Philip Pape: 0:01

You probably found yourself mindlessly reaching for that extra slice of pizza? Binge watching another episode when you should be sleeping, or reflexively checking your phone for the 100th time today. Even if you've put in the work at the gym, those pesky food cravings are sabotaging your efforts to build that lean strong physique. You're after you've hit your macros for the day, but that pint of ice cream in the freezer is calling your name. You know, these habits aren't serving you or your health, but breaking free from them seems nearly impossible. What if I told you that the key to conquering these cravings isn't more willpower or a stricter diet, but understanding the inner workings of your own mind. In today's episode, we're sitting down with a neuroscientist who's cracked the code on why we get hooked on foods and how we can break free whether you're battling late night snacking, stress eating, or any other food related habit that's hindering your physique goals. My guests groundbreaking research offers a path to freedom that doesn't rely on restrictive dieting, or endless cardio. Today, you'll learn science back strategies to rewire your brain, break bad eating habits and take control of your nutrition once and for all, so that your eating habits and fitness goals are better aligned. Welcome to Whitson weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, Philip pape, and today we have a very special guest joining us, Dr. Judson Brewer. Dr. Brewer is the Director of Research and Innovation at the mindfulness center, and professor at Brown University's School of Public Health and Medical School. He's an internationally recognized expert in mindfulness training for addictions, and has developed groundbreaking app based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He's also the author of several popular books, including The hunger habit, why we eat when we're not hungry, and how to stop. Today, we'll be discussing strategies that actually work for managing food cravings and breaking poor eating habits, all backed by cutting edge neuroscience, this is often the missing piece, if you're looking to optimize your nutrition for your health and physique goals. Dr. Brewer or should I say Judd, welcome to the show.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 2:03

Thanks for having me. So, Judd,

Philip Pape: 2:06

I first heard you on or not first heard you, but I heard you again on the hidden brain recently, and then I reached out to you could come on the show. And then I got a chance to read your book, The Hunger habit. And there's this powerful moment in the book. And I think you mentioned on the show as well, a light bulb moment when you were working with patients struggling with binge eating. Can you start by painting a picture of a particular instance, from your own life? Perhaps involving ice cream or gummy worms? Where you found yourself, you know, in front of the pantry or fridge, you're grappling with a craving? You know, what was that inner battle? Like? Because I think so many of us can relate to that. And then what would you have tried back then that we now know maybe isn't so effective? Yeah.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 2:45

Well, I could do it. I mean, back in high school, I had a very strict diet, because I was trying to optimize my athletic performance, I needed all the help that I could get. And, you know, offseason. So I would need any basically no processed sugar, you know, and just really healthy, clean diet. And offseason, no, just the ice cream would call to me. And so I'd find myself, you know, galloping through a half gallon of ice cream. Fast forward to I think it was cheese, grad school residency, I think, when gummy worms were kind of my siren song where they would just call me and there was nothing I could do, I was totally under their control. So I'd eat, you know, whatever bag of gummy worms no matter how big it was, I would have it, you know, I'd eat the whole thing in one sitting because I knew at least they would be out of the house. Until of course, I bought the next bagger somebody gave me some. And so, you know, willpower, you know, a lot of discipline for all sorts of things, you know, from, you know, athletic training, to getting into medical school to completing a PhD and all that. But it didn't seem to apply when it came to gummy worms. So that's where, you know, ironically, I started practicing what I was researching, I found that it worked pretty well for me.

Philip Pape: 4:09

Yeah, I can identify with that. Back in college, I had a convenience store right around from my dorm, like literally in the building. And they had Sour Patch Kids or something like that, you know, and it's like, you have one bag of those. And every day you get a habit of just having having another bag like it just have to have it. And listeners can relate to that so much. So that brings up the idea then of the emotional versus physical hunger, or I think you call it he Donek hunger, how you know, emotional states drive people to eat. Maybe let's start there. Because people are wondering, how do I even distinguish that? Where do I even start? Before I then go down the rabbit hole of what to do about it?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 4:45

I think that's a great place to start you as a neuroscientist. I think it's generally very helpful for us to understand how our brains work, and we don't need to know it down to the synapse level. But it is helpful to know some of these general frameworks and one of the most basic frameworks that is evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug is this process called reinforcement learning. And it helped our ancestors survive before we had, you know, ready availability of food. And both in terms of learning where food sources were, but also learning where danger was. So they could, you know, go get more food and avoid danger is basically get lunch and not become lunch is the way that I think of it. And so that is described as homeostatic hunger. And the reason it's called that, you know, that fancy term homeostasis just means it's trying to keep us in balance. So when our stomach is empty, we're out of balance, and our body kicks into gear, dopamine fires and says, go get some food. Well, it actually starts back with learning dopamine firing when we learn where a new food source is. So if there's something surprising that they say, oh, there's food over there, then that Oh, signals dopamine to fire. And we actually laid on a memory that says, hey, remember this, remember where this food sources, and then that dopamine firing shifts from that Oh, surprise, because it's no longer surprising to, Hey, get out of the cave and go get the food when we're hungry. So we get back, you know, when we're out of balance, it says, Go get back and get balance. So that's homeostatic hunger. hedonic hunger was coined probably within the last 20 years. And it was coined as a response to what researchers were finding, which is that people are eating a whole lot, not when they're hungry, not when their stomach is empty, not when their body is saying that it needs calories. But when they're out of balance in a different way, emotionally. And they coined, it's a misnomer, actually, because it's called hedonic hunger, meaning eating because of emotion. But it's a misnomer, because we're not actually hungry. We're just eating because there's a, the urge to eat. And that urge says go eat. But often, you know, bringing this back to when I first started working with patients with binge eating and or disorder around this, they couldn't tell the difference between when they were actually hungry, or when they just had an urge to eat, because they had learned that, you know, when they felt sad, they could eat as a way to distract themselves when they were celebrating something they could eat, you know, as a way to reinforce that process. So they were mixing up this homeostatic mechanism of this reinforcement learning, where they were learning to reinforce behaviors, such as making themselves feel better through food, rather than filling their, you know, filling their calorie deficits,

