Episode 356: Special Guest: Glenn Livingston, Ph.D., Cravings, Bingeing, Overeating, Variable Ratio Intermittent Reinforcement, Mindful Eating, Extinction Curve Timeline, And More!
Welcome to Episode 356 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine and Vanessa Spina, author of Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight.
Today's episode of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast is brought to you by:
Butcherbox: Grass-fed beef, organic chicken, heritage pork, wild-caught seafood, nutrient-rich, raised sustainably the way nature intended, and shipped straight to your door! For a limited time go to butcherbox.com/ifpodcast and get Chicken Thighs, Ground Beef, or Steak tips for a YEAR for free in every order for a whole year! Plus, get $20 off your first order!
To submit your own questions, email questions@IFpodcast.com, or submit your questions here!!
SHOW NOTES
Beautycounter: Keep your fast clean inside and out with safe skincare! Shop with us at melanieavalon.com/beautycounter and use the code CLEANFORALL20 for 20% off, plus something magical might happen after your first order! Find your perfect Beautycounter products with Melanie's quiz: melanieavalon.com/beautycounterquiz
Join Melanie's Facebook group Clean Beauty and Safe Skincare with Melanie Avalon to discuss and learn about all the things clean beauty, Beautycounter, and safe skincare!
BUTCHERBOX: For a limited time go to butcherbox.com/ifpodcast and get chicken thighs, ground beef, or steak tips for a YEAR for free in every order for a whole year! Plus, get $20 off your first order!
Go to Defeat Your Cravings for a free copy of Defeat Your Cravings!
The lessons learned since the first book
What is "the pig"?
Loving yourself thin?
Mindful eating myth
Food rules and rebellion
Intermittent fasting
Extinction curve timeline
Eating by design
Hacking your cravings
Our content does not constitute an attempt to practice medicine and does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider for medical advice and answers to personal health questions.
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon:
Welcome to Episode 356 of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy, and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat with no calorie counting, then this show is for you. I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, author of "What, When, Wine" and creator of the supplement line AvalonX. And I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Spina, sports nutrition specialist, author of "Keto Essentials" and creator of the Tone Breath Ketone Analyzer and Tone Lux Red Light Therapy Bannals. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ketogenicgirl.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment. To be featured on the show, email us your questions to questions@ifpodcast.com. We would love to hear from you. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for the Intermittent Fasting Podcast.
Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, this is a very special episode today with Dr. Glenn Livingston. We don't even remotely touch on everything in his book, which is such a valuable resource. I cannot recommend enough. Everybody get it. And it's completely free, which is insane. So just go to freecravingsbook.com.
Melanie Avalon:
That's freecravingsbook.com. You can download the book completely free. It is such a valuable tool. It goes into the science of cravings, the science of overeating and bingeing, provides step by step plans to tackle the inner voice, your inner pig, that's telling you to eat all the things.
Melanie Avalon:
It has troubleshooting recovery plans, refutations for everything your inner pig might say and all the excuses it might make. So many things cannot recommend it enough. Freecravingsbook.com. Pause the podcast.
Melanie Avalon:
Go download it now. You will not regret it. All right. Now enjoy this fabulous conversation with my dear, dear friend, Dr. Glenn Livingston. Hi friends, welcome back to the intermittent fasting podcast.
Melanie Avalon:
This is episode 356. And this is a very, very special episode, very long time coming. I am here with my dear, dear friend, Dr. Glenn Livingston friends. I have talked about Glenn so much on this show.
Melanie Avalon:
So a lot of you are probably already familiar through me mentioning it or through reading his prior work. Glenn is the author of a book that had thousands of reviews about overeating issues, binging issues, craving issues.
Melanie Avalon:
And since then he has released a new iteration of the book, updated it, added the latest science, added his latest thoughts. And I cannot recommend enough this book. It is called Defeat Your Cravings, The Back Door to Weight Loss.
Melanie Avalon:
And friends, the reason I've talked about Glenn so much on this show before is because he has a, if you're not familiar with it, a paradigm shifting mindset approach tool technique thing, which I'm sure we'll talk about in order to really address those moments of food temptation and cravings, especially with you guys doing intermittent fasting.
Melanie Avalon:
You might have these moments where you really want to eat these things that you're used to eating or that you're craving. And Glenn has a brilliant, simple, effective method that has helped so many people.
Melanie Avalon:
I personally have implemented it. Glenn, we were talking right before this about how we got connected, which was through your publicist, I believe. But did you know, I'd been reading your books way before that.
Melanie Avalon:
Did you know that? I've been following you for years. I did not know that. Yeah. Since like 20, when did you publish your first book? What year?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
2015.
Melanie Avalon:
Since then. Really? Yeah. Because I can remember where I was when I first read your book and it was in the apartment that I lived in like 2016. So right after that.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I'm honored. You were a very young lady at that time.
Melanie Avalon:
I was. Those were the days.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You still look pretty young, lady.
Melanie Avalon:
Thank you. Thank you. Wow, that's crazy. And even at that time, when I read it, it had a lot of... I mean, that was in the beginning and it had a lot of reviews and a lot of fanfare. So, I'm super curious.
