062: Dr. Glenn Livingston: Teaching Others to Never Binge Again

Glenn:                  I was lucky and I was getting older and my metabolism was slowing down a little bit and I couldn’t stop. I found that it’s like I lit a fire and I couldn’t stop thinking about food and eating all the things that I learned to enjoy and, and I was, I was stuck and because I am, I got fatter and fatter and triglycerides went through the roof that were over a thousand at one point. The doctors were telling me I’m probably going to die of a heart attack. And before I knew it I was really heavy and very upset about it. But worse than that, I was distracted all the time thinking about food. And that’s a really bad thing for a psychologist to be because doing psychology, doing psychotherapy, it’s not really an intellectual endeavor. I mean it is, but you have to be present and lend somebody your soul. And if you’re not then you can’t really be effective and if you’re working with really high risk people then it’s Kinda dangerous and thankfully I never lost anybody.

Glenn:                  Nothing really horrible ever happened, but I would be sitting with a suicidal patient and thinking about when can I get to the deli or get a box of Snackwells or Doritos or something like that. Same thing with patients after an affair or on the verge of divorce and. No, I think that I did a pretty good job anyway, but I really wasn’t with myself. I come from a family of 17 therapists. Wow. Yeah. What the standing joke is, if anything breaks in the family, we all know how to ask how it feels but nobody knows how to fix it.

Glenn:                  But coming from a family of psychologists and being one myself, I figured I should take a psychological approach to fixing this and that maybe it’s not what I’m eating. Maybe it’s what’s eating me. And so I went to all the best psychologists and psychiatrists in the area and I talked about my childhood and I took medication and I went to overeaters anonymous religiously and everything helped a little for a while and then it got worse.

Kathy:                   And it got worse?

Glenn:                  Yeah.

Kathy:                   Do you mean that you started to lose weight but then it all came back plus more? Is that what you mean?

Glenn:                  That’s what happened. That’s what happened. Yeah, and I learned a lot of soulful things about myself. I even, at one point I didn’t have kids at. I never commuted. I always worked at home, so I had a lot of time for my career and at one point I even funded my own study. So over the course of that five years when clicks on the Internet were cheap, I got about 40,000 people to take a survey. And it was a fairly resurvey about the foods that they struggled eating and the areas of life that they were either happy or struggling with.

Glenn:                  And I found three really interesting things. One was people who struggle with chocolate like I did, and my binges always started with chocolate, they said that they were lonely or broken hearted more so than others. The kind of makes sense because I was in a bad marriage and she was traveling a lot and I really wasn’t, um, really was alone most of the time.

Glenn:                  And then I found that people who struggle with salty, crunchy things like chips or pretzels, they tend to be stressed at work and people who struggle with soft, chewy things like bagels and bread and pasta tend to be stressed at home.

Kathy:                   Interesting.

Glenn:                  Yeah. Right. Yeah, so I thought that was going to be the answer and I figured that all I had to do then was for myself, work on the loneliness or the broken heartedness and then my food problem would go away and for the other people work on their issues. Before I got to work on that, I called my mom who was also a therapist and I said, mom, this is what I found. It says that chocolate is a substance people go to when they’re lonely or broken hearted, but can you tell me anything else? What happened to me in my upbringing and how did this, how did this come together?

Glenn:                  Do you know anything about it? And she got this horrible look on her face. Honey. I’m so sorry. And I said, what? And she says, sweetheart, when you were a little boy, maybe about one year old, your dad was in the army. He was a captain and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam and I was terrified. At the same time your grandfather had just gotten out of prison and I didn’t know that he was guilty. I always adored this man, but he was actually doing these things. So she was devastated. And she didn’t have the wherewithal to hold me and hug me and love me or feed me well when I’d come running to her and crying. And so what she did instead was she got a little refrigerator and put it on the floor and she filled it with bottles of chocolate Bosco Syrup.

Glenn:                  I’m dating myself by telling you the brand that was random, the sixties, and if I come running to her crying, she said, go get your Bosco, Glenn. And I’d go run over to the refrigerator on the floor and I take out the Bosco and I’d suck on the bottle and I go into a chocolate sugar coma. And you would think when I heard that story, if this were the movies, I would go, Eureka, this is it. Mom and I would have a big cry, a big hug, and we forgive each other. And then I would never have trouble with chocolate again. Well, we had a big hug and a cry metaphorically because this was over skype and it did make me feel softer towards myself. I did forgive myself to a certain degree and softer towards my mom, I had more compassion for what she was going through. That conversation led me to a whole bunch of other questions about what was going on in her life. So it did help in that way, but it made the food problem worse.