Philip Pape: 7:43

so to speak. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, we hear that often how something we've evolved that was beneficial in the wild under a different environment. Now we have this, you know, modern food environment, that is up plenty. And like you said, it's not really hunger, right? It's filling a gap, or having an urge, or there's some chemical link that forms out of habit. And again, we're gonna get to what do we do about it in a second, but I want to tie that concept to the environment, since I did just mention that the modern food environment, the food industry, which is not just their happenstance, there's a lot of design and intent behind it. And I'm not gonna call them villains or anything, they're doing what they do to make money, and it is what it is. But it makes food very addictive, right? It taps into that exact thing you talked about, which I assume is a reward system. When you mentioned dopamine, it sounds like to me, maybe tell us about that. We're not using it so much as an excuse, as we want to be aware of this and be aware of even the manipulations that might be going on. And so we can make better choices around that. Right.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 8:42

And I like the way you framed that this isn't about vilifying an industry, that either because this is really about just how humanity has been conditioned through capitalism, to say, hey, you know, making money is a good thing. And so if we had been conditioned as a society to say, hey, public health is the ultimate greatest good, we probably wouldn't be in this predicament because people would be designing food to optimally deliver nutrition, and not optimally addict us. So that will eat more. So the idea of, you know, if it's a growth industry, if it's, you know, a consumer model, so to speak, where you get people to consume to make profit, then people are going to be conditioned to try to get people to eat as much as possible, because they'll get you know, the revenue will come in the margins will be higher, and they'll ultimately, you know, help their stakeholders who will then feel like they are momentarily fulfilled because the stock price goes up and then we can see how that becomes a vicious cycle itself. We can talk about that later where, you know, that's ultimately this meeting the same, the same process. That's not actually helping people be healthier or happier, but we're just stuck in and because we don't know any way out As a society, so it's not society's fault, it was, you know, it was set up, you know, way, way, way long time ago. So with that as a backdrop, if you put yourself in the perspective of a company that's trying to maximize profits or increase its, you know, its growth so that it can, you know, meet its projections and then get have its stock go up, then they're going to do everything they can to learn about how our brains work, so that they can tap into these learning mechanisms to get us to consume. And so and Michael Moss, I think, wrote a beautiful book over 10 years ago now, around how the food industry, you know, it's peeling back the curtain, this exposition on the food industry, and all the different ways that the food industry has been doing this for decades. You know, you can think back to 1963. When was it Lay's potato chips came out with the big candy? Just one, right? Because we're designing it that way. So you know, they put it in our face, that they're they're doing all this stuff to make food addictive, whether it's a bliss point, which is a perfect, you know, mix of sugar, salt and fat to banishing caloric density, which is exactly what it sounds like, we're, like, think of any puff type thing. You know, like a Cheetos or whatever, where it melts in your mouth, in your body says, Did I just eat something? I don't think so. Because it's gone. I should eat another thing. You know, and so we get all these calories in, but our brain is like, but it's supposed to I have to I'm supposed to to it right? Because that's what that's what natural does. So that's the backdrop against, you know, against with, we're working. I'm not saying that properly. But that's what we're up against. Let's put it that way. And just to kind of name how explicit it is. RJR Nabisco. So RJ Reynolds merged at some point with Nabisco. Right, RJ Reynolds, a tobacco company, they had all these engineers that knew how to get people addicted to cigarettes. And they started applying that to food. Right? So it's, you know, again, that's how they're choosing to spend their time. So if we don't know how that process works, then we have very little chance of being able to work against it. Because, you know, they got billions of dollars invested in getting us addicted. And all we have is our one little brain. Yeah.

Philip Pape: 12:28

And my comment about them making money too is like, I mean, simple thing is capitalism and economics drives. Behavioral Economics drives an entire industry to then become neuroscience experts and psychology experts. We see it in marketing, right? For years, we've seen it in marketing, even go back, you know, and look at the old Howdy Doody show. And you see how like, right in the show, they're marketing straight to kids, because they understand the psychology of it all. I just saw Taco Bell ad that was my wife and I were watching people were like, really, that's how they're pushing this, it was about how you have no time to eat. So go get Taco Bell. And it was like, wow, like, we're just throwing mindfulness out the window with that ad. And you think of like Planet Fitness, or the big box gyms, same thing. There are health and fitness companies whose model is to get you to not go to the gym. So we see perverse influences everywhere. And I think we said enough about that. But now that people know, we want to go to Okay, what do we do? So we take back control of our, our minds, our mindfulness to whether it is quitting smoking or eating better, rewiring the brain, right. Like, I think that's the next logical step. It is.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 13:31

And so just to highlight this in the catapult us into what we can do, think of the McDonald's play scape, right? The parents could think, Oh, it's so convenient that we can go and play in the playground and eat at the same time. And McDonald's is saying, we're gonna have kids associate having fun with eating McDonald's. And so if you do that at an early age, then kids start to associate McDonald's with happiness, quote, unquote, with playing, and then they're wondering why it's so hard not to eat McDonald's when they're older. So with that as a backdrop, let's talk about what to do about it. Yeah,

Philip Pape: 14:09

let's hear the expert on that one. Where do we start with? Yeah,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 14:14

it goes back to really understanding this process itself is reward based learning or this reinforcement learning process. And so if we think about if we break it down, there are three key, let's say key ingredients for forming any habit around eating. The first is a trigger, the second is the behavior. And the third is the result or from a brain perspective, a reward. And so think of it let's use McDonald's as an example. So, kid goes to McDonald's and they see a play scape, right? And so there's the trigger. They're fed McDonald's foods, there's the behavior and they learn to associate playing with eating McDonald's, right? There's the result, and their brain lays down this memory. Hey, you know, let's go eat at McDonald's because it's fun. Okay, that's called positive reinforcement. So the other side of the equation, which is the same equation is just flipped a little bit in terms of Valence is the negative aspect when somebody feels sad, they've learned, hey, you know, I know McDonald's has a place gay is fine, right. So let me eat some comfort food. And that comfort food makes them the reward is that it makes them feel less sad or mad or bored or anxious or frustrated, or whatever the negative emotion is that they're trying to escape. And if they eat that, they get this temporary relief, one of my patients described it as that she would numb herself she would eat to numb herself. This is somebody who is binging on entire large pizzas in one sitting, because it you know, it started with one piece. And then that wasn't enough, two pieces, three pieces, because her body would habituate. And eventually, she was eating entire large pizzas in one sitting 20 out of 30 this month, because that was the only coping mechanism she had learned since the age of eight, and how to cope with negative emotions. So it was eat to numb. So trigger is negative emotion, the behavior is to eat a pizza. And the reward is to numb herself from her negative emotions, which of course, doesn't fix the problem in the first place. And just reinforces the process to do it again, the next time she has a negative emotion come up. What is the industry?