Melanie Avalon:
And again, we need to talk about your system and everything, but this new book, Defeat Your Cravings, what inspired you to write it? Well, I think it's a great book.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
The whole system, I wrote the first book, which had almost 20 ,000 reviews now, I think, in 2015 while I was getting divorced, basically about how I personally overcame overeating. It was different than the standard approach out there, although I've come to learn that it actually resonates with what the evidence says works for overcoming overeating, which is cognitive behavioral therapy and maybe some SSRI medication.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But I wrote it in the absence of a deep knowledge of the science of cravings formation and extinction. Since I wrote that book, I've had experience with over a million readers of the first book and over a million readers in psychology today, and over 2 ,000 paying clients who came through my group and individual programs.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I feel like I have a much more comprehensive understanding of how to overcome overeating now than I did way back when. Also, Melanie, while I was getting divorced, I was in a pretty angry state of mind, and I feel like it came through in the book.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I wrote it like a pissed -off middle -aged guy getting divorced. I think that in some ways, that's why it became so popular because it was a radically different way of looking at it's a tough love approach to taking control of your own mind.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But I don't think it had the same level of compassion that I really have for over -readers. I also don't think it was nearly as comprehensive or doctor -like. Like I am a psychologist. I do think in a comprehensive way, and there are pieces and parts that come together.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
The old book was really about fixing your thinking to stop overeating and how I fixed my thinking by keeping a journal, and it took me a while. And then we worked with all these clients, and I had all these coaches working with me.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
We got really good at fixing people's thinking quickly. But what would happen is, I can give examples of all this if you want to, but what would happen is, no matter how well I help people to disempower their excuses about overeating, they would still get to this point where they said, screw it, just do it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I know you can't really start tomorrow because tomorrow never comes. If you say start tomorrow and you eat a bar of chocolate, that you're going to reinforce both the craving and the thought about starting tomorrow.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So you are more likely to say start tomorrow again tomorrow and have a stronger craving. And so you can only ever use the present moment to be healthy, and if you're in a hole, you better stop digging.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That would be an example of fixing your thinking. And that's what the whole old program was about. But it was very, very effective. We got by like 2022, we were to the point that after one month, people would have reduced their overeating self -reported episodes by about 89 .4%.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But if the six -month market was more like 55% and the year market was a little lower, and that really bothered me, and I don't know if I'm giving you a long -winded answer to your very first question.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so then we saw the screw it, just do it, response, and that's when I realized I had to update the book and put in everything I knew about overcoming that response, which has more to do with overcoming organismic distress and understanding the science of craving that it does with fixing your thinking.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So that's why I wrote the new book.
Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. I did not know that about you going through. I knew about your divorce, but I didn't know that that was during that time of writing that first book. I can totally see the change in tone in the second one.
Melanie Avalon:
I loved how you go deep into the science of everything in this new iteration. I thought it was so fascinating. And that's so interesting about that second phase response. So now, because you open the book with a really, you know, it sounds like a pipe dream, salesy, almost too good to be true.
Melanie Avalon:
Do you really help 85% now perpetually?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
We don't have data on the perpetual level. We just opened the new program a couple of months ago. So I could tell you that it's more. It's, I don't have a statistically reliable sample yet, but I can tell you that it's more.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That's what I can tell you. And just, you know, anecdotally, qualitatively, my experience in working with people like this is that it's easier to hold onto than just fixing your thinking.
Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So I'm trying to decide because I have so many specific nuanced questions about the approach, but can we just tell listeners a little bit about the actual concept? So what is the pig?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Let me first say, I had a very serious over -reading problem myself that I tried everything you could imagine to fix it for about 20 years. I come from a family of 17 psychotherapists, and when something breaks in the house, everybody knows how to ask it, how it feels, and nobody knows how to fix it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so, for the first 20 years of my trying to overcome over -reading, I was trying to love myself then. I thought there was a hole in my heart, and if I could fix that hole in my heart, then I could probably fix the hole in my stomach, or I wouldn't have to keep trying to fill the hole in my stomach.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And I went to a psychologist and psychiatrist, and over it is anonymous, and I cried and I screamed, and I had a spiritual journey, and it made me a very soulful person, but it really didn't fix the problem.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I get a little thinner and a lot fatter every time I tried something new. And during that time, I was also consulting for industry. I was married to a woman who commuted, who traveled for business most of the week, and I had time for a second career.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I was a child and family psychologist with a big practice, but I also started doing advertising research for the food industry and the pharma industry, but most of the food industry. And in the course of doing that, while I was going through all of these love yourself thin rituals, I started to notice that they were spending millions of dollars to get these rocket scientists to engineer hyperpalatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and salt and exciter toxins, and it was all geared at hitting the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And eventually, looking at that got through to me, it made me realize that maybe it's not about the fact that my mama dropped me on my head or her mama dropped her in her head or that she didn't love me enough or she was going through something of her own when I was little.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Maybe it has more to do with what these big companies are doing and they're hitting these evolutionary buttons and creating addiction. And the hitting these evolutionary buttons that exist in the reptilian brain, it's not the higher brain where love lives and long -term goals and achievement live and strategic planning and rational thinking.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
They're hitting our primitive survival buttons. And I eventually thought to myself, maybe I need a more of a tough love approach. Maybe you can't really love yourself thin because the part of the brain that they're targeting doesn't really know love and kind of bringing you up to speed about what is the pig.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I did something a little crazy. I decided that I had to create a kind of tripwire. If I was going to be the alpha wolf of my own brain when this lower part of my brain was trying to take control, I said, I need to create a kind of a tripwire so that I know when it's active.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so I would make a rule, like I will never have chocolate on a weekday again. And that way, if I was in a Starbucks and there was a big old chocolate bar on the counter, and it was calling to me and I heard a little voice in my head that said, you know what, Glenn, you worked out hard enough and you're not going to gain any weight if you have a couple of ounces of chocolate.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Go ahead and start your silly rule tomorrow. Let's just get some of the chocolate right now. Yippee, feed me. I would say, wait a minute, that's not me. That's my inner pig squealing for pig slap. And chocolate is pig slap on a Wednesday.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I don't eat pig slap. And I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. And Melanie, I was not going to teach this. I was not going to publish this. This was a very private thing internally. I will tell everyone you don't have to call it a pig.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You can call it a food monster or anything that's just a little bit aversive to you that you don't want to take control. But you do need to have something that wakes you up at that moment of impulse and makes you say, well, wait a minute to hear who's in charge because you're going to need to research yourself at that point.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And if you think that you need to love yourself more at that point, it's going to leave you very vulnerable to the to the pig taking control. So what I'd done back then was I established a tripwire and it would wake me up and I'd have these extra microseconds to make a better choice.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And I wouldn't always make the right choice. I wasn't instantly cured, but sometimes I did more so than I did before I made the tripwire. And over time, I experimented with different rules. I would start to fix what the pig was saying.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So if it said, you know, oh, one bite is not going to make a difference, I would say, well, it's never just a bite. And one bite is the difference between whether you're in charge or I'm in charge, which is a totally different way of life.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's a difference between making important food decisions with my head and my intellect versus making them with my emotions and whims and impulses. And so, you know, one bite is a tragedy. And I would disempower that thought.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And over the course of about eight years, I got better by fixing my thinking about food, fixing my thinking about food. So that's what the pig is. The pig is the, it's the sum total of all the thoughts that suggest you're going to break very specific rules that you lay out for yourself.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You know, we define it as that, which is also a good definition of your lower self. And then you are all the, all the thoughts and feelings that suggest that you're going to stick to your plans. And by, by accomplishing that separation, what I know now that we're, we were doing was interfering with the automatic habit loops that the brain is so good at implementing in order to acquire calories and nutrition.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It just opened up the space between stimulus and response where I could start to, I could start to have an impact, whereas nothing else did. When I would be thinking about, you know, like earlier on I'd be thinking about, well, maybe I really need a hug or maybe I need to cry about, you know, what my mother did to me when I was a kid or, you know, maybe I need to assert myself in some way with someone that bothered me when I was thinking about all these emotional needs.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It didn't give me the clarity to figure out the choices that I could make. And also there's, those emotional needs are pretty hard to fulfill. And it's, it's hard to fix the traumas that you went through as a kid.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And it's hard to, you make yourself dependent upon, dependent upon what happens with these other people in relationships if you feel like you've got to solve all of those conflicts before you stop with reading.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
When I just started focusing on that space between stimulus and response and what I could do, that's when I started to get better.