Kathy:                   Really?

Glenn:                  Uh-huh.

Kathy:                   Okay, go on. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat.

Glenn:                  It made the problem worse because there was this little voice in my head and the voice went something like this. Hey, Glenn, you know what? You’re right. Your Mama didn’t love you enough. And she left a great big chocolate sized hole in your heart and until you can find the love of your life, you’re going to have to go out and binge on chocolate. Let’s go get some now, yippee. Let’s go do it. And that’s why I started eating more chocolate. It’s like, like this voice in my head could use anything to justify the chocolate. At the same time I was finishing up some consulting for some large food company I worked for. I probably shouldn’t say the names, but a lot of the big brands you would know. And I’d become aware of the …. that they were getting very, very good at engineering these food like substances that targeted our reptilian brain. And what they’re trying to do is use these hyper palatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and oil and excitotoxins to hit our bliss point.

Glenn:                  And there were billions of dollars aimed at this, hitting our bliss point, without giving us enough nutrition to feel satisfied. And then at the same time, the advertising industry is beaming 7,000 messages that us, that makes us feel like we can’t live without these things. And they’re learning how to package everything in such a way that really fakes us out. So I remember the VP of a major food bar manufacturer that I was working with telling me that the reason that we’re profitable, they’re big profitable insight was it take the vitamins out of the bar because they were interfering with the taste and to put the money from the vitamins into the packaging instead to make it look more vibrant and colorful. So I mean, what are they doing? They’re, they’re, they’re, they’re basically, they’re faking us out. They’re taking nutrition out of making, making it look like a big salad.

Glenn:                  But it’s not a big salad. It’s a bunch of chemicals. Yeah. And so what I recognized was that the billions of dollars stacked against us, we’re really giving these foods a life of their own. It didn’t matter so much why I was overeating or why I started, or was it trying to escape my loneliness or depression or brokenheartedness or comfort from this or comfort from that. What was happening was I was actually getting high with food. This was not just for comfort. I was getting high with food because these substances, look, there were no chocolate bars on the savannah, there were no chocolate bars and the tropics when we were growing up, when we were evolving. Chocolate isn’t artificially concentrated form of pleasure that evolution hadn’t prepared us for and some people can handle it and some people can’t, but I was one of those who couldn’t. And it had a life of its own.

Kathy:                   Okay. So let me ask you about that 40,000 person study or that you self funded. And in the book you had mentioned that if you figured out the why people are overeating or binging, then you could solve their problems and figure it out so that way they don’t have to do that.

Glenn:                  I thought I could, I thought I could.

Kathy:                   You thought I could. So in your book you talked about how you learned, you do not need to know why you been. She just needs to stop. So was that part of your process when you discovered all of this after you know the chemicals and, was it just an epiphany that you said, okay dad, I can’t control the ingredients that companies are putting into their products and I’m not gonna try to to remedy whatever happened when I was a one-year-old, and it’s just a matter of making a decision?

Glenn:                  Well, almost almost. It’s a little more to it than that because what I really discovered was that yes, these foods have a life of their own and the emotional conflicts are kind of like a fire, but the problem is that there are holes in the fireplace and it’s escaping into the house. And if you think of the fireplace as your ability to keep that fire logically contained, well the problem is that there’s that voice of irrationality and justification that says, you know, your Mama didn’t love you enough and there’s a chocolate sized hole in your heart, so let’s go binge. And what I discovered was that regardless of how that voice got there, if you could expose that voice and expose the logical fallacies within it, then you could recognize what it was up to and you could wake up at the moment of impulse and give yourself those extra microseconds that you need to do the right thing. So that’s what I discovered.

Kathy:                   Okay. So just to give people some context, if you wouldn’t mind sharing, how much weight did you end up losing to get to your healthy weight?

Glenn:                  It depends when you want to weigh me. But about 60 pounds on average. About 60 pounds.

Kathy:                   Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s a lot. And you’re a tall guy. You probably hid it kind of well, but that’s still a lot of weight.