Philip Pape: 16:30

Or what is the been the traditional approach to addressing this? That is not effective? Because I want to compare that to what actually works? Yeah.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 16:38

So what I learned in residency, and what most people learned today is, is use your willpower. Right? Now, that works well for the diet and weight loss industry. Because they can say, look, the formula is correct. And I learned this formula in medical school calories in versus calories out. And they set it up like it's just a straightforward cognitive thing. If you eat salad instead of cake, you're going to lose weight, it is true. What they don't talk about is it in context, and whether that even fits with how our brains work. It's a great business model, because they can say follow our diet, whatever the diet is. And you'll notice these diets change every two years because there's a new fad diet coming out, because the last one didn't work. And so you think, Oh, here's something new, maybe this will work and they claim that it works. And then it it works briefly, and then it doesn't work. Because it all relies on this willpower, you know, you just have to use your willpower. And the diet, people will say, hey, it's not our fault. You know, this is a low calorie diet, it's your fault, you don't have enough willpower. So not only do they implore you to sign up for another year, but they also tell you that it's your fault. That is a travesty to blame people for a system that's set up to fail. Yeah,

Philip Pape: 18:00

the yo yo diets are the Weight Watchers and everything. It's like, there's no endpoint, you go to them, you do the thing. It doesn't work, you come back, you do it again, then we want to say what are the alternatives because people in like my practice and nutrition coaching, we will use various tools and mechanisms that maybe they are I don't want to say band aids, but they're not necessarily getting at the root cause, such as tracking. And I've heard you talk about tracking. As you know, there's pros and cons. But I've definitely heard you say, you know, it's kind of an intermediate thing that doesn't necessarily solve any particular problem. But I do want to address that real quick, because we talk about tracking calories, macros, for awareness and things like that, not so much for emotional eating, per se, but it's a way to potentially get there. What do you think of tracking? Yeah,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 18:41

it depends on how you use it. So if somebody uses tracking as a way to judge themselves, beat themselves up, you know, to say, Oh, I'm not meeting my goals, then it's just gonna ultimately fail, if they use it as an awareness tool, and we'll talk about why this is critical in a minute. If they use it as an awareness tool, it can be extremely helpful. But if they use it, anything more than helping them become aware of what they're putting in their bodies, then it's going to generally fail for them and actually can create even, you know, the same type of problems that, you know, the self control problems that are caused by the diet industry.

Philip Pape: 20:02

Okay, so I mean, you mentioned self control, and actually do have, you talked about societal pressures in your book, how we value things like fitness, right, and self control and willpower. And that I think you said, quote, Those who carry a few unwanted pounds can feel like they're wearing a sandwich board announcing their failure. How do we build resilience against these judgments? Right, and shift the focus toward the practices I think we're going to talk about related to self care and compassion and all that we can get into. Yeah,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 20:30

so I won't emphasize this today. But I think there's a big effort that needs to happen around public health and changing societal habits. It's around what is healthy. So, you know, I would just want to put a footnote there, because that's really important. So we're not, you know, there's this, you know, anti fat bias, where people just like that quote says, you know, somebody's walking around and they're deemed by society as obese or fat. Along with that goes, the label, lazy lack of self control, can't do it, failure, all this stuff. And there's lots of research showing that there are all sorts of, you know, biases and viewed discrimination against fat people basically. So that's something that we need to work on as a societal habit, at the individual level, where more of my research comes in, is that we can do a couple of things. One is one, see that societal bias, and to see if we're beating ourselves up, when we are working with our own behavior change processes, because this self deprecation that, you know, self abuse, literally for a lot of people actually gets in the way of making progress and sucks energy into this black hole of judgment, and shame and blame and guilt and all of this, that actually just keeps us spinning in the same types of cycles. So we can actually repurpose that energy to help us learn our brains work, help us learn to change our behaviors, but we can't repurpose it, if we're stuck in the same unit. If society is telling us we're bad. And then we're telling ourselves that we're bad on top of, which

Philip Pape: 22:06

is yet another loop we can get into here. So okay, is this one of the first things people should be aware of and work on then? Is this like cultivating self compassion? Or are there some tools or steps like your reign method, you have a bunch of methods in the book that I thought were pretty straightforward and helpful? You know, again, what's step one, somebody's at the fridge, and they just have that like total urge, they can't help themselves. They know, they need to do something differently. What's next? Yeah.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 22:32

So I think, depending on how much somebody judges themselves, this also fits. There's a general three step methodology that, you know, my labs been researching for over 10 years. Now, this fits into major buckets, one is around getting stuck in the urge to eat. And the other is getting stuck in that bucket of self judgment. So if we're judging ourselves and blaming ourselves, and that's taking all of our energy, it's a really good place to start is to map those habits out, and then bring in some kindness to help as an antidote. But I'll walk through the general process, and then we can see how we can apply it, both the eating and also the self judgment. So the first step is really just recognizing what the habit is. And we can simplify it. So we talked about these three ingredients for a habit loop, but you can actually simplify it just asking, what's the behavior? What am I doing right now? Am I eating because I'm hungry? Or am I eating because I'm bored, sad, lonely, angry, frustrated, you know what we're celebrating whatever. And so we can separate out the hedonic hunger, that celebration, anger, boredom, you know that the mood food relationship from the calorie, you know, I actually need calories right now, because I've added a deficit from that homeostatic hunger. That's the first step is just to be able to recognize what is this? Right. And so, for example, working with patients with binge eating disorder, those were so much together that they couldn't tell the difference.