Melanie Avalon:
So I love two big myths that you dismantled there. One is the loving yourself, then the emotional role of it. And you even mentioned in the book, you said that you talk about how your work with clients and how some clients do still insist on starting with the emotional work first.
Melanie Avalon:
And you say that when that's the order that less than half of the time, are they ultimately successful and everything? But you also draw attention to the fact that people can still, you know, work on their emotional connection and the reasons and everything, but it's not like the actionable step that you can implement now that can actually make the change and change the habits and, you know, address those habit loops.
Melanie Avalon:
So, so effective.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I remember a guy that told me that if I really wanted to know what my psychological traumas were, that I should stop overeating and then I would know, as opposed to trying to fix all my traumas before I stopped overeating.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Right? And it's true. If you, the brain has difficulty conducting the emotions when the digestive system is overloaded with food. And so when you're constantly overeating, you're not really aware of all the thoughts and feelings surrounding your traumas.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So it actually works better to focus on these very practical techniques to stop overeating and then go hire a good therapist to help you with them or psychologist or psychiatrist to help you process the traumas.
Melanie Avalon:
And then sort of related the second huge paradigm shift myth busting that happens. There's the whole mindful eating world. And there's this idea that we should be able to mindfully eat these foods in small amounts.
Melanie Avalon:
And it's funny because I listened to so many podcasts. And I was listening to a podcast once, and I got so angry, which kind of says something about me. Like, clearly, I was being triggered by the episode, so I'm not sure what that means.
Melanie Avalon:
But basically, the girl being interviewed was making this very elaborate case for why we should always be able to eat a little bit of anything. And if we don't, if we feel like we're not able to, or if we have like a quote restriction rule around it, that means that we are not in touch with ourselves.
Melanie Avalon:
And it means that we, you know, it means there's work still for us to do if we can't have just like a little piece of the chocolate. When for me, I'm like, well, chocolate, I don't really have a problem with.
Melanie Avalon:
But if it's like Fun Fetti Cake, if I have one piece of that, it's not food. It's like a processed drug thing that is programmed to make me crave it and want it more. So I don't feel like I should have to mindfully eat that.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, what are your thoughts on mindful eating?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Well, I think 100 ,000 years ago, we wouldn't have needed food rules and we could have eaten when we were hungry and stopped when we were full. And I think that eating mindfully is a good idea, but it's not sufficient to help you eat healthy in today's modern food environment.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So the food industry is manufacturing things which can turn off your ability to know when you're hungry and full. And I mean, literally there are, you know, hormone, there's hormone interference in some of the packaging.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so if what you're eating has broken your ability to know when you're mind, when you're hungry and full, then how can you rely on your ability to know when you're hungry and full entirely to control it?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So my metaphor would be more like driving. I think it's really important to drive mindfully to be present while you're driving and pay attention. But you also need to pay attention to the lights and the stop signs and the yield signs.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And, you know, in a city without stop signs and yield signs and traffic lights, you wouldn't really, really be safe to drive around. So I think that the controls actually expand your freedom and make it possible to navigate a larger radius of locomotion.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You know, have the free flow of commerce and socialization in a city or, you know, like the metaphor we go back to making it possible to enjoy more foods and more taste satisfaction and more freedom.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I think that the rules make it possible to do that versus the you've got to be able to eat everything approach. Some people respond negative. Well, let me see one more thing about it before I go into how some people respond.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I think that a good food rule is like a kitchen knife and you could use it to over restrict or you could use it to chop vegetables. So I don't think the problem is the knife. I think the problem is the way that the rules are used.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I mean, I would refer that people use it to chop vegetables. Some people are overtaken by a feeling of rebelliousness and response to rules. And so either they make rules that are way too strict. And, you know, like if you say, I'm only going to eat 500 calories a day, your survival systems are going to be on overload, trying to press you to have a lot more.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And they're going to say, forget about your silly rule. So it's really hard to maintain that. You know, so there's some rules you can't make. I always joke and say you couldn't make a rule that say I'll never pee again because your bladder is going to tell you otherwise.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You need to authentically nourish yourself. But let's just seem to have a reasonable rule. There are some people who are thrown by the rebellious feelings that the rules engender. And I would say that the goal in my system is to sever the link between all emotions and overeating and make important food decisions with your head.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And rebellion is just another emotion. Why do you want to reify the rebel inside of you? Or can't you just understand that as another emotion, like anxiety or anger or, you know, or sadness or... You don't need to eat because you feel too angry.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You don't need to eat because you feel too sad. You don't need to eat because you feel too anxious. Why do you have to eat because you feel too rebellious? Why can't you follow the rule anyway? So I'm in favor of teaching people to eat by design rather than to eat on impulse.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I have a disagreement with the mindfully community that it says that you have to allow all foods. I do have a disagreement with that. I think it's very possible to use rules to be over restrictive. And if you are physically over restrictive, your body will rebel for you.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Those aren't the kind of rules that we encourage people to make. We actually try to get people to make weight loss kind of a secondary goal. And the first goal is to have a normal, calmer, easier, more peaceful relationship with food.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You know, where you're flooding your body with nutrition and a slight caloric deficit if you want to lose weight and you're not going through these tremendous ups and downs. And really the primary purpose is to be able to make decisions about foods and foods behaviors that were previously under the control of your impulses and emotions instead.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So does that answer your question?
