Overeating – Glenn Livingston
Guest: Glenn Livingston
Release Date: 1/3/2022
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Steve Washuta: Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I am your host Steve Washuta, co-founder of truly fit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Glen Livingston. Glen has a PhD in psychology. You can find him at Livingston, Glen GL e and n on Instagram or his book. Never binge again at WWE. Never binge again, calm. Glen and I today we’ll be discussing overeating and binging which is his specialty.
We go over the clinical definition of overeating or binging. And if that’s different from his definition, we talk about the evolutionary reasons why we may be doing this. We talk about if overeating and the stimulation is tied to particular foods. And I give him some hypotheticals to break that down. We go over the standard treatment that one would give in the medical community to somebody who is dealing with this overeating or binging issue. And what Glen would do differently to help people overcome this.
A lot of different studies and evidence surrounding Glen’s beliefs in overeating. We talk about consumerism, and corporatism involved, and especially the western culture and how that adds to overeating and binging and a host of other things surrounding this. It was a great conversation. And Glenn is certainly a wealth of knowledge as this is his expertise. With no further ado, here is Glen Livingston. Glen, thank you so much for joining the truly fit podcast. Why don’t you give the audience and listeners a bio of who you are professionally your credentials and what you do in the health industry?
Glenn Livingston: Well, um, I have a lot of kind of highfalutin fancy credentials, I am occasionally in clinical psychology, and I was a child and family psychologist originally being an all sorts of radio and TV and I had a dual career because my ex wife used to travel for business when a lot of time on my hands. And we didn’t have kids and I didn’t commute.
So I also consulted for industry on the wrong side of the war. I in my 30s was working for a lot of big food companies, big advertising companies to help them to sell us a lot of junk. And I always feel bad about that.
And I’m trying to make up for it now. But I was very good at it. And I ran a multimillion dollar company for a lot of years. And more importantly for the purpose of this interview is that I’m not just a doctor who decided to work with overeaters, I had had a very serious overeating problem myself, I was somewhere in the 280 pound range.
I had, you know, extremely high triglycerides and psoriasis and relational types of autoimmune problems and the doctors were yelling at me all the time. But I found that the food really had a hold over me and coming from a family of 17 psychologist and psychotherapist, I figured the problem must be that metaphorical hole in my heart. And if I could figure out how to heal the hole in my heart, then I wouldn’t have to heal the hole in my stomach.
It actually distracted me and it took me like 2025 years to figure out that overcoming overeating was more of a alpha, alpha wolf approach, a kind of a tough love, dominate your cravings kind of thing versus a love yourself in and kind of thing. There are a number of influences on that, including some of the consulting work that I did. Where I saw these companies were engineering, you know, food like substances, which were hyper-palatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and oil and excitotoxins.
It was all directed at hitting the bliss point and the reptilian brain without giving us enough nutrition to feel satisfied. Every time that someone was looking for love in a bag box or container, there was some fat cat and a white mustache and a suit laughing all the way to the bank. Looking at those external forces, I eventually realized that they had nothing to do with my upbringing, or my personal psychology, or that I was a little depressed or lonely at the time. And they had much more to do with these external forces.
We’re told the wrong thing in society about how to overcome overeating where we’re told told to like eat healthy 90% of the time and indulge 10% of the time, which ignores the fact that that requires a lot of decision making. And willpower is the ability to make good decisions and there were only so many good decisions we can make every day. So we’re actually better off with really clear lines.
You know, like very hard and fast rules more so than these fuzzy guidelines which require a constant decision making him wearing down to willpower. And through, you know, a long series of turns and events and a study that I did, and we can talk more about any of them at any time, I came to the conclusion that I could fix this with a much more aggressive and clear cut practical approach than a better in depth psychology approach.
So that’s what I did. And turned out that I wrote a book, which got really, really, really, really popular. It’s got 13,000 reviews, which is more than the Da Vinci Code. So now, that’s what I do, I go, I go around, and I speak about it. I have a boutique coaching agency, where we help people implement the method. We’re trying to help million people a year to stop binge eating. That’s the goal. So well, that’s me. That’s my story. In a nutshell.
