what were evolutionarily healthy and helpful mechanisms for getting calories into helpless survive and those mechanisms that have kind of gotten co-opted in modern day that are having us consume calories when we don't actually need them.

And so, habitulating can range from just mindlessly snacking when we're reading a book or watching television or watching a movie to overeating when we just habitually finish our plate, the clean plate club, that type of thing. But all of those fall into the same general category of behavior in terms of we're doing that just automatically. We're not really paying attention. One of the arguments you make in the book that I found really compelling is that we experience

anxiety as something that's negative that's happening to us. We feel bad for ourselves when we realize that we're anxious. Whereas we experience overeating as something not bad that's happening to us, but something bad that we're doing, a sin that we are committing. Yes, and this was... I don't know where that differentiation happened, but this is something that a lot of people nod their head when I say that. And this is actually a conversation I think I was having with my editor when I was first putting the book together. And that distinction came out so clearly. You know, on my work with anxiety, people come to my clinic and ask, you know, help me with anxiety. And with eating, it's like, they feel like they have to do it themselves. It's like it's their fault. Yet the two actually share a pretty common mechanism, which is habit. Right. You're people who haven't heard you on the show before, probably won't

realize that you've come on here and you've written a great book about the fact that you view anxiety as a habit to us or a mental habit. Yeah, so the 32nd recap on that was, it was actually still probably the biggest discovery I had in my clinical practice and also in my neuroscience research, was this little known assertion put forward in the 1980s that anxiety could be driven like a habit. And the long and short of it is, you know, anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying, and that mental behavior feels rewarding enough to our brain, makes us feel like we're in control, or at least that we're doing something, that it feeds back and says, hey, next time you're anxious, you should worry. The problem there is that worrying doesn't actually help, and it just makes us more anxious. So that's the anxiety habit loop in a nutshell. And we can actually see how eating

is very much related to anxiety as well. It was actually somebody in our eat right now app that had said, Hey, I'm noticing that anxiety is triggering me to stress eat. So you can see these habit loops around the feeling of anxiety. It might lead somebody to worry. It might lead somebody else to go into the kitchen and distract themselves by eating some food. I've been there. We're going to talk in detail about your method in 21-day challenge for dealing with mindless eating, overeating. But let me ask some more questions at a kind of higher level. You argue that diets and measuring, counting calories, et cetera, et cetera, don't work based on what, because I think this will be a new argument for some people.

Oh, really? Yes. Okay. Because a lot of people this time of year, new years are going on diets and they do it because they believe it works. The diet industry is huge. You know, we talk a lot on this show. I talk a lot about how diets don't work. So many of our listeners probably are familiar with the argument, but we may have new listeners around new years and they may be believing that actually they can and should go on diets. Yes. Okay. To me, I would say you need not look any farther than the scientific literature to see what

the problem is with dieting. And for anybody that doesn't want to read the scientific literature, most I understand that I like to do that. And you probably like to do that, but not everybody does. There's this term called yo-yo dieting. And so there's a lot that's been written about in terms of whatever that the diet de jour is. If it's will power-based, it's more likely than not to fail. And so anybody that's tried dieting before knows what I'm talking about because they're now looking for the next one.

And the diet industry's great at saying, hey, you know, either it's the calories and calories out that formula is correct. It is correct, but they're saying, you know, you need to develop more willpower, sign up for another year of our program. So that's one argument. It's really good for marketing. And the second argument is,

oh, you did that diet? Well, that diet doesn't work. Our diet does. And if you just stick with our diet, then you'll win. And so both of those are based on people following a set of rules. And following rules is not, our brains aren't actually great at doing that. Our brains are good at following an internal rule set, but not somebody else's book or, you know, as seen on TV, you know, six weeks to a Hollywood body or whatever. Wheel power is more myth and muscle. Yet we like to think that we have willpower and that we can apply that to affecting our eating habits. So when we fail, we feel bad that it's our fault.

It's not the diet program's fault. Or the overall toxic culture sending us messages about pushing us to achieve essentially aesthetic goals that have nothing to do with underlying health. You can be super healthy without six pack abs. I'm glad you're bringing that forward because yes, that's toxic as well. I think we're moving in the direction of seeing that just because somebody doesn't look the way that the models do doesn't mean that they're unhealthy. And so the terms are starting to evolve, for example, we're starting to use terms like clinical obesity as compared to obesity to

differentiate those, which is I think a really nice step forward. But yeah, what's it, Kate Moss's, you know, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, right? You know, that's a high bar for anybody to meet. And I think basically impossible in the long run. And so you're, you're setting yourself up for the yo-yo. Absolutely. Absolutely. I've talked a lot on the show about intuitive eating, but I don't know that I've ever talked about it with you. Are you familiar with intuitive eating?

I am, and I don't think we've talked about it. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. I've talked about it a million times on the show, but I had this sort of revelatory podcast interview with Evelyn Tribbley, one of the godmothers of intuitive eating right here on the show, and it really had a huge impact on me. Because I was heading into that interview, one of these guys who counted his calories and avoided certain foods as quote unquote sinful and you know, just making myself miserable and also sending not so healthy messages to my young son and anybody around me that we can it should be torturing ourselves to meet these kind of random aesthetic standards. So I meet her and then she's like no you should die it's not, B, instead of listening to what some for-profit company

is trying to sell you about what you should eat, why don't you listen to your body and eat what you want when you want it with two caveats, one that you're actually tuning into how your body feels and two, that you're using what she calls like gentle nutrition. So yeah, you don't want to throw all the rules and nutrition out the window,

but you want to not use it as a cudgel against yourself. So that's the basics of IE, intuitive eating, as I understand it. What's your view on it? Oh yes, I'm a big fan and I think they wrote their book, she's 25, 27 years ago, long time ago. And it made a big splash and I think it still is impacting people throughout the ages. I think it's a really nice, accessible, digestible, ha ha, book on how to really pay

attention to our bodies. And I like how she highlights the, how do you put it, not bludgeoning yourself with nutrition. Our bodies are actually extremely wise when we pay attention to them. And they know when we're eating healthy food and when we're not eating healthy food, our bodies don't need a label scanner to determine what is healthy. If we can really pay attention and really dial in, it gets easier and easier and easier and our body's going to tell us everything. And so even there, I think, intuitive eating can play a big role in nutrition.