Philip Pape: 24:01

You mean the hedonic hunger and the homeostatic hunger and the homeostatic hunger?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 24:05

Yeah, I still remember a patient. Because if you just clarified this for me so much, this was as if it was yesterday, but it was over. It was probably 15 years ago, where she said, I just have an urgent I eat. And my assumption was, oh, when somebody's hungry, they have an urge, because they're hungry. And she's like, I can't tell the difference between hunger and mood related eating. And so being able to just ask that question, am I actually hungry, helps us step back, and then start to be able to tease those apart, it can take a while for some people, where and then I've got some methodologies to help differentiate those until we can really quickly feel it like, oh, yeah, I'm actually hungry, or nope, I'm just angry. You know, in my anger drives me to McDonald's, or whatever. So that's the first step in before we go on. Does that make sense? Yeah,

Philip Pape: 25:01

it makes sense. And people might be asking, Well, how do I do that? And I know you have, there's apps and things and there's probably checklists, rubrics, you know, maybe even just a journal and you literally just ask yourself the question, you know, again, if somebody's listening, they're not necessarily going to sign up for a big program, and they just want to know today. What do I do when I go grab my next snack? Yeah.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 25:19

So the simple question there that they can ask themselves is, am I actually hungry? Right, and check in with their bodies. So this starts with awareness. They've got to be starting to build out awareness of their body. Am I actually hungry or not? And that can, you know, that's the basic question to be asking, and then looking for evidence whether they're hungry or not. Yeah, so you don't need an app, you don't need a book. You just need that question.

Philip Pape: 25:45

This is part of your, your rain technique. I think we're gonna get into here because you started with recognize, it's related

Dr. Judson Brewer: 25:50

to that. But it's it goes, it's even before that. So it's really just starting with this simple question. Am I hungry and starting to be able to tell the difference between that homeostatic hunger, the true physiologic hunger and the hedonic hunger, which is the mood food thing? Yeah,

Philip Pape: 26:05

okay, no. And that's extremely helpful when you hear people discuss things like intuitive eating, and your hunger signals, and all that a lot of this gets lost in there, where there's a lot of finger pointing is like, well, you can't be intuitive because the food environment and you don't know what hunger is. And the other side's like, well, you have to track all the time, you know, you kind of get both. And it sounds like you can definitely, you know, learn about yourself as a human and your brain and actually know what real hunger is. Before we get to the next steps, yeah, great.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 26:31

I mean, this is something that has been so important, from an evolutionary standpoint, that for some people, they regain that pretty quickly. And for others, it takes a little bit longer, especially with all of the noise in the system, and the noise that the food industry is deliberately injecting into the system. I haven't met anybody that hasn't been able to regain that, because it's such a critical evolutionary function.

Philip Pape: 26:58

You told a really neat story,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 27:00

I think this is on a hidden brain you talked about with the gummy worms, when you finally gave it a thought, moment of thought to what you were eating and what it tasted like that awareness, you realize it just tasted like chemicals or something like that, right? Yeah. Is that part of the this first phase is coming up? It's actually part of the second steps. Okay. All right. All right, once we can just pause, bring some awareness in and start getting reacquainted with our body and asking, am I actually hungry or not? And determining that, then we can go to the second step. And the second step is credit, I'd say all three steps are critical. But the second step is the most counterintuitive, but also the most critical in the way that works from a neuroscience standpoint is our brain, you know, this willpower thing, it's not even in the equations of neuroscience for forming behaviors or changing behaviors, right? That's how far off off the realm it actually is. So what is in those equations, is what's called reward hierarchy. And this reward art can be set up to help us make decisions every day. And the way it works is if given A versus B, and we've done both of them, our brains going to naturally compare them and say, Do I prefer a over b? Or do I prefer B to A, and whichever it gets, the higher reward value we're going to do. And that becomes our habit. So we don't have to relearn all of our habits every day. So most of this reward hierarchy is really helpful. For us, just living our everyday lives, it helps us you know, learn just the most efficient way to walk, this is the most efficient way to get food in my mouth. This is the most efficient way to do X, Y and Z. It also pertains to food, right? So from an evolutionary perspective, our brains looking for calorie density, because it's planning for famine. It says, hey, if I've got calories in front of me, I'm going to try to get them in. Because I don't know if they're going to have calories tomorrow. For most of us, we're not going to run into famine anytime in our lives. So when our brain says, hey, you know, sugar is the most efficient way to get calories in because I can get those in, I can storm this fat, I can save them for later. If we have a ready source of sugar, we can see how that becomes a problem. We just keep eating sugar or body keeps laying it down as fat. And then voila, we develop diabetes. Like it's some magical thing. No, it's just our body saying hey, you know, famine hasn't ever come and now you know, our pancreas is worn out, basically. So we can't handle all of this extra especially the adiposity, especially around our in our in our viscera idea in our intestine. So and we don't need to go into the details there. That's been well worked out. The bottom line is our body is going to prefer sugar to non sugar things until it's too much right. So the second step is really asking as another simple question, what am I getting from this?

