Overcome Overeating Using Behavioral Neuroscience

Are you struggling with eating habits? Do you want to end the cycle of overeating or restricting and change your relationship with food? Eating with awareness and understanding your body’s cues is the key. In this episode of “Your Life in Process” Diana and regular contributor, Dr. Judson Brewer, discuss resetting your eating habits to overcome challenging food patterns.

Transcript

Do you want to develop healthier eating habits?

Do you want to end your cycle of overeating or restricting and learn how to eat with more awareness?

That's what we're going to talk about today with our frequent contributor,

Dr.

Jed,

On your life in process.

If you didn't have a food plan or rules about eating or a structure around your eating,

How would you know how to eat,

When to eat,

Or what to eat?

That's a question that Sumner Brooks asked me when we were talking about how to raise intuitive eaters,

How to help kids develop intuitive eating.

And it's a question that I've been asking myself for many years in my research into appetite awareness training,

In my work as a clinical director of a treatment program,

An intensive outpatient program for eating and weight concerns,

And in my own life,

In my recovery from an eating disorder.

I think it takes psychological flexibility and mindfulness.

And today Dr.

Jed is going to talk about the mindfulness component around bringing more awareness to your eating habits,

Your signals inside your body that tell you when and how much and what's right for you.

He's also going to talk about the habit loops that we form around eating.

A habit loop being this pattern of a trigger,

Like there's chips on the counter,

Behavior,

You eat the chips,

And reward,

They taste good.

But some of the habit loops we're engaging in around food can become quite mindless.

They can be rule driven,

And they may not have the long term consequences that we really want for ourselves.

Dr.

Jed is an internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

He's the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University,

As well as the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare.

He's talked about this behavioral neuroscience model of bringing awareness to our triggers,

Fears,

And rewards when it comes to our digital devices,

And when it comes to our productivity anxiety.

And now he's writing a new book about how to use this model with eating.

The book isn't going to be out for a while.

So we're really lucky to get the behind the scenes on what he's working on.

And so grateful to have him as a breaking contributor on the show.

Here we go.

I love talking to people when they're writing a book,

Even if the book isn't going to come out for a while,

Because I feel like when you're writing a book,

You are just a wealth of information.

It's like people that study through the boards,

You'll know more at the time that you're taking the boards than it was a doctor.

More useless facts than you need,

For sure.

More useless facts,

And you've just been steeped in it.

So I think this is a good time to talk about eating and what you've been exploring.

And also a real big interest of mine,

And has been for a long time.

So I think that we could have a fun back and forth conversation about food and eating and whatever it is you've been discovering as you've been writing.

Great.

So yeah,

Let's just start with what brought you to wanting to write and do some research into the arena of eating?

Yeah,

It was a serendipitous thing.

I had been doing study with smoking cessation,

And my lab had gotten some pretty positive results where we'd gotten five times the great rates of gold standard treatment.

And that was striking in itself.

It was great.

And I was,

At the time,

Thinking,

Well,

How can we scale this?

I was doing this in person.

We ran the study around 2010,

So over 10 years ago.

And historically,

At that time,

It was right when the iPhone was starting to roll out across major cities.

We were developing our first digital therapeutic smoking cessation app called Craving and Quit.

And as people were pilot testing it,

They were telling me that they were changing their eating habits.

And at first,

I was thinking,

Well,

Everybody gains about 15 pounds when they quit smoking.

On average,

That person gains 15 pounds because smoking affects the hypothalamus,

So it can affect the hunger system.

And nicotine's a stimulant.

And so if somebody's got a stimulant on board,

Then they're less likely to eat.

That's all the amphetamine crazes of the 1950s that doctors were prescribing them like candy to have people lose weight with lots of untoward effects.

So I was thinking,

Well,

People are going to gain weight.

That's expected.

But they said,

No,

No,

No,

Doc.

I'm actually losing weight.

I'm not snacking as much as I used to.

I'm using these same tools to help me with my snacking.

And that was a big light bulb moment for me because I hadn't really paid much attention to eating.

I'd been studying how to help people with alcohol addiction,

With cocaine addiction,

With smoking.

But I hadn't really thought about eating as that same process.

But it turns out that eating is this core process that all these other habits and addictions co-opt the same mechanism.

And so I said,

Well,

Okay,

This is interesting.

Same mechanism.

Let's see if we can target eating.

So we developed our first digital therapeutic around eating called Eat Right Now and started testing it.