Steve Washuta: That’s a fantastic goal. And I want to thank you in advance for leaving the corporate gig to join Team good guys and really make a difference. That’s, that’s not the Iron Man, I’m trying and, you know, doesn’t pay as well. But it’s okay. It certainly doesn’t. So that’s a very big view. And it let’s, I think we should start from the beginning here, let’s define overeating. And that could be a clinical definition, Glenn, or that could be your definition, if that’s different than the clinical definition.
Glenn Livingston: It is different. It is different. I write for Psychology Today these days, too. And I wrote this long article about the discrepancy between the diagnostic category of binge eaters, which, depending upon what study you look at, falls in the like, two and a half to 3% range of the population.
And the fact that 40% of Americans are obese. So something’s missing there. Right. And they’re, you know, diagnostically, the, you know, DSM five would say that, well, there are, you know, there are other forms of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, which are also fairly small incidents and this fairly large category called eating disorder not otherwise specified.
But I think the question, Am I a binge eater in and of itself? And I could tell you what the DSM five criteria are, if you want. Or I could just explain to you that the question is actually not entirely helpful, with the possible exception that there are some medications that are showing some promise these days? Minimal Promise, Promise.
The question, am I a binge eater ignores the fact that most people in our society, eat beyond their own best judgment. And most of the things I’ll talk about today, in terms of how to help yourself with that are things that can help you to eat within your own best judgment. So rather than let someone else define for you, what’s healthy eating or not most, most people know what a healthy day of eating looks like for them. Most people know, when they’re eating healthy.
When they’re not, for the most part, I mean, in favor of consulting with nutritionists, and experts and things like that to get more information. But most people have a much harder time with complying with what they know is best and actually figuring out what’s best.
So when you ask, Have I crossed the line into formal binge eating yet? It’s almost like you’re asking, How much more can I get away with? And I think that that question in and of itself, tends to get people to overeat for longer before they could, you know, learn some very practical tools, little techniques that could help them to eat the way that they really want to eat in the first place. So that’s, that’s my answer to that question.
Steve Washuta: Do some people argue? And do you have anything to add to this, that, you know, overeating is just evolutionary, it was a feature not a bug in that, you know, for 1000s of years, it was difficult to get food and so, you know, there’s sort of epigenetics ingrained into us into our DNA to say, if we have food near us, we need to eat it.
Glenn Livingston: Um, I wouldn’t argue with that at all. I would get right behind that. I think that what’s going on on our society is that these big companies are pouring billions of dollars into pressing our revolutionary buttons.
You know, they’re looking to hit the bliss point in the reptilian brain. They don’t give us industry to feel satisfied. That’s, that’s a you know, it’s an unfair button to have billions of dollars to figure out how to trick you into doing that. Then thinking that that’s what you need to survive. I’ll give you another example of what’s going on So I, I want to tell you a little story about three types of fish.
I’ll explain to you how this parallels in the food industry. There is a, what’s called them a big fish and a little partner fish. And then we’ll talk about the, the parasite fish. There’s a big fish, and it’s kind of got a little partner. And when the little partner does a dance, the big fish goes into a kind of trance.
This is an evolutionary mechanism that’s developed over the years over the, over the millennia. And the big fish when it’s in a trance, because little fishes dancing, opens his mouth wide, and allows a little fish to clean the seaweed and gunk off of its teeth. And it’s a symbiotic relationship, which means that both fish benefit, the little partner fish gets a meal, the big fish gets its teeth cleaned, no harm, no foul, everybody’s better off.
But then there is this predator fish, parasitic fish that has learned to mimic the little partner fishes dance. So the parasitic fish comes in and does a little dance. The big fish goes into trance and opens its mouth, at which point the parasitic fish eats the lips of the big fish into trance. So the big fish loses the parasitic fish wins.