Glenn:                  It was a lot of weight and it was dangerous for me because of my cardiovascular background. You know, Kathy, I’ve had people tell me you can’t possibly know what it means to lose weight because you only lost 60 pounds. And I say, look, if I knew it was going to be such a badge of honor when it happened, I would have made sure to gain another 50 pounds first so I could say I lost a 110 or something like that.

Kathy:                   Really? They discount you because it’s 60 or only 60 or I guess you should say.

Glenn:                  Yeah, it’s only 60. I have. I have clients who lose hundreds, but only 60.

Kathy:                   Okay. So how long did it take you?

Glenn:                  Well, you know, it wasn’t a miracle right away. Here’s what happened. I finally came across some alternative addiction treatment literature by a guy named Jack Trimpey at Rational Recovery and he works with drugs and alcohol. And what he pointed out to me was that the part of the brain that is targeted by food addiction doesn’t know love. It knows dominance. So it’s, it’s a very, very primitive part of the brain. You call it the lizard brain and the reptilian brain. And when the reptilian brain sees something in the environment, it doesn’t think about love it. Thanks. Do I eat it? Do I meet with it or do I kill it? Eat meat or kill, that’s the level at which are addictive brain actually operates. And the problem is that love is in the upper part of the brain. Everything that we really value, like music and creativity and family and relationships and longterm goals and strategies and and contribution and cooperation and society.

Glenn:                  All of that is in the upper part of the brain. That’s where our real human identity is and the other part of the brain is actually superior to the reptilian brain. It’s wired in such a way that we can resist virtually any impulse even though the reptilian part of the brand is a very strong organ and generates a very strong impulse. Well, so are our ovaries and testes and our bladder, they generate very strong biological impulses that press for expression, but we the humans that lives in the Neocortex, the upper part of our brain. We take control and say, no, you’re not going to pee in the living room. I know you got to pee, but you’re going to wait till we get to the bathroom. And it turns out we can do that with any type of biological urge. We really have the ability to delay the expression of those urges and express them in a more appropriate way. And that’s, that’s why we don’t run out in the street and kiss attractive people without that asking them. Right. That’s why.

Glenn:                  So what happened to me was I said, okay, you know why this is working for drugs and alcohol, and he says you have to have a really dominant approach. This is not like nurturing your inner wounded child. This is, it’s more like an Alpha wolf dealing with a challenger for leadership. And when an Alpha Wolf sees a challenger in the pack, they growl and snarl and basically what they’re saying is get back in line or I’ll kill you. It’s, wow. So that’s a shifted my whole paradigm. I can’t love myself in. I’m trying to nurture on my own or wounded child and find my shadow and you know, I still think those are all good things to do, but it doesn’t seem to help with food addiction. So I decided to be the Alpha Wolf and I decided that I have to draw a very bright line. So then I would know when I was eating healthy and what I wasn’t and so that I could hear the challengers because if you don’t, if you don’t have the clear target then you don’t know when you’re off base.

Glenn:                  So the first one that I did was I will never eat chocolate on a Monday through Friday again, I’ll only ever have it on the weekend. If I said that, then I knew if I heard any voice in my head that suggested that I was going to have it on a Wednesday. Well what I said was that was my pig. That’s my inner pig. And you don’t have to call it a pig. You can call it your food monster or whatever you want to call it as long as it’s not a cute pet. But I said that’s my pig. Pigs squealing for chocolate. I don’t want that. My pig’s squealing for chocolate, which is pig slop. I don’t eat pig slop. I don’t. Not with farm animals telling me what to do. And as ridiculous as that sounds for a sophisticated psychologist who’s done all these big studies, Kathy, it worked for me.

Glenn:                  That’s how I did it and it wasn’t a miracle, but ever so slowly I would wake up at those moments of impulse and remember who I was and what I wanted to do with the food and I started to feel like I had a choice. It started to feel like I wasn’t powerless. And sometimes I’d make the wrong choice anyway, but my sense of responsibility and authority and ability to conduct my life came back to me. And then once I had that and I realized that nobody was giving me these roles, no one’s forcing me to do that. I could eat whatever I want it to, if I was willing to deal with the consequences. I just started changing the rules to the things that I liked was more willing to live with and slowly but surely and I got better and better and better so I don’t eat pig slop. And I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do.

