FIX Your BROKEN Relationship With Food: The NEUROSCIENCE of Habit Change | Dr. Jud Brewer

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 a neuroscientific backing neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist Dr Jud 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 jud's latest book The Hunger habit is a must read instead of like trying to fight your craving especially when it's all consuming we can't fight it so what can we do instead today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show [Music] [Applause] possible cool Jud 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 the short version of it is you know I did mdphd 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 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 and so when I finished my mdphd I shifted my career to really like going wholeheartedly into like neuroscience clinical trials and learning all that stuff and there was a big deficit in and you know this um in addiction treatment right and so this is in the early ASDS 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 sensation 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 cuz 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 Sensations craving a quit app and somebody that was pilot testing it they were saying it's changing my eating habits and at first I blew that Comet off cuz most people gain about 15 pounds when they quit smoking you know the stimulant effects gone and all this and they also replac 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 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 curve 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 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 where 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 sensation habit formation and habit change in the context of addictions and 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 and allow us to in a non-judgmental way understand and take inventory of 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 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 theat 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 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 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 You have the 21-day program we're going to talk about that but uh 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 bargain 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 simple definition of a habit is basically something we do a 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 yeah 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's involves the vental tegmental area the nucleic humins and this dopamine spritzing that's really set up to help us form memory 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 behavior and a result so let's say they're 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 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 Etc and that's you know in modern day we call that positive reinforcement right isn't part of that dopa manic 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 anticipating that reward in the pursuit of that behavior I'm glad you asked that question cuz 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 urgy 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 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 um 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 than truth in that yeah um but we also know that we can learn languages or learn how to play instruments and do certain things at a young age much 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 adapt in an everchanging environment I don't know if there's a little bit of a trail off as we age there it'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 in the hippocampus you know so they're 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 that feeling of the comfort zone is really our brain saying hey it works and there's you in Neuroscience they call this um the exploit explore tradeoff 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 state 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 or whatever the more that becomes ingrained and that that's where that feeling of the challenge of change comes in but old dogs you know like when the television shows start you know start drying up so to speak then suddenly we get anti to find new on 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 well-being uh the recalcitrance of of the human mind to accept that is you know profound yeah it's true and and with addiction especially with that big manipulation of the dopamine system that's where we 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 den the um we're going to ignore things we're going to do all these things where it's like no keep doing this keep doing this until you know until we hit rock botom so as we move into a conversation around how all of these are applicable in the context of of nutrition you know it's worth noting or spending a few minutes acknowledging the fact that our 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 you know 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 you know 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 yeah but how do you think about that well it's certainly a debate in the scientific community and the medical community people can debate all they want from a pragmatic standpoint you know as a clinici I'm looking at and I 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 continu just despite ERS consequence is more dangerous than drunk driving in some studies right so food in the same way where people are overc consuming you know there's a continued use and their 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 in the modern science if you look at the BMI uh it's not a great marker of obesity and so I think it's really important the debates are helping here where us where we're starting to distinguish like hey somebody could be f fat and healthy and then you know the 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 it's not good at differentiating lean muscle Mass versus um versus fat especially if you look at trunk obesity and and like the visceral obesity that seem to be more dangerous than other types of fat so I'm here I'm talking about clinical obesity as compared to just OB 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 their endeavoring to do all sorts of things but at the top of that list generally is people want to lose weight they want to to get a little bit more fit um they go on a diet uh 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 the largest diet movement in the last century in the in the US at least was around Weight Watchers you know formed in 1963 interestingly same year that LS had their famous potato chip challenge bet you can't eat just one right because they're this is about the designing of over consumption 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 calory 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 loosen 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 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 like it's just a massive bus with efficacy it would just be like an X you know like the bigger the industry gets the less efficacious the results and we continue to get more obese 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 and sober a minute and well versed in you know the recovery parlament like I'm very familiar with the limits of willpower like willpower will Avail you nothing in 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 and and awareness and the like but maybe explain why 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 ition we should be able to use our willpower to change habits philosophers tend to disagree that there is even a thing of willpower it's more 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 we want to get here or you know sciency 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 the kind of default disposition that we have or relationship that we have with willpower where we're so insistent that that that's the path that we should be pursuing yeah so the closest that people have gotten is their prefrontal cortex and particular the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex or kind of up up you know like more lateral in forward in our head that seems to be involved in cognitive control cognitive control does not equal 100% willpower that's but that's kind of how the best somebody could map you know the phenology of willpower onto cognitive control and when you look at that it seems to be