Like how do you feel after you eat a bag of Doritos versus eat something healthy? We all know those. Absolutely, we all know it, but we are, and you argue this in your book, we've been drag-gooned and manipulated and confused and befogged by these billion-dollar industries, multi-billion-dollar industries, they're trying to get us to follow their rules instead of listening to our own

bodies. And, you know, just to amplify your point, I just came back from a four-day boys trip with my son. He came with me on a business trip. And, you know, when I'm traveling with my son, we tend to eat a lot of, you know, nine-year-old boys like French fries and hamburgers and candy and that kind of stuff. I pretty much let him eat what he wants. And I notice if he's eaten too much junk, he will want something healthy. And the same for me now, if I go on a trip with him, we eat a bunch of crap, I start craving healthier food because it makes me feel better.

Yeah. And so it sounds like both you and your son have calibrated your bodies to really be able to see how good it feels when you eat healthy food. That's something they all can do. Yes. Yeah. And I think kids have this naturally until society sets in on them. Yes.

Yes. They are fighting in a pill battle in on them. Yes, yes, they are fighting an uphill battle in one sense. And in another sense, it's relatively simple, especially if we can set some of these habits in an early age of paying attention to our bodies. When we eat, our bodies will tell us what to do. On this intuitive eating tip, where are you and in terms of the program that you're recommending to people,

which again, we are gonna get into in detail, where are you on weight loss? Because as I understand it in intuitive eating world, they're not trying to get people to lose weight. They're trying to actually do something much more radical, which is revolutionize your relationship to your body and to food. And once you do that, you'll just arrive

at what nature wants your body and to food. And once you do that, you'll just arrive at your, what nature wants your body to be. Yes, so with regard to weight loss, some people have what I'll call clinical obesity where they have health effects that are directly related to their weight. For example, somebody that I write about in my book was 400 pounds when he first came to see me

and he had a lot of health-related effects due to his clinical obesity. So he had hypertension, he had a fatty liver, basically his liver is like pate, because he was garging himself on fast food. He also had obstructive sleep apnea, and he had health anxiety, which ironically, he was going to fast food to try to suit or numb himself with.

So there, I would say it can be healthy for someone to lose some weight in some circumstances. The interesting part was he tried everything to lose weight. So we said, don't try to lose weight. Just pay attention as you eat. He lost 100 100 pounds, and he's maintained those gains. He's continuing to keep that gradual weight loss. But he said it was the easiest weight loss he's ever had, and he feels much healthier. So for some people, you know, again, like you're saying, their body is gonna tell them what to do,

and not necessarily because they're saying saying I need to lose 20 pounds. We've had a lot of folks report that just by paying attention, and we can get into some of these details, but as they pay attention and stop eating when they're full, they naturally lose 10 to 15 pounds because they're just putting in more colors than they actually need. That all makes sense to me. I think where I get a little concerned and maybe I shouldn't be is if you're dangling weight loss out there, are you playing into what's called diet culture? But it sounds to me that you're saying, no, I'm only putting weight loss out there if you need it in order to like get healthier, like genuinely healthier. Yes, the hunger habit is not a weight loss book. It's to help people change their relationship to eating.

Two more questions before we get into the three parts of your actual plan. You mentioned somebody who was 400 pounds, but is your book for people who are clinically obese to use your term or for people with serious eating disorders? It certainly can be helpful for people who are clinically obese to use your term or for people with serious eating disorders? It certainly can be helpful for people with clinical obesity. It can be helpful. I've worked a lot with people with binge eating disorder, but this book is not for people

with anorexia nervous or bulimia nervous. This book is not for them and actually gives some resources in the book if somebody starts reading the introduction where I clearly say this is not for somebody with an RxA here are some resources. Got it. And final question is, what's the evidence to support your approach over others? Have you done clinical studies on what you're about to teach, folks? Yes.

So I wouldn't feel comfortable writing a book unless I'd actually done the research myself, and this isn't just like reading other people's research, but to be able to write about my experience clinically, but also more importantly, my experience with my lab, you know, doing these studies. So that's where this book comes from. Some of the evolutionary stuff, obviously, I didn't, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so I draw a little bit of that history from that, but that's just the preface so to speak of the book. But this is really based on our clinical studies with our E-right now program. And what are those studies show? For example, there was a study led by Ashley Mason at UCSF where she found a 40% reduction in craving-related eating in people that use the eat right now app. And we actually published a study, a couple of studies

recently, where we can look at the world-world value and how it shifts in somebody's experience pretty quickly. And we can talk more specifically about that. That's the second step of the program. All right, that's all very helpful. So you talked about the steps of the program. Let's dive into the program. You structure it in your new book as a 21-day challenge with three parts. And the first is mapping your habit loops. That's the first part. What does that mean? Mapping your habit loops. Yes. So what I've seen over the last 20 years or so in my clinic is if my patients can't identify what their habit loops are, they can't work with them.

So we start with simply having them map out the three components of their eating habit. So for example, if it's stress eating, it tends to be stressed. It's the trigger. That's the first element, which leads to eating. Right? That's the second one. And then the result of that is that they distract themselves. They numb themselves.

There's some type of reward from a neuroscience perspective. And that behavior-reward relationship forms this, what's called positive reinforcement, or negative reinforcement in this case, because it's making something unpleasant go away. So that feeds back so that the next time somebody's stressed their brain rings a bell and says, hey, why don't you go and eat something at work for you last time. So there can be stress eating habit loops. There can be just mindless eating habit loops. This happens a lot when somebody's, you somebody's reading a book, watching television. This can even be the overeating, or somebody just finishes all the food on their plate, because they've learned to do that as a kid.