Kathy:                   I related a lot to the pig and that voice, and what I thought that was great that you included is that the first thing you need to know is the pig is not you. That there is a distinction, because I would berate myself if I went on a on a potato chip binge or something like that, and then I would tell, tell myself, oh, you did terrible thing. You ate all these potato chips, Yada, Yada, Yada. But I didn’t realize that there was a separate pig or food monster or whatever you want to call it, that was convincing me or persuading me that I should eat.

Glenn:                  Yeah. Well, it’s. It’s obviously a game, right? Because if you’re. This isn’t organ inside you. So the pig is not you in the same way that your bladder is not you. You’re in control, your bladder isn’t. And it turns out to be healthy to make that distinction because you can start to separate out all of the doubt and insecurity. So if you’re feeling like, Gee, I think I might binge or what’s gonna Happen Tomorrow? Or maybe I can be good for you know, a couple of days, but yeah, then the pig is going to get me. All that doubt and insecurity. You start to say, well, that’s pig squeal and I don’t listen to the pig squeal and you. You forced it out of your identity and you start to develop a really successful identity. And you start to be softer and more compassionate towards yourself and you start to have more self esteem because you recognize there is this voice inside you that could talk that was coming from your reptilian brain that was wrong and it doesn’t. It only wants bad things. It would sacrifice anything to get a little bit of slop and you don’t have to listen to it. It doesn’t matter how smart it sounds. Doesn’t matter if it has a phd from Harvard. Well, it doesn’t because if you know that it is your pig and you know that by definition your pig is that entity which wants you to break your plan, then why have an intellectual debate with that No matter how smart it is, because you know what It’s up to.

Kathy:                   Well, interesting, your book is filled with pig quotes and a lot of them I. I said, Oh yeah, I know that one. I know that one, but some of them were very, very deceiving, they’re persuasive, they’re tricky. And you said to watch out for some of them, these deceptive pig squeals, their persuasions, they’re trying to get you to go on a binge. And I was wondering if you could explain to me a little bit about the one about being overly grateful because we all want be grateful for things that we have in our life. How does the pig try to convince you to binge based on gratitude or gratefulness

Glenn:                  Well, gratefulness is a good thing. And, you know, my girlfriend and I, we both do gratitudes in the morning and we write down 10 things you’re grateful for and we try to remember all the things that we’re grateful for about each other in the mornings. But the gratitude emphasizes the present moment, which is also a good thing. However, the over emphasis of the present moment and some people might say that it’s not possible to overemphasize the present moment. I disagree. I think that part of the executive function of the brain is the ability to plan and strategize and move towards the future that it really wants to create for you. The pig’s idea is that you should only be grateful what you for what you have in the present, You should not worry about the future at all, Just live completely for today and that synchronizes with a life of indulgence in food addiction because when you’re indulging all the time and food addiction, you don’t have much energy for anything else.

Glenn:                  You’re always recovering or sitting on the couch and sweating and spending a lot of mental energy wondering how much more am I going to have? How much more can I get away with? How much do I have to exercise to undo the damage? How am I going to hide the evidence? Where am I going to get the next binge? How much is that going to be? 5,000 calories. How much am I going to weigh in, on and on and on, and it prevents you from executing strategic plans that help you accomplish your dreams in the long run. So being overly grateful or being only grateful to the exclusion of thinking about the future and planning for the future, is a pig’s maneuver, it’s a sneaky pig maneuver. And you’re the first person that ever asked me that. I’m really impressed with that question.

Kathy:                   It perplexed me a little bit because yes, I want to be grateful for life, but I could also see the argument for the pig that well, you want to live for today, live for the moment, live like there’s no tomorrow, so let’s go binge or let’s go eat something that you shouldn’t be eating.

Glenn:                  Yeah.

Kathy:                   That was very interesting to me. Let me ask you this, Glenn, is it true that your pig calls you Bubba?

Glenn:                  There’s only one that ever asked me that. Yeah, my pig calls me Bubba. It’s like, listen, Bubba, you don’t have the energy to….

Kathy:                   Okay. So where did I come from? Is that a nickname for you when you were a kid?