tied to kind of reward 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 of Consciousness even you know 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 uh 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 Mo 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 aren't all quite there someone suggested that we are doing that on a consistent basis is just that our stories line up better and so we're like oh yeah this must be me doing things MH there's this famous liit experiment uh from I think the 1970s they put um EG electrodes on people's motor cortex and they had they timed when they had the urge to tap a 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 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 my hand was going to move and I told the story that was consistent with my hand moving so a lot of this could be driven by what our 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 down deep down that because I do want to make this practical but uh worth considering good footnote and go look up the live experiment well we say like uh as they say in AA like self-will you know will Avail you nothing here every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right gear is key to Performance if what you're wearing is poorly crafted it's just going to put distance between you and those goals you've set you owe it to yourself to invest in the best and the best is on I'm obsessed with the cloud Ultra great on the trails and I just got the new nextg Cloud Stratus 3 for the road I'm loving those but on also has this incredible line of lightweight high performance apparel that it's just beyond anything I've previously dawned it's like this second to none Second Skin I love to rock the sweat wicking Ultra te and the ultra shorts which have this pocket right at the base of the spine that perfectly anchors your phone no jiggle I'm just so proud to partner with an and I love their vision for the future where their gear is engineered for circularity so check out their amazing lineup of super comfortable sleek and durable pieces for yourself at on.com well if willpower doesn't work what is efficacious in the context of weight loss or reshaping our relationship with food so you go on this journey to try to understand setting aside willpower what is the best way 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 that's I don't know that's not help help me not pragmatic enough use your brain come on come on Rich use your brain yeah will 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 just stop it you know yeah that is a great Bob newart kid 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 got to 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 R scorland 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 you kind of have this reward hierarchy in your brain about where that fits relative to other behaviors cuz 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 um a dark chocolate with sea salt and cayenne pepper 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 oo this one's nice it's got a nice mouth feel to it's 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 uh 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 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 equal x - one like that you know at the previous time point plus an error term that error term is really interesting uh let's get pragmatic here right I'm not a mathematician myself so I like to talk pragmatics let's say a new um 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 cake 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 ER 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 URS 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 eror 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 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 lattice work 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 yeah so I go right to the math and right to the neuroscience and I say pay attention and to 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 worked with it so I just want to give a shout out to this well my favorite is is her name Jackie yeah the mindful 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 uh you know I think a lot of people can kind of relate to like I say I do this thing and then left in my own devices I end up doing all these other things and I feel horrible about myself and that emotional state U 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 okay the only variable here that's going to change anything is awareness right you've got to pay attention as you do something and we can even build 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 complet present and non-judgmental with what is happening on some level it's a bit like the inventory aspect of of 12st Step where it's like let's just really from 10,000 ft 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 you know 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 but bias it's oh here's guy's not you know J's not anol or addict he does he do how just completely derailing this can be yeah well I've certainly seen it way too many times as you have and the 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 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 you resist persist kind of thing right and this is where I like the Marcus aelius quote like what what stands in the way becomes the way instead of like trying to fight a 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 you 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 12ep comes in with 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 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 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 going to circle back to something that you said earlier I'd love to explore this a little bit more because I'm 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 you know 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 call that more easily they're like oh 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 is BR is less likely to be like well it wasn't so bad because they're going be like really 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 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 appropo 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 going to 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 like well then I'm do this I'm do that 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 uh you know my wife has left and you know you 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 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 of picking up a bag of whatever could be baruka nuts which we have over here or it could be Gummy Bears or it could be potato chips that's my weak spot um and not being able to just eat one because these foods not baruka nuts but ultr 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 this Loop and I think we come up with Nar ative stories like you just said well this was how 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 you know 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 honic 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 honic 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 physi ologic mechanism says Hey eat some food so you can you can get the calories that you need and so the homeostatic hunger piece you know it's 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 of women with binge eaing disorder and I 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 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 honic hunger was gone they had no distinction well they probably never reach homeostatic hunger because the craving is always satisfied in the honic context certainly could be the case yeah absolutely and if you're 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 blindly unaware of how I had transferred all of that attic 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 you know reached a nere 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 you know but then when you look at it you're like well oh my God like when you do that inventory you're like holy [ __ ] 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 yeah 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 dis angling this knot and 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 okay but it really is set up it's a 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 connect 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 you know 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 and cheek nod to an internet myth which is if