Melanie Avalon:
Yes, it does. And you know what's really interesting? It's actually, well, first of all, I'm very much a rules -oriented person. So to me, it works really well right off the bat because I see rules as freedom.
Melanie Avalon:
Like I can live my life when I have the rules in place and you answer my question because I was gonna ask about people who are rebellious or have you read Gretchen Rubin's Fortunes?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
No.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, you would like it. Are you familiar with it? A little. It's like basically, do you fulfill inner or outer or a blend or neither expectations? So which rules do you follow or which rules do you rebel against?
Melanie Avalon:
And she has it, four different types of people.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
as I can need to read that.
Melanie Avalon:
Yes, probably. I mean, it goes so well with your work. But interestingly, it's actually very similar. So the example you're making about the knife and how it's used, and then also the rules, it's actually very similar to me hearing it to intermittent fasting because you're basically setting up these rules about when you eat or don't eat.
Melanie Avalon:
It's not personal, it's not emotional, at least it's not supposed to be. Then you just exist within that frame. And anything during the fasting window, any voice you would hear telling you to eat is, it would be quote, pig squeal, with the assumption that those rules, those fasting rules aren't being made from an overrestrictive place.
Melanie Avalon:
So they aren't using the knife like you said to. What did you say? What was the bad way to use it?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Well, you could imagine bad ways to use a knife but just use a knife to chop vegetables. We find the best results when people start with a 12 hour window to begin with. And then after a couple of months, if they want to have a tighter window, then it can work out.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But you and I want to talk about this. And you explained to me why that might be. I just know that it is. I find that if people, unless they've been intermittent fasting for a long time or they're not eating a lot of processed food.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But I think that when people have been, especially if they've been binging or just eating a lot of bags and boxes and containers of stuff, I find that we do better if they'll start with a 12 hour window before they tighten that up.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Do you have thoughts about that?
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I mean, I can definitely see that working. And for a lot of people, easing in to intermittent fasting is the approach that really works for them. And I can see how, especially if they're coming from a sort of binging type background or overeating type background, that that would be, you know, a really powerful approach.
Melanie Avalon:
And again, then it wouldn't be just relying on intermittent fasting to, quote, fix everything. It's this really, really powerful mindset tool, you know, psychological tool that you've created. So, I mean, if it's working in your clients, sounds like a plan to me.
Melanie Avalon:
And 1212 is, I don't want to make assumptions, but I think a lot of people on the standard American diet eating system, if they haven't thought about it before and they were randomly asked how much do they eat during the day, they might think it's like 1212.
Melanie Avalon:
But when they've done studies where they actually see what people are eating, people are eating like constantly, like most people eat once they wake up and then they snack throughout the day and then they snack right before bed.
Melanie Avalon:
So most people aren't, you know, are not doing a 1212 thing. So, you know, that's a great place to start.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Okay, good. That's a good intersection of our work then. Melanie, you know that the last thing I want to see about them, the allow everything approach is that it does work for some people. I don't want to discourage people from doing that if it really works for you.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
We get complaints from the people that come to us who that was working for. They'll say, I'm not binging because I allow everything. So I don't ever feel rebellious, but I don't feel like I can eat as healthy as I want to.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
They're trying to achieve a higher level of health. And I think that's a benefit of our system is helping you to get there.
Melanie Avalon:
So basically they can use the system to make these new choices surrounding what they're eating within that mosaic of eating everything. Awesome. Awesome. And listeners, I really, really cannot recommend enough getting the book.
Melanie Avalon:
Just get it now. Get it now. If you've ever experienced anything with cravings or overeating or any struggles with food, it's crazy. I just think this is a reason that your work has had such an incredible response.
Melanie Avalon:
It's crazy how much people will identify with it. You get so specific and you list off things and it's like, oh yeah, I've literally heard that exact thing in my head. It's kind of like Taylor Swift.
Melanie Avalon:
How she relates to everybody for the people who like Taylor Swift.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
The book is free on the website, by the way, for Ken O 'Nilkin PDF.
Melanie Avalon:
So you can get it free at freecravingsbook.com. Okay, get it now. Freecravingsbook.com. So I have a few questions, specific questions that I liked with content that you had in this book specifically.
Melanie Avalon:
And it's been a while since I read your first one. I actually read a lot of, because you had quite a few. I've written eight books. Eight books, okay. I probably read, I probably read half of those probably.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Most of them were written in the early years though. I hadn't written a book since 2019.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, in the early years, I remember I read your first book and then I was like, oh, I got to read all of them. So but in any case, so I think the things I'm going to ask you about right now are new to this book, but they might have been touched on in previous books.
Melanie Avalon:
So one of the things I found so fascinating was you talk about the extinction curve timeline. So the actual process that well, first of all, you talk about the science of a habit and a craving and what the brain actually goes through.
Melanie Avalon:
And then when you stop indulging that, what the brain goes through and what that looks like and what that timeline looks like, which is probably very helpful to people because apparently it's got some twists and turns and you think you're you think you're through it and then you're not.
Melanie Avalon:
Was this the first time we're talking about the extinction curve timeline?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
This is the first thing I'm talking about it with you, yeah.
Melanie Avalon:
Do you talk about it in the previous books?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
No, no, no, we had a webinar once about it, but that's not available anymore.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so it was new. So one of the things I found so fascinating is, because I think a lot of times people will, you know, be working on a specific craving or not eating a certain food, and then they'll be doing pretty good, and then they'll wanna have it, you know, like a slip up, like just this one time, like it'll just be this one time, but even if it is just that one time, you point out the role of randomness and that if you, and I'll let you explain it better, but basically this idea that the uncertainty surrounding whether or not you're going to have something makes the brain want it even more.