It’s not a win win relationship. But this parasitic fish has figured out an evolutionary loophole by which it can profit. Well, can let’s fast forward to the modern food industry. And I’ll tell you a story about a company that you’d recognize if I gave you the name so I won’t who produce food bars, a very well known food bar manufacturer.
I was very friendly with the vice president of marketing. And he told me as he was leaving the company, that he was kind of ashamed of the thing that was most profitable to them. And what turned out to be most profitable in the food bar marketing industry was to take the vitamins out of the bar and put the money into shiny, vibrant, diverse, multicolored packaging instead.
Because when you give people the illusion that they’re going to be eating the rainbow, they believe that there’s a an evolutionary basis, we’re programmed to believe that there is a diversity of micronutrients available. So if you go look for a salad with a purple cabbage and keep dark blueberries, and yellow carrots, and red tomatoes and green lettuce, you’re going to be getting a diversity of nutrients. That’s what we say eat the rainbow.
As a matter of fact, it’s probably why we have such an appreciation for color in the first place. But what was profitable for this company, was to fake us out like the predator fish was faking out the big fish to make us believe and just kind of go into a trance. And these are automatic responses, automatic evolutionary responses, to just go into a trance and think, Oh, I have to get the bar with the multicart color diversion, you know, a diverse packaging, because that’s where the nutrients are. But the nutrients were not there.
I don’t mean to single out the food company, the food bar manufacturers, because this goes on all across the industry. They know how to hit our evolutionary buttons. You know, we didn’t have pizza and Pop Tarts. And you know, all the bags and boxes contain containers that we do now. We never had them in the Savannah. And you know, and people are really suffering because of that. So I I totally and thoroughly support what you’re saying I think it’s the problem. And then I think society on top of that, because we’re not really meant to sit between four walls and stare at a computer screen hoping electrons get transferred to our bank account all day.
I think that we have rely on these bags and boxes and containers and these evolutionary tricks. And society basically, all tacitly agrees to slowly kill ourselves without saying anything about it. It’s a matter of fact, not only without saying anything about it, we support each other to do it. So it sounds very depressing at it is kind of very depressing.
But at the same time, it’s like the matrix and if you know which pill to take, and you’re willing to wake up, there are some very simple defenses you can take against it and and things are not hopeless. And you know, legislation is kind of sort of slowly coming around and there are there’s more regulatory pressure and I think that just like it’s not really cool to smoke anymore. I think in 25 years, it’s not going to really be cool to eat all these is processed foods. Anyway, I was a little long waiting for the answer. But that’s what I think.
Steve Washuta: Well, it sounds to me like you think sort of consumerism plays a big role in again, pressing our evolutionary buttons for lack of a better term in order for us to be Overeater. So So my next question kind of ties into that, let’s go ahead and say, hypothetically, we lived in a world that that those foods didn’t exist, right? Nabisco was not a company. And all you could eat was, like, let’s say, vegetables and fruits, could somebody still be overeating at that point, or would now over eating not exist? Because we don’t have those, let’s say chemicals, sending signals to our brain to continue to eat?
Glenn Livingston: I think it would be rare. I think there are there are some influences on overeating that have to do with how children are fed as infants, and some other mothers are better features than others, and some others are more consistent than others. And, you know, I think that people can panic that there’s not going to be enough food and are going to starve because they’re left too long without mother’s breast or something when they were a young lad in the cave.
But I think that influence is so much less significant than the industrial influence. And I think it is so much overplayed in our society today. That it’s almost negligible. That’s That’s what I think,
Steve Washuta: what is the standard treatment for an overeater? And I’ll give you again a scenario. Steve as an overeater. Do I tend to just go to my general practitioner and and talk to them about this? And then they send me to somebody for the for the next step? What what goes on and and then you could also elaborate why you think that process is potentially broken and how you would fix it?