So really the first step is pretty straightforward, identifying the behavior, and then mapping backwards and forwards, like what was the trigger, and what's the result or the reward. And I'll even say that they can make it easier than mapping out all three of those elements. The triggers are actually the least important part of the equation because they're just what sets the behavior in motion. But from a reward-based learning standpoint, if you avoid triggers, you can avoid them for a little bit, but they don't actually change the word value and change the behavior. You just kind of put it off for a little while. So it doesn't dismantle the loop at its core. Oh, so that's interesting. I was just thinking about my own

where I mindlessly eat often. It's when I'm bored, and it's like the end of a meal, and there's still food on the table, or even on my plate, but I know I'm not hungry, but I'm just eating. And that's super charged if I'm tired or stressed. Yeah. So that's the trigger. The behavior is I eat when I'm not hungry, and the reward is some sort of temporary distraction

or relief from the emotion that I don't want to feel. Exactly. Yeah, nice mapping. What I'm missing there is that the reward is a piece of shit because I get a temporary relief, but I actually feel like garbage in the not too distant future. So why can't I just add the fourth part of the loop and cut the whole thing short? Oh, the good news is you can, but often we are lulled into these, we think of these as the brief relief reward pathways where it's like the immediate relief just feels good enough and then we're going to rationalize it afterwards. Where I was like, oh, it wasn't that bad or maybe I'll change next time or all these things

that don't compete, especially when we're tired, where a brain says, oh, this is the path of least resistance, just do it. Just eat it. And as you were saying a moment ago, avoiding the trigger, so avoiding the long, langerous end of meal, where I'm sitting around talking to my friends

or talking to my family, and maybe I'm starting to get a little bored or restless and that cues me to overeat. Avoiding that trigger is not the answer. There's something else that is the answer. Absolutely. Right. So somebody can say, well, if I void the trigger, it's not going to trigger the behavior. That is true. But avoidance itself takes a lot of work and it's fragile at best. Because we can't avoid those things forever. Like when am I going to do? At the, as soon as I'm full, get up from the table,

floss my teeth, brush them, and declare the meals over for me, you guys can sit here and talk. I'm going to like check my phone. Exactly. Yes, you can see the downsides to the avoidance piece. Yes, you can see the downsides to the avoidance piece. All right, coming up, Judd talks about why changing behavior may not require you to dig into your past in some deep therapeutic way, something he calls the hunger test, why you should focus on contentment instead of satisfaction, and another Judd termed the pleasure plateau.

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It features a meditation teacher's car, a lie down, Maricio, and Matthew Hepburn. One of the things you say in this portion of the book is, and I'm interested in this, is that mapping your habit loops, while it may seem sort of surface level on, you know, seen from one angle, is quite sufficient. Like, you don't need to go on earth, your childhood traumas or all the other stuff that might be driving this. Yes. So those tend to trigger habit loops, but they have happened in the past.

So to change any behavior, you have to actually work with the habit itself. And if you look at the equations that, let's say, are good explanatory models for behavior, behavior change, whether it's forming a habit or breaking a habit, they don't have trauma or childhood history or anything like that in the equation. It's really dependent on, you know, we've got some reward value set for the behavior. Remember that's set and forget. And then our brain, it's only gonna change behavior based on

what happens next, which is paying attention. And this is really the second step of the book. Now, I want to emphasize, this isn't to say that we should ignore or not honor or not do therapy or whatever is helpful for people. Like if somebody wants to work with trauma, history, or things like that, that can be very helpful from a therapeutic standpoint.

But from a habit change standpoint, it's really focusing on the habit itself, you know, what's happening in the present because that's how we reinforce habits. And that's also how we can un-reinforce those habits. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. You do therapy. You're not arguing against therapy. You're just saying that as it pertains to breaking this habit, it might not be absolutely and utterly and irretrievably relevant. Yes. Well said. So step number two is interrupting your habit loops with awareness.

So in short, this goes back to what we talked about earlier, where willpower is more myth and muscle. So if we want to interrupt a habit and we want to change a habit, it actually requires one thing, which is awareness, right? And that's something I know you talk a lot about on this show. So awareness, I think if it is bringing this curious awareness to what's happening, so why is that so important for changing a habit? Well, if you look at the equations, and these actually go back to the 1970s. They explain behavior from animal models, mice, other animals to humans, you know, we as humans as well.

The formulas are actually pretty simple. It's basically current reward values based on the previous reward value plus an error term. And that error term can be differentiated into generally one of two things, what's called a positive or a negative prediction error. And what that means is, well, let's called a positive or a negative prediction error. And what that means is, well, let's use a concrete example and then we'll explain it.

So let's say that a new bakery opens up in my neighborhood. So if I go there and I have a certain reward value of chocolate cake in my mind for how much I like chocolate cake, like there's a certain chocolate cake that's really good, if I go there and I eat their chocolate cake and it's like the certain chocolate cake that's really good. If I go there and I eat their chocolate cake and it's like the best chocolate cake that I've ever had, I get what's called a positive prediction error, meaning it's better than predicted. I get a dopamine spritz in my brain

and I learn, hey, this is a good bakery. Come back here and eat more cake. Does that make sense? Yes. So the other scenario is that if I eat the cake, and I'm like, I've had better, I get what's called a negative prediction error. And that negative prediction error says,

hey, this cake is not as good as your standard. So don't bother. Don't come back and eat more cake, right? So more dopamine, spritzing, more learning. Both of those require awareness. If I go into the bakery and I get a phone call and I'm, you know, it's a really important call and I get my cake and I'm talking on the phone and I'm really paying attention to the conversation. I look down in the cake's gone, I have to do it again, you know, if my wife says, hey, how was the cake? I don't know.

to do it again, you know, if my wife says, hey, how is the cake? I don't know. I didn't pay attention. It wasn't so good that it took me away from my conversation. It wasn't so bad that it took me away from my conversation. So that error term is critically dependent upon awareness. So we have to pay attention. That's what's going to change behavior. So that's where it's simple, not necessarily easy, but that's the critical behavior change method or technique or tool. If you want to think of it as a tool, awareness is a tool. And the nice thing is we all have awareness, it's just a matter of training it. So the bottom line here is where the rubber hits the road in your plan to get us to turn the volume down on overeating, where the rubber hits the road is paying attention before during and after we eat.

Yes. Yes. And this is where a meditation habit, while not absolutely a must can be quite helpful because in mindfulness meditation we are tuning up our ability to pay attention. It can be extremely helpful, especially if somebody has a regular practice where they have tuned their awareness of their body. It can be extremely helpful. So, for example, when I first started working as a psychiatrist, I was working with doing a group with a bunch of women with binge eating disorder. And it took several weeks of these weekly group medical visits for me to even realize that

they had no idea what the difference was between hedonic and homostatic hunger. Basically, they said, oh, I have a craving, I eat, I have a craving, I eat. And that they couldn't tell the difference of whether this is their body saying, hey, I need calories or if this is their emotion saying, hey, I need soothing. So that's an example of people who just hadn't had the opportunity to start calibrating their awareness and paying attention to their body. So that was one of the places that we started was, hey, let's tune in, let's start paying attention.

Well, a meditation practice can be helpful. You're not saying, you can't do my plan if you're not a daily active meditator. Absolutely. And in fact, we've seen in our clinical studies that these informal practices, these informal awareness practices are really the key element here. And they can be inspirational for people where they start to see results by paying attention as they eat, as compared to shaming themselves for not meditating, just like they're not exercising and not this and not that. So I really start wherever somebody is at. And you know, everybody, if they're eating, let's start there. You don't need to take extra time. It's just about starting to bring some

curiosity in as somebody eats. And so they can start to pay attention, like you're saying, before they eat, oh, why am I reaching for food? So I think of it as the why what and how, like why am I reaching for food? Am I hungry or am I emotionally charged, you know, or is it habit? What am I reaching for? You know, am I reaching for comfort food because I need some comforting or am I reaching for something healthy?

And then how am I eating? Am I paying attention as I eat or am I just gobbling it down or am I eating it mindlessly while I'm doing something else? Just to amplify your point about not needing to be some heavy duty meditator in order to do your plan, which really involves a lot of free range on the go, informal meditation practice, or just paying attention practice. You don't even have to use the word meditation. But to amplify that point,

I've had periods of time where I've been practicing inspired by you upwards of two hours a day of meditation, and I've been so busy and so stressed that I would still be overeating because I wasn't bringing my mindfulness into these key moments. And so I think you can almost start with bringing mindfulness and awareness

or paying attention into informal moments during your life and then reverse engineered that into a meditation practice. Absolutely. And I think that just so nobody just glosses over that, I think that bears repeating, right? So we can start with these informal practices. We can see how the informal practices help us.

They're rewarding unto themselves. And that can form a positive feed-forward loop where our brain says, oh, that was helpful. What else might be helpful? Oh, maybe I'll actually try meditating. Okay, so let's talk about some of these informal practices. You have an exercise I don't want to talk you about. It's called the hunger test.

Can you walk us through it? Yeah, so we formulated this. It was actually based on my... the group that I was working with with these folks that had been cheating disorder, we just looked to see what are the typical symptoms that come up when somebody is hungry, what are the typical feelings and symptoms that come up when somebody's stressed, for example, or emotionally charged, and what comes up when somebody's bored, because there's a lot of bored eating out there.

So people can, we think of it as a check box. For example, somebody can feel restless when they're physiologically hungry or when they're stressed out. And so there's some overlap between some of these feelings. So we have people just go through a checklist and start to notice, like, oh, well, what's happening in my experience, which is in itself already a stealth awareness

exercise. So to speak, right, we're getting people to pay attention. And then we have them think back to, well, when was the last time you ate, right, was it six hours ago versus six minutes ago? And because that can help differentiate, if the restlessness is there and you ate six hours ago, that might mean something different than if the restlessness is there and you ate six minutes ago, right? So the six minutes might be, hey, that might be more of a stress or an emotional response as compared to the six hours, which might be, hey, your stomach needs philic. So having people just do that checklist helps them start to calibrate. Oh, this comes up due to emotions.

Oh, this comes up due to actual physiologic hunger. And just like these women in my group, it helps people to start to recalibrate, kind of get to know their body again. So they can start to see, oh, this is what physiologic hunger feels like. Oh, this is what a craving to eat feels like to avoid something, so that they can just start

by being more informed about what's happening in their experience. And so this, stating the blazingly obvious here, but this is the crucial move to breaking the habit. Like, so you have a craving and then you investigate. And that move of investigating is what can stop you from eating when you're not hungry, which breaks the whole loop.

Yes, and I wouldn't say it is the crucial, I would say it is a very helpful element. And so what our research found was that the crucial element is changing that reward value, which also takes awareness. Think of this hunger test as a calibration. So it helps us calibrate that awareness so we can pay more attention. And then the craving tool is that critical reward value changing experience. So we have to calibrate, okay, am I hungry? Am I not hungry? But we also have to

pay attention to see how rewarding is this behavior for me, right? This goes back to the positive negative prediction error. So for example, if we're overeating, first we have to pay attention to our body to see when we're full and when that becomes overeating. And then we have to see how rewarding or unrewarding that overeating feels. This is actually a critical difference between things like satisfaction and contentment.

This may sound like splitting hairs, but it's actually really important. So somebody can eat a large holiday meal, they're like, oh, that was satisfying. But how content do they feel? There's actually a subtle difference between those two. And the contentment is really the marker that we're looking at, because somebody can be pretty discontent, especially if they pay attention to their stomach, which is saying, hey, you ate too much.

This doesn't feel so good, right? And so we found that contentment was a better differentiator than satisfaction was. We had to do a bunch of testing to actually find that out and see that that was the case. So we can actually use contentment as a meter and have people pay attention as they eat, right? What type of food are they eating, how much are they eating, and how content do they feel afterwards? What that does is if they feel discontent after they overeat, for example, and this is one

of the studies that we published a couple of years ago. If they really pay attention as they overeat, that reward value in their brain shifts below zero in as few as 10 to 15 times of them doing that. 10 to 15, right? Which makes sense because from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains, you know, they can't be chased by the saber-to-tiger 20 times to realize that that's dangerous, right? Which makes sense because from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains, you know, they can't be chased by the saber-to-tiger 20 times to realize that that's dangerous, right? We have to adapt pretty quickly to a changing environment. So our bodies are actually set up to change pretty quickly when they get accurate information, but we have to give them accurate information and that comes from paying attention from being aware as we eat. That all makes complete sense. I think where I'm a little confused is if I've done the hunger test

correctly, won't that stop me from overeating and therefore there won't be anything to pay attention to, anything negative to pay attention to? Not necessarily. So the hunger test just helps us tell when we're hungry versus when we're eating out of a craving for an emotion. It doesn't necessarily help us dial in to how rewarding or unrewarding that eating behavior is. Got it. Yes. Yes. Yes. So it'll let me know, okay, is it actually time to eat right now, but it won't tell me when to stop.

Yes. Yeah. Exactly. And so I talk about this concept of the pleasure plateau in the book. And I've seen this a lot clinically. And it's a very simple concept that a lot of my folks have found helpful where we'll have people pay attention as they eat and ask themselves with each bite. Is this more rewarding or less rewarding than the last bite? And our brain is set up, especially if we're hungry, to say, okay, more please, more please, more please. And if we eat, if we don't eat too quickly, because it takes about 15 minutes for our stomach to register fullness. So if we don't eat too quickly, we can start to see that that's

going to taper off. At first, it's going to say, more please, more please, and then it's going to say, yeah, maybe one more bite. Okay, maybe, okay, okay, I'm done. We hit that pleasure plateau where our brain is saying, you've had enough. If we don't pay attention, we go right off the cliff of overindulgence, which is the clean plate clubbers, the habitual overeaters, all this stuff where we're not paying attention. But if we pay attention carefully, we can actually stop when we're full. And that is more rewarding than over indulging. So we've gotten two wins there. One is we haven't eaten more than we need. And also, it

feels better. Our body is registering and saying, Hey, that was a good thing. Notice how none of that requires like, Oh, I shouldn't overeat. I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't do that. Right. I'm I should I should do what the diet tells me to do. I shouldn't eat this specific food because, you know, I saw some podcasters say I shouldn't eat it. Whatever, it's more about listening to your body and letting our innate natural reward system kick in. Absolutely. And I think pragmatically, that's what the intuitive eating is all about. And it's nice 25 years later to do the scientific studies to show what they're pointing at, you know, where we can put this in clear specific neuroscientific terms.

So I think it might be worth saying a little bit more about, you've used this term mindful eating and you've given us some tools, the hunger test, the pleasure plateau. But is there more to say in terms of the practicality of mindful eating? Yes, I think there is. I think that's a really good question because often there are a lot of misconceptions around mindful eating. You've got to eat slowly. For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction, there's this famous raise and exercise,

getting people to pay attention. Sometimes for the first time, they spend 20 minutes eating a single raisin, that type of thing. I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what mindful eating is. I would say what can be helpful is to really get back to the basic principles of like, what's the core of my infelating, which is really being curiously aware as somebody eats. And so if we don't have 30 minutes to sit down and pay attention to each bite of a meal, we can start by paying attention wherever we can, which could start

with like how hungry am I, right? And paying attention there. Or am I eating because I'm hungry or am I stressed or things like that. And then when we do have, you know, even a few minutes or even a few moments to pay attention as we eat, we can just really see if we can remove the distractions and just pay full attention as we eat so we can really taste whatever is going into our mouth, whether it's food or drink or whatever. That helps with two things. One, it helps us enjoy what we're eating, if it's food that we enjoy. And it can also help us start to differentiate these chemical, crevajenic materials,

like the Doritos and the Cheetos, from things that are healthy. To give a concrete example of that, I used to be addicted to eating gummy worms. So when I started paying attention, when I eat gummy worms, I started noticing, I still get this cringe feeling when I eat gummy worms. I started noticing I still get this cringe feeling and when I remember it, it's like this sickly sweet petroleum type product. The mouth feel is weird.

They're kind of too sweet and they kind of make me want to eat the next one while I'm chewing on the one that's in my mouth. So I didn't notice that forever. This wasn't until I think grad school or residency that I started really paying attention to gummy worms. And I'm like, these aren't actually that good. Now we can have gummy worms or gummy bears or gummy anything in the house. And I'll look at it and I just remember the last time,

I'm like, no, thanks. In contrast, when I pay attention, one of my favorite foods is blueberries. And I don't know about you, but they have this perfect sweetness. And I don't crave the next one. I'm just enjoying what I'm eating, especially like a really plump, crispy, juicy blueberry.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Mm-hmm. And I don't over-indulge. I'm not looking for the next one. And I don't over-indulge. I'm not looking for the next one. And I'm very content after eating those blueberries. And you need a list to say, my body thanks me for the blueberries over the gummy worms. As I'm listening to them, I'm thinking,

and hopefully this isn't too much of a non-sequitur that there's a red pill aspect to all of this. Like we are being manipulated by the larger culture trying to tell us that we should look a certain way by these food companies, that engineer food, that makes us want more, even while we're still chewing the thing that's in our mouth. What you're suggesting here, and I think you're standing on the shoulders of the intuitive eating folks before you is to like take your power back. Yes, absolutely. We as individuals have a tremendous amount of power

and it really stems from simply learning how to pay attention and be curious. And the nice thing is those curiosity muscles build themselves as we see how powerful they are. It doesn't feel like, oh, I've got to go and work out my curiosity muscles. It's like, oh, that was helpful. Maybe I'll do that again and again and again. So for people who want to try mindful eating the next meal, we do what? We try to do a hunger test as we're heading into the meal, and then just try to simply pay attention to the best of our ability while we're eating to tune into the satiety cues, are we full or not, and then see what it feels like at the end of the meal,

whether we've eaten just the right amount or not enough or too much and let the brain start learning. Yes, and I think there are some very simple training wheels that we can add to that. For example, putting our fork or our spoon down between bites so that we're really paying attention. And the other thing is, just to to state the obvious that we're putting all the distractions away. So many of us have our phone out, a book out, are sitting in front of the television when we eat. So this is really about sharing a meal with ourselves. Yeah, I've had one of the first big changes I've made when I got into it, and to it

of eating is not eating with my phone, not eating in front of the TV, just actually taking a break to eat. And this kind of brings me to the next question because in the intuitive eating world, you don't have to eat monk like a lone, although, you know, that's great. It certainly counts to eat undistracted with other people. But other people can be distracting. So how do we mindfully eat in social situations, whether it's family, dinner or a party? Yeah, it's a really good question. And that is a challenge. I'm not going to say, oh, here's an easy solution to that. That can be very challenging. There are a

couple of things that can be helpful here for people to play with. And this is really about Tuzerone Adventure, see what works for you. So for example, if somebody is getting into a big conversation, they can notice that and put their fork down, have the conversation. And then in the natural law and the conversation, take a moment to take a few bites mindfully. The other thing we can do is invite other people that we're having a meal with to pay attention as we eat. And it's not like, hey, now I'm going to do this mindfully eating exercise.

It's like, wow, that food looks really good. Let's explore, I'm going to take a bite. What does this really taste like? And so we could even do this in a shared environment as a shared exploration, because so many people aren't paying attention as they eat, it's often welcome. They're like, oh, I didn't notice that before. Oh, wow, there's some lemon notes or whatever with my broccoli or whatever I'm eating. And so we can be creative when we know what the core principle is, which is to pay attention as we eat

and not habitually be shoveling food into our mouth when we're in conversation. And I think there are lots of ways that people can play with that and be very creative with how they implement it. For me, the biggest challenge all these years into, I mean, I first learned about mindful eating when I went on my first meditation retreat in 2010 and, you know, I've been meditating for a minute and I've been engaged

into it, eating for a couple of years. For me, the biggest problem still is remembering to do it and not just rushing through everything because I'm rushing so much. Does that sound familiar to you? Is it something you struggle with as well? You see see in your patients? Yes, and yes, and yes. They're remembering. And so one thing that we can do to help this, and I do this a lot with folks in our email program is even if we've gone through, you know, a meal or a snack or something like that where we've done it mindlessly, we can go back and look at the results. If we can recall any emotional or embodied feel to what

the result was, it still counts for learning. And what I mean by that is, I think of this as like this retrospective second step where we can look in the rear view mirror as we're driving past our car crash of an eating episode. And we can say, what did I get from that? And if we can feel into it, it's like, oh, wow, I felt guilty, I had the gut bomb or whatever, if we can still feel into the emotion, we can still learn from it. Because our brain will say,

oh yeah, that wasn't so great, was it? So we can get that retrospectively, and it still counts. I think of this as building our disenchantment database, right? So as we pay attention to something and get those negative prediction errors, we become less excited. We become disenchanted with that eating. And this actually goes all the way back to Buddha psychology. You know, you may be familiar with the King Pasinati. He came to the Buddha

for advice about overeating. Did you know that? No, I didn't. No, yeah, actually, A Nali of you may know him. Yeah, he's been on this show. Oh, great. So Anolio, this western monk, who's an amazing scholar, wrote a couple of commentaries on the Buddhist view, basically, on overeating. And basically, Passenade was, it sounds like, if you can interpret the sutras correctly, or accurately, that he was probably had some clinical obesity going on. And so the Buddha said, basically pay attention as you eat.

If something like, you know, people who are constantly mindful know their measure with the food they've gotten or something like that. And what he was saying is like, if you pay attention when you eat, you're not gonna to overeat. That's the pleasure plateau that we've been talking about. And then he goes on to say all of the health benefits that come from that.

So the Buddhist psychology was describing this back in the day, centuries before paper was even invented. But it's the same principle, right? It's about that reinforcement learning and becoming disenchanted. And all that doesn't chamomile needs is awareness. I sometimes think about, you know, when you get a new iPhone, and I apologize to anybody who doesn't use iPhones, and maybe I'm not sure I don't, I've never really played with an Android. Maybe this technology is on an Android too. But

when you get a new iPhone, and you, it has to learn your face, and you'll have to hold it all over. You have to move the phone around and it's learning the contours of your face. You can see that it's learning and learning and learning and learning and learning and learning and Bing. It finally, it's like, okay, I got your face. And so now anytime you hold your face up in front of this phone, it's going to unlock. I feel like that's happening with the brain all the time.

You are just teaching and teaching and teaching. And at some point, bang, it gets it. And you get disenchanted. You don't want to do that stupid thing anymore. Yes. Yes. And this also goes back to the Buddhist psychology. There's a lot written about exploring gratification to its end.

The Buddha wasn't about willpower. He was about awareness. And he was showing the power of awareness, you know, with all sorts of behaviors. You know, it was something like, you know, it wasn't until I explored gratification to its end that knowledge and vision arose, aka, I got enlightened. And so he's talking about like seeing very, very clearly how unrewarding these unhealthy behaviors are. And so obviously we're talking about eating, but this also extends to things like, you know, judgment or self-judgment.

And so maybe we can talk about that a little bit because this is really, really critical. And I see this a ton in our program and also in my clinic where people judge themselves. I think Rob, who I read about in my book, I think he told me how for years and years he would not have any mirrors in his apartment because he just couldn't, he was low to look at himself, right? So he just didn't have any mirrors. So there's a huge amount of self-judgment and there's a huge amount of societal judgment, which we touched on earlier around, you know, how we should look. And that self-judgment can actually spawn on healthy eating habits, right? So self-judgment is unpleasant. And so

sometimes that can lead to eating. I've had a number of patients with binge eating disorder who have negative emotions and then the way they suit themselves is by bingeing. I'm thinking of one in particular who would eat entire large pizzas in one sitting and she was doing this like 20 out of 30 days a month. And you know, she would actually binge on top of a binge because she would then have self-loathing on top of her negative emotion. The only way she knew how to cope was by eating so ironically she would eat more. There's a huge amount of self-judgment, societally, and we can apply these same principles to that

where we compare what's it like when I judge myself to what's it like when I'm kind to myself. I know you've been exploring, you know, self-compassion, kindness a lot. How does that sit with you? I find that I sometimes talk about shame as a kind of psychic constipation. So if you get stuck in self-loathing and shame, nothing gets learned. It blocks the facial recognition program. Nothing moves. And kindness doesn't mean letting yourself off the hook. It's not a calgon take me away type of bubble bath situation. It's more like talking to yourself

the way you would talk to a good friend. You would tell a good friend the truth, hopefully. When you can be honest with yourself without getting into hatred and self-loathing and castigation, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, all that lands for me. Yeah, I like the psychic constipation. And I like how you're differentiating, I think of it as self-indulgence is different than self-care.

We can meet our needs, and that's critical because often we need something like we're lonely, or we're angry, or frustrated, or something, and we're feeding our wants by eating, for example, or judging ourselves because it's something we can do versus meeting our needs, which is, hey, I need some emotional support right now. You know, food's not going to provide that. It's only going to provide a temporary distraction. So, meeting our needs is really critical, and it helps us step out of these old habits of feeding our wants. Coming up, Dr. Judd talks about something he calls the bigger, better offer,

unforced freedom of choice, and whether we can still eat gummy worms. I'm Afwaher. I'm Peter Fragerpan. And in our new podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen a Picasso work, or the Picasso brand on something.

But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side, too, that makes us look at his art in a different way. He was a genius, and he was very problematic. Follow Legacy Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy Add Free on Amazon Music, or by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. a little bit whether I've committed any journalistic malpractice here because I feel like we've stepped into the third part of the challenge that you're laying out in the book the 21-day challenge without really announcing that we've stepped into it. So the first part is mapping your habit loops, getting a sense of why do you do what you

do. The second was interrupting your habit loops with awareness paying attention so that you either don't do the habitual thing or when you do do it, you realize that it kind of sucks, so then you don't do it going forward. And then the third, which we haven't explicitly named, but we are kind of talking about some of it, which is identifying what you call a bigger, better offer. So I know we've covered some of this, but maybe just be a little bit more explicit if you're up for it.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So here, this actually builds right on the step two. So if we think of reward-based learning being really the strongest learning mechanism in our brains, it can help us become disenchanted with old habits, like we've talked about, you know, overeating doesn't feel very good. And that same mechanism can help propel behaviors that are more rewarding forward. So we can compare overeating to what it's like to stop when we're full. And the stopping when our full is that bigger, better offer because it feels

better. And so our brain is going to naturally gravitate toward things that are more rewarding. The more rewarding thing could simply be stepping out of an old bloop, such as overeating or snacking when we're not hungry or stress eating or eating a bunch of fast food as compared to healthy food. So any of these can be bigger better offers. For me, a bigger better offer is blueberries compared to gummy worms. Right? So there's an example of this third step where I compare what's it like to eat gummy worms versus what's it like to eat blueberries?

And not cognitively. I want to be super clear here. This isn't me thinking, oh yeah, of course gummy worms have all these food colorings that are should be banned in the US because they've been banned in Europe forever. It's like God knows wetter in those things. I know that those aren't healthy for me, but the knowing isn't good enough. Our thinking brain is not nearly as strong as our feeling body. What I'm talking about here is feeling into my last experience when I had gummy worms,

feeling into my last experience when I ate blueberries and letting my brain be the decider. So to me, it's no brainer, right? Blueberries taste better, they're the bigger better offer. It's easy for me to pick blueberries over gummy worms. In fact, you know, like I said, I can't remember the last time I've had a gummy worm because I'm just not interested. In this part of the book, the third part of the book, you talk about unforced freedom of choice. What does that mean? Yes.

So that came from one of our studies where after about 10 years of looking at these behavior change patterns, we started doing focus groups with people in our program and we were trying to get from their own words and their own language, what they were noticing for this third step, and what they described to us, this is after a bunch of qualitative research, they were describing these elements. So one is this freedom of choice, right? So I can choose, and they were using the word choice, this is from them, you know, I can choose blueberries over gummy worms that comes from this unforeseen freedom of choice, emerging from embodied awareness.

The body says, hey, choose blueberries over gummy worms because they're more rewarding. I love that language because it's not mine, it's theirs. They're describing beautifully exactly what this third step is all about. It's about paying attention, noticing what the result of a behavior is. And then that leads to this freedom of choice as compared to this food jail that people often put themselves in because of food-based rules. You know, I should eat this, I shouldn't eat that, right? There's no freedom of choice there.

This is somebody else telling you what to do. The freedom of choice comes from this wisdom and the wisdom comes from the awareness that helps calibrate our system over time. In your system, can one ever eat a few gummy worms and without it being, you know, like mindfully, if you gummy worms and enjoy them and call it a day. Absolutely. Yes. My immediate response was, well, why would I eat gummy worms? But that's just me. So there might be people that aren't as disenchanted

with gummy worms as I am. So what you're highlighting here is this again is not about food rules, right? You should need gummy worms. This is about, go ahead and eat gummy worms. And this is also very in line with intuitive eating. Like eat gummy worms, see what happens. You know, go for it. And people might notice, I just want a couple of chips.

And that's okay. I'm thinking of one of my clinic patients who used to eat an entire bag, and this wasn't a snack size bag, but an entire bag of potato chips every night. And she did this as a bonding exercise. She did this to bond with her daughter. So, she and her daughter would watch the television show together, and she would just eat this entire bag mindlessly. So I said, go ahead and eat them. Just pay attention as you do. So can you guess

Go ahead and eat them. Just pay attention as you do. So can you guess how many potato chips she stopped at as she started paying attention? Two? Ding ding ding. Yes, it was two. I call her my two potato chips later because after about two when you really pay attention, that's probably enough salt for a week. You know, I don't know about you.

You know, I enjoy potato chips, but they're pretty salty. There's no getting around that. After a couple of potato chips, I can put them down. That's exactly what my patient did. I guess I just keep coming back to, I still after all of these years, fail to pay attention. I forget to do this. And, you know, I mean, I don't do it that often, but, you know, if I'm probably my son and I'm tired and there's a lot of junk food around, I just mindfully eat a bunch of it. I still do this. So like, I don't find, I've not reached some point where the disenchantment has clicked in so deeply that I don't fuck up anymore. Yeah, that's normal. And so if something is not terribly unruording, right, it's going

to be a slower role in terms of having that disenchantment build. And it may be that there's nothing wrong with indulging every now and then, right? It also helps remind us what it feels like when we, you know like when we don't. So you mentioned you start craving healthy food again. That's your body system saying, hey, not back on track because that's like a forced thing. But it's like, hey, this path over here, you like that path. Maybe you want to walk on that a little bit more. And I can only speak from my own experience. But over time,

as that path becomes more well-worn, my body just prefers it more and more and more and more. And so, you know, there are fewer times when I find myself, you know, reaching for the whatever. Early in this conversation, we talked about trauma. I don't want to come back to it because we talked about the fact that you don't need to go on earth all of your childhood traumas in order to understand the basics of a habit loop. And yet, you do come back to trauma in the book because, as you know, and as many listeners, no part of trauma is a dissociation from your body, which is adaptive in the moment. So if you're a kid and something,

you have an adverse event, you can dissociate because it's the mind's way of protecting you, but that means you're really even more cut off from your body than most of us are in this culture. And so these techniques of awareness that you're recommending can be quite difficult for people who've experienced trauma.

Absolutely, I'm glad you bring that up. So if somebody's had a trauma history that's affecting them in modern day, you know, sometimes people have had traumatic histories and they can move on from them. They've moved on in their lives. Other times, it seems to be weighing somebody down. And so certainly having some trauma informed therapy or other types of trainings can be very, very helpful in being able to release that. And I've seen, you know, I'm thinking of somebody in our unwinding anxiety program who was in his 60s and he'd had some pretty severe childhood trauma. And the way we kind of talked through it and he came to this conclusion that he needed to honor his childhood self and the only

way that his childhood self could protect him in those moments when he was a kid was to worry, right? Because that's the only thing he had control over. And so it was kind of like a pair of shoes that he'd been wearing forever and they no longer fit. And he was realizing that the worrying was actually weighing him down. It was hurting him now in his 60s. So he needed to honor his childhood self in terms of like, this was the best that I could do in those terrible circumstances. And I can move on from that. I can get a new pair of shoes.

And so I think it's really important to be able to honor ourselves in doing the best that we can. And then also check in to see, do those shoes still fit? Or are they actually hurting me? Final question for me is that I'm just wondering, you and I are well-paid white dudes, and there are people in our culture, in our society, on this planet who do not have the same access to food that we do, either because they don't have enough food or they're in a what's sometimes referred to as a food

desert where there just there isn't access to that many types of food. So how do if I'm listening and I'm and I fall into this category is your plan doable for me? I'm glad you bring this up because these social determinants of health are critical. And so putting it bluntly, some people have more access to healthy food than other people, full stop. So here, I think, I'd love to see more, and I know a lot of people are advocating for this,

but it's not happening as quickly as I would like to see. So policy level changes, where, you know, we're moving away from things like the corn subsidy that make high fructose corn syrup very cheap and therefore fast food, very cheap. So if somebody is a single mother working three jobs, taking care of three kids, she's got to get calories in her kids. And so there can be these very convenient ways that are inexpensive to feed her kids. So starting there, I'd love to see that start with something healthier than we have right now.

And a lot of that comes back to policy and government regulations. So I think those are critical pieces. This book is not going to solve everybody government regulations. So I think those are critical pieces. This book is not gonna solve everybody's problems. I think it can help us start to see where we do have power as individuals. And hopefully it can also help us differentiate where things are beyond us.

And then we can advocate for that very needed change. Let me ask you one final question, which is, can you please just shamelessly plug your new book, your old books, your apps, anything that you want people to know about? I'd be happy to. So I'll start by saying, there's this guy, Dan Harris, and we did an eating episode or a program in his 10% happier apps. I'll start there. Had a lot of fun with that. We recorded that a couple of years ago.

And then my new book is The Hunger Habit. You can get it anywhere, books or soul. Please support your independent bookstores. My other book that I mentioned is Unwinding Anxiety. And then the apps that I mentioned are eat right now and also Unwinding Anxiety. You can find information for all of those things on the Dr. Judd website, drjudd.com. And you can also find Judd's immensely popular

TED Talk, so go to the website, sign up for all of it. Judd, congratulations on this new book. Great work as always, and great to talk to you. Thank you, really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again to Dr. Judd, I was great to talk to my guy. Stay tuned for part two of our series coming up on Wednesday with the writer Virginia Sol Smith. She has a very provocative and in my opinion, quite useful things to say.

By the way, if you'd like to hear more from Judd, we've put links to his previous appearances on the show in which he has discussed anxiety, habits, and addictions, and even answered some listener questions, we've put those links in the show notes. And we've also put a link to the episode that I mentioned with Evelyn Tribbley that completely changed my own approach to food. In real time, you can actually hear it play out. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Suckerman, Justin Davie Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer,

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell, is our director of audio and post-production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackie leads our marketing and Tony Magiar is our director of podcasts, finally Nick Thorburn of islands, wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and add free right now by joining Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or

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