Glenn:                  You know, I have no idea. Um, I used to make this joke when I was a kid about if did something wrong. Not that I ever did anything illegal, but it used to just exaggerated in any way. And I’d say, well, you can always come visit me and my new husband Bubba in a gray cell with four walls and bring me a can of tomato soup. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s. That’s one of the mysteries of the unconscious but my pig does, he calls me Bubba.

Kathy:                   Does he still talk to you?

Glenn:                  Yeah. Oh yeah. There’s always the. What happens with food addiction because of the neurology’s ability to upregulate and downregulate. What I mean by that is if you have a chocolate bar every day, then your nervous system adjusts and your pleasure center responds less and less to the natural sugars in fruits and vegetables and you require more and more chocolate to get the same pleasurable response.

Glenn:                  It’s kind of like, um, I lived underneath the subway in college in Graduate School for a little while. And when I first got there I couldn’t sleep because the noise of the subway passing every 10 minutes, was so loud. But after two weeks I couldn’t hear it. And what happened was that the subway noise was actually a supersized stimuli and my brain didn’t know what to do that at first. But then it downregulated it’s response and say, well, this is not really relevant. It’s not dangerous. There’s no reinforcement available. There’s no food or resources available just because that noise is here. It’s irrelevant. I don’t have to pay attention to it. And it downregulated the response. Well, if you present a supersized sweet to the brain because there were no chocolate bars in the savannah, and you do that over and over and over again, eventually the brain says, wow, this is more sweetness than we found anywhere in nature.

Glenn:                  Obviously we’re in some environment where we really struck it rich. We don’t have to pay as much attention. Let’s downregulate the response. And that can get so bad by the way, that people start to feel like they need the chocolate or the sugar to feel normal and they actually displeasure without it. And it’s at the level of survival. People really believe that they need the chocolates to survive and there’s no way they could skip it. That’s why you have jokes like just handed over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt. So bad, but the good news is that your body upregulates also, and so your pig will tell you that, well, you can’t drop chocolate to once a week or give it up altogether. It’s too good and you’re going to be deprived. You’re gonna feel tortured, there’ll be no pleasure in life, but within six weeks the research says that your taste buds a double in sensitivity and they keep going up from there until they get back to normal. So before you know it, you can start to taste the subtle flavors in apples or even a tomato and you start to really enjoy different species of fruits coming in. You don’t have to believe me. Now you can think that I’m full of crap.

Kathy:                   No, I believe you. I believe you because I used to put a lot of sugar in my coffee and I stopped doing that long time ago and now if I have any kind of sugar in my coffee. I have to throw it out. It just tastes awful to me.

Glenn:                  So that’s what happened to me. That’s, that’s what happened to me is slowly but surely, I found that… I asked myself this one question over and over, which had got from Doug Graham, which was Doug Graham says, you shouldn’t have to recover from a meal. You should never have to recover from a meal. That’d be a lot of sense to me because why would we be wasting so much energy sleeping it off in nature. We’re not hunting down an antelope. So I just started gravitating away from things that I had to recover from an eating more fruits and vegetables and more fruits and vegetables and eventually gave up chocolate altogether. I’m not saying anybody has to do that, but for me it was not worth having to recover from. And I found I craved it for a lot for about two months. Then not so much, but once in a while for about a year and then somewhere around the 18 month to two year period, it just started to look like a bag of chemicals to me and I can’t remember why I liked at all in the first place. If I had a bar I would remember, but I don’t want to have a bar. I don’t want to remember.

Kathy:                   So you talk about willpower versus character, but is it your willpower or is it something else that we can use to defeat the pig?

Glenn:                  Character trumps willpower. So the reason for that is that willpower is not like a black and white switch that some people have on and some people have off. What we know about willpower from all the recent research is that it’s fatigued by decision making. It’s like gas in the tank and you burn a little bit of it with every decision that you make. Not just decisions about food, but any decision. There are only so many good decisions you can make over the course of the day. That’s why so many people wake up in the morning and feel like they’ve got the perfect plan for what they’re going to eat. But then by nighttime they’re, you know, sitting in front of Taco bell or hanging out in front of the pizza place or in front of the refrigerator and just going to town because there are only so many good decisions you can make

Glenn:                  over the course of the day. what we know is we want to eliminate decisions wherever we can. Well, the standard advice that we’re given about food decisions is that we should eat healthy 90 percent of the time and indulge yourself 10 percent of the time. Well, on its surface, that’s a good idea, right? Right. The problem with it is, first of all, it’s not well defined what healthy eating versus unhealthy eating years, so every time you make a food decision you have to make another decision. Is this healthy or is it not? And secondly, it’s not well defined when the 90 percent is and when the 10 percent is so when you’re in line at starbucks and there’s a chocolate bar of the character with your name on it, you don’t know if this is more than 90 percent days or one of the 10 percent days, and so you are burning willpower, glucose moment by moment as you’re making those decisions.