Unknown: 30:02

Hey, just wanted to give a shout out to Philip. I personally worked with Philip for about eight months, and I lost a total of 33 pounds of skill weight and about five inches off my waist. Two things I really enjoy about working with Philip is number one, he's really taking the time to develop a deep expertise and nutrition and also resistance training. So he has that depth if you want to go deep on the whys with Philip but also if you want to just kind of get some instruction and more practical advice and a plan on what you need to do. You can pull back and communicate at that level also. He is a lifter himself. So he's very good Now you're aware of the performance and body composition goals that most lifters have. And also Phillip is trained in engineering. So he has some very efficient systems set up to make the coaching experience very easy and very efficient. And you can really track your results. And you will have real data when you're done working with Phillip and also have access to some tools likely that you can continue to use. If all that sounds interesting to you, Phillip, like all the coaches has a ton of free information out there and really encourage you to see if he may be able to help you out. So thanks again, Phil.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 31:16

Now, if we look at it from a just a meal perspective, ticket one meal at a time, if we pay attention, the same food is going to taste different from the beginning of the meal to the end of the meal, which is kind of interesting in itself. Very same food, you can keep it at the same temperature, you can make sure it hasn't changed at all. Yet our body says wait a minute, I don't like this as much. At the end of the meal. As I did at the beginning what's going on here, our body is registering satiety. And it's got these all of these intricate networks set up to say, Hey, eat until you're full. But don't eat more than that, because that's what's gonna help you survive optimally. If we don't pay attention to those signals, those hunger and fullness signals. We're often eat beyond satiety, especially when we've got the engineered food. And then on top of that we learn to eat not because we're hungry, but because we're, you know, have some mood, right? So the second step is asking a simple question, what am I getting from this, right? Am I eating because I'm hungry? Or because I'm bored or whatever? And what do I get when I overeat? Right when I eat beyond satiety, but when I when I'm not even hungry at all. The second piece that we can ask is if like, let's use the gummy worms as an example. What do I get when I eat non food objects that have calories in them and that are designed to be addictive like gummy worms are right. So when I started paying attention to eating gummy worms, they had this sickly sweet petroleum hit nice to them. I still, my mouth still screws in my face still screws up like Yak. I haven't eaten and gummy warming. And I can't remember how many years but I can still remember what they taste like, right? Because my body was like, dude, really, you call this food. But I hadn't noticed that for years because I was just eating. Because I was basically addicted to them. I was craving that next gummy worm while this the gummy worm was still in my mouth. And I wasn't registering what it actually tasted like. So we found We've done studies with this we've been called Eat right now that we've that we can actually run these studies to measure reward value, it only takes 10 to 15 times if somebody's really paying attention, whether it's eating the gummy worm equivalent, or overeating for that reward value to drop below zero. When that reward value drops below zero. That's when our brain says hey, this is no longer rewarding. We become disenchanted with that behavior. That disenchantment is key for behavior change,

Philip Pape: 33:45

because why are we going to do something that we're not excited to do? We're not right, notice how that takes zero amount of willpower. This is so powerful. There's a lot I want to ask about here. But like, you really close the loop on the willpower thing, because what I got from that is that the habits that we want to engender are about not needing willpower at all. Like that's the powerful statement here. Is that the things we want to do we want to put them on autopilot. So we don't have to have willpower. And I know people are thinking, Well, what do I do to change the habit? And that's we're kind of getting into that, when you mentioned that the body and the mind have these automatic preferences, right? You said you compare things you just automatically go with this. And so if you can make one of those less palatable and drop it in the kind of choice tree here, you'll go toward the other one, a few things came to mind. One is how like, I've always, I've told my clients like when they go to a restaurant, they're a little bit hungry. It helps to have something like the salad first, just because you start going through that satiety curve that you talked about with your stomach, like the task salad is going to taste amazing. And then the next thing is going to taste less amazing and so on. Because of that people often think of satiety, I think in terms of like calorie density, but what you're talking about is just the temporal the time based aspect of satiety is super important. And then the the non food objects. I was thinking of movie popcorn, right? You go to the movies and you just mindlessly shove it in. Folks just stop and eat a few of those like mindfully and you'll see how disgusting that oil,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 35:13

the oil and the amount of salt. Yeah,

Philip Pape: 35:17

well I put my own salt. I've already put too much on there. Yeah, you're right. Okay, so then you said okay, we need to have disenchantment with the behavior. Neuroscience doesn't even care about willpower. We care about the loops in our brain. So before we go to step three, how does this play into pickiness with things like vegetables. People grow up and they have certain behaviors and they avoid vegetables, apparently, and get them to eat them. And then now they're in their 20s and 30s. And they don't eat any vegetables. does this tie in somehow with like how our brain is trained and disenchantment?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 35:51

I think it certainly could, right? So I don't want to generalize. Because there, there could be lots of different situations that lead to the same result. But let's use just one example. So a kid is fussy. And for some reason, you know, they say, I don't want to eat my vegetables, and they throw up a fuss, and they have a fed, and their parents are like, Fine, I'm not going to make you your vegetables. Well, you know, french fries, or ketchup or sugar laden things, you know, gotcha, typically has a lot of sugar in it, right. And so if you think of French fries, you get the Triple Threat of sugar, fat, and salt, especially if you're putting ketchup on them. So the kids are going to, can learn this preference for this type of addictive type of thing. Now, as a kid, you're not going to typically have a lot of negative consequences for eating a bunch of French fries. Because, you know, they're usually pretty active they can. Now it's interesting. This is less and less the case case these days with a lot of sedentary, you know, like a lot of the habits of kids where it's not to go outside and play, but it's to stay inside and play video games, right? So. So I think childhood obesity is at a record level now. And we can see why you get the Busey kid, the parents too tired to just wait it out, and say, hey, you know what, they're hungry, can it take over at some point, if I don't give in, but if I give in, they've just trained me to feed them crappy food. And so that that habit gets set up. And they can go, you know, junior high schools, high schools, the food industry tries to get in there. And you know, be able to offer all these sugary things because they know they're going to that's a critical period to get kids addicted to certain sodas and certain things. And so they're going to try to get in there and how and have unhealthy meals as well. And so there's no real place to line people up to kind of learn, oh, that healthy food actually feels pretty good. So we're fighting against all of that history where somebody makes it in their 20s. They wake up, and they're like, Wow, well, I feel really sluggish in the morning. And I you know, I'm in a pretty unhealthy weight. And I don't have a lot of energy throughout the day. When I feel sad, I reach for candy, right? So that's where we just have to start to become like pay attention and see the cause and effect relationship between what we put in and how we feel. It's that food mood relationship. And it can be hard to tease apart if that's all we're doing. Until we start really isolating enough of the variable. So we can see very clearly, what a bunch of junk food this is what happens. And when I eat clean for a week, this is what happens. So interesting. I grew up in Indiana needs to race BMX bikes. And I learned this myself kind of accidentally, when the way it would work, when we race on weekends was that there were three heats, you know. And so you whoever won the most place the best in three heats won the trophy or whatever. And so I could do well, like I'm the first heat and then I bought like soda and crap. And then I'd get tired by the third heat, because you have to go through all the age groups. And my mom's like, why don't you need like peanut butter and honey sandwiches or something like that something a little more nutritious. So I do that. And I was like, wow, sustained energy, I can actually do better consistently. And I learned from my own direct experience, hey, junk food leads to this, how the food leads to this. And I just happened to run into that, because I needed it in junior high school for my athletic performance. So a lot of people don't have that serendipitous opportunity to learn from their own experience until later in life. But that's the place where we where actual change happens is when we can really say okay, let me pay careful attention to what I get from this, whether it's an amount or type of food, versus this and this is where the third step comes in. But before we go there, you know, we can even just start by asking when I overeat, what do I get from this? Right? How do I feel afterwards? I've never had somebody come back and say, You know what, thank you for helping me see how wonderful it feels to overeat. You know, thank you Dr. Bird. Now I am I'm overeating even more. Never, never. Yeah.