Melanie Avalon:
So if you randomly do indulge, you're actually making it much worse, even if it's just that quote one time. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit more. I find this so fascinating.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Rather than jumping into the middle to make that one particular point, I'd like to give you some background about how cravings are formed and extinguished in the first place. And then it'll be easier to explain why randomly reinforcing a craving is about the worst thing you could do.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Is that okay? That's perfect. So let's start with the understanding that if you have a strong craving, if you have stronger cravings than other people, that's actually a sign that you have a healthier mind than other people, a healthier brain than other people, not a sick mind.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You need to know that 100 ,000 years ago, food was not nearly as abundant as it is now. And as a consequence, we had to work for it a lot. As a matter of fact, the bulk of our day was probably involved in sourcing and finding and motivating in ourselves to go find food.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And if we, if we didn't have strong cravings, we would have died because we wouldn't have been motivated to, you know, go hunt and gather and, you know, organize and bring food back and feed our family.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so the brain evolved this system for motivating us to do what was necessary to go find food. And it does that through the use mostly of dopamine. And it, it does that through the same mechanism to form the craving and extinguish the craving.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So this is important also, because people think that they must be broken. They can form cravings, but they can't extinguish them. But it's not true. If you have a strong craving, it means your brain is working, which means that the extinction process will work also.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So that's very important to overcome any notion that your brain is broken like that. If you don't have lesions in your ventromedial hypothalamus, or, you know, if you haven't had a serious brain trauma, and sometimes even if you have it, it's very unlikely that you can't extinguish a craving.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Okay. So let's, let's imagine there is a caveman. I'll call him Thag, T -H -A -G, Thag. And I just like the name. It's a random. I love it. It's a really random name. And let's say that Thag is out looking for food and he sees a monkey.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And he follows a monkey to a banana tree. And Thag is so happy that he gorges himself on bananas. He would have eaten mass quantities because remember food was scarce back then. And it would have taken as many as he could back to his wife and family.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
What would then happen is that the next time Thag saw a monkey, his brain would secrete a bunch of dopamine and try to get Thag to follow the monkey because he was more likely to find food if he followed a monkey than if he was just randomly searching.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So the monkey had some utility. We'll call the monkey a food signal. And in today's modern environment, that would be akin to seeing a sign for a donut store or a hamburger place or, you know, a convenience store that you're familiar with, all of the branding and signage.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Their food signals also, they lead you to the acquisition of calories and nutrition and sometimes just calories. Now, suppose that I decide that I'm eating too many donuts. I'm stopping at this one particular donut store on the way home from work.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And I'm having three or four donuts every time. And so I'm developing a little punch and I decide I have to extinguish that. So I decide to make a rule that says, I will never stop for donuts on the way home from work again.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And what most people think will happen at that point, and I'm going to go back to Thag in a minute to explain why, but most people think what will happen is that you're going to have the worst cravings on day one.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's going to be hardest on day one. Then it'll be a little less hard on day two, a little less hard on day three, all the way until you get to the point that the donut store doesn't bother you anymore.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But that's not actually what happens. What happens is you have a little honeymoon period right away. So it's actually easier than you think it's going to be for the first couple of days or exposures, which are an exposure is passing the donut store and not having the donut.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And then the brain does something which is called an extinction burst. I call it the worthy effort of my donuts reaction. It says, I used to get donuts whenever I passed the store and I don't get donuts anymore.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Where am I calories? See, the brain thinks that this is keeping you alive. It thinks that the acquisition of massive amounts of calories is necessary to keep you alive. It thinks you're going to die if you don't stop for donuts.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That's why this is so difficult. Why does it do that? Let's go back to Thag. Thag follows a monkey the next day, and at least to a tree with bananas, he's really happy. And then the next thing, and the next thing, and the next day, and it becomes a really solid habit.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
He gets so excited when he sees monkeys. But then one day, Thag follows a monkey. It's later in the season, the bananas will become scarce, and they get to a tree without any bananas on it. Thag was really sad and disappointed.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Many people think that at that point, in fact, his brain would give up and would stop motivating him to follow monkeys to trees. But what it does instead is it doubles down, it secretes even more dopamine, and makes Thag even more motivated to go follow monkeys to trees.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And the reason for that is that it would be more beneficial, more of a survival advantage, to hold on to a food signal, to find a monkey that led you to a tree with bananas 70% of the time, or 50% or even 20% of the time.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It would still be a survival advantage as opposed to having no monkey at all. Your brain is a calorie acquisition machine, and when it's learned that there's a signal that makes it more likely you're going to find food than if you didn't have that signal, it doesn't wanna let go of that, and it's gonna motivate you to engage in the behavior that led to the calorie acquisition before.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So what that corresponds to in the extinction curve is this extraordinary effort to test whether the reward has become available at random. It's called intermittent variable ratio, intermittent reinforcement.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's like what happens with a slot machine. You don't know when it's gonna pay off. So you know you have to be there pulling the lever. This is why those little ladies get stuck at the Las Vegas slot machines, because they don't know when it's gonna pay off.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And sometimes they'll even fight if they go to the bathroom and someone takes their spot for a second. There's this feeling of compulsion that you have to get the reward. And that's you have to be there to get the reward.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You have to engage in the behavior to get the reward. And that's what the extinction burst or the worthy effort in my donuts reaction is about, your brain is testing to see whether the reward has become intermittently available at random.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Now, if you push through that, what most people do is they say, oh my God, this is too hard. And their inner pigs say, well, this torture is gonna last forever. You obviously can't do it. What most people do at that point is they give up and they reward the craving.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
They reward the food signal. And so now they've proven to the brain that it was intermittently available at random. And the brain goes, oh, good, I did the right thing. I generated this extinction burst.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I generated this horrible craving. And the extinction curve resets and people start to feel like they're powerless over the problem. But it's really just because they don't understand what's happening.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And if you can tell yourself, you don't have to do anything about that craving. What you want to do is plan out these extinction curves, pick a very particular craving, plan out the extinction curve, and plan to take extra good care of yourself over the course of the whole curve.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So what reinforces people's willpower is having good enough nutrition and good enough sleep and good enough hydration and feeling like they're part of a tribe and they're not isolated and minimizing their other decisions they have to make over the course of the day.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And what you want to do is take this all very seriously. Don't go into battle wearing a plastic helmet. Tell yourself this is going to be hard. The brain doesn't want to give up the calorie acquisition learning, but you can push through it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Once you do, then you start to enter a more or less linear reduction in cravings. But the brain is going to throw out a couple of mini tantrums at the very end of the extinction curve. Somewhere around the 20 to 30 exposure mark, you're going to get a couple of little tries, little cravings for donuts.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
If you push through that and you allow you know, allow the full extinction curve to take place, you will then hardly be bothered at all because the brain will then say, okay, it's obviously a waste of energy to follow the monkeys.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's obviously just a waste of energy to get you all motivated when you see the donut sign. I'm going to label this as dormant. It's not gonna erase the craving. It's not gonna erase the learning because what if monkeys lead to banana trees again someday, but it's gonna label it dormant so it won't bother you unless and until you reinforce it again?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Does that make sense, Melanie? Yes, it does. So then, if you don't want to give up donuts entirely and two or three people are capable of doing this, and if you've gone too far down the, you know, the automation loop and you've dug too deep of a groove, then it might be you have to give up, but I give it up.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But I find that two or three people can moderate rather than abstain. The way you do that is to very specifically bind the reward to a particular context.