So that's how I got into it,

Was just listening to my patients.

So eating is going to follow some of the same behavioral pathways as smoking or alcohol because it's this habit reinforcement loop that you've talked to us about and taught us about.

And it's also a tricky one because there are so many different nuanced factors to it.

There's just questions around what do I eat and how do I eat and what is healthy food and what is not healthy food.

So how are you working with people in identifying for themselves a way of eating that works for them?

Well,

Here,

I leave it to them in that sense.

And I think of this as one,

Most people that come to me that want to change their eating habits,

They have read a lot.

They have listened to a lot of podcasts.

They've watched a lot of YouTube videos.

So they come in very,

Very educated.

So from a cognitive perspective,

I don't go in trying to teach them something about,

You know,

This is healthy food,

This is unhealthy food.

Thankfully,

I don't have to do that because generally,

They already get a good sense for it.

It's kind of like my patients who come who say,

None of them say,

Hey,

I want to smoke more because smoking is good for me.

Everybody knows that smoking is bad for them.

We all know that processed food is not good for us,

Right?

So as a general category,

That's a piece of knowledge that I don't need to approach.

And the nutritional guidelines are constantly changing anyway.

So here I look to see what's common,

What's core,

And what's unchanging.

So instead of having people think of it as the shoulds,

Right?

I should eat this,

I shouldn't eat that.

And everybody's tried that.

That really is,

A lot of my patients talk about food jail.

They make these food rules.

If I eat this and don't eat this,

Then I will lose weight or I will eat,

Be healthier,

I will feel better.

But then when they break the rules,

Which invariably we all do,

Then they put themselves in food jail,

Right?

And then they beat themselves up for having violated their,

You know,

Their food rules.

And then often ironically,

They stress eat.

So way to cope.

And then things just,

You know,

Go south from there.

So instead of the shoulds and the willpower-based approach,

I really take a neuroscientific approach,

Which is to ask,

Well,

How does the brain,

You know,

Form habits?

And oh yeah,

That's the strongest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective,

The strongest circuits in our brain.

So can we actually leverage those?

And that's where it gets,

You know,

Comes back to mindfulness training and simply bringing awareness to our behavior.

So you know,

If somebody wants,

Just like one of my patients that wants to quit smoking,

I say smoke and they look at me like I'm,

You know,

I'm crazy,

But they pay attention.

They realize that cigarettes tastes like crap in the same way.

If somebody overeats,

But they pay attention,

That's actually going to tap into those core learning mechanisms.

They're going to get what's called a negative prediction error.

You know,

And you and I've talked about this before where they realize that overeating is not as good as expected,

Right?

It just doesn't feel very good.

And in fact,

My lab studies have shown that if we have people pay attention as they overeat,

It only takes 10 or 15 times for that reward value to drop below zero.

So that's the general framework that I use to approach eating,

Which is,

You know,

If you want to eat,

Eat.

Whatever it is you want to eat,

Go ahead and eat it.

However much you want to eat,

Go ahead and eat it,

But really pay attention as you eat so that you can really see very,

Very clearly how rewarding or unrewarding it is.

And it seems like you'd be paying attention to a lot of different aspects of eating.

So maybe paying attention to the physical act of what food tastes like,

Bringing awareness to just the sensation of eating,

But also paying attention to things like your fullness levels and then also how you feel physically after the fact that sort of extending that awareness beyond just the short term,

But the longer term impact of food.

Because I think sometimes,

You know,

In the short term,

It feels really good.

But then a couple hours later,

You're realizing,

Oh,

If I had eaten something differently,

I would be maybe more focused in this meeting right now,

Or my performance would be a little bit better at my sport.

So it's sort of both the mindful awareness during the eating,

But also longer term as well.

And the longer we look out past the eating,

The harder it is to make those direct connections.

So the immediate feedback,

That's how we learn the best is through immediate feedback,

Right?

And so,

For example,

If we eat too much and we feel stuffed and we can feel that,

That's going to give us very clear indication,

Okay,

I ate too much and I feel stuffed.

As compared to,

You know,

If we eat and then two hours later,

We're feeling kind of sleepy in our brain,

It has trouble making the association.

Well,

Was it food,

Was it me not getting a lot of sleep last night,

Was it,

You know,

This or that?

So the farther out we look,

We can still get very,

Very valuable information,

But it can sometimes get lost in the noise.

So here,

Repetition,

You know,

Like science,

Repetition is really key.