Philip Pape: 40:13

Could you have a situation though, where someone acknowledges that like the first of the six muffins actually was a very pleasurable experience and they enjoyed it and it was high quality and then it was the second through sixth though it's the issue. Yeah,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 40:25

yeah. So this isn't going to make chocolate tastes terrible is not going to make muffins taste terrible at Target. So it's both the type of food and the amount of food for me. There was nothing redeemable about gummy worms but other People are gonna be like, yeah, other people like, yeah, gummy worms no big deal. I'm not saying that everybody's gonna have the same experience that I did. What I will say is that our bodies are pretty intricately tuned. And the more we can tune them, the more we're going to our bodies are going to really say, really, you know, this sickly sweet thing is. Now what helps us do that is finding and comparing these two foods that truly satisfy that urge to have something sweet, for example, and don't have any negative consequences to them. So just to put it out there, the example for me was blueberries, right, I started eating, you know, it was like, after dinner, I wanted something sweet. I needed some blueberries. And I was like, wow, these are good. These are really good. And blueberries have enough fiber in them and all this stuff. But they're not overly sweet. They're not they don't hit that bliss point. So I can eat some blueberries, and be finished, and actually feel great afterwards, right, and I'd have more blueberries for later. So we can become disenchanted with an old habit. But importantly, we also have to become enchanted with something different. And that something different tends to come in two flavors. One is not overdoing it. If it's like one muffin versus three months, or the type of food which can be you know, for me gummy worms versus blueberries. I'll give a concrete example. I remember somebody in our E right now program to she and her husband had gone to a was like a church, you know, get together with a it's like a yearly thing. And she had a friend who would always bring like the world's best pie. And she she ate three or four bites of the pie. And then she turns she's like, I don't want anymore. And she turns to her husband, because usually when he two to three pieces, right? She turned her eyes when she's like, does this taste as good as it always does. And he's like your ads killer. It's same yours because same thing. She's like, Ha, it tastes good. But I still want anymore, right? Because she'd seen the difference between eating those few bites and enjoying it. And eating to the three pieces, which didn't actually make the enjoyment any better. It made it worse, but she was now aware that that was the case. So same pie, different result. You know, oddly,

Philip Pape: 43:01

I remember iced speaking of ice cream, I love ice cream, I still do and I enjoy it. And I remember when I was tracking my food and deliberately reducing my portion of ice cream, it forced me to realize that I actually could like less ice cream, right? It was kind of a again, awareness. Really not the fact that I was picking X number of grams of ice cream was the fact that I could get through it be satisfied and realize that was the case. And I think we, like you said we don't have we're not in tune with that. When you go to go to the ice cream parlor and you see people ordering these large ice creams you like you'd probably be cool. Like in your head, you know, you'd probably be caught this little one. But before we go to step three, I still there's a few other little corner cases I'm curious about. So the first is actually this is from a listener community. She said, You know, when she eats a diverse diet, lots of vegetables, meat fiber, she still craves the sweet after a meal, even if she's like, quote unquote, full, like, where does that come from? And how does that tie into this?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 43:56

So evolutionarily speaking, and this is where the, you know, the example of a holiday meal comes in, in an extreme. So you know, let's say Thanksgiving in the US where you know, people are they're eating till their stuff, for whatever reason, because that's the habit, you know, societal habit. And then they pull up the desert array buffet, and they're like eight desserts, and they have to have one of each, right? Or at least some of it. Well, there's an evolutionary mechanism for variety in there. Because our body is saying, Hey, if you eat a bunch of different foods, you're more likely to get all the micronutrients that you need. So there is a, there's an evolutionary, at least explanation for it's like, oh, you know, like, let's have a little something extra, because that might help fill this little niche that I hadn't filled with the the year the regular meal.

Philip Pape: 44:49

So that's an interesting segue into the other corner case then, which is, I alluded to vegetables before, I used to be very picky. I'm not anymore. My wife helped me out with that, because she pureed vegetables into things I liked, for like a year, love her for it. And I was willing to do the experiment. And for whatever reason, my brain got used to it or I saw it and was eating it and realizing it's not so bad. You know, like, I'm curious about the neuro science mechanisms, but also where that's going to fit into our process here of not just avoiding foods you don't want avoiding foods you don't want too much of but then adding in foods that you kind of know you want to need, but maybe don't taste so great to you yet. Yeah. So

Dr. Judson Brewer: 45:29

not to nerd out too much from a neuroscience perspective, but hopefully this will be helpful for folks. I'll keep it simple, but try not to oversimplify we tend to have a top down model of the world of how We interact with things and that is based. It starts with our sensory information coming in and saying, Hey, I'd like this I don't like this often gets set up early in life, you know, where if our parents feed us a bunch of vegetables, early in life, it's much that top down model says, I like vegetables, when they don't forced us or, you know, say, Oh, you're not leaving the table until you because then we associate vegetables with negative things, right? So it's like, oh, vegetables, you know, boom, we've got this top down model, not a big problem, because then our bottom up sensory information says, Hey, vegetables, and our top down model says, I like vegetables. If we come in with the I hate vegetables, model the world, two things are going to happen. One is, this affects how we see how our sensory information is interpreted. So we are literally biasing our world based on our worldview, so that our world conforms to our worldview. We see this everywhere you look at politics, and you take any you political actor that you like, or you don't like, and you have a top down worldview, let's just use age as an example, right? Doesn't matter whether we're Republican or Democrat, we can look at the other candidate and say that person is too old for the job, or that person is just right for the job, are top down model until some sensory information comes up. And proves to us with beyond a shadow of a doubt that our top down model is not true. And then we have to revise our top down model, right? So we see this all over. It's not a political thing. It's a brain thing.