Glenn Livingston: Yeah. I’m trying to remember the name of the woman that educated me about all this, she said, Immaculata University, I forget, I forget her name. She’ll be mad at me, but I forgot. But she reviewed all the research with me. And what’s interesting is that what’s most commonly prescribed is not really what the evidence support for, for overeating and binge eating in particular, the evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy and and some of the new SSRI medications are the only thing that’s, that helps mostly the cognitive behavioral therapy.
But what’s usually done is people are sent to an eating disorder specialist who really promotes a philosophy of mindful eating. And, and not distinguishing between good and bad foods necessarily, they tried, they really aim to eradicate perfectionistic thinking, which I think is a good thing and a bad thing.
Okay, that’s something important to come back to because there’s an energy in perfectionism that can be used for good as well as bad. But you can miss apply it and fuel the eating disorder itself. So usually, people are taught to eat mindfully to be more present, while they’re reading to get more sensitive to being hungry and soul so they can eat when they’re hungry, and stop when they’re full.
Stop eating, you know, sneaky eating, and to not be frightened of any food in particular. I think that that works for a lot of people to a certain extent. Because I do think that a lot of people, I mean, first of all, it’s hard to avoid the stimulation of all sorts of foods in today’s society. So when you cultivate the fear of a food, you tend to be thinking about it all the time and obsessing about it all the time. And it can make things worse.
Secondly, I do find that the people who are worse off with overeating, they tend to be people who were raised against their own best interest with some type of food rules, you should eat this, you shouldn’t eat that. They’re not there at the right time. And so they developed a survival mechanism to, you know, rebel. And so it, it stops that kind of two year old rebellion in its tracks, and a lot of people do okay with that.
The problem is twofold. First of all, the industrial forces we talk about are designed to break hungry and full meters. When a bag of chips is manufactured, it’s manufactured with slight flavor variations. So you think it’s going to be all in one assembly line with one formula going into the bag, but it’s usually a multitude of assembly lines, each of which has a slightly different flavor, because the variety in flavor kind of confuses the mind into looking for more.
And so they find that people keep eating due to that subtle variation and flavor and there alternatively, experiments and tricks like that the that the industry is, is engaged him. So fair things like that that breaker hungry and full meters, there’s the concentration of pleasure that breaks are hungry in millimeters. And then there’s the fact that well, mindful eating is good.
We think there’s some research that suggests that we absorb new, more nutrition, if we’re mindful, and we’re keen to stop sooner. And it’s really good to be present while you’re eating. The problem is in that in the society that we live with, who has time to be mindful all the time.
And the third problem is that there has to come a point where you delineate healthy versus unhealthy food, if everything you can put in your mouth is okay, then you’re destined to poison yourself, there’s flavored cardboard in the food system, it’s legal, there’s flavored cardboard in the food system, at some point, don’t we have to stand up and say, this is good food, this is bad food, not just well, you should kind of sort of try not to have flavored cardboard.
It’s, um, the regulatory systems are very slow to catch up with what the food industry does, and and so while people overcome the obsession with a purely mindful approach, they don’t necessarily overcome eating unhealthy. And so they’re not really as happy as they could be with their, with their food and their well-being. And so, I’ve, I’ve the system we’ve developed, we suggest that rules are okay. It’s okay to come up with rules that talk about the very clearly distinguished healthy versus unhealthy eating.
And in fact, it’s important to do that, because if you don’t delineate your bullseye if you don’t draw a circle around the bullseye that you’re aiming for, then how do you know when you hit it or not? If both of that you’re aiming for is fuzzy, then when you miss the bull’s eye, you don’t know by how much and in what direction.
So you’re eliminating the feedback mechanism that will help you learn. Whereas if you very clearly delineate where your Bullseye is, for example, I will only ever have chocolate on Saturdays and Sundays again, then, you know, if you hit it, or if you missed it, if you make a mistake, you’re immediately aware of it, you can assess how big a mistake it was you and access the exact type of correction that’s necessary to aim better at the bull’s eye next time.