Glenn:                  So we’re told to use guidelines instead of rules and strive for progress, not perfection, but the truth is that that really wears down our willpower. What you want to do instead is come up with very clear habitual statements that define how you will react in certain situations without having to make a decision. So let’s say, let’s say you walk into a diner and there’s a $10 bill on the table because the waitress has not gotten her tip yet. She says I’ll be right back. I just have to get your menus. And there is nobody upfront. There are no windows. Nobody would see you take the money, their own reasons. They’re virtually all the people I ever present that scenario to say no way. I would take it. And I say, well, doesn’t that take a lot of willpower? And they say no. They say, well, what do you mean it?

Glenn:                  Would it be pleasurable? No one would say you do it. And they say, well, but I wouldn’t do because that woman worked hard for her money and I’m not a thief. And I say, oh. So as a matter of character, as a matter of principle, you’ve decided that there are certain things you’ll just never do a no matter what, no matter what, no matter what. And they say yes. So character eliminates the needs for decision making in the moment of impulse. You can make simpler character statements. I’m not a thief is a pretty bold one, but you could say I’m just not the kind of person who eats chocolate Monday through Friday. I only eat chocolate on the weekends. That’s the kind of person I am. And when it becomes part of your identity, then Monday through Friday you’re in front of a chocolate bar. You don’t have to make a decision. Just it becomes just like that $10 bill on the table. It’s not part of my character to take it. That’s not part of my identity. I’m not going to do it.

Kathy:                   Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And making a statement that you normally don’t eat chocolate Monday through Friday or whatever it is, is doable.

Glenn:                  I think are a lot of things that we never do in the world because we have unconsciously learned that they’re not acceptable and they’re not the kind of people that we want to be in the society and so all I’m advocating is thinking through your character statements and articulating them in black and white so you know what they are and you can change them whenever you want to become the person that you want to be, not the person that I want you to be, the person that you want to be. And then it becomes part of your identity and it protects you from all these decisions day in and day out. It obviates the need for willpower.

Kathy:                   Right You described that a binge is even one bite or swallow outside of your well defined food plan.

Glenn:                  Take a lot of heat for that and go ahead.

Kathy:                   and that making a sacred commitment to your food plan is getting married.

Glenn:                  I define the bullseye with very clear boundaries around it. I think that learning to stop over eating requires that you know exactly what you’re shooting at and not having a fuzzy target. People are frightened of making a very crystal clear target and understanding that if they miss the Bullseye, than they actually missed the bullseye because they’re used to the experience of letting their pig control things if they make one mistake. So if you do make a mistake, I suggest you feel guilty about it for a moment, just like you feel a little bit of physical pain if you touch a hot stove, let it get your attention. Figure out what went wrong. Did you not feed your body well enough that day where you’re not attending to your blood sugar? Did you not get enough sleep? Did you hear a sneaky pig squeal that convinced you to break your plan without you knowing it?

Glenn:                  Figure out what went wrong and what you’re going to do to fix it in the future, and then let go of the guilt. What I don’t recommend, which is what people are frightened of, which is why they won’t say that one bite off is a binge. They’re frightened of just saying, oh, screw it. I guess I’m off my plan until tomorrow then, but it doesn’t make sense to do that. If you accidentally chip a tooth, do you go get a hammer and bang the rest of them out? And I’m trying to drive home the notion that it’s okay to commit with perfection and forgive yourself with dignity and that’s the reason I use the marital analogy. When we get married. We don’t aim it a fuzzy target. Like if somebody asks you to marry them, Kathy and they say, hey honey, I’m 90 percent certain that I’m never going to sleep with anyone else, but there sure are a lot of attractive people out there and you don’t want me to lie. Right?

Kathy:                   I hope that never happens to anybody.