you look on the internet and H ask how long does it take to form a new habit you're going to find the the answer is 21 you know it's not the 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 like oh 21 days sounds pretty good and then you just get something you know 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 Jud 21 days feel short to me I I just know in my own case like trying to sh 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 dtes 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 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 and 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 if somebody's 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 in see how good it feels to like stop overindulging into eat healthy food it's it's really hard to go back so it's I think of it more as is you know here are 21 things that you can bring together as compared to you're going to nail it in 21 days right the first prong here is what you call 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 of the result and just being able to identify them in Vivo like as we go through 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 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 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 eight 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 and taking the kind of self- judgment and shame out of it and allowing some space for for self-compassion and just being The Observer of 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 you know last time I checked the average email in the US goes unread for only three minutes wow cuz people you know 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 Trigg 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 Avid those then I won't drink which of course duh you know if you V the liquor store in 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 part of the equation so if somebody's 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 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 allow ows 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 and it it's been very challenging to reduce those because you say you know don't pay attention to the trigger then there's the behavior but once you take that first bite 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 that you've had enough 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 willpower adjacent is creating binary rules and maybe that's because of my experience in 12ep it's like you're either sober or you're not you're either drinking or you're not drinking it's an onoff 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 is a gray Zone you know it's like it's not like there's no there's no onoff switch for that you know what I mean so this is like and I've made great progress I'm doing good and I feel better than I did six months ago um but I'm wondering like this I this isn't really a question this is more like me using you as my psychiatrist right now good free session so this is interesting because so just getting at that why is 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 doesn't work you know the switch comes back on but for a lot of people it can be very helpful just that 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 r roll experience here you eat super clean food right you're probably not eating much of any processed sugar but you 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 the we talk 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 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 be a different Plateau if you've gone for a 20 mile run versus if you haven't mhm 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 the likes on social media have been so addictive because we know exactly where we stand versus like actually throwing caution into the wind and like having a conversation with somebody and looking at their body language and be like what what is this this going well are we doing exactly so if we can learn to tolerate that ambiguity and even lean into it and get curious this is where curiosity becomes the 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 we if 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 in but how do you conjure that Curiosity curiosity is not something you can compel 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 being asked to supplant that with C it's okay just put that aside and be curious how do you actually do that yeah I think of it this is 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 self judgment doesn't feel good and they just start exploring dipping their toe in the water of kindness and 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 lives 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 is 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 Jud 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's been kind to you and almost everybody can think of one you know at some point in 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 kind 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 what's it 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 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 in 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 we're brought to you today by Roa glasses are not something you normally think about as a piece of performance gear which when you think about it is kind of insane because you can't perform at your best if you can't see well the Geniuses at Roa basically rebuilt eyewear from the ground up no matter how active you are or how much you sweat these things never slip or fall off your face they're super durable they look awesome and they've got tons of super classy modern styles to choose from I've been rocking Ras for about four years at this point I love them I'm a big fan of the Hamilton style in gloss black that's this Frame right here as well as clear or I guess they call them vintage on the website and uh if you want to try them out for yourself you can do that right now and unlock 20% off your order with the code Rich Roll at roka.com or you can click the link in the description below okay back to the [Music] show distinguishing between Cravings hedonic hunger and true hunger um feels analogous to this idea of trying to understand the difference between wants and needs yeah they're 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 stress 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 you just you're just doing what you do and because these foods are so unhealthy and because they hit all of those hormonal hot spots 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 yeah yeah like this is not going to happen quickly for most people who have been eating most of their lives in a certain way yeah 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 Ward and see the benefit of that single step which could be simply they're at the 7-Eleven they've got the 32 o 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 is tasty they can actually start leveraging that pleasure Plateau piece where are 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 then 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 hammer this 32 oz 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 is going on in my brain that is compelling me to like keep eating or keep drinking this thing yeah absolutely as you highlight earlier so there are certain like we don't have to buy a slurpie 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 from the body signals it's so true yeah so James Joyce wrote this famous line in his short story what was it a a painful case where he says Mr Duffy lived a short distance from his body yeah you know I think we all do to some extent yeah it reminded me of bertran Russell's five different types of eaters do you 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 friends and he's written extensively about this I don't know it's you can find it of different places but this is probably um but he no he he identified that there are five ways that people eat this is from the conquest of Happiness there's the boore 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 uh 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 gormandizer gormandizer 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 it more but I love those five types I was trying to trace the history of like this mindful eating piece and of a friend biku Alo is 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 suta there's a poly Canon writing about about overeating this king panati who used to overeat and he actually