The natural learning mechanisms of our brain are engaged when we are learning organisms, if we’re provided with sufficient feedback and motivation to hit it hit a target. And we keep getting up and trying, we’re going to get better and better. It’s just the nature of what a human being is. But people don’t get better because there’s, you know, this idea that you shouldn’t have a bull’s eye.
And that you know, the archery target in the first place is a bad idea. And you should just kind of aim for progress, not perfection. But the problem with aiming for progress and not perfection, when it comes to food goals is that it really just means you’re going to try for a little while until you don’t feel like it anymore.
What I think we should do instead is commit with perfection, but forgive ourselves with dignity. So when an Olympic archery is aiming at the target, even though they don’t hit the bull’s eye, within 30, or 40% of the time, when they’re aiming at the target, they don’t lose the arrow until they feel at one with the bullseye.
They’re aiming with perfection. And that allows them to purge their mind, of all the doubt and uncertainty that otherwise would drain energy from accomplishing their goal. If they miss the bull’s eye, they take an assessment of what happened and make adjustments.
They don’t say, oh my god, I’m a pathetic Archer, I might as well shoot all the rest of the hours off the target or into the audience. Right? So they commit with perfection. They take their mistakes and misses seriously, but they forgive themselves with dignity and make use of that feedback.
So I think that the idea of not really thinking up, the idea of discarding all the energy of perfectionism, in order to eat better, I think is a mistake. The idea of focusing that perfectionism on the commitment and aiming phase or relinquishing it, when you’re analyzing your mistakes. I think that that’s what works much better. Yeah,
Steve Washuta: I agree completely. And I’ve had some people on the podcast discussing intuitive eating and I thought that was interesting, but I don’t necessarily agree with the whole premise of it. Insofar as I do believe that we have these hedonic urges where we want to eat bad stuff a lot and I don’t know if we should always intuitively fall down that path and say, I need to listen to my body because my body is craving chocolate.
So maybe I need something in the chocolate. I think sometimes you just have these, again, these hedonic urges and for some Unlike me, again, totally anecdotal, not my area of expertise. But I’ll have all of my dinners set for the week, meaning I’ll buy seven different types of meals from my wife and myself, I don’t necessarily have to eat one on Monday and one on Tuesday, if I’m craving what I bought, you know, any of those seven days,
I can switch the menu around and eat what I thought I was gonna eat on Wednesday on Monday, but I still have a little bit of a plan around what I’m going to do, because with no plan there, and like you said, no goal, I just I don’t see how success comes about.
Glenn Livingston: Another analogy might be thinking of yourself, like a city traffic planner. And if you were a city traffic planner, you would be responsible for two things, the safety of the populace, you’d be looking to minimize accidents.
But you’d also be looking to maximize the mobility of the populace to facilitate commerce and socialization. If you put too many traffic lights in place, in places that are not necessary, you would be demitting, you’d be increasing the safety too much at the expense of the enjoyment of the populace and commerce and everything like that. When you’re arranging for rules for yourself with food, you actually have a similar task, you’re trying to maintain your freedom with food to whatever extent is possible.
So you want people to be able to avoid the dangerous intersections, which means coming up with rules that really regulate the foods that they get themselves or behaviors they get themselves in trouble with. But once that safety is achieved, you want them to be able to express their urges and kind of free float in Daydream while they’re driving. So I always tell people that we we only want as many rules as are necessary to protect us and no more.
And once they’re in place, you actually enjoy your freedom more. Just like as a participant in a city. I have a greater locus of what is the radius of locomotion. I can drive about a much farther distance than I could if there weren’t any lights at all. Because people will be crashing into each other all the time. So the discipline actually increases your freedom, it doesn’t decrease your freedom.
Steve Washuta: In my world, you keep using this term energy of perfectionism. And I want to sort of unpack that a little bit how it relates to my world. The general population, obviously, is who struggles more with overeating. The athletes, and the trainers, and the people that I work with. They are now struggling with something that’s more vanity based obsession. Where they’re using that energy of perfectionism, or in perfectionism. That the term that you use with the quality and the amount of food and the tracking of food. And they’re very fixated on this. And I believe it’s a problem, it’s becoming a problem. Do you have any thoughts on this? Or recommendations? Do you deal with this in your in your personal life and are day to day?