If we can see very,

Very clearly and kind of isolate the variable,

If you think about it from a scientific perspective,

And we say,

Okay,

I'm going to eat this for lunch or this amount for lunch and see what happens two hours later,

I'm going to do the same thing tomorrow and do that a couple of times,

We can really start to see,

Wow,

You know,

For me,

For example,

Every time,

Like when I eat a big thing of pasta,

You know,

I have to take a nap an hour later because my brain is like,

Wow,

You know,

This is,

I'm just totally sleepy.

And I've done that experiment enough that it's pretty clear that when I,

You know,

That it's the pasta that's leading me to be sleepy.

I can also do the alternative experiment,

Which is if I don't eat,

You know,

Carb laden pasta that I'm not sleepy,

You know,

Two hours later if I don't overeat.

So we can do those little experiments,

We can see the immediate results,

And then we can also look a couple of hours later.

Beyond that,

It gets much harder to associate the behavior with the direct results of the behavior.

Elizabeth Ricker talks about this in terms of scientific self-help,

Where you have to be careful at not changing too many variables at once because then you can't really tell what is it that's causing me to feel different.

Even there's some tracking involved in all of this because in order to pay attention and kind of see how things are working or not working for you,

It's helpful to self-monitor.

How are you doing that with people and what are you monitoring?

Yeah,

So there are different types of tracking,

You know,

And so the typical tracking that most people think of when it comes to food is calorie tracking.

And so one thing we specifically don't do is emphasize calorie tracking because we can kind of place all of our faith in something external,

You know,

Where an app says,

Oh,

You should only eat X number of calories.

And then we don't listen to our bodies.

So I just want to highlight how that's actually not an emphasis that we have.

These trackers are notoriously not very accurate.

And more importantly,

They actually take us into these disembodied experiences where we say,

Well,

I don't feel that hungry but my calorie tracker says I can eat 500 more calories so I'm going to go for it.

And so we really don't listen to the wisdom of our bodies.

So the tracking that we do is really helping people pay attention to their bodies.

So we start by helping people calibrate their awareness of their bodies.

When people live this disembodied existence,

What's the James Joyce,

There was a short story about in the Dubliners about this guy,

Mr.

Duffy.

And I think there's a line in there that says Mr.

Duffy lived a short distance from his body,

You know.

And so many of us live these disembodied existences where we're kind of walking around and we're not paying attention to our body,

Whether we're ashamed of how we look or we just don't,

You know,

It doesn't feel very good so we don't want to feel it because it's unpleasant or whatever.

So one thing we do in terms of tracking is we help people start to pay attention to what their bodies actually feel like.

One thing that I learned in my clinic was that,

This actually blew me away,

Was that a lot of my patients have no idea what actual hunger feels like.

I remember working with a group of people with binge eating disorder and I just assumed everybody knew when they were hungry and they started,

Uniformly they were saying,

No,

When I crave I eat,

When I crave I eat.

And so they could crave food because they were hungry or they could crave food because they were sad or lonely or bored or angry,

You know,

Or just any of these things.

And so here the other tracking we do is we help them start to differentiate what physiologic hunger actually feels.

True hunger feels like as compared to psychological hunger or,

You know,

The terms are homeostatic hunger versus hedonic hunger,

That hedonic hunger comes from emotions.

So those are two aspects that we use to help people kind of track their direct experience.

And then,

And this is one of my favorite ways to work with this,

Is we help them track their food as they eat.

And so I think of this as the pleasure plateau where with each bite I have people pay attention and ask themselves,

Is this better or worse than or the same as the last bite?

And what we typically find is if we're just starting to eat something,

Whether it's the novelty or the,

Or hungry,

You know,

Couple of bites and we're like,

Yeah,

More and more.

But eventually,

Like relatively quickly in our stomach and like behind this a little bit,

But if we really pay attention,

We start to,

That pleasure starts to plateau and it levels out where it's like,

Okay,

It's about the same.

And then we see that it can easily go off a cliff where we've overeat and then just actually doesn't feel very good.

So we have people track kind of in real time as they're eating so they can really recalibrate what it feels like to stop eating when they're full,

When they're,

When they've had enough.

And this type of tracking is basically returning people back to what they already did as children or young babies.

You know,

Like when you're little,

There's like a point where you're eating,

You're feeding a baby,

You feed the baby,

Feed the baby.

And then at some point the baby just starts turning its head away.

Like you put the spoon and it's in front of its face and it's like,

I'm done.