Philip Pape: 47:07

It's framing right?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 47:08

Now the way to put it. Yeah. And that severely bias is how we see the world. And we can also you know, we're like how can that person not see this? Well, they have a such a model, that they're conforming their bottom up information to fit with that model. Now how this is relevant to eating is that we can be like I vegetables, to the point where every vegetable looks like a Mr. Yuk sign. And so we're not going to actually take in that bottom of sensory information and explore, hey, does this sensory information actually fit my top down model? Or does it force me to reevaluate this top down model, right. So you could do a couple of things, one, as you could put somebody on psychedelics, which is a way to like, totally change this top down model temporarily, and then introduced bottom up sensory information. I'm not suggesting we do this, but this is just a hypothetical, where suddenly taking notes, yeah, this bottom up sensory information is more accessible. And it reforms are top down view of the world. You don't need to take psychedelics for that well you can do is start to bias awareness. So if you start to get curious that curiosity helps to increase the weights, they call this in math, how much this essentially information is weighted as compared to our top down model. So our top down model has to start to pay attention and say, Hey, does my model fit the data? And when the data are really, really clear, then have to reevaluate and change our models. So for you, let's use you as an example. Tell me if this fits your experience. So you have this top down model says no vegetables, and your your wife says, well get curious, let's puree some vegetables, start introducing some sensory information where you can actually access that information. And I'm guessing your brains like vegetables aren't so bad.

Philip Pape: 48:57

Exactly. Fine. Model. And then

Dr. Judson Brewer: 49:00

suddenly, that top down model is going to start looking at vegetables like yeah, it's compared to yuck. That is

Philip Pape: 49:07

awesome. I loved it. This has got to be one of the most powerful like insights out of this episode, at least for me, because we talked about curiosity and skepticism and using data and all of that. And that's exactly what you're saying is like, just always be curious. If you have a fixed statement sounds like fixed versus growth, right? It is this or it? Isn't this that there's some there's an opening there. There's an opening there. You just got to find what it is. So okay, cool. So I think we talked about step 1am. I actually hungry. Step two, what am I getting from this? What step three,

Dr. Judson Brewer: 49:36

step three, I call it finding the bigger better offer. And what that does is it leverages Step Two directly. So if our brains are always looking for setting up a reward hierarchy, and we start to become disenchanted say I became disenchanted with the gummy worms, my brain says, okay, that slot is now open, fill it in with something better. And so I started comparing it and I mean, for me, it was blueberries, I start eating blueberries, and I pay attention. I see blueberries tastes great. They're healthy. Like I get all this energy. I don't get the sugar rush and crash. I don't crave more, all this good stuff, right? And so my brain gets this bigger, better offer, it sets up blueberries and then it becomes very easy to make that choice, right? My brain is already doing that. I'm not even choosing my brain is like duh, you know, this is better, you know, until you prove to me until you give me some sensory information that's different. That's where I'm going is blueberries are my go to choice. So that happens so it can be a dip One type of food, but it can also be a different amount of food. So if it's one muffin versus three muffins, we can ask ourselves, hey, what feels better one versus three? Or in your example, Hey, actually a little bit of ice cream. Will you tell me it was better than a lot of ice cream? Yeah,

Philip Pape: 50:57

you didn't feel stuffed? And like, you know, afterwards.

Dr. Judson Brewer: 51:00

Did you have where's your willpower in that? Yeah, no.

Philip Pape: 51:04

No, it was easy, right? But that's

Dr. Judson Brewer: 51:06

it. Right? So not only do we become disenchanted in the second set, we become enchanted. It could be the exact same food. But what bringing that curiosity and then asking how much is enough? How much is enough? And truly being curious?

Philip Pape: 51:20

Okay, yeah, no, as simple as that, right? No, I love it. It's substituting one thing for another. I'm trying to think if there are like particularly difficult cases where this, you know, require something extra to it. I don't know if you have exactly, you know, if you can give us an example of where some of your patients have had, or I don't know, if you call them patients, but like, the binge eating that's just uncontrollable, and they don't like anything, and everything is just against them. This process works every time, or is there anything along the way, that's like an obstacle, there are a couple of

Dr. Judson Brewer: 51:53

things that I see pretty consistently that are worth pointing out, you know, with my patients, for example, my clinic patients, one is if they've, so our brains don't like change, right. And this is actually fitting with these top down models of the world, our brains are looking to try to predict the future. And what's called mathematically is you're trying to maximize future or minimize future prediction errors, you're trying to be able to accurately predict the future. And so what we're doing is we're What do you how do you predict the future, it's based on past experience. And so you take your past experience, and you say, Okay, if I do this, again, this is going to happen. So if something has helped us survive to this point, it's going to be hard to change course, because it's a habit. And our brain says anything deviating from this could be dangerous, and I could die, you know, edit an extremely, that's what our survival brain is saying. So anything that's different is going to push up against habits of the comfort of familiarity. So that's the biggest thing that most people run into is, oh, this is this could be dangerous. And really, so I have people ask themselves, is this dangerous? Or is this different? To remind themselves that anytime we're stepping out of our comfort zone, we can either step into our panic zone, which makes us run back to our comfort zone? Or we could step into our growth zone where we're actually growing and learning. That's where Curiosity comes in. So instead of going, Oh, no, we recognize that Oh, no habit. And we go, oh, this is different. Right? Vegetables gonna kill me? I don't know. Let me try and see, right? Most likely not going to, obviously not eating poisonous vegetables, right. But that's where it comes. I mean, that's actually where it comes from. We're gonna go to food that we know isn't going to kill us. Now, generally, society is is not going to put food in the grocery store that's going to kill us. So we don't have to worry about that.