Glenn:                  It’s not a commitment that they made sure of certain commitments is 100 percent and it turns out that if you don’t commit 100 percent to a goal. If you know, if you’re climbing a mountain and you can’t see yourself at the top of the mountain as you’re starting out, the odds of you making it to the top are very small because you’re going to be constantly distracted by doubt and uncertainty. But if you visualize yourself at the top of that mountain from the very beginning, even if you don’t make it, if you visualize it and you commit to it, then you can continually purge all that doubt and uncertainty from your mind and just focus all your energy on achieving the goal.

Kathy:                   In your book to change what you say to yourself. Instead of saying, I’ll try, say I will.

Glenn:                  yeah, yeah, I’ll try really means I’ll try for a little while until I don’t feel like it anymore. It’s got an end to built into that game. Yeah.

Kathy:                   Yeah. It doesn’t sound like a committment. I’ll try to be faithful to you. Yeah, that doesn’t sound really good.

Glenn:                  My book wouldn’t have sold 600,000 copies if I named it Binge Sometimes. That’s not what people want. They want to Never Binge Again. If you want to change their character, they want to become a person who never binges again.

Kathy:                   yeah. For others who are out there listening who may be struggling with their own weight and they have their own pigs whispering in their ears, is there anything that you would like to share? Maybe a one action step that they could do towards never binging again?

Glenn:                  What you want to do is find one rule that might make a difference for you. It can be something really simple. For example, maybe I will never eat standing up again or I’ll always put my fork down between bites or I never eat chocolate Monday through Friday and anything you want to, anything you want, but it should be something that would make a big difference that you might be willing to do because you know this, this really serious problem is is dogging you and it would make a big difference if you could stop. And then just listen for that for your pig to try to break that one rule and get a sense of how the game is played and as you have a sense of how the game is played, don’t don’t worry about losing weight this week. Make sure you’re having plenty to eat, as a matter of fact. When you recover your sense of power and enthusiasm and ability to control the pig, then you’ll be in an infinitely better position to adjust your food plan, add another rule and set it up so you can lose a little weight thereafter. So that that’s my advice. One rule. Learn how the game is played and even write down what your pig is saying and try to disempower its logic. Ask yourself where the lie and the pig’s logic is and and, and see what happens.

Kathy:                   Okay, that sounds like a great plan to start off with. Okay, so Glenn, if anyone is interested in learning more about you, your book, the services you offer, how can they find you?

Glenn:                  If you go to NeverBingeAgain.com and click the big red free bonus button and you sign up through that will get you a free copy of the book itself and Kindle, Nook or pdf format. You could buy the paperback if you wanted to wear the audible version, but you’ll get a free copy in electronic format and I will get you copies of recorded coaching session so you can hear how this very, very weird theory plays out in practice and I will also get you a set of food plan templates. These are starter templates that you can use to see what kind of rules you might use to follow a low carb or high carb or macrobiotic or point counting or calorie counting or Vegan with whatever your diet happens to be, your preferred philosophy. We’ll get you started and you can modify them at will. It’s Never Binge Again. Dot Com and click the big red button. We do have paid services also, but I recommend you start with the free materials that will lead you to the paid services if you’re interested.

Kathy:                   Okay. Terrific. So one final question. I know we talked about a lot and we could have talked a little about a lot more from your book. Is there anything else that you would really like to share?

Glenn:                  Um, what I’d like to share is that it’s a lot easier to stop than it’s made out to be. People think that they have to solve all of their emotional problems first. You really don’t. You can stop overeating and still have emotional problems. That’s okay. I’d like to say people said that you, for emotional reasons, they say, well look, if you’ve got six problems and then you overeat, then you’re going to have seven problems. It’s a lot less complicated than you think. You don’t. You don’t have to do years of meditation. You don’t have to have a deep contact with a higher power. These are nice things to do for your own psychology, but you don’t have to in order to stop overeating, all you have to do to Never Binge Again is never again. You just make make some lines in the sand where or how this game is played. Identify that crazy voice in your head and find the lies within it and before you know what you have your control back.

Kathy:                   Terrific. Dr Glenn Livingston, author, I’ve never been to. Again, thank you so much for your time and sharing your story with us. Really appreciate it. I.

Glenn:                  Well thank you, dear. This was really nice.