went to the Buddha like hey basically I'm I'm 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 King pay attention as you eat so not all Tak responsibility for paying attention he pays somebody to pay attention for yeah yeah well or to remind him at least because he still had to pay attention the other guy couldn't say hey it you know looks like you've had enough he had to just remind the king and the King did well um but I think it's that's interesting that you can find these stories all the way back 2 200 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 um but there is something to the idea of 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 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 slid in it for an hour right 20 minutes is reasonable for you unless you're just eating a small snack the pragmatic piece of this is if you shovel down your entire dinner in 5 minutes it's going to be really hard to tell if you've overeaten until until you hit that 20 minute Mark and you're like oh that didn't work so well and so it's that's all there is to it really it's 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 MH and perhaps that might help solve that equation or Square the equation between honic 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 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 mhm and that comes from reward right if it feels good 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 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 time crunched and just says listen you know like I'm just trying to I'm working two jobs the only way I can even feed myself is through the drive-thru or the quick meal on the whatever this feels like a very privileged thing I'm 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 the only thing they can do is go through the drive-thru and say great let's start there and if they only have 5 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 under eat 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 process you can compare those it still take about the same time to eat cost about the same the second pillar in this 21-day program is 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 tension to override that Willpower Instinct and bring mindfulness into 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 Asen goena um famous for his vasin Retreats you these Ultra Hardcore 10day silent meditation Retreats where where people are spending basically 10 days we call it the body sweep where they're 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 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 to do it as you go to sleep at night cuz a lot of people find it helpful to get 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 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 and you know going from one place to another U 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 yeah 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 the this smaller Circle within a larger Circle Vin diagram of mindfulness so meditation you 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 called noting practice and I read about it in the book a little bit this was popularized by a a Burmese monk named mahasi Sao 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 you're 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 you 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 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 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 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 you know 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 mhm 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 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 an 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 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 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 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 ey is my favorite part the investigate and I think of this is 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 note 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 thiss observer effect or in Psychology they call it the Hawthorn effect where the idea is that if You observe something you're going to affect the outcome um 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 in fact This Acronym was first developed by meditation teacher Michelle McDonald and the N actually stood for non-identification tarach has really taking this steps forward where it's like oh in the western world it's really hard to understand this concept of nonidentification I think her current iteration is like nurture like nurture ourselves meet our needs yeah but for me it's how do we not identify exper with experiences through noting practice and they happen to both start with n so is 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 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 all is good we're not going to have that tickle there's not going to be anything itching so we if we look a week in ahead we can 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 gets that snowball rolling and to the point where it's way too big we get clobbered by it when it comes to today MH 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 like oh wow here's this 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 T forward what happens when I indulge in that and you know we can see how that 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 want to have to try to divert the the snowball when it's gigantic you know at the Inception of the behavior moment you want to 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 is the accumulation of these behaviors that lead you to the point where you can bring that awareness into your daily life and register in 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 jiujitsu move but I think that's the aspiration right well and who doesn't want to be a black belt of course this this third pillar of this program is 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 database is 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 aame here and so here we can start asking ourselves s 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 over eat 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 offer than overeating and again as I mentioned earlier doesn't take that long to to find that pleasure plateau and 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 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 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 explor exporing 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 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 gonna 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 you're like oh well I know that my brain doesn't like change what does it feel like to resist change and we 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 on to 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 discomfort discomforts that I should be avoiding absolutely yeah um how does this work with trauma you know we've been talking about emotional eaing 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 very un they weight because of some traumatic history I'm thinking about you know a lot of women um who've had you know 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 you know these types of sexual aggressions so it can be a very pragmatic approach that somebody's doing unconsciously where they're gaining a bunch of weight that's just one example but there's also the emotional eating when you know there's there's all trauma and we want to use food as a way to numb ourselves I've had number of patients talk about it literally in those terms I I eat to numb myself so we can look at whatever the mechanism is that 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 could have done something different you know anybody that's been in a in a traumatic situation my heart goes out to them like 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 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 his only 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 talk 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 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 have 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 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 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 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 mhm I appreciate you but we're good now right yeah it reminds me of uh Richard schwarz's work with internal