Philip Pape: 53:44

So, yeah, so again, it comes back to curiosity, I love it, it

Dr. Judson Brewer: 53:48

generally comes back to curiosity. So that's the biggest thing that I see. And directly related is when people have had food rules forever, like, I have to eat this, or I have to do that. Or they're depending on somebody's step by step checklist, just tell me what to do. It's really scary to step out of that, especially when they asked me, Are you really telling me that I can eat as much or whatever I want? And I say not only Yes, but you have to, in order to change. Now, the good news is they've largely done that enough in the past that they don't actually have to go back and repeat the experiment. They can just recall their previous experience. And that's what did I get from that last time? Right? And if it's, if they can feel into the results, enough, they don't have to repeat the behavior. But if they can't, they're going to repeat the behavior anyway, at some point. So they might as well pay attention as they do, and give themselves the freedom to learn and say, Wait, this is in the spirit of learning, so that they're really paying attention and asking how much is enough? How much is enough? So they're gathering what I call, they're building up their disenchantment database. If they're so scared that they're always going to go back to their old habit, it's going to be really hard to change.

Philip Pape: 55:01

Sure, understood. No, I love the whole message of flexibility and openness, curiosity, collecting data being it is what it is, we're just trying to figure ourselves out, which is awesome. One little last thing that comes to mind is when someone is in a fat loss phase, and they're actually deliberately in a calorie deficit. And let's say they've dialed in, you know, their eating habits, like we've talked about here, but now there is physical hunger. You know, what does that introduce? Is there? I'm guessing the answer's no, a willpower aspect to it, or is there other things that we lean on to continue that and be successful?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 55:34

Yeah. Again, it that willpower is more myth than muscle. So it's not about willpower at that point. and some people associate willpower with doing something. But really, if they look at it carefully, it's probably the reward of having done the thing that they then go back and attribute to Oh, yeah, it's because of willpower. So here again, we can look to see, okay, if I'm looking to lose X amount of weight, when hunger comes up, if they're in a calorie deficit phase, they can go, oh, no, I gotta fight this or then go, oh, what does this actually feel like, right? And so instead of running away, or pushing against something, you know, that phrase, what we resist persists. And having that build or run after us, we go at it, but not in a fighting with it way, but in an aikido way, where we bring that curiosity in. And I love that phrase, you know, the only way out is through. And so if we start exploring, oh, what does anger feel like? Oh, what does it feel like? Oh, what does it feel like? And we start to notice these thoughts like, oh, no, if I don't eat, something's terrible is gonna happen? Or, oh, no, or Oh, no, or Oh, no, pretty quickly, like within days, we can actually get used to having hunger, having it be there, and not having a drive our lives. Now, I'm not saying it's easy, but it is definitely like, that is the most consistent way to be able to be under like

Philip Pape: 57:01

smart, efficient, consistent, over forcing yourself or trying to, quote unquote, make it easy necessarily. What did you say there that I wanted to comment on? Oh, the hunger like getting used to it and knowing that it's actually doing the job. I mean, you're going to have some physical hunger when you are releasing fat stores, you're going to have that. So I love it. Okay. Is there any, any question you wish I'd asked Judd? And if so, what's your answer?

Dr. Judson Brewer: 57:25

Well, the one thing I would say just briefly is, now let's apply this to kindness. All of the steps are the same. But let's use a concrete example. So if somebody judges themselves, see, they look in the mirror, I had a patient who didn't have a single mirror in his apartment because he was so self judgmental, right? So that's the extreme of what we're talking about here. Somebody looks in the mirror, trigger, they judge themselves, Oh, I'm fat and whatever. There's the behavior. And then the result is shame. Or maybe they ironically, go and eat to numb themselves, which I often see. So the self judgment, habit loops are critical. So one recognize second step is ask, what do I get from judging myself? So there's this false association between Oh, if I beat myself up, then I will change, right. And what that comes from is the perceived reward of doing something rather than doing nothing. The irony is that doing something often perpetuates the habit makes it worse. So we can ask the same question, what do I get from beating myself up? Oh, it doesn't feel very good. Nobody's like, Oh, this feels great. It doesn't, right? If they're being honest with themselves. The third step is then to compare that what's the bigger better offer kindness, right? Oh, and so the number of ways that people can bring in kindness, tons of stuff out there for building it, but really, it's starting at what does it feel? What does kindness feel like? What's it like when somebody's been kind to me? Anybody can remember that, right? Anybody has had some small act of kindness happen to them in their life, and hopefully recently, so they can feel into kindness feels like and then they can compare that What does kindness feel like compared to self judgment, right, so they can find that bigger, better offer? And then they can start exploring? Well, what's it feel like when I'm kind of myself, and that can simply start with not judging themselves? Right? Again, when it's an old habit, it can be hard to break. So it can take a while, but it is not that hard to access. And your first step leads to the next step leads to the next step.

Philip Pape: 59:26

So self judgment is the gummy worms, the petroleum, gummy worms, kindnesses, the blueberries. And that's how we're going to tie it all together. All right. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. Where can listeners find out about you? I know you've got a lot out there. So where do you want them to reach out

Dr. Judson Brewer: 59:41

the simplest places, my website, it's Dr. Judd, Dr. J. ud.com. Got a bunch of free resources. You know, the hunger habit book, The unwinding anxiety book, the other books in our apps are there as well, if anybody's interested, but also tons of free resources, if just people want to learn how their brain works. One thing I love to do is try to make the science accessible. So we have some animations, videos, things like that, that anybody can access for free. Yeah,

Philip Pape: 1:00:05

it's full of stuff. I mean, I would say your book is excellent as well, in terms of practicality. It is not it's not too dense. You know, in terms of the science, it's just right, at least for me, I'd like to geek out on that. But it has a lot of practical things in there. And we'll throw your website in so people can check out free resources as well. Again, appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure.