The Rich Roll Podcast - Breaking Hunger Habits: Dr. Jud Brewer On How To Fix A Broken Relationship With Food

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

As the new year unfolds, resolutions often falter, particularly those related to food habits. Acknowledge this truth with gravitas—most diets fail most of the time. Neuroscientist Dr. Jud Brewer challenges conventional weight loss wisdom, exposing the myth of willpower from a neuroscience perspective. In his third podcast appearance (RRP episodes 471 and 586), Dr. Brewer, Brown University’s Mindfulness Center director and School of Public Health and Psychiatry professor, delves into his latest book, The Hunger Habit. Drawing on two decades with thousands of patients, he advocates attention, mindfulness, and curiosity for healthier choices. Evolutionarily, our brains, seeking certainty, create habit loops with triggers, behaviors, and results. The reinforcing dopamine spritz forms a stubbornly resistant, recalcitrant loop. Dr. Brewer scientifically addresses breaking these habits. Today, we explore the neuroscience of habits, dopamine’s role, the absence of willpower in behavior change, and the importance of self-acceptance. Note: This discussion may be confronting for those with eating disorders; seek help at www.nationaleatingdisorders.org. Dr. Brewer’s blend of Eastern traditions and hard science provides practical solutions. This episode is a must-listen if you’re wrestling with cravings or food compulsions. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: SEED: Enjoy 25% OFF 👉 seed.com/RICHROLL ON: Get 10% off on.com/RICHROLL AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs 👉 drinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich

If we rely on the magic pills and the magic bullets and the magic injections, we're never going to get at peace with ourselves and develop that self-efficacy that's critical for everything. Now, well into the new year, we've kind of reached that point where most people's resolutions have already begun to falter, particularly our habits around food. This willpower approach doesn't have neuroscientific backing. Neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist, Dr. Judd Brewer, back for his third appearance on the show, has answers that I think will profoundly change

everything you thought you knew about how to lose weight and how to eat to thrive. We're engineering food to manipulate a specific thing. It's not about nutrition. It's not about optimal health. It's about consuming. Most diets fail most of the time.

This episode is a must-listen. And Judd's latest book, The Hunger Habit, is a must-read. Instead of trying to fight your craving, especially when it's all-consuming, we can't fight it. So what can we do instead? Well, Judd, so great to see you. Good to see you. Nice to have you in the studio. I'm very excited to talk to you today. Previously, we have gone in-depth into your backstory, your credentials,

etc. We're not going to do that today, but I do think it would be worthwhile for you to just briefly give us a glimpse of your background and your experience leading up to this point of tackling hunger and food, which is a universal subject that we all contend with. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the short version of it is, you know, I did an MD-PhD program, was very interested in like how stress affects the immune system and things like that. Was working in mouse models and then shifted my career when I decided to become a psychiatrist, last thing I thought I was going to do. But I started meditating at the beginning of medical school and got into that and was starting to realize how little I knew about my own mind. to realize how little I knew about my own mind. And so when I finished my MD, PhD, I shifted my career to really like going wholeheartedly into like neuroscience and clinical trials and learning all that stuff. And there was a big deficit in, and you know this, in addiction treatment, right?

And so this is in the early aughts. So started just kicking the tires on mindfulness training to see if it could help. Like first with cocaine and alcohol use disorder and found that it was as good as CBT. Then started doing smoking cessation studies. Got like five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment with mindfulness. I was like, oh, there's something here. And then we started doing some of the neuroscience, like the neuroimaging and looking to see what was going on. But as we were starting to try to figure out how to scale some of this, because as a clinician,

I want to see what's going to work for my patients and what's going to actually get out there and help other patients. I was doing some work with like developing this app for smoking cessations, Craving to Quit app. And somebody that was pilot testing it, they were saying, it's changing my eating habits. And at first I blew that comment off

because most people gain about 15 pounds when they quit smoking, you know, the stimulant effects gone and all this. And they also replaced that oral fixation with food. But they said something that made me look sideways where I was like, they said, hey, you know, it's actually, I'm cutting down on my snacking using these practices. And I said, you know, did the double take and said, say more about that. And they said, you know, I'm using some of these principles and practices that you help people with smoking cravings with to curb my eating cravings.

I never thought about working in the eating space, but it put my mind on the track of like, well, could we help with this clinical obesity epidemic? Because, you know, in medical school, I learned this calories in calories out, the formula is still correct, but they never taught us the how they just assume that, you know, you are the doctor and your patient's going to listen. And they're just magically going to be able to use their willpower or whatever to cut down on, on, you know, snacking or overeating or eating junk food. And clinically, I didn't see that, you know, I was like, wait, what did I miss here? You know, that's kind of kind of what brings us to this work with eating

is that I started approaching it from the lens of habit change instead of like the willpower approach. And that's when things got really, really interesting. So that's the long and short of it. Yeah, I feel like it's a natural progression of all the work that you've done. The work that you've done in the field of anxiety and stress, smoking cessation, habit formation and habit change in the context of addictions and compulsive behaviors, expanding the aperture beyond the 12-step model or the disease model in general to bring mindfulness practices, meditation, awareness into our behaviors to kind of connect us more deeply with ourselves and allow us to, in a nonjudgmental way, understand and take inventory of how we behave as a baseline to then shift those behaviors.

And you've had great success with that. So it's not a surprise that you would now focus on our eating habits because I think everybody can relate to having some kind of compulsivity around certain types of foods or struggling to maintain their weight. I mean, this is a universal thing. So it's very natural. I know you shared before the podcast even started that it hadn't occurred to you to kind of write a book about this. But to me, it feels a very natural progression of your career. Yeah. Well, our scientific data are really strong.

And I think so many people don't still – this blows my mind. They still don't connect the mind and the body. And to me, they're inseparable. My sense is from how you operate, you see that as well. It's like you can't approach one without the other. And so many people are just trying to divorce the head from the body and just treat the, you know, clinical obesity or whatever as a physical thing. It doesn't work that way.

You got to treat the whole human. Right. The thesis being like, if you want to change your relationship with food, you have to change yourself. Yes. You know, nobody wants to hear that though. They want the quick fix. Where's the pill? You have the 21 day program. We're going to talk about that. But yeah, that's the kind of bad news

baked into this, which is actually good news because you end up getting much more than you bargained for if you decide to sign up for this adventure. Yeah. There's no going back once you start seeing how your brain works. So let's start out with some real basic stuff. Like what is a habit? Like from a neuroscientific perspective, like how do you define what a habit is before we even get into food?

Yeah, so you can think of a simple definition of a habit as basically something we do automatically. And habits are set up to help us not have to expend energy learning new things every day. You know, imagine wake up in the morning and you fall out of bed because you forgot how to walk. You know, you couldn't put your clothes on. You had to relearn that, had to relearn how to make coffee. You know, you can imagine we wouldn't make it past breakfast before needing another nap. So it's really about this set and forget

where we like set these habits, we forget about the details and that helps us do things automatically that really are really helpful so that we can have that cognitive energy to learn new things every day. And is there a specific area in the brain where this functionality is centered?

There are a number of networks that work together around this. And so one of the most studied networks is this dopaminergic reward-based network. You know, it involves the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and this dopamine spritzing that's really set up to help us form memories.

And so if you think of this from an evolutionary perspective, it's about, you know, being able to remember things like context dependent memory formation. So on the Savannah, when there weren't refrigerators and people had to remember where food was, any habit loop has three elements, right? A trigger, a behavior, and a result. So let's say they go on the Savannah, they find food, there's the trigger. They eat the food, there's the behavior. And then they've get this dopamine spritz in their brain, Actually, their stomach and their mouth, there's several places where dopamine is going

to send off firing for that dopamine to fire in the brain because it's that important to be able to get that signal across. And that says, hey, remember this, remember the context, remember the food, et cetera. And that's, you know, in modern day, we call that positive reinforcement. Isn't part of that dopaminergic pathway rooted in anticipation? It's not as much about the payoff when you actually indulge in the behavior and get the reward or the result. It is the emotional experience or the hormonal experience of anticipating that reward in the pursuit of that behavior? I'm glad you asked that question because it's a both and, where before we know that something's rewarding, we have to learn it.

So this is where surprise comes in. So when we're surprised, oh, I didn't know that was tasty. We get a dopamine spritz that says, hey, remember this. But then that dopamine firing shifts to anticipating it. So when we have a memory of that thing, we get this dopamine firing, not when we're there, but before we're there that says, go get it.

And it's this itchy, urgey quality that says, go do something, because that's adaptive, right? It says, you know, if you're hungry, don't just sit in the cave, go get the food, right? So it shifts from this firing of like, I learned something to the firing that you're hungry, don't just sit in the cave, go get the food, right? So it shifts from this firing of like, I learned something to the firing that you're talking about, which is anticipating getting it. So obviously there's an evolutionary incentive to develop habits as a race to perpetuate the species and all of that. I'm curious around the receptivity to new habits.

Obviously there's this adage, like you can't teach an old dog new tricks. From a neuroscience perspective, I suspect that there's more myth than truth in that. But we also know that we can learn languages or learn how to play instruments and do certain things at a young age with much more facility than we can when we're older.

So when you're thinking about habits or talking about habits, what's going on in the brain with respect to receptivity as we get older? Is it harder to break and form new habits or is it really not that much different? So the good news is we can break and form new habits. We have to be able to adopt in an ever-changing environment. I don't know if there's a little bit of a trail off as we age there. That's a good question. I don't know if there's a super clear answer on that. People used to think that the brain doesn't change and then they learn that you actually get neurogenesis and the hippocampus, you know, so they're new things that are coming out all the time. Pragmatically speaking, one thing that our brain,

we do know is that our brains are these prediction machines where they're always trying to predict the future. You know, it's called predictive processing. And what they're trying to do is get certainty, trying to get as much certainty as possible. And so that certainty is that old dog

having the old tricks and those tricks work for the old dog. And so the dog says, why should I change this? This is working for me. And the longer it's worked, this is our comfort zone, basically. The more it feels comfortable because our brain is saying, don't change, I know this works. So that feeling of the comfort zone is really our brain saying, hey, it works. And there's, in neuroscience, they call this the exploit-explore trade-off, where, you know, if you get a food source and it's a really good food source, you want to stay there

and exploit that as compared to like going off and trying to find another one because you might not find it and then you're, you know, you're missing out. But the problem is if you stay at a food source and it dries up, you've got to get that urge to go explore. So when in our modern day, when we can kind of set things more and more and more to like be constantly working for us, you know, it's like, oh, I eat the same food every week and I sit on the couch and watch this television show or whatever, the more that becomes ingrained. And that's where that feeling of the challenge of change comes in. that feeling of the challenge of change comes in. But old dogs, you know, like when the television shows start drying up, so to speak,

then suddenly we get antsy to find new ones. So it's there. Yeah. In the case of true compulsivity or legitimate addictive behavior patterns, what comes along for the ride with that is a whole, you know, sort of set of baggage around denial and like refusing to believe that this is no longer working for you and all the kind of rationalization, you know, despite, you know, external evidence telling you like this habit is not in service of your wellbeing, the recalcitrance of the human mind to accept that

is, you know, profound. Yeah, it's true. And with addiction, especially with that big manipulation of the dopamine system, that's where we fool ourselves, you know, and it's like, do this again. And that's really that, wow, that was a big dopamine hit. And so I think we get, you know, like you're saying, we fool ourselves because our brain is saying, no, that was a big dopamine hit that should be working. And so we're going to go through the denial, we fool ourselves because our brain is saying, no, that was a big dopamine hit. That should be working. And so we're gonna go through the done aisle. We're gonna ignore things. We're gonna do all these things where it's like,

no, keep doing this, keep doing this until we hit rock bottom. So as we move into a conversation around how all of these are applicable in the context of nutrition, it's worth noting or spending a few minutes acknowledging the fact that our kind of unhealthy relationship and habits around food are really a function of the modern Western world and the food environment in which we find ourselves. Like this book and

your work and everything that's going into thinking about how to reframe our habits around food would just be an irrelevant non-issue 200 years ago. Like this is a modern problem that we've created for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the amount of energy, time, money that's spent on engineering food, you know, that's very different than food sources evolving over millions of years, right? Those have perfected themselves. And here we're engineering food to manipulate a specific thing. It's not about nutrition.

It's not about optimal health. It's about consuming, like full stop. It's all about getting people to consume more. To get you to be as mindless as possible, to divorce you as thoroughly as imaginable from, you know, what's in your best interest, you know. When the term food addiction comes up, like, is food addiction a real thing? I guess it depends on how you define the term addiction, but how do you think about that? Well, it's certainly a debate in the

scientific community, in the medical community. People can debate all they want. From a pragmatic standpoint, you know, as a clinician, I'm looking at, and I learned this really simple definition of addiction in residency that I absolutely love, which is just continued use despite adverse consequences. And so if you look at it that way, it's not just the cocaine, the cigarette, the alcohol. It's social media, you know, like somebody's texting while driving, continued use despite adverse consequences. More dangerous than drunk driving in some studies, right? So food in the same way where people are over consuming,

you know, there's a continued use and there are adverse consequences when it comes to their health. You know, I'm thinking of clinical obesity here. And I want to make a distinction here. when it comes to their health. You know, I'm thinking of clinical obesity here. And I want to make a distinction here. In the modern science, if you look at the BMI, it's not a great marker of obesity. And so I think it's really important.

The debates are helping here where we're starting to distinguish like, hey, somebody could be fat and healthy. And then, you know, society says, hey, you're fat, you know, there's something, you know, all the fat shaming that comes with that. I think we need to stop that. We need to have that conversation and show people, hey, it may not be the societal norm. And that's the problem with society, not with the people. But that's different from clinical obesity. And so this BMI measure is a really quick and dirty and easy and cheap measure, you know, height and weight, you're done. But it's not good at differentiating lean muscle mass versus fat, especially if you

look at trunk obesity and like the visceral obesity that seem to be more dangerous than other types of fat. So here I'm talking about clinical obesity as compared to just, I shouldn't say just obesity, but there's a differentiation there. Right. So it's January. Everybody's writing out their New Year's resolutions. They're endeavoring to do all sorts of things. But at the top of that list generally is people want to lose weight.

They want to get a little bit more fit. They go on a diet. But you have this whole thesis around why diets don't work. So state your case, good doctor. I'd be happy to. And you don't have to go much farther than asking anybody that's been on a diet how well it's worked for them. You know, if you look back historically, probably the largest diet movement in the last century, in the U.S. at least, was around Weight Watchers, you know, formed in 1963. Interestingly, same year that Lay's had their famous potato chip challenge, bet you can't eat just one, right? Because this is about the designing of overconsumption.

So if you look at the dieting industry, there's new nomenclature around this called yo-yo dieting, right? And so over and over and over again, it's been shown that whatever diet somebody goes on, whether, you know, calorie restriction, this or that diet, if people are approaching it the standard way, which is just use your willpower, more likely than not, they're going to lose some weight and they're going to regain it. And sometimes they'll regain more, you know, they get rebound effects. And so we haven't seen consistent weight loss in any major clinical trial that really shows like, hey, this is going to do it long term through a calorie restriction standpoint. Yeah, it's very interesting. If you were to graph the kind of GDP of the weight loss industry over the last 50 or 60 years, you'd get this upward curve like it's just a massive business. With efficacy, it would just be like an X. The bigger the industry gets, the less efficacious the results and we continue to get more obese and more unhealthy. and more unhealthy. And I would add to that, that it's a great business model because they can say,

look, the formula is correct. If you make sure you burn more calories than you take in, you're going to lose weight. And so there must be something wrong with you if you can't follow the formula. And so they shame people, maybe not explicitly,

but people implicitly feel like there's something wrong with them. Oh, it's such a simple formula. I should be able to follow what's wrong with me. The problem is that they're relying on something from a neuroscience standpoint is more myth than muscle. Like this willpower approach doesn't have neuroscientific backing. Right. So that's the core kind of key premise at the root of every diet, which is you're going to have to rely on your willpower to make this work. As somebody who's been sober a minute and well-versed in the recovery parlance, I'm very familiar with the limits of willpower. Willpower will

avail you nothing in a true addiction context. So it makes me think about our relationship with food through that lens. If willpower is not the solution, it has to be a different approach altogether, which is what you get into with mindfulness and awareness and the like. But maybe explain why willpower doesn't work. Like why can't we just summon the will

to navigate the discomfort, change these habits, and get to the other side of it? It seems like it should. It seems like it should. And that's the question we can ask is, and this has been a debate that's been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is this, and we don't need to get into the willpower debate, because you can think of this as free will debate, right? If we have free will, we can make decisions and we can choose our fate. So by extension, we should be able to use our willpower to change habits. Philosophers tend to disagree that there is even a thing of willpower. They describe it more as an illusion that's part of the system. As do neuroscientists.

Yes. And so from a neuroscience standpoint, I mean, depends on how crazy you want to get here or, you know, science-y we want to get here. If you look at the equations for habit change, let's just go there and we can bypass the free will debate for now. There's no variable for willpower in behavior change, whether it's forming a habit or changing a habit. Willpower is not part of the equation. So then what is willpower? Like, is there a way to identify like a locus of it in the brain? And what is the kind of default disposition that we have or relationship that we have with willpower where we're so insistent that that's the path that we should be pursuing? Yeah. So the closest that people have gotten is their prefrontal cortex, and in particular, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

so kind of like more lateral and forward in our head. That seems to be involved in cognitive control. Cognitive control does not equal 100% willpower, but that's kind of how the best somebody can map, you know, the phrenology of willpower onto cognitive control. And when you look at that, it seems to be tied to kind of how rewarding a behavior is or isn't, and we can get into that in a minute.

That's the best that people have gotten is, well, here's the cognitive control centers of the brain. And again, these are networks. It's not just single brain regions. If you take that one step farther, where people have tried to find the locus of consciousness even, nobody's been able to find that yet. So what exactly is willpower? Where is it? The best I can suggest, I'll give you some baseless speculation, some BS. So my BS answer here is that one thing that is known, and if you look at Alzheimer's, for example, as an extreme example of this, is that we tend to confabulate.

We tell a story about the world that fits with how we see the world. And that's not limited to people with Alzheimer's disease. That's just where you can see, you know, somebody's like making something up that you're like, you know, I'm looking right here and they're like, I swear that's true. That's their brain trying to make sense of the world in a way where they're struggling with their neural connections aren't quite there. Some would suggest that we are doing that on a consistent basis. It's just that our stories line up better. And so we're like, oh, yeah, this must be me doing things. There's this famous Libet experiment from, I think, the 1970s.

They put EG electrodes on people's motor cortex and they timed when they had the urge to tap their finger on something, like something very simple. And they found that the motor cortex was getting ready to fire a full half second before they were consciously aware of it. And that's been replicated. It's a very elegant experiment. You could say, oh, there's good evidence of confabulation that we're confabulating.

We're saying, oh yeah, I just moved my hand when my hand was going to move and I had told the story that was consistent with my hand moving. So a lot of this could be driven by what our conditioned experience is going to do. And then we tell the story afterwards. And so that story includes willpower. Right. That also brings up the free will issue because if your neurons are firing or something is happening in your brain before you have a conscious awareness of a

decision that you're making or a behavior that you're engaging in, are you really consciously choosing that? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't want to go too deep down that because I do want to make this practical, but worth considering. Yeah, good footnote and go look up the Libet experiment. Well, we'll just say like, as they say in AA, like self-will, you know, will avail you nothing here. Well, if willpower doesn't work, what is efficacious in to help people reshape how they interact with food so that they can live healthier? Yeah. Well, the short answer is use your brain.

And the longer answer. Yeah, that's, I don't know. That's not helping me. Not pragmatic enough? Use your brain. Come on. Come on, Rich. Use your brain.

Yeah. Well, you tell the joke in the book of like the, what is it that, you know, you pay $5 and the guy shouts at you to stop it, you know? Yeah. That is a great Bob Newhart skit. Anybody should watch it. It's called Stop It.

So the way that we can look at this is what's consistent and what's powerful in the brain. So if we know that the prefrontal cortex is the youngest and the weakest part of the brain, so it's the first that goes offline when we're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, right? That's the HALT acronym. Anybody in addiction treatment knows.

If you can't rely on your willpower, you gotta see, well, what's happening when your prefrontal cortex is going offline? Well, you're reverting to your older evolutionary mechanisms. What are those? They're habits. How do you form habits? It's through this process of reinforcement learning. And so we took this crazy approach and

said, well, if this is really strong, let's study those equations and see what that's up to and see if we can actually leverage that. And so we can kind of subvert the dominant paradigm by using it against itself. And so the way that that works is it's actually a pretty simple equation. These two guys were Skorler and Wagner back in the 70s, put it forward, and it's still true. We still use these equations today. They're really powerful from mice all the way to humans. And the way that works is that you set up a reward value of a certain behavior, right? And you kind of have this reward hierarchy in your brain about where that fits relative to

other behaviors, because we're all, you know, relatives. Like I might like a certain type of chocolate and you might like a different type of chocolate, right? We've got different relative reward values for that type of chocolate. So we set up that reward value so that our brain can make quick decisions. So if I'm getting chocolate A, let's say a dark chocolate with sea salt and cayenne pepper or something like that, you know, and then I compare it to a different chocolate that's like, you know, 85% versus 80. I'm like, Ooh, this one's nice. It's got a nice mouthfeel to it. Slightly smoky, whatever. That's higher in the reward hierarchy. And so I don't have to eat both of those every time and make a decision. If I've learned, I like B more than A, I see B and A, I'm just going to pick B.

And so this is this reward hierarchy that's set up in our brain. The orbital front on cortex is like the hub of that. So that's the main part of the equation is you've got this learned reward value of a behavior. And then if you look at changing that, like the current reward value is going to equal the one that's set. Think of that as the habitual reward value plus an error term. And that's it. There are only three variables in the equation. The one, you know, x equals x minus one, like that, you know, at the previous time point,

plus an error term. That error term is really interesting. Let's get pragmatic here, right? I'm not a mathematician myself, so I like to talk pragmatics. Let's say a new bakery opens up in my neighborhood, right? And so I have a certain reward value for chocolate cake in my brain. I go in the bakery, their chocolate cakes looks pretty good. And so I go try it. And if it's like the best chocolate cake I've ever had, I get what's called a positive prediction error, as in it's better than expected.

Dopamine fires and I learn, hey, eat this cake. And then I go later, I anticipate it, you know, so I get the urge to go to the bakery again. So I've learned something like this is good cake. If on the other hand, I eat it and it's not very good, I get what's called a negative prediction error. I'm like, eh, not very good. I've also learned something. Dopamine spritz, it says, hey, don't go back to this bakery. Both of those require one critical thing, which is awareness. You have to pay attention as you're eating the cake. So if I'm on my phone, like on an important call while I'm eating the cake, my wife says, hey, how's the bakery?

I'm like, I don't know. I haven't paid attention. So that old habitual reward value stays the same if I don't pay attention. Does that make sense? Yeah, sure. So taking all of that and then laying it on top of this latticework or framework around compulsive eating or unhealthy eating habits, like how does that inform how you then counsel somebody who, you know, can't stop eating corn nuts or gummy bears? math and write to the neuroscience and I say, pay attention. And to expound upon that a little bit.

And also I want to pause here and just give a shout out to the people that form the stories in my book. As you saw, these are wonderful people who made themselves vulnerable so I could tell their authentic stories. And so people could see what they struggle with and how they work with it. So I just want to give a shout out to those. Well, my favorite is, is her name Jackie? Yeah. The mindfulness teacher who secretly, you know, has all these crazy habits around food and feels ashamed.

Like, I think that's a very relatable thing. Like the disconnect or the polar opposites of like, I teach this thing and I tell these people to do this and I'm secretly behaving this way. You know what I mean? And how awful that must feel for her and the trap, the like, you know, sort of prison that you create for yourself,

I think is something that, you know, maybe not on such an extreme level, but, you know, I think a lot of people can kind of relate to. Like I say, I do this thing and then left to my own devices, I end up doing all these other things and then I feel horrible about myself.

And that emotional state then motivates me to splurge and indulge even more because I'm so uncomfortable with those emotions. And it's this cycle that perpetuates. And, you know, the grooves get deeper and deeper and deeper until it feels impossible to break free. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, shout out to them. Beautiful stories. And the reason I bring them forward now is that when we look at this question around like, okay, how do we actually leverage this stuff?

Having people pay attention, you know, like when my patients come into my office, I have them like map out these habit loops and start paying attention as they're indulging in these behaviors. And that's going straight to the neuroscience and saying, look, the only variable here that's going to change anything is awareness, right? You've got to pay attention as you do something. this in. So we've built this into our right now app where we can study it and we can see how quickly behavior changes when somebody pays attention. Because, you know, like you're pointing out with Jackie's story, we can tell ourselves to stop doing things, but that's not going to work. Right. And we can then live a shame filled life or we can start learning how our brain works and then, you know, change that whole thing. So essentially the solution lies in being completely present and nonjudgmental with what is happening. On some level, it's a bit like the inventory aspect of 12-step where it's like, let's just really from 10,000 feet, look at what you're actually doing and like, don't get upset with

yourself. Like, let's just create the map. Here's what's going on. So we can see it for what it actually is when it's happening. And the more present and aware you are with that behavior, it ends up acting like an antidote to the kind of trigger response

that traditionally occurs when you're not paying attention or you're not actually thinking about what you're doing. And I guess where I sort of, you know, bristle a little bit or like my bias comes in with this is, you know, as somebody who is an addict and an alcoholic, I'm all too familiar with the just overpowering nature of what a craving can look like.

So powerful that I will literally lie, cheat and steal. I will put myself in harm. I will put other people in harm. And you become so inoculated from any kind of outside messages that would dissuade you from meeting that need that is like put you into tunnel focus and just blots out the rest of the world

that it makes it hard for me to hear the counsel of anyone other than the like-minded souls who see the world that I do. So I'm just admitting that, you know, and you treat people like this and you're familiar with this. So, but that's my bias. It's like, oh, here's a guy, he's not, you know, Judd's not an alcoholic or an addict. He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand how just completely derailing this can be. Yeah. Well, I've certainly seen it way too many times, as you have. And the bristling, I think, is important.

And again, you certainly know this better than I do. I've only lived it vicariously through my patients and the folks in our program. But this all-consuming craving, the nice thing here, and I think this is actually pretty aligned with 12 Steps, for example, is that, you know, don't try to fight the craving. And Jackie actually talks about this fighting the craving monster. It only makes it stronger. And so- Resist, persist kind of thing. Right. And this is where I like the Marcus Aurelius quote, like,

what stands in the way becomes the way. Instead of like trying to fight your craving, you know, especially when it's all consuming, we can't fight it. And so what can we do instead? Well, in the aftermath, instead of judging ourselves, because that, well, you tell me,

but that's what I see happen most often in the aftermath is it's another habit loop of somebody judging themselves that gets away from learning. And so you said this earlier, I want to just go back and highlight that it's critical that people, and not saying it's easy because self-judgment's also a big habit that we can get in, but the more we can bring kindness and acceptance to ourselves and see, oh, this is just my brain that's gone off track as compared to there's something wrong with me, that opens us in the aftermath of whatever happened,

you know, these crazy binge episodes, which are very similar to alcohol binges, right? Afterwards, we can look at it and say, what happened? And what really happened in terms of the negative consequences here because that rock bottom piece is what helps us start to wake up and say there's got to be another way yeah i think the overlap with 12 step comes in with the recognition of these behavior patterns and then you know developing the reflex to kind of go share it and hear other people share their versions of it

so you don't feel alone. And that diminishes the shame piece. Like you feel like-minded with a group of people. And I mean, if there is a habit that you learn, it's that before you indulge, you go and you share it. And there's something about like bringing voice to it that dampens the craving and the urge. And I think on top of that is this idea of not fighting the craving,

like you were saying, acknowledging it and understanding that feelings are just feelings. And I think we're hardwired in our lizard brain or whatever part of the brain that you would, you know, classify it scientifically to believe that these feelings really do want to kill us, like it is life or death. And so we give them much more credulity than they deserve. And if we can just sit with them, what happens every single time, 100% of the time without fail is that they pass. They go away. Yeah. So instead of, you know, that resist persist piece, right? Instead of pushing against them, if we open our arms and accept them. Right, it's the surrender piece on some level.

Yeah, and so if you don't give them something to push against, that's the acceptance piece. Then they just come and they just keep going because there's nothing to push against. But I want to circle back to something that you said earlier. I'd love to explore this a little bit more because I think I'm starting to see a parallel here that I hadn't seen before. So you said when people come together and share what they're about to do, the craving goes away. Can we explore that a little

bit more? So I say that because this is really interesting. In our eating program, we find that we have people pay attention as they overeat. We created this craving tool that then, as they do this enough and they gather, we call this gathering disenchantment data because they start to see, oh, overeating doesn't feel good, doesn't feel good, doesn't feel good. As they gather those data,

they can then recall that more easily. They're like, well, last time I did that, this happened. So when you said when somebody comes together and shares what they're about to do, well, how's their brain simulating what it's going to be like when they do it? They're recalling previous memories because the past is what predicts the future. And that's what our brain is using for this predictive processing to say, hey, it was like this in the past and it's going to be like this in the future. So if you bring it in front of the forum where people are bearing witness, so they're keeping you honest, I would guess, my hypothesis is, his brain is less likely to be like, well, it wasn't so bad

because they're like, really? It wasn't so bad? And they're going to start questioning, which then forces that memory to be more accurate. And with an accurate memory, if we feel into what happened before and we're like, oh, that wasn't so good, that's where the disenchantment builds. And we see this exact thing happening with eating. The more people can recall what it was like last time, the easier it is for them to become disenchanted and not do it again. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah. I mean, the disenchantment database,

I immediately thought of that because the parallel the more apropos parallel in in recovery is the context in which you call your sponsor or you call somebody and you're like i'm getting ready to do this thing and i'm gonna do it and instead of the person on the other line saying don't do that they're just like okay tell me what it looks like you know what is that okay cool like okay so let's say you do it. Then, so you take that drink and then what happens? And it's like, okay, well then I'm probably gonna do this and I'm gonna do that.

All right, cool. Okay, and then what? And then what? And then what? And then what? And invariably it leads you down that path to, well, I wake up and I'm in Vegas and I lost my wallet and, you know, my wife has left.

And, you know, you just play it out to its conclusion and you are then very connected to the results of that kind of behavior. So it conjures that memory and perhaps neurochemically creates a certain kind of groove that makes you more resistant to indulging in that behavior that time or the next. Yeah, and that groove comes from the remembrance

of the embodied experience. And I want to highlight that because this is not about thinking our way out of an issue, whether it's overeating or drinking or whatever. This is about feeling our way out and into a new way of being because that feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain, right? We've all had that experience of picking up a bag of whatever. It could be Baruca nuts, which we have over here, or it could be gummy bears, or it could be potato chips. That's my weak spot.

And not being able to just eat one because these foods, not Baruca nuts, but ultra processed foods are scientifically engineered with billions of dollars behind them to create the precise ratio of salt, sugar, and fat to make it almost impossible to resist. And then we feel shame. We end up doing it again.

We're stuck in this loop. And I think we come up with narrative stories, like you just said, well, this was whatever. But what we're not doing is really, we're not really connecting with the trigger, the emotional state that led to that behavior. And we're also not cognizant of the difference between hunger and craving. We just say, well, we were hungry. I needed to eat. So, let's differentiate hunger from craving and how we can begin to understand the difference between

those two things when it comes to making a choice. It's a good point that we should really double down on. And so here, they're actually two different, they're described as homeostatic hunger and hedonic hunger. So interesting, they still use hunger here because like you're highlighting, one is based on just craving, even in the absence of the need for calories. That's the hedonic hunger. Whereas the homeostatic hunger is as it sounds, it's like, hey, homeostasis is out of balance. I need to get it back into balance. And so that very adaptive physiologic mechanism says, hey, eat some food so you can get the calories that you need.

And so the homeostatic hunger piece, you know, this is striking to me because when I first started working with people with binge eating disorder, I assumed that they could still tell the difference like when they were actually hungry versus when they weren't. And that was actually not true at all. I worked with a group of women with binge eating disorder

and I felt like I was missing something. For the first several weeks that we were working together, I was like, what am I missing? What am I missing? And I basically asked this question like, well, don't you eat when you're hungry? And they're like, what? No, I just have a craving and I eat.

And that was it. So the difference between homeostatic hunger and hedonic hunger was gone. They had no distinction. Well, they probably never reach homeostatic hunger and hedonic hunger was gone. They had no distinction. Well, they probably never reach homeostatic hunger because the craving is always satisfied in the hedonic context. It certainly could be the case. Yeah, absolutely. And if your itch just starts itching and you immediately scratch it, how are you going to tell where that itch is coming from, right? And so I think, you know, going back to your question,

certainly we can have a craving when we have homeostatic hunger. That's how we're set up is to say, hey, you know, stomach's rumbling, go get some food. In modern day, more and more where we've learned to eat not because of hunger, but because of sadness, boredom, anger, whatever, we've learned through these,

ironically, they're supposed to be these adaptive mechanisms, but they're anti-adaptive because they're not helpful for our health. Where we're like, oh, I'm stressed. That doesn't feel good. Go eat some food. Oh, I'm bored. Go eat something.

You get the gist there. And so that gets ingrained more and more and more to the point where people aren't even paying attention to their bodies anymore. It's astonishing how that operates. And I've experienced that myself. I mean, I got sober and spent the next 10 years blithely unaware of how I had transferred all of that addict energy into my food choices. And the relationship between what I was eating and the emotional state that I was in was completely beyond me

until I kind of reached a nadir with it and looked at it for the very first time. And I had all these tools and I still wasn't seeing it. And I was like, what do you mean I'm an emotional eater? But then when you look at it, you're like, well, oh my God, like when you do that inventory, you're like, holy shit, it's incredible. And it's empowering because you realize like, oh, when I feel, like when you do that inventory, you're like, holy shit. Yeah. It's incredible. And it's empowering because you realize like, oh, when I feel like this or when

this is happening, or I just, you know, mindlessly reach for this thing, it is the self that makes those uncomfortable emotions go away. And so when you're counseling people around breaking up with those habits, you're asking them to divorce themselves from what is perhaps their best friend, even if they're not aware of it. Yeah, absolutely. It's so powerful. Yeah, I mean, they're best friends for a reason, right?

They provide a lot of comfort for us. Disentangling this knot and getting to the root of how you can drive these better habits, getting back to the mindfulness piece and the awareness piece, you have this 21-day program. My first question is why 21 days? We'll get to that.

But it really is set up, it's sort of a three-tiered approach. The first two tiers are really focused on this inventory process of connecting the person with who they are and undertaking all of these tasks to create that connection and that level of awareness and get rid of all the guilt and the shame

and the stories that go with all of this. So first answer the 21 day question and then let's get into what the program actually is. Yeah, so I was trying to have a little levity and fun here. And so the 21-day program is honestly, it's a tongue-in-cheek nod to an internet myth, which is if you look on the internet and ask how long does it take to form a new habit,

you're going to find the answer is 21. It's not the universal number of 42, but it's close enough, right? It's 21. Where did that come from? Plastic surgeon in the 1960s wrote a book about how long it took his patients to get used to their new nose jobs. That's the origin of that. That's it. And then people are like, oh, 21 days sounds pretty good. And then you just get something trending at the top on the internet. As long

as people just keep referencing it, it's going to stay at the top. I know this is hard to hear, but sometimes things on the internet aren't true. Oh, no. What am I going to do, Judd? 21 days feels short to me. I just know in my own case, like trying to shift or change any kind of behavior takes a lot longer.

Yeah. And people are in a rush. And the temporal nature of that plays into the idea of why dyes don't work also, like having this finishing line. Yeah. So the reality here is it isn't about like something's going to change in 21 days. I read about this in the book. One of our studies, we found that in 10 to 15 times of somebody using our craving tool, that reward value in their brain drops below zero. But that doesn't line up with days. Somebody could be doing this, you know, and paying attention 10 to 15 times, like within a

couple of days. The 21 days is this tongue in cheek, you know, nod to that. But it's really about here's a way to break it down into 21 steps or 21 things that you can bring together. It's really about it. Somebody is going to change behavior quickly. Most people are going to take several months to really get the gist of it. And then it's going to take a little bit longer to really nail it and be like, wow, this is, I'm a lifer with this. Because once we really see how good it feels to like stop overindulging and to eat healthy food, it's really hard to go back. So I think of it more as here are 21 things

that you can bring together as compared to you're gonna nail it in 21 days. Right, the first prong here is what you called mapping your habit loops. So what does that mean? It's as simple as taking those three elements that we talked about, the trigger, the behavior, and the reward or the result,

and just being able to identify them in vivo. Like as we go in our daily life, let's use stress eating. Oh, here I'm walking into the refrigerator. I'm not hungry, but I'm stressed out. Okay. There's the behavior. I'm about to stress eat. Can we map back and see what triggered it? Oh, stress, for example. And then can we map it forward and get that third element of like, what's the result of the stress eating? So we can map the habit loop out before we do it, we can map it out when we do it, we can map it out afterwards. Like somebody wants to journal at the end of their day, they can look back on their day and see how many times they stress ate and just map out that loop. So it's not even about arresting the behavior,

it's more about paying attention and the noticing of it and taking the kind of self-judgment and shame out of it and allowing some space for self-compassion and just being the observer of your own life. Yeah, and I think of it as like, here's a great opportunity to learn. Who doesn't want to learn how their mind works, right? And so this is a simple model

that can be brought way beyond food. Food's a great way to start mapping this out because we have so many food habits. But then we can start to see, oh, this applies to my social media habit. Oh, this applies to me checking email when I've got a project that's due. Last time I checked, the average email in the U.S. goes unread for only three minutes. Because people, they're constantly checking their email and they also have their alerts on and they get distracted by it. So the mapping process is simple and I'll make it even simpler. The trigger doesn't matter. And let that sit for a minute because a lot of

people are like, what? The trigger, you know, if I could just avoid my triggers, one of my patients told me, he's like, people, places, and things. If I can avoid those, then I won't drink, which of course, duh. You know, if you go to the liquor store and the bar, you're less likely to drink. The problem is that we have to eat. You don't have to drink, but you have to eat. So here, one, it's really hard to avoid triggers. But more important than that, the triggers aren't what reinforce the process. They aren't what keep it going.

They just set the thing in motion. So the triggers are the least important what reinforce the process. They aren't what keep it going. They just set the thing in motion. So the triggers are the least important part of the equation. So somebody is going to start mapping their habit loop out, find the behavior, right? They can do it before, during, or after, and then start exploring what the result is. And that's where it gets really important and that shifts into the second step.

That's so interesting. I can't help but think about my own experiences with food and trying to manage my habits. And we were sharing before the podcast started that I've been on a little bit of a journey recently. The last year and a half, two years, I've been sedentary more than I have been historically since I turned 40 as a result of a chronic lower back issue, which I'm in the process of resolving. But that has sidelined me more than I care to admit. And I haven't been able to run and move my body in the way that I like to and that allows me to feel like who I am.

But with that kind of reduction in physical output, I took with me my eating habits that fueled all of those endurance challenges. And although I eat quite clean and probably cleaner than most people, I am prone to large portion sizes. And it's been very challenging to reduce those because you say, don't pay attention to the trigger, then there's the behavior. But once you take that first bite, I find myself powerless to like slow it down and just be mindful and allow that 20-minute window where your body kind of catches up to what you're doing and sends those signals that you've had enough. And that's been difficult. And that's been difficult. And although I would say I probably bring a level of mindfulness and awareness to what I'm doing, I certainly have room for improvement there. But what has worked for me to some extent, and perhaps this is you're either sober or you're not. You're either drinking or you're not drinking. It's an on-off switch. There's no gray area. And I just say, okay, I'm going to take this food

like off the table. And there's no further decisions to be made. Like this is just not something I'm going to have. And I'm pretty good with sticking with that. And it doesn't feel like a willpower thing. It's like, once I've made that decision, I'm pretty good about adhering to that. But portion size is a gray zone.

You know, it's like, it's not like, there's no on-off switch for that. You know what I mean? And I've made great progress. I'm doing good and I feel better than I did six months ago. But I'm wondering like, this isn't really a question. This is more like me using you as my psychiatrist right now. Oh, good.

Free session. So this is interesting because, so just getting at that, why does the binary feel easier from an energy standpoint? Well, willpower is about making a decision. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. Whereas if you've made a decision that you are not X, like I don't eat sugar, I don't drink alcohol, I don't do this, you're not making a decision anymore. You know,

you're kind of imagining yourself as not that. So there's no psychic drain or decision fatigue involved. Yeah. You know, some people they're like, well, I've tried that and it doesn't work. You know, the switch comes back on. But for a lot of people, it can be very helpful, just that binary piece. And you can do that with certain aspects of food, right? That's what I see the most is people are like, I just stop eating sugar. And it's easier or processed sugar. So that's easier for them. But you've got to eat, right?

And so if you eat, let's use the ritual experience here. You eat super clean food, right? You're probably not eating much of any processed sugar. But you've got this food in front of you. And your habit is like, well, got to get this number of calories in because I just burnt this number of calories because I went for a 20 mile run. So here it's like, well, I can't just tell myself to stop doing it because as we talked about, the willpower may not work. But this is where we can bring the power of

awareness in. And if we're in the habit of just shoveling it down, that's the first thing we've got to pay attention to is, hey, if I'm just shoveling it down, what am I getting from this, right? So that helps us become disenchanted with the shoveling. So then we'd say, okay, well, I'm going to pay attention as I eat. And that's where we can start exploring

what I call the pleasure plateau. Because our wise body is going to tell us when we've had enough. And that's gonna be a different plateau if you've gone for a 20 mile run versus if you haven't. Does that make sense? No, it does, it does, it does. I'm just imagining myself sitting in front of a plate of food

that's probably larger than what I need. And what my mind is doing is saying, yeah, but that's not the satisfying, super clear, here's what you do kind of answer, you know, because the responsibility still sits with you to conjure the awareness and do that kind of work, which is not easy and kind of like ephemeral. I agree.

And we can disentangle a couple of things to make it easier. So one, just knowing that our brains don't like ambiguity. They prefer quantitative, clear results. You know, this is why the likes on social media have been so addictive because we know exactly where we stand versus like actually throwing caution to the wind

and like having a conversation with somebody and looking at their body language and be like, what is this going well? Are we doing it? So if we can learn to tolerate that ambiguity and even lean into it and get curious, this is where curiosity becomes a superpower. We can learn not to fear ambiguity. So that's one thing. If we can disentangle and pull out the ambiguity piece, then we can get to the heart of it and it gets easier. And that is that as we start paying attention, right, we can bring the curiosity in. So first, let me back up and say, we start by seeing what happens when we don't do it. So that brings in that motivation. That's like the rock

bottom. It's like, oh, when I don't pay attention, I over eat and I feel crappy. Okay. That crappiness motivates me to want to change. Now change can feel hard or it cannot feel hard. So how do we get it to not feel hard? This is where we bring in curiosity as a superpower. When you're curious about something, how hard is it to pay attention to it? No, it's natural. Okay. So we could say, okay, great. Let's leverage that curiosity because it in itself is going to make this not feel as hard as what I might have been trying. But how do you conjure that curiosity?

Curiosity is not something you can compel in another. And I don't know how you can possibly conjure it in yourself, especially if your habit loops and your patterns around self-judgment, self-criticism, shame, guilt, or whatever you experience when you make that wrong choice, being asked to supplant that with, it's okay, just put that aside and be curious. How do you actually do that? Yeah. I think of it as you got to work with what's in front of you first. So if somebody's stuck in a self-judgment habit loop, they can use these same tools to work with that first. But if they're stuck in self-judgment, they can't bring curiosity to eating. They've got to work with the self-judgment first. So here, asking themselves, what am I getting from beating myself up and feeling into that? Again, feeling body much

stronger than thinking brain. So when they feel that self-judgment doesn't feel good and they just start exploring, dipping their toe in the water of kindness, like which one feels better? No brainer, kindness feels better. And so we can start to lean into kindness as a way to help us step out

of these self-judgment habit loops. And we have to do that enough so that we can actually start paying attention to the food in the first place, right? So there's all these blockers, but we can't ignore them. We have to start with the blockers and get ourselves unblocked. You know, and self-judgment's the big one. I'm sure you've had many patients who come to you, you've explained just this to them,

and they say, but trying to feel kindness for myself feels indulgent and it feels unearned or undeserved because I'm fundamentally bad and broken. Don't you know that Judd or I wouldn't be sitting here with you. Right. So I don't know how to be kind to myself. And when I try to do that, it feels like a shoe that doesn't fit. Yeah. That's a good point. I'm glad you bring this forward because I see this a lot. So there are two places I start outside of self-kindness. One is think of a time when somebody has been kind to you and almost everybody can think of one, you know, at some point in the past, hopefully less distant than more distant. And I have them feel into that. What does kindness itself feel like, right? So they can just feel into the

experience of kindness. Oh, it feels pretty good. Now they're already a little closer to the self-kindness. Then I ask them, what's it feel like when you're genuinely kind to somebody else? And fortunately, most people are like, oh yeah, I can think of a time and it feels good. And hopefully it was like just earlier today, you know, where they're practicing kindness. So we know that kindness is there. And then they can actually bring curiosity in and be like, hey, well, what's it like when you've actually cared for yourself? So there's a difference between self-kindness and self-indulgence. And so we can do a little bit of education around that where it's like self-indulgence is like, oh yeah, I deserve the ice cream or whatever. And so they indulge versus, well, I actually needed the calories.

And so we can break out of the loops of like the self-indulgence, which is that story we tell ourselves versus, oh, I'm meeting my need. When we meet our needs, it actually feels pretty good. And there's an act of self-kindness that is pretty simple, relatively straightforward, and it can feel rusty at first until we do it. But then it's like, oh, we can reflect back on it. Well, how many times did I meet my needs today? Okay, there's an act of self-kindness. How does that feel? So we can actually back our way into it by recognizing times when we've actually done this, or at least

other people have done it to us, or we've done it to others, so we can start awakening that light of kindness. Distinguishing between cravings, hedonic hunger, and true hunger feels analogous to this idea of trying to understand the difference between wants and needs. Yeah. There are fine lines for a lot of people and fundamental to this whole idea of mapping your habit loops or your whole program entirely involves a greater level of connection with self. Yeah. But I think most people, even if they struggle with their weight or their food choices, they're living their lives so detached from their bodies and the choices they're making around what they put in their mouth that this is a brand new idea to them. Like they just, you get up, you eat what you eat and you're just kind of reacting to the world and the stresses and just trying to get through the day. And you go to the drive-thru and you hit the 7-Eleven and on the way home, back to the drive,

you're just doing what you do. And because these foods are so unhealthy and because they hit all of those hormonal hotspots that light you up, that person might not even know what it would feel like to actually feel good in their body or feel connected to who they are. So to get them to that place,

that's a long road when you're like, well, you just have to really connect with yourself. Like this is not gonna happen quickly for most people who have been eating most of their lives in a certain way. And I know this from my own personal experience, I'm not standing on any kind of high horse here. Yeah. Well, you know, reminds me of that quote of, you know, journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. And so here, even with, so I totally agree with all of that. And I would say it's worth the journey. And if somebody can take a single step forward and see

the benefit of that single step, which could be simply they're at the 7-Eleven, they've got the 32-ounce Slurpee, and they start paying attention as they're drinking it. I don't know how anybody can down one of those as quickly as... A lot of people do. I know. I know. So if they start paying attention and they just start asking, well, how is this sip relative to the last sip? And they just get curious, like, oh, is this still as tasty? relative to the last sip. And they just get curious like, oh, is this still as tasty?

They can actually start leveraging that pleasure plateau piece where they're starting to see, oh, this isn't, you know, I'm actually starting to get full. And even that helps them see, oh, what's it feel like not to like slurp it to the bottom versus like stop when I'm full.

And, you know, they can go back and finish it later. That's different than like just hammering it now and then feeling crappy and then not making that association that like when I hammered this 32 ounce drink, I feel pretty crappy. To me, it feels like the easier choice is to not even take the first slurp than to try to drink a little bit of it and then have the mindful awareness to put it aside. Because once I've indulged and begun that process and the train is pulled out of the station, my disposition is I have to see it all the way through to its bitter end.

You know what I mean? That's why these binary choices feel easier for me. Like I just don't, if I don't taste it, then I'm not setting in motion all of whatever's going on in my brain that is compelling me to like keep eating or keep drinking this thing. Yeah, absolutely. As you highlighted earlier, so there are certain, like we don't have to buy a Slurpee, but if somebody is so compelled to

buy a Slurpee or they have to, you know, they've got to eat dinner and they're habitually overeating, they've got to work with what's in front of them. You have this great James Joyce quote that I'm going to read. It's basically about how people often live at a distance from their bodies, treating them as mere carriers for their brains. The challenge is that this disconnect makes it difficult to listen to and learn from the body signals. That's so true. Yeah.

So James Joyce wrote this famous line in his short story. What was it? A painful case where he says, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. Yeah. I think we all do to some extent. Yeah. It reminded me of Bertrand Russell's

five different types of eaters. Do you know about this? No, tell me. Oh, this is great. I wrote it down because I was like, oh yeah, this is like, he has a whole thing about mindful eating. No.

His whole thing is like how you need to eat slow and with friends. And he's written extensively about this. I don't know, you can find it. I'll take a look, but this is probably- But no, he identified that there are five ways that people eat. This is from the conquest of happiness.

There's the boar, and that's the person who's never known hunger and basically just eats whatever they want and has never connected with true hunger, right? They're just satisfying their cravings. There's the invalid who just eats joylessly. Like they're just eating to satisfy their nutritional needs.

The epicure who's the snob and like nothing's good enough, no matter what fantastic meal they have before them, it's done wrong and this isn't right. There's the gourmandizer, that's the rapacious eater. I would put myself in that category. And then finally, the fifth is the person with the sound appetite. And that is the mindful eater who has a balanced approach

to what they're eating and how they're eating. But he has a lot to say about the benefits of like slowing down and paying attention to the food that you're eating. Yeah. Well, it's interesting

and I'll have to look that up more, but I love those five types. I was trying to trace the history of like this mindful eating piece. And I've had a friend, Vico Inalio, is a German born monk who's got this photographic memory, basically. And I was talking to him about this and he's like, oh, there's actually a sutta. There's a Pali Canon writing about overeating. There's King Pasenadi who used to overeat. And he actually went to the Buddha

and was like, hey, basically, I've got clinical obesity. I got problems here. Can you help me? And the Buddha said, you know, basically pay attention as you eat and you'll stop eating when you're full and you'll lose weight. Of course, he's a king. So he pays somebody to like every time he's got a meal, he's like, hey, remember a king, pay attention as you eat. So not all of us have this service. Instead of taking responsibility for paying attention, he pays somebody to pay attention for him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, or to remind him at least, because he still had to pay attention. The other guy couldn't say, hey, you know, looks like you've had enough. He had to just remind the king and the king did well. But I think it's, that's interesting that you can find these stories all the way back 2,500 years where

the Buddha is actually talking about this very simple concept of paying attention as you eat. And that's all you need. Yeah, the human brain's like, no, it can't be that easy. Like, take me behind the velvet rope. Like, I need the VIP program here. But there is something to the idea of slowing down physiologically

because of this 20 minute window where it takes the body that much time before the signals to your brain that say you've had enough or you're full, right? Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's a very practical, like if you slow down, this is what you will experience.

Yeah. The good news is we don't have to slow down for an hour, right? 20 minutes is reasonable for, unless you're just eating a small snack. The pragmatic piece of this is if you shovel down your entire dinner in five minutes, it's going to be really hard to tell if you've overeaten until you hit that 20 minute mark. And you're like, oh, that didn't work so well. And so that's all there is to it, really. I recognize how this is not always pragmatic, especially for people who are working multiple jobs, who may be a single parent, things like that.

And they're like, I'm just lucky that I can eat a meal because often they go without eating. So I just want to name that. But as much as we can, if we can at least give ourselves 20 minutes as we eat, that'll give our body time to get that signal in there that gets up to our brain that says, hey, you're done. Or hey, maybe a little bit more. And perhaps that might help solve that equation or square the equation

between hedonic hunger and what's the other word? Homeostatic hunger, right? Like, oh, this is satiety versus just a craving. You know, like I'm done and I can like, and I think there's something to the muscle memory. Like if you actually do that, then you can check a box and you have a win, right? And once you have a win, you're on your way towards building

a little bit of momentum. And momentum has a very powerful spiritual force to it. You know, once you have a little bit of momentum, it's so much easier to extend that. And that comes from reward, right? If it feels good, we're going to keep doing it. You're adding that energy in to keep that momentum going. So for example, if we notice, oh, it actually feels better to spend 20 minutes eating, we're going to keep doing it. You're adding that energy in to keep that momentum going.

So for example, if we notice, oh, it actually feels better to spend 20 minutes eating where I can actually dial it in as compared to overeating or undereating, there's a win because it feels good. And that builds the momentum through that reward-based learning process. Oh, it feels good to do this. What do you say to the person who's time crunched

and just says, listen, you know, I'm just trying to, I'm working two jobs. The only way I can even feed myself is through the drive-through or the quick meal on the whatever. This feels like a very privileged thing. I'm supposed to take my time and prepare my meals and do all of this. Like, how do you address that? Yeah. So this is, you know, we start where we're at. And so if somebody, you know, let's say they live in a food desert, they're, you know, working three jobs, trying to raise their kids by themselves, whatever. And the only thing they can do is go through the drive through and say, great, let's start there. And if they only have five minutes to scarf down their

food, scarf down the food. But at some point they can take 20 seconds and check in with their body. And so whether it's 20 minutes later, whether 30 minutes later, an hour later, they can check in and be like, how did that go? Just in terms of, did I overeat? Did I undereat? That's a place to start. Then down the road, which can be harder and, you know, take more resources is like, okay, let me compare this to eating, you know, maybe it's a prepared meal, but it's not the drive-through from fast food. You know, you can get healthier food that's prepared quickly. That's not, you know, a bunch of ultra processed food versus ultra processed. And you can compare those. It's still take about the same time to eat,

cost about the same. The second pillar in this 21-day program is about changing the reward value of eating behaviors. We've already talked about some of this. The first pillar really being about this inventory and self-connection. And the second piece really being about cultivating the awareness and the attention to override that willpower instinct and bring mindfulness into your eating practices. We talked about the disenchantment database and kind of playing it through. You mentioned pleasure plateaus, but you have a couple other interesting things here. The body scan, I want to hear about that. And also this RAIN technique. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, the body scan is really there to help

reconnect the body and the mind. So, if Mr. Duffy or any of us live a short distance from our bodies, we got to get back into our bodies. And the body scan, you know, this was popularized by this guy, SN Goenka, famous for his Vipassana retreats, these ultra hardcore 10-day silent meditation retreats where people are spending basically 10 days, we call it the body sweep, where they're basically just focusing on different parts of their bodies, they're scanning or sweeping through their body. So they can start to notice the different physical sensations that are there in any one moment. There's nothing, you know, radical or complex about it. It's really about simply getting, you know, you get to practice curiosity, getting curious about what your body feels like as you scan up from your toes to your head or from your head down to your toes.

And then also practicing the acceptance. So it's like, okay, that's pleasant, that's unpleasant. It's there, you know, noticing our reaction, like whether we skip over it, push against it, resist it, judge it, so that we can start to become aware of what our habitual reactions are as we start reconnecting with our bodies. So how would that be practically applied in the context of someone who's like,

okay, I'm in January, I'm trying to really figure this food thing out. Is this like a five-minute thing that somebody could do when they wake up? Is this something that somebody would do after they've been overindulged? So I think of this as kind of like a baseline training practice. You know, this is like your daily endurance run, right? And so this is more of a

do it when you wake up in the morning, do it before you go to sleep at night, you know, start with doing it when you can do it. So I like the do it as you go to sleep at night because a lot of people find it helpful to get to sleep this way. And they can't say I don it when you can do it. So I like the do it as you go to sleep at night because a lot of people find it helpful to get to sleep this way. And they can't say I don't have time to do it because they got to get to sleep anyway.

And even if they start scanning, they fall asleep, great. They've done a little bit of it. So they can do it in the morning. They can do it at night. They can do it when they've got 15 minutes between meetings or something like that. They can do it if they're riding on a bus, you know, going from one place to another because all they're doing is really just focusing on these different physical

sensations. So it's a very pragmatic tool and practice to just help reconnect with the body. It's a mindfulness strategy, right? It's a very specific way of channeling a mindful approach to how you feel. Absolutely. What is the difference between mindfulness and a strict meditation practice in the context of bringing awareness to eating habits? That's a good question. I think of meditation as this smaller circle within a larger circle Venn diagram of mindfulness. So meditation, you typically do a meditation

practice to isolate yourself from, you know, variables that get in the way of you paying attention. And so here, you know, you can sit on a cushion, you can do walking meditation, you know, there are different forms of meditation that somebody can do formally where they're doing a practice. But the meditation itself is doing the same thing that this larger circle of mindfulness is doing as well which is training ourselves to be paying attention to our our embodied experience and well basically to all of our experience both internally and externally and for somebody who's brand new to the idea of a practical mindfulness practice where does one begin or what is a simple practice other than the body scan that somebody could pursue that would initiate them into this? Yeah, there are a lot of different meditation practices that people can practice. I like one called noting practice. And I read

about it in the book a little bit. This was popularized by a Burmese monk named Mahasi Saido. And I like this because you can do this anytime. You don't have to be sitting. You can be walking. You can be driving even, where it may help you pay attention even more as you're driving instead of mindlessly driving, where we're basically just noting

whatever is most predominant in our experience and in the moment. So for example, we're sitting here talking to each other, looking at each other. I might note that I'm seeing, and I might note that I'm hearing if you're talking. I might note feeling as I'm feeling physical sensations in my body. And so just about one per second, I might note, you know, feeling, I'm just doing this in real time, seeing, hearing, hearing, feeling, thinking, right? And so that noting practice helps us stay present and notice what's happening in our experience it's pretty simple we're so insistent on living in the past and in the future it's it's very hard yeah it is you know in 12 step it's all about practicing these principles in all your affairs in other other words, there's abstinence

and then there is emotional sobriety and then there is bringing these tools into all of our interactions, our behaviors and how our minds work. And in a similar way, this is about conjuring a presence, like a sense of being present with oneself in the world into the context of eating, but really to your point about like,

you have to change your relationship with yourself, how you really interact with the world around you in all its colors. Absolutely. It's a big ask, but it's sort of like the eating thing is the Trojan horse. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And the way I think about this is, well, it certainly is a big ask, but would we rather know this now or in 10 years? I'd rather know it now because if it can help me get on the path of reducing suffering now, both for myself and others, I want to know it now.

Sure. Tell me about the RAIN technique. So RAIN is an acronym for recognize, allow, accept, investigate, and note. So we just talked about the noting practice. And the R just helps us kind of wake up to what's happening. So we recognize what's happening. We recognize we're in a habit loop. We recognize that we're on autopilot, whatever. So that part's pretty straightforward. If you don't recognize it, you're stuck. You can't work with it. The A, we touched on this a little bit before, is that acceptance, that allowance. If we can't accept our experience, we can't see it for what it is. And so it's really important to practice not resisting our experience. And if

we resist it, great, we can use that as practice. Like, oh, here's what resistance resistance feels like what do i get from this right okay it's not helping me so we can become disenchanted with resistance itself but the allowance the acceptance is really to help us be able to come close and be honest with ourselves with our experience right you can see the importance of that honesty that radical honesty So we try to just see how much we can open to our experience. That's what the allow, accept is for. And it's kind of this reminder to like, okay, here it is. Let me just see if I can open to it. The I is my favorite part, the investigate. And I think of this as like, this is where we bring in the superpower of curiosity. And we get curious instead of going, oh no, here's this craving for whatever. We go, oh, here's a craving. And that opens us. That also helps with the allowance,

the acceptance. And it helps us start to be with whatever experience there is, let's say a craving instead of resisting it. Like, oh, oh, what is this? And then we can note there's that last part of the N. Oh, and we know what our experience is like, oh, this craving feels like tightness, tension, burning, heat, rising, you know, like, oh, this tightness, oh, now it's lessening, now it's this, now it's this.

And so the noting brings in what's described as this observer effect or in psychology, they call it the Hawthorne effect, where the idea is that if you observe something, you're going to affect the outcome. Physicists talk about to measure the mass of an electron, they had to measure its momentum and they had to hit it with photons. And they realized they had to take that

into account when they were measuring the mass because hitting it with photons was affecting the measurement. This observer effect is really powerful in psychology because by observing our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, we're actually changing our relationship to them. We're not as identified with them. So the noting is really helpful with that non-identification.

And in fact, this acronym was first developed by a meditation teacher, Michelle McDonald. And the N actually stood for non-identification. Tara Bach has really taken this steps forward where it's like, oh, in the Western world, it's really hard to understand this concept of non-identification. I think her current iteration is like nurture,

like nurture ourselves, meet our needs. But for me, it's how do we not identify with experiences through noting practice? And they happen to both start with N, so it was perfect. Yeah, super interesting. You had mentioned earlier that a lot of this work is about not overly focusing on the trigger and looking instead at the behavior and helping to modify the behavior by better understanding the results.

But I can't help but think when we're talking about the trigger, when you were discussing the disenchantment database, and I was talking about like playing it through, like, okay, casting into the future, here's what's going to happen. But similarly, I found a practice to be very effective to cast that gaze in the other direction. Like if I'm really aware that this trigger results in this type of behavior, then how can I reverse engineer to avoid putting myself in that triggered position? Like, because as an alcoholic, like once I'm there,

like all bets are off. So as they say, like the relapse starts, you know, way ahead of whatever, you know, triggered you to pick up that drink and developing awareness, similar awareness around all the things that led to that moment so that you can avoid putting yourself in those precarious positions or have strategies around, you know, how you might act or behave when the first little tickle, like a week before when something happened, how is that related to the moment where you pick up? And I'm wondering whether you've thought about this in the context of eating or if this has some kind of applicable strategy here. Yeah, I think that the parallel is absolutely there. So whether it's eating or drinking alcohol, something happened a week ago and it tends to be some disturbance in the force.

It's not like all is good because if all is good, we're not gonna have that tickle. There's not gonna be anything itching. So if we look a week ahead, we can start to see, oh, generally there's some need that's not being met. And that need gets filled by a want. You know, we feed the wants

instead of meeting the needs. And so we can start to look as, you know, we can keep an eye out for are my needs being met? Because that's one of the big things that starts the whole cascade, you know, gets that snowball rolling into the point where it's way too big. We get clobbered by it when it comes to today. So the more we can be aware of those things and then constantly be on the lookout, not like with over-vigilance, but just being really curious, like, oh, asking ourselves,

hey, am I meeting my needs today? Am I doing that? If that snowball starts rolling, we can meet it there before it gets too big. And we're like, oh, wow, here's this emotional need that's not being met. And I tend to cope with it in an unhealthy way doing this. We can reflect on it then.

Well, let's play the tape forward. What happens when I indulge in that? And we can see how that helps us become disenchanted. And then we can start asking, oh, well then what do I need right now? How can I meet that need? Yeah, I think that's really important and powerful, whether it's a domino effect or a snowball

that's like building in strength. You don't wanna have to try to divert the snowball when it's gigantic, at the inception of the behavior moment. You wanna deal with it when it's small, you can divert that behavior much more easily, but that requires, it's an extra step of awareness, right? Which is the accumulation of these behaviors that lead you to the point where you can bring

that awareness into your daily life and register an experience for what it is, even though it's only very tangentially related to the later behavior that you know you're going to indulge in if you don't do something now 10 days ahead. You know what I mean? I mean, that's a black belt jujitsu move, but I think that's the aspiration, right? And who doesn't want to be a black belt? Of course.

This third pillar of this program is really about the behavior change aspect of this. You call it finding more rewarding behaviors. And it talks more about curiosity and the disenchantment databases is replaced with the enchantment database. So it's really about connecting with the impact of healthy behaviors.

So talk a little bit about the philosophy behind this pillar. Well, this leverages the same very strong brain network that we talk about with the disenchantment. And so, you know, if our brain has this reward hierarchy and it starts to see that, oh, overeating, for example, doesn't feel that great, it's going to then start asking, well, if B isn't as good as I thought, what's better? Give me an A game here. And so here we can start asking ourselves simple questions like,

well, what feels better than overeating? Well, the simplest one is not overeating. And so even if we start paying attention and we notice, oh, it feels good not to overeat, we've already found that behavior that feels better and is more rewarding. I call this finding the BBOs, the bigger, better offers, right? So not overeating is a bigger, better and is more rewarding. I call this finding the BBOs, the bigger, better offers, right?

So not overeating is a bigger, better offer than overeating. And again, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't take that long to find that pleasure plateau. And it's like, oh, this feels good. And going off the cliff of overindulgence doesn't feel good. So we can start to find it in simply like backing off of the old behaviors. And we can start to find it in simply like backing off of the old behaviors and we can start finding it in the development of new behaviors that are more aligned with flourishing, for example. So we talked about self-judgment.

What does self-judgment feel like? We can compare that to self-kindness. Which one feels better? Self-kindness. So bigger, better offer, right? And so we're going to lean toward, because it's a natural gravitational pull toward the self-kindness when we can see very, very clearly how good it feels. Those are just a couple of examples. Another little wrinkle here that feels like it's worth exploring

is parsing negative emotions that we should pay attention to and negative emotions that we shouldn't. You mentioned what it feels like to overindulge. That doesn't feel good physically, but also there's the guilt, everything that comes along with that. But there's also a different kind of negative emotion that maybe we do need to develop some appreciation for, which is the discomfort to develop some appreciation for, which is the discomfort that greets us with any behavior change. And our resistance to that or our fear around that

keeps us stuck in patterns that don't serve us. So in the context of how we're relating to our emotions and our feelings, how can you help somebody embrace the necessary discomfort that will always visit us when we try to do something on our own behalf that's different from what we're used to. Well, this starts with knowledge being power. And what I mean by that is just knowing that change is scary makes it

less scary. Just knowing that. So I'm going to say that again. Change is scary. And so if we can know and anticipate that any change might be scary, it's like shining that light into that dark cave. Oh, it's not as dark. It's not as scary as I thought because we've now reduced that uncertainty. We're like, oh, I'm expecting that it's going to feel uncomfortable. The good news there is that we can actually lean into that discomfort by using curiosity and be like, oh, well, I know that my brain doesn't like change. What does it feel like to resist change? And we can get curious and be like,

oh, well, what's it feel like to explore something new? Most of us, especially if we can think back to the last time that we were really curious about something, we're exploring something, it's not so scary if we're going in with that adventure mindset. If we're going in with like, oh, this is going to suck, well, it's more likely to suck. Sure.

I guess you could map that onto the enchantment database. Like this type of discomfort is coupled with feelings of self-esteem. So I can create that association and have a different lens on how I interpret that discomfort and not correlate it with these other kinds of discomforts that I should be avoiding. Absolutely. Yeah. How does this work with trauma? You know, we've been talking about emotional eating, understanding that we make mindless

choices around food when we're triggered by various emotional states that are uncomfortable. Trauma is sort of an accelerated version of that. Something happened to us when we're young, we created a defense mechanism or a survival strategy that relates to how we interact with food. So talk a little bit about that because that seems to be a more acute

situation that might need a different approach. Yes, and. I'm glad you bring this forward because I've seen so many people come to me. They're at very unhealthy weight because of some traumatic history. I'm thinking about a lot of women who've had sexual trauma have gained weight as a protective mechanism so that they were not seen as attractive. And so it was a literal way to escape these types of sexual aggressions. So it can be a very pragmatic approach that somebody is doing unconsciously where they're gaining a bunch of weight. That's just one example. But there's also the emotional eating when there's all this trauma and we want to use food as a way to numb ourselves. I've had a number of patients talk about it literally in those

terms. I eat to numb myself. So we can look at whatever the mechanism is, that mechanism that we've developed as a way to literally help us survive, we can then start asking ourselves, well, we can first honor our previous self because often we blame ourselves, oh, I should have been stronger because it's done something different. Anybody that's been in a traumatic situation, my heart goes out to them. That sucked. It shouldn't have happened to them and it's not their fault. That's the first place that I start because if somebody is feeling like it's their fault, it's going to be really hard to move forward. So I just want to say that again. It's not their fault. And then with that, we can bring some kindness in and help them just honor their previous self and say, look, you did the best that you could, right? And so

I've had patients that develop worry habit loops, like this guy that was abused as a kid. And he was a kid. The only thing he could do was start worrying because that's the only thing he had control over. He comes to me in his 60s trying to break this anxiety habit. And we talked through this as, you know, it's like, well, you had some shoes that fit and they became your go-to shoes. You know, like you always wore these because this is the only pair of shoes you had.

Well, now check to see if those shoes fit. They may not fit you anymore. You might've outgrown those shoes. And so these have become these protective mechanisms that might paradoxically be harming us now. So the worrying isn't helping him. The overeating or having, you know, an unhealthy weight isn't helping him. The overeating or having an unhealthy weight isn't helping somebody.

And so here we can honor our past self and we can lean into the present and say, okay, look, this was my brain trying to protect me. How can I help my brain? How can we work together now to see what shoes fit now? And that opens the space for change. Yeah, it's a very compassionate approach. And I think whether it's trauma or some less acute scenario that led to a certain habit, we develop these

habits for a reason. They're all adaptive strategies that we relied upon because they worked or they did something for us at some period of time. And now they're not working for us, but our brains don't know that, our bodies don't know that, they're just operating on autopilot, assuming that this is in your best interest. And you have to be in communication with that and be like, it's okay, I get it, thank you.

I appreciate you, but we're good now, right? It reminds me of Richard Schwartz's work with internal family systems, who I know is controversial in the psychiatry world, but he talks a lot about kind of honoring those impulses that we have and understanding that they were installed for a reason at some point.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the strategies or techniques that you talk about is five-finger breathing. Mm-hmm. Explain. I love this. So this gets super pragmatic.

And I love this because this is something for any parent that has a young child. They can teach it to their kid. And if the parent is stressed out or distraught, these loving kids just want to help their parents. And so they can say, hey, when I'm seeing stress, come and walk me through this five finger breathing. And the way it works is very simple. So, you know, you take one hand, take the index finger of one hand and put it at the base of the pinky of the other hand. And as we breathe in, we're going to trace up the finger and pay attention. So I'm going to, I'll just do this.

You want to do it with me? You pause at the top of your pinky and then you breathe out as you trace down the inside of the pinky. And then as you breathe in, you trace up your ring finger. Pause and then breathe out down the inside of the ring finger. We'll do two more. Breathe in, trace up the middle finger. Breathe out, trace down. Breathe in, trace up the middle finger. Breathe out, trace down. Breathe in, trace up the index finger.

Breathe out, trace down. Okay, one more. Up the thumb. And then down. So that was five breaths. I did a little fast, but we could do it at our own natural breathing pace. How does that feel just to take five mindful breaths? It's amazing how something as simple as that can really calm you down.

Yeah, I'm gonna geek out about science about this because I love this. So our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, working memory, right? We can only hold a few pieces of information in our working memory at one time, right? The grocery list can't be very long or we'll forget it. And it's probably somewhere around four pieces of information.

So how do you clear out that cache? Well, you pay attention to four things that aren't the worrying mind, the worrying thoughts, the feeling anxious, the whatever. So we paid attention to two physical sensations, actually three physical sensations, two fingers and the breathing. And we watched our hands. So we've just paid attention to four things and that clears that cash out. And as you said,

we calm the physiology down in as few as five breaths. And then, so if the worry or the stress thought comes back in, there's a mismatch from an emotional tone level where our brain says, hey, you should be stressed. And our body's like, nope, not feeling it. And so it's much easier to notice those thoughts and just, oh, there's a thought and note it, let it go. Because our body is grounded in a calmer physiology. I like how simple it is. Would this be something that would be good

as somebody who has a tendency to eat more than I should, to do right before I have my meal? Absolutely. Yeah. And you can also do it if you're noticing, like you're racing through your meal, take five breaths. It only takes five breaths and see what happens. See if that helps. Because it also, you might've noticed, it like helps heighten the senses because we're grounded and that awareness kind of pops a little bit more. Yeah, I like it. I just like how practical and simple it is. It's like, oh, I'll just do the five finger breathing.

Yeah. Like I can do that. Yeah. It's not a big deal. It's not. How does all of this play into treating somebody who has an eating disorder? Well, for example, the hunger habit was not written

for people with anorexia nervosa. That is a really severe clinical condition that requires a village. And so I actually give some resources in the introduction saying, hey, if you've got anorexia nervosa or have a family member and you're reading this

because you want to help, here are some resources. Go to those resources. So this book is not for that. And bulimia, I would say, is also along those lines. But for somebody with binge eating disorder, I've seen this be very, very helpful for people. And I've treated a lot of patients in my clinic with binge eating disorder. So how does one know if they're somebody who's just a binge eater versus somebody who might need real treatment

for disordered eating? Well, it depends on- More clinical. Yeah, it depends on how much you believe in the DSM. So as a board certified psychiatrist, that's the Bible that I was trained on. I think that that is an evolving document. So it was first developed as a billing document.

Sure. What are we on, seven now, six? We're on five. Five, okay. So it's by definition evolving, but slowly, very slowly. So I like to think of the person and not the book that we try to pigeonhole people into diagnoses around. So the pragmatic thing is how much is somebody suffering? If it's

something that's really getting in the way of their daily life and they're just really debilitated by it, that might be a sign that it's helpful to go see a professional. And these things can be done in conjunction. If they want to really kind of learn how their brain works and work with their brain, you know, that's why I wrote this book is so they can start to get a lay of the land there. brain works and work with their brain, you know, that's why I wrote this book is so they can start to get a lay of the land there. I would imagine that somebody who really takes everything that you're sharing seriously, incorporates it into their life, goes on this journey with mindfulness, meditation, developing a sense of present awareness with their behaviors, a sense of present awareness with their behaviors, et cetera,

this is going to clearly reshape their relationship with food. But, I mean, this spills over into everything. So what has your experience been with patients that you've taken through some version of this protocol when they come out the other side or a year later? What does their life look like? What's changed? What hasn't? This is the gift that keeps on giving. And I like eating as a very practical example because we all have to eat. And so if we can use that eating as a vehicle to learn how our mind works and learn how to start working with our mind, we then start generalizing that knowledge to apply it to other things.

And that to me is a marker of the development of wisdom. So we become wise and we start to see, oh, well, I'm in the habit of being snarky with my partner. Oh, well, let me apply these three steps there. Oh, well, it doesn't go that well when I'm snarky with my partner. Oh, well, let me apply these three steps there. Oh, well, it doesn't go that well when I'm snarky and it goes better when I'm kind. Oh, let me lean into the kindness piece, right? And that's just one example of where we can start. I see this start to generalize into people's lives because we're treating the whole human here. We just start with that eating as that door in, and then we start treating the whole human here. We just start with that eating as that door in,

and then we start filling the house. Right. If you start exercising compassion to yourself and you earn self-esteem by performing esteemable acts on behalf of yourself, then you are going to interface with the world differently, treat others differently. They will then treat you differently. Your relationship, not just with food, but with literally everything will change. And then maybe they start treating other people differently and then those people start treating other people differently. You're changing the world, Judd.

Well, I don't know about that, but I love to see the possibility of this change starting one person at a time and then spreading compassion through social contagion. This is the real agenda. This is the real goal here. Of course, the human mind wants to identify the simple, easy stuff, whether it's deleting this macro from your plate or this new fad diet that's all shiny over here, the latest of which is Ozempic, right? Weight loss drugs.

I don't really have to think about this, let alone be present or mindful in my behavior. I can just take this drug and it will take care of it. This was all the rage about a year ago. How long are we into sort of live human experience with this brand new drug at this point? The short answer is not long enough. Yeah.

So what are you seeing? I'm sure you've had patients that have wanted it, have experienced it. What's going on here? Well, it's been really fascinating to observe with my patients. And so I'm thinking of one patient in particular who had clinical obesity and also alcohol use disorder. And so she started taking Abzimbic to help with her weight. And for about four months, she was like, this is a miracle.

You know, like I'm just not hungry because she was nauseous a lot, you know. And so she lost a bunch of weight. And she's like, you know what else? I just don't have cravings for alcohol anymore. Yeah. And so, and this is not just a case end of one, it's case studies in the literature. And there are studies that are ongoing now around like this helping people with substance use. Problem with her was that it worked for about four months. And then she's like, doc, it's like it just stopped working. And she was totally baffled. I was too. I was like, well, you know, they're saying that

you should be on these drugs for life, which is great marketing for the drug company. But it can't be shocking that somebody develops a tolerance and it doesn't work anymore. Yeah. I mean, our one thing that we know for certain is that our brains are really good at adapting. And so if you give our brain a challenge, it's going to challenge that challenge right back. And so I don't know what's going on. I don't know what percentage of people this is happening to. But I do know this, if we rely on the magic pills and the magic bullets and the magic injections, we're never going to get at peace with ourselves and develop that self-efficacy that's critical for everything. Are there negative side effects that you've seen as well? Oh yeah,

and some of those negative side effects are like liver toxicity or something like that, I don't know, or kidney. So there are some of those things that aren't, I haven't seen a ton of those things. I mean, the typical side effects are, you know, GI distress, things like that, sometimes vomiting. But one thing that people haven't talked, in my opinion, enough about is like a lot of this weight loss is coming because people are losing muscle mass.

That's not great. If your visceral fat stays constant, but your scale number is different because you've declined in your, yeah, that's not good. Well, they're probably losing that visceral fat as well, but they're also like the ideal one. And this highlights how, even though this is much farther along than any other drug that I've seen, it's still not ideal. There are some studies that are suggesting that it's helping with heart conditions, things like that. But all of those are obesity related, so it makes sense.

So they're probably helping that visceral adiposity and things like that. But you don't want to be losing muscle mass. You actually want to be building muscle mass as you're starting to exercise. So if people are like, I'm just going to sit on the couch and inject myself with this GLP-1 drug, that's a problem because they're not learning to work with their minds. So if the things stop working for them or if they, you know, if they stop getting

coverage and this is, you know, mind you, just the people that can afford it or have insurance that helps, you know, so for everybody else, for some people, medications can be helpful. For everyone, learning how to work with their mind is essential. Well said. What is your feeling around technology and apps and how they can be helpful or not helpful to somebody who's trying to develop a new relationship with food? Well, some of the ones that I've seen that aren't so helpful, and this is the Mr. Duffy problem, is the tracking apps where somebody says,

oh, I'm just going to track my food and then I'm going to magically lose weight or be successful. Now, I've certainly known people that the tracking has helped them become aware of what they're eating, right? And so they'll take a picture and then now they're more aware. So again, that's getting back to the awareness aspect. And in that sense, great. If that's a helpful tool, think of it as a training wheel, it helps somebody become more aware, that's very helpful.

But if somebody is relying on a tracking app to count their calories and their caloric intake, these things are notoriously inaccurate. And they're relying on an app to tell them when they're hungry. As we've just discussed, that's a big problem. I'm just thinking about in the same way that billions of dollars are poured into ultra processed foods to make them irresistible.

Similarly, hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into these apps to kind of gamify and addict us into scrolling endlessly. But there's something about the gamification of habit change in the form of these apps that I think has some value, but it's in your relationship and how you're kind of holding these things. Like I'm wearing a whoop and it tells me my sleep score. And I don't put a lot of stock into these scores, but I do look at trends. and even if it's inaccurate and it's data points, like over a period

of a month or whatever, I notice, well, I sleep better if I don't eat too late at night or whatever. I can like map on, it can be a tool for mindful awareness that connects the behavior with the results. Yeah. And I think you're highlighting something really important, which is if we can't be aware of something, then we can't get that feedback, you know, the positive or negative feedback. And so this is where I think humans and technology can work very well together if we're very careful about how we do it. something like a whoop where you can notice a trend over time that there's no way that you'd be able to just individually be able to say, oh, five days later, it was because of this, whereas you can start to see those trend lines and you're like, hey, there's something off here. I wouldn't have known that because it's too subtle for me to see. Very helpful. So I'm not anti-technology in this respect. I think technology can be extremely helpful. So I'm not anti-technology in this respect. I think technology can be extremely

helpful. What about the accountability piece? I'm interested in how you think about the importance of holding yourself accountable, not only to yourself, but perhaps to somebody else for both positive and negative reinforcement. But at the same time, maybe that pushes us into that willpower loop that we're trying to extract ourselves from. That's a good question. I hadn't thought about the linking the willpower piece to this. So let's just walk through this in real time.

So the accountability piece, a connection with somebody else can be really powerful. And so if somebody is bearing witness in a kind, supportive way, that can help us when we feel like we're just treading water. And so the accountability piece can be really helpful when we feel like, oh man, I'm just really struggling here. It kind of injects some energy into the equation. Not necessarily willpower, but it can

help in a very productive way. On the other hand, if we become dependent upon that, you know, it's like, oh, every time I have a craving, I have to call my sponsor. What happens when they don't pick up the phone? So I think of this as a both and. We can have that support and ultimately, and we can have that support. And ultimately we want to develop the internal mechanism like that internal support as well. That's why I brought it up because success long-term is going to be driven by your internal barometer.

And I think accountability is important in leading you towards that. But at some point you have to kind of transcend that, right? And that other person to whom you're holding yourself accountable does sort of feel a little bit like the willpower thing. Like, I'm just going to do this because I want this guy to approve of me. And so I'm going to grid it out until I get to that 30-day point. with me and so I'm going to grid it out until I get to that 30-day point. And you're not really owning this journey for yourself. Yeah. And you can also see that could be the willpower story that's saying, hey, it's rewarding to get this person's approval. So you could also see that from a reinforcement learning standpoint, which may be a little more accurate. As we begin to

wind this down, I think it's revelatory for people to understand the limitations of willpower in the context of changing eating habits. I mean, that's just like a mind blower, I think, and it will be for a lot of people. What else do you think people get fundamentally wrong in their approach to trying to up-level their habits around food?

It's a good question because 95% of it is willpower, is the willpower piece. I just, that's such a dominant paradigm. I'm just trying to think if there's anything else that's even remotely a second. It's not a close second. Well, the temporal nature of dieting

is related to willpower, right? Because it's like, I'm holding on tight until I can release. Right, right. And then you always, you know, revert back to your old behavior patterns. i'm holding on tight until i can release right right and then you always you know revert back to your old behavior patterns and the holding on tight is until we can't hold on anymore because we're exhausted and then we slide again so yeah i honestly can't think of anything that's substantive besides the willpower when it's so dominant the book is great i think

it's going to help a lot of people yeah i think I think you did a wonderful job. And like I said, it is a natural progression of the work that you're doing. And I think what's so kind of wonderful and beautiful about who you are and how you comport yourself in the world and share your wisdom is this interesting blend of West and East. Like you are deeply informed by Eastern traditions and have been personally impacted by your experiences in meditation and the various teachers that you've worked with and written books with, et cetera. But you weave it so indelibly with the hard science that makes it accessible to a Western audience,

which is another kind of Trojan horse that's happening here, right? Like you're really trying to create this inception where you can introduce these arcane Eastern ideas to a Western audience by draping it in neuroscience. Yeah. Some people describe science as like the Western, the new religion in the West, because people believe it because it's got a picture of a brain or something like that. So from a way to be

pragmatically helpful, you know, if that helps people believe things, great. Also, I would say science in itself is useful because you can see if something works or it doesn't. Sure. Well, you're a change agent, You're activating change in a lot of people, positive change. And the kind of question that I like to ask change agents at the end of these podcasts is more of a bird's eye view or kind of a 10,000-foot perspective on the nature of change and the human capacity to change. Because I think a lot of people feel trapped in their habits or they feel like they can be inspired by hearing

or bearing witness to somebody else's story of transformation, but they have difficulty connecting it with their own capacity for change within themselves. So maybe leave us with a few thoughts about that capacity that I think lives and lurks within all of us. Well, I would say that I am more and more inspired the more I work with people and see this happen in even very extreme cases. And that inspiration comes from people taking that leap of faith where they see somebody else,

you know, make a major change in their life. They're inspired. But more importantly, I think of this as developing evidence-based faith where they take that first step and they're like, oh, this isn't so bad. The ground is solid.

They take the second step. They take the third step. They build the momentum. And then they see in their own life for themselves, in their own experience, that this is possible. And that is the most inspirational faith ever. It's unshakable because it's your own experience. Beautiful.

Take the first step, people. You can't go on the journey unless you take that first step. Absolutely. Right? Thank you. You're always welcome here. I really enjoyed that. I appreciate it. Everybody, please go pick up The Hunger Habit, available everywhere. It will change how you think about not just your relationship with food, but all of your behaviors that you find might be compulsive in nature from time to time,

which I think is what it is to be human. Yeah. Well said. Thanks, Ben. If people want to learn more about you, is it just drjudd.com? Where's the best place for them to- Yep, drjudd.com. Cool.

All right, man. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers. Peace. Peace. Peace. Latz.

That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube,

and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by

Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.