Melanie Avalon:
I just love this concept so much.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
much? Well, yeah, because it makes it possible for you to have what you want without having to, you know, give up your freedom. We call it eating by design. So if you were to say, I will only ever have donuts on Saturday mornings after my workout and no more than two.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
What you're really doing is setting up a set of food signals that have to work in concert and your brain is smart. It knows how to recognize the particular contacts. It'll say, okay, I need to have experience the workout.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's got to be Saturday. It's got to be morning. And there's a limit of two. And it's kind of like if you were to have a slot machine in a casino that only paid off on Saturday mornings at 10am, the casino would be empty all week long.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
The little old ladies would suddenly not be there after a week or two, they would not be there because it only paid off on Saturday. And then there'd be a mad rush on Saturdays. And so that's how cravings work.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
If you haven't gone too far down the rabbit hole. The last thing I would tell you about cravings, which is important, is that, well, two more things. One is that at the end of the extinction curve, when things are starting to be labeled dormant, a lot of people make the mistake of becoming overconfident and saying, I've got this.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So now let me try just stopping at random at the donut store again. And boom, they reset the extinction curve, they simulate the variable ratio, intermittent reinforcement schedule, and they're bringing lights up and reignites the craving.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So once you break out of prison, don't go back to see your friends. If you want to re -experience the food, do it by design, don't do it at random because you're feeling cocky. Okay, the last thing to remember about cravings, I lie, there might be two last things.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But the most important last thing to remember about cravings is that they're tied to specific food signals. So let's say I go through 30 days, even 60 days, and I'm just really not bothered. I don't even think about stopping at the donut store on the way back from work.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I don't, I don't, I don't obsess about it during the day. It's just not really part of my life. It's where I wanted to be. I'm really happy. And then I go to my mom's house. I haven't seen her for a couple of months and she invites me over for breakfast.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And there's a big old plate of donuts like she always has when I go for breakfast at mom's house. And I've got cravings like I've never had before. I'm thinking, what's wrong? I must have failed. This is too hard.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I must have failed. But you didn't fail. You succeeded at extinguishing the donuts from the donut store sign. You didn't succeed at extinguishing your mom's house on Saturday mornings, you know, when, when you go to her place and you hadn't been there in a while.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So as a practical matter, when you really want to, when you have a food that's troubling you or craving that's troubling you, you want to think about all of the different stimuli that it's attached to and make a plan for it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And if there are infrequent stimuli like going to your mom's house that it's attached to, then you want to write yourself reminders like actually plan out an email to arrive to yourself just before you go into mom's house and what the day that you're going to be there in the day after.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And maybe in that email, it will remind you to eat a little more healthy food before you go. It reminds you what your pig is going to say and what's wrong with what your pig is going to say, like just a little more hurt.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And then you'll, you write out the refutation for that, the answer to why the pig is wrong about that. It'll remind you to drink more water, it'll remind you to get a little more sleep. And then you can extinguish those exposures as well.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Don't get thrown if the craving comes back in response to another stimuli. Just understand it's a little bit like a game of whack -a -mole.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, yes.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
These things are going to pop up because there are other stimuli that you won't have experienced. But if you keep whacking them down and keep going through the extension curves for them, you get to the point that they just don't bother you at all anymore.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Your pig will say it's going to go on forever. As a practical matter, usually about 80% of cravings for a given substance is related to one or two daily food signals, and then the remaining 20% are with these infrequent signals that come over the course of time.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That is, I think, the answer to your question.
Melanie Avalon:
Super amazing. Some quick follow -up questions. So that extinction curve timeline that you just went through, is it a set amount of time regardless of what the person is trying to tackle, or is it longer for some, shorter for others?
Melanie Avalon:
I know you talk about the role of the counterintuitive idea that it takes longer for cravings that we were more intermittently dealing with, compared to every day. So is there like a general amount of time that it takes, or is it random?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's a number of exposures, not a specific amount of time. Most cravings are daily habits, and those can usually be extinguished in about 30 days, 30 exposures. If it's something you do every week, let's say you're playing poker every Saturday and you're eating pretzels every Saturday, that's gonna take longer.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That could take 30 weeks to get through. And so you're gonna need a little more support to do that. And so that's, so you'll set up emails and friends to call you and things for 30 weeks. So you can really get through that.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So yeah, it's, I mean, and it also varies depending upon how long the craving was reinforced in the first place and how strong it is, but varies depending upon how pleasurable the experience was for you.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So these are principles, not hard and fast rules, but generally spanking for a daily habit, somewhere in the first four to 10 days, you're gonna have that extinction burst, which is the hardest part to get through.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And then you're gonna have very strong relief right around the corner. And the only way out is through. You should be excited when you have the craving because the only way to kill a craving is to have a craving and not reinforce it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You know, and once you understand this, you kind of prioritize your extinction curve and get at it, man. There's no use dilly -dallying around. You can make this happen.
Melanie Avalon:
Nice. And if you do indulge, let's say you're at like day 29, does it reset to the very beginning or?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It kind of does. Yes. I mean, people have had the experience, so they'll find it a little easier to get through, but please don't shoot the messenger. Don't reset it at day 29, please. Please don't do that.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, another question. You mentioned in the book and you mentioned it here as well, that cravings are never extinguished, they just go dormant. If you had a craving and you successfully went through the curve and now it's dormant and it's in the past, is there the possibility of having it again and not enjoying it as much for whatever reason and rewriting how your brain interprets that food item?
Melanie Avalon:
And the reason I'm asking, I'll just elaborate really quickly, is because when Jin used to host this show with me, we would often talk about Fun Fetty Cake because like I said, that's my thing. She would swear up and down that my food buds had changed and if I were to try it now, I would not like it.
Melanie Avalon:
And she said that she had tried things like that now and she didn't like them, like things she used to crave, that she no longer crave them and she could eat them now. I was like, nope, that's not me.
Melanie Avalon:
I was like, I know if I have it again, it will taste amazing. And yeah, and it did. I actually tried some gluten -free Fun Fetty Cake and it was like the most amazing thing I've ever tasted. I was like, okay, we're not going down this rabbit hole at all, but I feel like I did have something similar where I don't know the context of, it's really vague in my memory, but I feel like I had an experience where I did rehab something and I just didn't like it as much now and that actually helped me want it less.
Melanie Avalon:
So is there that possibility of retrying something from the past and actually having that help you not want it more or is it like once it's a craving, keep it in the past?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
There is that possibility. First of all, there is the possibility of going through the extinction curve. You know, like a lot of people will go through a 90 day period where they have no sugar, flour or alcohol.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But that's one of the best resets you could do if you're really struggling. Go through 90 days with no sugar, flour or alcohol and then look at the difference in how you're thinking and what rules you want to set and how you want to eat at the end of that versus the beginning.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It's a very freeing thing to do. And I've seen a lot of people do that and then say, I think that I will allow sugar once a week at a restaurant for one serving of dessert or something like that. A lot of times that's possible.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I'm not guaranteeing it. It's at your own risk. A lot of times that is possible, especially when people really study this stuff hard. So they're not part of what allows the habit automation loop to take hold is this idea of powerlessness or that it's a disease or if there's something wrong with you.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And when you get rid of those ideas and you really understand what's going on, it's often possible to moderate something that you couldn't moderate before because you say, all that's happening is my brain's really excited.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I'm just, I really, really like this. That doesn't mean I have to do it. I can just extinguish it again. So I have seen people come up with conditional rules to bind their pleasures to certain contexts after needing to not have them at all for a long time.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I feel like it's safer in most cases if you decided you didn't, you really couldn't have it. It's probably safer not to have it. But let's go to the specific question you're asking. Could you have a toxic experience with a previously pleasurable substance?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
The answer to that is yes, because of the phenomenon of down regulation and up regulation. So your being is designed to avoid overloading your brain with stimulation if that stimulation is not relevant to the acquisition of what it wants.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
When I used to sleep underneath the subway, when I went to graduate school, my parents got me an apartment with these crazy pediatrics students that slept just about underneath the subway. And I could not understand how anybody slept.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But three weeks later, I didn't even hear the subway and I slept like a baby. And the reason for that is that my brain down regulated or habituated to the noise. It decided that stimuli was not relevant anymore.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Let's say you really like super salty things that your desire for super salty things probably didn't occur. I'm sorry, let me back up for a second. The same process would happen if you would eat something salty every day.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Like if you eat something a little bit salty, it would be interesting then you put a little more salt on it, a little more salt on it. Because in order to get the same pleasure response from the salt, you need a little more, a little more, a little more because your brain is down regulating in the same way that it down regulated that's response to the subway.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Because it's not going to respond to salt in the way that it normally does. Okay, so now you get to the point that you're eating these nacho chips that have two grams of salt in them in a bag and you hardly even taste the salt.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
It just tastes it tastes good to you, but not as good as the first time you had it maybe. And you need more and more salt to make it taste good. So you're eating super, super salty nacho chips, then you decide to extinguish that.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
If you then go back 90 days later and you have one of those super salty nacho chips, it's going to taste too salty to you because over the course of that 90 days, your brain would have up regulated, it would have reestablished the responsiveness.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Just like if I went out to the country for a couple of months and then I went back and slept under the subway, I wouldn't be able to sleep again because my brain would have up regulated again. So provided that you went back and had the same level of intensity of stimulation, you would have a toxic experience and you wouldn't want that thing.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And I've experienced that with salty stuff. I stopped having salty soup. And then one day I decided I just give it a shot and I couldn't imagine how I ever got it in my body. So it can, but it depends upon a number of things.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, that totally makes sense. I've definitely experienced that with salt as well. Salt's one where it's like very, at least for me, very telling, like, because I've gone through low carb keto periods where I was eating much higher salt and then cutting out the salt and then having it.
Melanie Avalon:
I'm like, whoa, I don't have, how in the world was I eating this? The sweet thing though, I don't know that Fun Fetti cake. It's always, it's always gonna call to me. Well, something I also love in the book.
Melanie Avalon:
And again, I will just prefer listeners to the book because there's so much we didn't even remotely touch on. So, you know, you talk about, like I said, the specific squeals and how to refute them. And those are the ones where I think people will really resonate and be like, okay, I've literally heard that exact phrase in my head.
Melanie Avalon:
And here's how you can, you know, combat it. You talk about how to, how you can use all of this to actually create healthy habits that you want. So kind of like hacking the, you know, the variety and the randomness and everything to make yourself crave healthy foods.
Melanie Avalon:
You really read the book. Oh yes, oh yes. Most definitely, I loved it. It was so great. So much, like I said, so much science. I loved all the updates. You have your ritual mantra, your 100% optional tool people can use that they can possibly integrate if it resonates with them.
Melanie Avalon:
So it's completely free. Get it now, freecravingsbook.com. Completely free.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Press the big blue button.
Melanie Avalon:
press the big blue button. Is there anything you want to talk about specifically before we go from the book for listeners?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
just because we went into depth so much about the science of cravings that it's how to say one more thing about it. It's helpful to understand that it was so important to be able to locate food sources, that the brain has the capacity to form a new craving, a new automation loop, from one particularly unexpected, rich, and delicious experience.
Melanie Avalon:
I'm just gonna ask that. I'm glad you're talking about this. Yes.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I had a friend in my 30s, his name was Hank, and once we went out to a diner and he took a bite of a sandwich, I think it was. And he said, Oh, Glenn, I can't eat this. This is too good. And Glenn, if it's too good, then it's no good.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
That that was his understanding of how to avoid getting a craving. If he had something that was too delicious and unexpected, he knew his brain was going to start making him want to go to that diner all the time.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And so he decided right away that he wasn't going to do that. So if you find yourself having an unexpectedly delicious experience that you don't want, like I don't want to take anything away from you that you do want.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
But if you feel like it's going to be trouble, then make a rule for it right away. Don't don't let it take hold. On the other hand, you can use that phenomenon to crave the things that you want to crave.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So if you research a half dozen or a dozen recipes that are entirely on your plan, like one of my favorite things is this vegan, flowerless, you know, cheeseless lasagna. I got it from Dr. Furman. And you have like a half a dozen or a dozen of those things, and you rotate them through your diet.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
So you don't have them every day, or even every month, you allow, you know, allow yourself to wait for them. Then you're constantly having these unexpected, delicious experiences, and your mind will keep craving that.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And it is an awful lot for the satisfaction on your plan. And that's one of the ways you can hack your brain to want the things you wanted to want to not want the things that you don't want it to want.
Melanie Avalon:
I love it. I love it so much. So if somebody had that delicious experience where they're like, oh no, this could be a problem, what sort of rule would they create around that?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Well, let's say it was a particular sandwich. It could be very particular. I feel like I will only ever have a half of this particular sandwich at such and such restaurant with my spouse on the weekends, right?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Or maybe it's just so strong, they feel like they can't deal with it at all. And so they'll say, I won't ever do that. It's up to you and it's a matter of judgment. And I have to interview people about their experience with it to really know what to tell them about that.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I err towards conditional rules where you don't have to give things up entirely because people like more freedom than less, something like that.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I was going to say intuitively, I think the reason I really loved the binding concept is it's something I've historically done, like I would, without even realizing it, I would, especially when I was still fine tuning my diet and what I eat, I would say I could only have certain things on like a holiday and only on a holiday and not if it wasn't a holiday.
Melanie Avalon:
And then interestingly, the farther I got in life and time, then I didn't even want those things on the holiday. It's like the longer I went.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
A very common condition or rule people will make is, you know, I can have one serving at dinner, of any dinner I want, a one serving of dessert, of any dessert that I want on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
I know I know a lot of people that do that. It works out well.
Melanie Avalon:
I also like just to throw it out there. I like your ambiguity asset test. So basically, because people might make their rules a little bit too vague and then, you know, what does that really mean? And so what is your test?
Melanie Avalon:
If how many people followed you around?
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
You want your rules to be operationally defined so that 10 people following you around for a month would know whether you followed it or not. So you can't say, I'm going to avoid chocolate 90% of the time because probably by the end of the month people would be arguing about whether you did or you didn't.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Right? Or you especially you can't say I'm just going to avoid chocolate or I'll try not to eat chocolate. But you could say I'm only ever going to have chocolate on the last three days of the calendar month.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
And that would accomplish the same thing. But it's very, very specific so that there's no ambiguity for the pig to barrel through.
Melanie Avalon:
I love it. Clear and specific.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
because you want it to function as a trip wire so you know the moment the pyrrhoxylmbran is awake.
Melanie Avalon:
It's funny because one of my good friends who is a major fan of your work, she would experience something that you would talk about in your book that I never personally experienced, but she would talk about like getting into overeating and not even realizing what led to it.
Melanie Avalon:
Like for me, whenever I would have issues with overeating, I was very much aware going in like from the first bite, I was like, Oh no. But for her, she would say that she would just realize that she was, she would just like find herself overeating.
Melanie Avalon:
And I was like, a lot of people say that it's just so interesting to see how, you know, how different things manifest in different people's minds. And you address all of it with your books and with your clients.
Melanie Avalon:
So yes, free cravings book .com. I cannot recommend it enough. And friends, Glenn not only is he making this incredible work accessible to so many people and changing thousands of lives, but he's also one of my dearest friends.
Melanie Avalon:
And I genuinely mean this. Like, Glenn, you're just such a treasure and one of the most kind, empathetic, savvy, knowledgeable, funny, awesome, incredible human beings that I know. And I'm so grateful that we're friends and thank you for what you're doing.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Could you tell my dad that please? Sure. Thank you, Melanie. That's really sweet.
Melanie Avalon:
Well, I have enjoyed this so, so much. We'll have to have you back on the show. Maybe we can have you on the show in the future for a Q &A if you're open to it.
Dr. Glenn Livingston:
Absolutely, anytime. You tell me when.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I think listeners would love that. So we'll have to do that. Okay, so again, the show notes for today's show will be at ifpodcast.com/episode356. There will be a full transcript there as well as links to everything that we talked about.
Melanie Avalon:
And I will see everybody next week and have a good rest of your day, Glenn. Thank you, dear. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Intramission Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice.
Melanie Avalon:
Thank you so much for listening to the Intimation Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice and no patient-doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes. We couldn't do this without our amazing team. Administration by Sharon Merriman, editing by Podcast Doctors, show notes and artwork by Brianna Joyner, and original theme composed by Leland Cox and recomposed by Steve Saunders.
STUFF WE LIKE
Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!
LINKS
BUY:
Melanie's What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine
Vanessa's Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight
The Tone Device Breath Ketone Analyzer
The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast
More on Melanie: MelanieAvalon.com
More on Vanessa: ketogenicgirl.com
Theme Music Composed By Leland Cox: LelandCox.com
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review in Apple Podcasts - it helps more than you know!