family systems who I know is controversial in the Psychiatry world but you know he talks a lot about about like 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 that you talk about is Five Finger you're breathing mhm explain I love this so this gets super pragmatic and I love this because this is something for any any parent that has a 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 seem stressed 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 put 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 I'll just do this you want to do it with me mhm 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 do two more 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's 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 want to geek out about the science about this because I love this so our dors 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 so there's 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 it there's a mismatch from an emotional tone level where our brain says hey you should be stressed and our body's like no 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 you know in a calmer physiology I like how simple it is uh 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 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 have noticed it like helps heighten the senses cuz 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 CIT 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 Noosa 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 believe me I would say is also along those lines but for somebody with bingeing disorder I've seen this be very very helpful for people and I've treated a lot of patients in my clinic with binging disorder so how does one know if they're somebody who's just a binge eater versus somebody who might need treatment for disordered eating well depends more clinical yeah it depends on how much you believe in the DSM so as a board certified psychiatrist you know that's the Bible that I was trained on I think that that is an evolving uh document so it was first developed as a billing document sure what are we on seven now six what uh we're on five but you know by definition evolving but slowly very slowly so I like to think of the person and not the book that you know that we try to you know pigeon hole people into diagnosis 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 the 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 Etc 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 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 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 um snarky with my with my partner oh well let me apply these three steps there oh well it's 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 you 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 different 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 Jud 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 the human mind wants to identify the simple easy stuff whether it's deleting this macro from your plate or this new fat diet that's all shiny over here the latest of which is OIC 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 we're how long are we into sort of live Human Experience with this brand new drug at this point the short answer is not 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 I'm thinking of one patient in particular who had clinical obesity and also alcohol use disorder and so she started taking OB zumic to help with her weight and for about 4 months she she was like this is a miracle you know like I'm just not hungry cuz she was nausea 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 n 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 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 you know this is happening to but I do know this if if we we rely on the magic pills and the Magic Bullets and the magic injections we're never going to get at piece 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 liver toxicity or something like that I don't know or kidney there so there are some of those things that aren't I haven't seen a ton of those things I mean the the typical effects or you know GI distress things like that sometimes vomiting but one thing that uh 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 in this highlights how even though this is much farther along than any other drug that I've seen still not a deal 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 MH 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 glp1 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 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 medication is can to 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 Dev 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 the tracking apps where somebody says I'm just going to track my food and then I'm going to magically you know 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 a helpful tool think of as a training wheel that helps somebody become more aware that's very helpful but if somebody's 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 ultr processed foods to make them irresistible similarly you know 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 its 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 we can't get that feedback you know the positive or negative feedback and so this is where I think humans in technology can work very well together if we're very careful about how we do it and so for example something like a whoop where you can notice a trend over time that there's no way that you'd be able to uh just individually be able to say oh five days later it was because of this where as 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 what about the accountability piece um I'm interested in 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 help us when we feel like we're just treading water and so the accountability piece can be really helpful when we 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 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 crav 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 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 yeah 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 grit it out until I get to that 30-day point and you 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 maybe 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 mindblower I think and it will be for a lot of people what else do you think think people get fundamentally wrong in their approach to trying to uplevel 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 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 you did a wonderful job and like I said it is a a natural progression of the work that 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 and share your wisdom is this interesting blend of West in 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 Etc 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 is like the Western the new religion in the west you 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 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 um well you're a change agent you're activating change and a lot of people positive change and the kind of question that I like to ask change agents at the at the end of of these podcasts is is more of a a bird's eyee 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 in lurks within all of us well I would say that I am more and more in 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 uh I really enjoyed that I appreciate it everybody please go pick up the hunger habit available every where 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 uh if people want to learn more about you is it just Dr jud.com where's the best place for them to yep Dr jud.com cool all right man appreciate you thank you yeah thank you cheers peace 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 Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change and the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. ral.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 newslet which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameo with digal 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 media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry mathys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plance [Music] namaste [Music] he

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 139,419

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: 3JJ7PB_JpKg

Length: 116min 33sec (6993 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024