Glenn Livingston: Most of the clients that we work with, find that tracking is a good short term tool. But it’s hard to sustain it in the long run. And so, you know, these tools like My Fitness Pal or chronometer. Are useful to get a sense of how much they’re eating. Where they might need to change in order to accomplish their goals. But they’re often best thought of as training wheels. That you want to remove over time as you get a sense of things.
Because most people feel burdened by the need to track everything before they’re eating. People in more extreme situations. For example, you know, a woman that traveled every day for business for three months. And she had to eat out three times a day with peers and all kinds of unexpected situations. And the way that she handled that was she eliminated all the decisions.
All she had to do was before she went to the restaurant. She would look up the menu online. And she would enter in exactly what she was going to have into my fitness pal. And then she would just follow that. So it becomes a tool you can apply when life is difficult. You’re going to require a lot more willpower than usual. But I don’t think it’s something you want to aim to do as a regular part of your life forever. Because that energy could be better used for other purposes.
Steve Washuta: What could be your recommended whether it’s the book. Or you just maybe talking at a you know, at a dinner table. Like the first objective step that some of them would take, if they say. Hey, I’ve come to grips, I’m an overeater. What’s the first step I’m taking?
Glenn Livingston: Take a breath and ask yourself, is there one simple rule, a low bar. Something you couldn’t would do easily? But which would make a big difference if you know about the Pareto Principle. The 8020 principle. There are things in life where we get a much bigger bang for the buck than other things.
And so if you take a breath and ask yourself, What’s one simple rule I could start with. And that would draw a very clear black and white line. That would distinguish healthy from unhealthy eating for me. Or healthy from unhealthy eating behavior for me. For example, I knew a truck driver who had about 200 pounds to lose. And he was eating at truckstops, all day long. And he said, No way, I can stop eating at truckstops all day long. But I’ll tell you what, I won’t go back for seconds. And that’s what he did. And he didn’t lose all the weight doing that.
But it got him started in the right direction. He lost a few pounds, he felt like he was in control. He no longer felt hopeless or confused, he reclaimed his spirit. And by doing that, for just a few weeks, he began to feel like it was possible. And that motivated him to choose another role.
That made his behavior a little healthier, and so on and so on. We lost about 150 pounds last time that I heard. Other simple rules might be, I’ll always put my work down between bites. Or I’ll never eat in front of a screen again. I’ll only have pretzels, that major league baseball games, or I’ll never consume calories after 9pm.
Whatever it is, just kind of think about what would be a big difference for you. That you would do that you couldn’t do. You probably won’t lose weight the first few weeks doing that, but you will gain confidence. And that actually means everything when it comes to overcoming overeating. Once you’ve set the rule, you want to listen for those voices in your head. That suggest that you should break it. It’s inevitable that they’ll be there. Because we’re all of two minds. We have the reptilian brain, we have our upper brain. The reptilian brain is the survival brain it’s eat made kill, you know, feast or starve.
And the reptilian brain is frightened that it’s going to starve. Without whatever behavior or food you’ve been having to this point. And so it’s going to try to take over in all sorts of situations. Overcome this rule that your upper brain set. All you need to do is listen for it, don’t be frightened of it. And when you do here, it wants you to engage in two behaviors. To move the battleground from your lower brain to your upper brain.
The first one is to take what Laurie Hammond calls a series of 711 breaths. You breathe in for a count of seven. And out for a count of 11. I’m not doing it right now because it takes too long. But when you’re in the moment you breathe in for count seven and out for a count of 11. About three times. What that does is it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Which is the part of our brain that says it’s time to rest and digest.
And this is when it’s safe to think about long-term plans and strategize and hit long-term goals. Like health and fitness and weight loss. Because we and it deactivates the emergency response system that says. You know, just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt. You better eat something now you’re going to starve even though it’s not true. And the reason that works is that in the wild. If we were being, you know, chased by a hungry bear. We wouldn’t have time to breathe out for a candle 11.