Like I don't want anymore.

And so,

You know,

As a parent,

Okay,

Stop putting the spoon in front of its face.

But what happens over time,

I think as we get socialized around food and our food culture is that we're taught a lot of messaging to override those signals,

Whether it's override your hunger,

The people with binge eating disorder that are coming in and saying,

I don't know what hunger feels like.

It's because they've been dieting a whole lot,

Which is part of the binge eating cycle.

And part of dieting in order to be a successful dieter is you have to turn off hunger.

You have to learn how to not listen to your hunger,

Override it.

And then the other side of that is overriding our fullness because either we're using food for emotional reasons and we actually are doing it on purpose because it helps us numb out or we're eating foods that are also kind of confusing to our fullness.

Like sugar-free jello has a lot of volume,

But no content.

And you're like,

Am I full?

Am I not full?

So you're kind of like helping us go back to where we started this whole thing with food and eating.

And we actually have to like train ourselves back to eat normally again.

We do.

Basically.

Yeah,

We do.

So sad.

It is.

Because our bodies are so wise.

We just don't listen to the wisdom of them.

They'll tell us everything that we need to know.

We don't need to read a book.

And in fact,

If we read a book,

It might get in the way of us listening to the wisdom of our bodies.

It's interesting that you use the word numb out.

I had a patient who specifically said when she would binge,

She binged specifically to numb herself from her negative emotions.

Yeah.

So it's absolutely not totally divorces us from paying attention to our bodies.

Yeah.

I mean,

Even just when you're going through the diagnostic category of binge eating and you're asking the questions around what is a binge,

The questions are things like,

Do you eat more rapidly than usual?

It's like you're using it to avoid the present moment.

And when you're teaching people to be in the present moment with food,

You're doing the exact opposite of what something like a binge would be doing.

My early research was an appetite awareness training and monitoring of appetite.

So my master's was on comparing writing down your food versus monitoring your appetite.

What happens to college students that are at risk for eating disorders?

If you ask them to write down their food for a week,

They're going to become more preoccupied with food.

If you ask them to write down their appetite for a week,

They're not more preoccupied with food and they actually have less risk.

You know,

Helps you prevent an eating disorder from developing.

Now we finally have interventions that can treat people that are at risk for eating disorders or people that are struggling with overeating.

It's like the same intervention works for both.

For so long,

The field has been divided.

And it's been about like,

With obesity,

You work on diets and with eating disorders,

You work on all food is legal.

And you know,

There's,

There's got to be a middle path.

Really.

I think there is.

I think that middle path comes back to the body,

You know,

Because there's no one size fits all for,

For how to,

You know,

What to eat,

How much to eat,

You know,

When to eat and all of that.

But our bodies really are,

Are individualized for us.

You know,

It sounds obvious when I say it,

But when we listen to that,

That is the person as personalized as it gets.

And it's really about dialing in our awareness.

So talk a little bit about your relationship with food.

Where are you at?

Have you struggled with it?

Has it been something that hasn't been on your mind?

I mean,

The fact that you,

That you were saying,

I can't believe people don't just know what their hunger and fullness is,

Is an indicator that maybe you do have a understanding of that for yourself.

Well,

It's so it actually started my,

My exploration of eating and how I think of it as food and mood,

That food mood relationship started back when I was in junior high school.

You know,

I was,

I grew up in Indiana and I was racing,

I would race BMX bikes and you know,

You would spend a full day racing where you'd race multiple heats and it was,

You know,

You'd,

You could do these sprint races,

But you had to be able to recover and have the energy to do another race.

And what I learned there was that if I ate,

You know,

Soda and junk food that I would,

You know,

Maybe I could do one race well,

But it would be really hard to get the energy up to race the second and the third heat.

And my mom just,

You know,

Suggested,

She's like,

Oh,

Why don't you try eating like peanut butter sandwiches or something like that?

And I tried it and I was like,

Wow,

This actually gives me sustained energy.

And that led me down this path of really exploring that,

You know,

Food,

Mood,

Energy relationship,

Just to see what that was like.

And in high school,

You know,

I,

I ran track and cost country,

Wrestled,

You know,

And,

And so really spent a lot of time trying to dial in optimal food for energy and performance and that,

You know,

Exploring that myself and also started to explore,

You know,

What it was like,

I would kind of try to force myself not to eat sugar because,

You know,

It seemed that I could do better when I didn't,

But then,

You know,

All my friends were,

You know,

Having a good time eating ice cream and whatnot.