If we were reading for kind of seven. We’d be trying to take more oxygen in than oxygen we lead out. So 711 breaths, activate the rest and digest system. And say there’s no emergency here. It sounds kind of hokey, but it really works. I don’t want you to be carrying around something to write with. It could be a smartphone could be pen and paper. And I want you to write down what your reptilian brain is saying we’re in the form of a justification.
Like you’ve worked out hard enough today. Even though it’s a Wednesday and you said you’re only going to have chocolate on the weekends. It’s not going to hurt, you know, you won’t gain weight with one bar. You know that. So go ahead and do it up. Let’s go get some. It’ll be just as easy to start tomorrow.
So you write that all down. And then you take another series of 711 breaths. Because writing down with a reptilian brain is thinking is going to reactivate the emergency response system a little bit. So you can never set a 711 press and then you say. Well, what’s wrong with what the reptilian brain is saying? How is it lying? And so for example, in this example, it’s saying it would be just as easy to start tomorrow.
But the truth is the principles of neurology suggest otherwise. The principle of neuroplasticity says what fires together wires together. So if you have the thought, if you have a craving for chocolate on a Wednesday. Y have a thought that you could just start tomorrow would be just as easy. And then you have chocolate, what you’ve done is reinforced the craving, and you’ve reinforced the thought. So that means that tomorrow, you’re going to have a stronger craving for chocolate.
And the likelihood of having the thought that says you start tomorrow again. In other words, have the thought, let’s just start tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be more likely. So you’ve actually dug a deeper hole for yourself. If you’re in a hole, you should stop digging, you can only use the present moment to be healthy. You always use the present moment to be healthy. And since it’s always the present moment, you’ll be fine if you do.
That’s the basic procedure. We have people go through your it’s kind of like it’s a combination of switching nervous systems. I mean, first, it’s setting down the rules. So you recognize when the return rate is active, and then you’re switching nervous systems. And then you’re deactivating the grease chute that previously existed between the craving and the action.
So now you’ve got a chute that’s filled with sandpaper and sawdust. You can still go down and if you really want to. But it’s a lot harder, and it’s much less likely to happen. So that’s the basic procedure, we recommend this, there’s a lot more to it. You know, and that’s where we have coaches and demonstration sessions and things like that. But that’s basically what we do. That’s basically how we help people.
Steve Washuta: Well, why don’t we get into that? Where can the audience find you or your coaches. Your books, everything, Glenn Livingston. If some of my listeners want to maybe reach out to you directly and just have a question. Where’s best to do this?
Glenn Livingston: So if you go to neverbingeagain.com and click the big red button. That will take you to a page where you can sign up for the reader bonus list. What you will get there is a free copy of the book in Kindle nook or PDF format. You will get a set of food plan starter templates. So we are diet agnostic.
I’m personally am a whole foods plant-based person, but the program is diet agnostic. You can use it with any dietary philosophy. You’re trying to stick to and you know, we have all sorts that come to us. And we’ve created sample plans, sample sets of rules, just you can get ideas. You have to take responsibility for them. But we have one for keto. We have one for whole food plant species. People we have one for point pan point counters, calorie counters.
Whatever you’re doing, there’s probably a set of rules that you can use as examples. And finally, I recorded a whole bunch of full length coaching sessions. Because I know that there’s a lot to follow here and you’re saying. What do you mean I’ve got this other brain inside of me? And it sounds kind of weird, but it’s really not. It’s a very natural, compassionate life giving process. Where you can see people go from feeling despair and hopelessness and powerlessness. To being excited and enthusiastic and hopeful about food and just one session. It’s all I never binge again, calm, click the big red button.
Steve Washuta: My guest today has been Glenn Livingston. Glenn, thank you for joining the tools, the podcast.
Glenn Livingston: Thank you for having me.
Steve Washuta: Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks again!