And so I even explored a little bit,

You know,

What it was like to kind of,

You know,

Have forbidden food and then kind of like go crazy on it,

You know,

At times and,

And,

You know,

Not anything approaching what a lot of people really struggle with in terms of like binging,

But really just getting kind of getting a flavor for what restriction,

You know,

Like just kind of forcing myself not to eat certain type of food was like.

I fortunately never struggled with,

You know,

Having a lot of weight gain or whatnot.

So that piece was something that I really had to explore through,

Through the kind of vicariously through working with patients with binge eating disorder or obesity,

Et cetera.

So it,

You know,

That,

That interest kind of re-emerged in my psychiatric practice as I was getting referrals,

More and more referrals for people with binge eating disorder or people who are struggling with overeating as a habit and really couldn't break it any other way.

You know,

And also the research,

You know,

My lab was starting to study how we could,

You know,

As I mentioned,

How we could actually help people change eating habits that way.

You know,

Food is so linked to body and body image and there's oftentimes in people's story about food and when things change for them and they either started feeling more rigid and controlling around their food or more out of control with their food or both.

Often there's a thread of body shame that shows up.

And sometimes I'll ask people about what's your body shame story.

Like when,

When do you remember that sort of that moment where you started to see your body as something to be controlled or something that you didn't like or something that you need to hide.

And that plays such a big role in our eating and sort of healing our relationship with eating.

How are you working with people around that?

Yeah,

I'm glad you bring that up because I see,

I'm sure you see this as well.

It is,

It is intimately intertwined here.

So the nice thing about taking this framework of reinforcement learning is that you can broadly apply it across the board.

So you know,

As I work with patients and help them start to map out their eating habits.

So for example,

A patient with binge eating disorder,

So she came to me,

She was binging 20 out of 30 days a month on entire large pizzas in one sitting.

And she was,

So when she mapped out her habit loop,

It was negative emotion that would trigger her to binge and the binge would numb her out.

She's the one that I was thinking of when you said numbing out.

And then when she would binge and feel completely out of control,

That would send her into a,

I think of this as an echo habit loop around where it would echo into self blame,

Self judgment.

And so she'd feel guilty for what she did.

And that guilt would trigger her to judge herself.

And the result of that was that she would feel shame,

Ashamed of herself.

And that shame would then trigger another spiral of binging because another negative emotion and all her brain and body knew to do was to eat when she felt bad.

You know,

So sometimes she would binge on top of a binge triggered by that first binge.

So all of that is to set up this,

This framework where I help them start to map out those self judgment habit loops.

And when they can map out those self judgmental habit loops,

Then I can have them start to learn practices around self kindness,

Self compassion,

And see which one feels better.

You know,

Cause our brains are going to naturally incline themselves toward a behavior that feels better.

So I have them just compare what's it feel like when you judge yourself versus when you're kind to yourself or compassionate with yourself.

Kindness and compassion win every time,

You know,

It's a no brainer.

And so as they start to see that,

Then they can start to naturally move toward those practices,

Which help them actually step out of these self-judgmental habit loops.

And in a similar way that where you're talking about coming back,

You know,

When we're talking about coming back to the beginning of our relationship with food before it got so distorted by our food culture,

The same is true in terms of our relationship with our bodies before it got so distorted by our body culture.

You know,

We're kind of swimming upstream there because a lot of the messaging is shame based messaging of shaming people for body sizes and then trying to motivate people through shame or trying to motivate ourselves through shame,

Which just leads to that endless cycle.

And part of that cycle I would say is also feeling bad about your body.

So then restricting food that then makes you more likely to binge on food.

So there's a biological component.

So it feels kind of like the opposite of what everybody has told you to do,

But it's actually what's going to get you,

It's going to be what works.

You know,

Like actually doing the opposite because you've been doing the same thing over and over and over again with eating and your body,

And you're just more entrenched in it.

You know,

It's the man in the hole that's digging and doing the opposite is what's going to help you get out of it.

But it feels counterintuitive to say something like,

I'm loving my body as it is.

And that's actually what's going to allow me to shift this cycle.

Yeah.

And here,

I'd love to hear your perspective on this,

But here even the language can be really important.

So often we'll fall into these habits of,

I'm going to work on X,

Being kinder to myself.

But often that I'm going to work on can have this harsh tone to it.

A lot of my patients will be like,

I got to work on this,

As in,

I'm not good enough right now or there's something wrong with me,

I've got to work on this.

And so here,

I'd be curious to hear if you do this with your patients as well,

Just helping them identify language that they're using that's habitual,

Where they,

You know,

It's like,

Oh,

I've got to work on this as compared to,

Oh,

You know,

Being curious and asking,

Oh,

What's it like when I'm kind to myself versus when I judge myself?

Right.

And so they've already been kind of themselves at times.

They've already been judgmental to themselves at times.

And so helping them really focus on like,

Look,

Which one feels better and helping them understand that if they can just notice that,

You know,

The cause and effect relationship very clearly,

That their mind is going to naturally incline toward this kindness and that there's not something wrong with them that they have to fix or they have to work on.

It's just a matter of bringing awareness and helping them naturally see,

Oh,

When I beat myself up,

It's painful.

When I'm kind to myself,

It feels good.

And it's just a matter of being aware.

So I don't know what your perspective is on that,

But I hear the kind of the habitual language a lot.

Part of that is the putting life on hold until,

So I just hear a lot of that of like,

When I have control over my food,

Then all blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Or when I get to a certain size,

Then all blah,

Blah,

Blah.

So the idea of self-compassion for me is treating yourself well right now and treating yourself the way that you would,

Like,

If you had a child that you were caring for,

How would you relate to them around food?

Like what,

What would you do for them?

I'd make lunches for my kids.

And when I'm making a lunch for them,

I think about things like,

What is it that they're going to enjoy?

What is it they need to get from lunchtime to when I pick them up after school without tanking?

What is it that's fun for them?

What is it that's nutritious?

Like,

I'm kind of thinking about all those things and packing this lunch.

And why aren't you thinking about that for yourself?

Or even taking,

I think all of this takes time.

And I think what one,

One thing that's really happened with food is that we've,

We've sped everything up.

Like we've sped everything else up in our lives.

And part of what we've sped up is the whole process of eating,

Just giving ourselves time to eat without other things going on,

Enjoying food,

The process of thinking about what's nourishing for us and what is it that we really want and what would feel good in our bodies and what is enjoyable to eat from a compassionate perspective?

Really I think I know,

I know.

And as you say it,

It sounds obvious.

And how many of us actually do that?

You know?

Yeah,

Well,

I've started doing it more.

Like I try and think about when I,

I mean,

I think ahead and I think about,

Okay,

I have a really busy day tomorrow.

I'll make myself a little lunch.

Like I'll package it up and make it special for me.

And I'll put some things in it that I really like that are unique to me and I'll put it in my fridge.

And when I go out for my lunch,

I'm like,

Thank you,

Self.

You're so thoughtful.

Today was a hard day.

You've thought ahead,

You know,

So that you can have more time to actually eat it and making the commitment to hold the lunch hour or hold the lunch half hour,

However much time you have to actually leave your desk,

Go somewhere,

Sit outside,

Sit somewhere,

Separate from where you do your work and allow yourself to eat because it's hard to be mindful when you're doing a lot of other stuff at once.

And if you really care about your body and you want to change your relationship with food,

You got to give it some space to,

To be able to do that.

Absolutely.

I like that.

Yeah.

So do you,

Do you take a lunch?

You know,

This is like a lot of people don't.

Yes.

Yeah.

I've been working a lot from home during the last couple of years of it,

As I go back into the lab and,

You know,

Back into the clinic,

I do,

You know,

I rarely eat out because it's just,

You know,

My body likes it so much more when I make my own food.

So I will,

I do make my own lunch and I was like,

Okay,

What's going to help me,

You know,

What's my second breakfast going to be like,

You know,

Kind of like the hobbits.

And then after that,

You know,

Mid afternoon and then,

You know,

Kind of having a healthy yummy food that I can,

That I can enjoy and eat throughout the day.

Now I will say that I don't always have time to take half an hour,

You know,

To,

To,

To eat without anything else going on.

And so I'm glad you highlight that because often we discount,

You know,

Taking care of ourselves,

But there's a great example of taking care of ourselves.

You're taking care of yourself when you take that half an hour to say,

Look,

This is really important.

And,

You know,

For those of us that find,

Boy,

That's really taking care of myself.

You think of it as,

Okay,

How about use this as an experiment or a learning moment where you're like,

Okay,

What can I discover about food?

What can I discover about food in this relationship to me?

And what's it like to just pay attention to my food as I eat it?

You know,

We might be surprised what the results are just in terms of how much we can notice what it tastes like.

We can notice when we're full,

We can notice the little variations that we might not have noticed before.

And then that can actually feed forward throughout the day and help seed moments of awareness throughout,

You know,

Throughout the rest of the day.

Actually you're front-loading something.

If you allow yourself to sit down and really eat lunch and let it register to the point of satisfaction,

Whether that's emotional,

Cognitive or physical satisfaction,

And hopefully all three,

Then what will happen is later on in the day when you would normally use food to check out,

You won't need to do that as much.

And then you also will save time because think about all the time and money and energy that you spend looking up the right diet plan,

Deciding how many calories you should eat,

When are you going to lose weight,

Changing this size to this size.

If you take a half an hour to actually feed yourself,

You won't have to do all that.

Sometimes we think,

Oh,

This just takes too much.

We have a lot of that.

We think that things take too much time,

But when we actually look at what we value and where we're putting our time,

There's probably fewer things that you value in the world than taking care of your health and your body and enjoying your life.

So for me,

Part of it comes from having been on enough retreats now where I've had a lot of time to just eat,

Like an hour long to just eat and there's nothing going on but just eating and being with people.

But I started figuring out,

Wow,

This is really part of what makes me feel good in my life is being in a slowed down relationship with food.

And foods cause a lot of suffering in my life.

So for me,

It's worth it.

If food causes you a lot of suffering,

Then give it some more time and attention.

Like anything that causes a lot of suffering.

If pain causes a lot of suffering,

Spend more time with your pain and figure out.

Yes.

Reminds me of this great phrase,

The obstacle becomes the way.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

The obstacle becomes the way.

So this is going to be coming out in the form of a book,

But you already have the app available for people.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the book,

Which I think will have the title Eat Right Now,

Which is also the same name as the app,

It's really written in the format.

So the app is set up,

You know,

30 core modules,

A bunch of theme weeks to really drive keypoints home where people get 10 minutes of training a day,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

So it's a very pragmatic tool that just kind of walks people step by step through the program.

The book is,

You know,

It's nice,

Books are nice in the sense that you have time to lay out theoretical frameworks and the premise for something.

And so the book is really,

You know,

Think of it as approaching food from a neuroscientific standpoint,

Like really being able to lay out and kind of geek out with people,

But hopefully in an accessible way,

You know,

How these processes around eating develop,

How they develop toward habits,

How we lose contact with our bodies,

You know,

And then all of these aspects of how we can start to regain our natural ability and tap into our natural wisdom around eating.

So giving people,

Highlighting some of the tools in the program where they can,

You know,

Somebody likes to read a book,

They can get all that background and really kind of really geek out about how their mind works.

And then,

You know,

Kind of the second half of the book is about helping people work with their minds and their body.

I don't think of the mind and body as separate,

But really their body minds.

So it's been really fun,

You know,

Just kind of going back and reviewing the details around,

You know,

Things like,

You know,

The term anorexia,

You know,

Anorexia nervrosa is a psychiatric quote unquote disorder whereas anorexia is a term really just around the loss of hunger.

And it's a survival mechanism that,

You know,

For our ancient ancestors,

When they were in danger,

Their stomach shut down,

You know,

Because we don't have enough blood in our body to serve our stomach and our muscles at the same time.

You know,

We'd be pretty heavy beings kind of sloshing around trying to run away from the predators.

And so we've developed these mechanisms,

These evolutionary mechanisms where we,

You know,

We have about,

You know,

Five,

What is it,

Ten units,

About five liters of blood,

If I'm remembering this correctly.

I should remember this because I'm a physician,

But I don't,

You know,

The details of that aren't that important right now.

So I think it's ten units of blood,

About five liters.

And so,

You know,

Our body says,

Hey,

You know,

Danger,

And it shunts all that blood to our muscles so we can run.

And then when we can,

You know,

When we're not in danger,

We can,

They call it rest and digest that all that blood body,

That blood gets shunted back to our stomach and it says,

Hey,

Let's have some lunch.

So those types of details are really fun to explore and can help people really understand how these processes are at play and how they can also be at play,

How they can get co-opted by some of our,

Some of these other learning mechanisms where we learn to stress eat or eat when we're bored.

It's a complex thing taking on food and humans' relationships with food,

But it sounds like you have a nice model that people can follow.

And I think it gets easier over time,

Not harder over time,

Which is a nice thing,

You know,

And this same model can apply to lots of different areas of your life,

Not just your relationship with food.

It does,

It does.

And what's been really fun is,

You know,

Models,

What's the joke?

All models are wrong.

Some of them are helpful.

So we get to test the model.

And so I can develop the theory kind of pilot tested in my clinic and,

You know,

With my patients who are struggling,

See what aspects they can really relate to and build those into same modules of the E.

Right Now app.

But then my lab can study the heck out of it where we can look to see if these theories around behavior change are actually true.

You know,

Does paying attention change the reward value of overeating?

Yes,

It does,

You know,

And actually can do that pretty quickly.

We can actually model that out and map the change in reward value pretty precisely,

Which is pretty neat.

So not only do we get to put forward the model and the theory,

But I can also talk about the direct evidence that we have around how these work.

And then also,

You know,

As humans,

We all learn from stories.

So some beautiful stories of people describing how their lives are transformed through a simple practice of learning to be aware.

You know,

That's it.

Being aware and kind to themselves.

Yeah,

Awareness and kindness.

And I would say the third component that I work on with a lot of my clients is the underlying values to do this in the first place,

Because it isn't always easy.

And you have to have sort of some deeper reasons why you want to take this on.

And when people start to look at some of their deeper reasons,

It can be really,

It can be really sweet,

You know,

Things like I want to model a different way of eating to my kids,

Or things like I want to have a different impact on the planet,

That I want to be more conscious about the impact of how I'm eating in a bigger picture way in terms of climate change or whatever.

But when you get to those whys,

Then you're more willing to do some of the important work of developing awareness and taking the time to get the app out of your pocket and look at Dr.

Judd in mini form,

Talking you through it,

Which is always good.

Yeah.

Good.

Well,

Thank you.

We're looking forward to this book coming out,

But people should check out Eat Right Now.

Go check out the app and explore it,

Have fun with it.

And we'd love your feedback on how it works for you.

Great.

Take care.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye.

Okay.

Bye.

Some things I want to highlight from this podcast.

First,

It sounds easy to just pay attention to eating and to learn to eat mindfully.

And it's not.

Most likely you have long-term entrenched patterns with eating that will take a while to unwind.

Give yourself time,

Be gentle with yourself and focus on the process,

Not just the end point.

Give yourself the attention and dedication to begin to eat with awareness.

And it actually can be really fun when you bring that component of curiosity to it.

Explore foods,

Explore your body,

Explore what works for you.

And here's some ideas that I would suggest based on our conversation today that you could bring into your eating this week.

Number one,

Pay attention to your hunger and fullness.

What does physical hunger feel like to you?

And what about physical fullness and how are they different from emotional hunger and emotional fullness?

It's really subtle and it's an inside job to learn that for yourself.

Is this physical hunger or is this emotional hunger?

Ask yourself that.

Pause,

Notice,

And then choose.

Second,

Learn your eating habits.

Map out your eating habits using Dr.

Jed's Habit Mapper.

This map will help you record what triggers your eating,

What your behaviors are and what the consequences are for you.

And I will put that link in today's daily practice.

So if you go to the daily practice,

You'll get a link to mapping out your eating habit loop.

And then third,

Practice mindful eating with at least one meal every day this week.

While eating,

Here's what I want you to pay attention to.

How hungry are you before you started eating?

You could do some kind of scale where you say from like zero to 10,

How hungry am I?

And then when is that plateau of pleasure?

As Dr.

Jed calls it,

When eating starts to have diminishing returns.

Then stop at moderate fullness.

Stop when you have that satisfied feeling,

But not stuffed.

Okay,

The last thing that I want you to do this week,

And this is actually something that you could do right after this episode,

Is take some time to write down your eating values.

What's important to you about your relationship with food?

Why do you care about changing your eating habits?

How will changing your eating habits impact other important domains of your life,

Such as your relationships,

Parenting,

Work or your environment?

All four of these daily practices will be in the show notes on your daily practice.

So if you didn't catch them all,

You can click on that and download them there.

May today's episode not only benefit you,

But benefit those around you.

Reviews

That was very helpful info 🙏

Ada mindfulness practitioner I found this session most helpful and enlightening. I never gravitated towards food focused models because I FELT an inherent flaw in them for me. Lack and resistance models do not work well for me. Thank you both for this valuable information and light on the path of awareness of my relationship with food and nutrition. I will use many of the ideas presented and will let you know how my journey goes. Namaste, Sherrie in Ohio