The Personal Battle Behind the Work
In this episode of the ANEW Insight Podcast, I sit down with psychologist and overeating specialist Dr. Glenn Livingston. Glenn’s story is deeply personal: once nearly 300 pounds and consumed by food thoughts, he struggled for years with binge eating despite being surrounded by 17 family members who were also psychologists. His background gave him tools, but his own food struggles made it difficult to be fully present with clients.
That tension—between wanting to heal others and being trapped by his own cravings—ultimately inspired his life’s work. Glenn realized that his personal challenges were not simply about willpower or emotional wounds, but about how modern food systems exploit the most primitive parts of the brain.
The Reptilian Brain and Food Industry Manipulation
During his career, Glenn consulted with the food industry and saw firsthand how companies design products to hit the “bliss point”—a combination of sugar, salt, and fat engineered to keep us coming back. This targeting of the reptilian brain bypasses our higher reasoning. Instead of thinking about long-term health or social connection, the primitive part of the brain just shouts: eat, mate, or kill.
In an environment where hyper-palatable foods are everywhere, this survival mechanism works against us. Unlike our ancestors, who faced scarcity, today we can purchase thousands of calories on every street corner. The result? Constant overstimulation and a system designed to undermine self-control.
Drawing the Line: The Role of Food Rules
Glenn’s breakthrough came when he created clear, personal rules to separate himself from cravings. He used what he calls his “inner pig” framework—naming the primitive voice that urges him toward impulsive choices. For example:
- “I never eat chocolate on weekdays.”
- “I only allow two ounces of chocolate after a workout on weekends.”
These rules acted as a tripwire, helping him notice when the reptilian brain was hijacking his choices. While some fear food rules may create rigidity, Glenn emphasizes they can be flexible and self-directed. The key is clarity: rules buy us a pause between craving and action, creating space to make mindful decisions.
Over time, Glenn noticed that setting low, achievable bars worked better than ambitious, restrictive diets. Control mattered more than the specific food plan. With practice, he lost 75–80 pounds, improved his blood markers, and maintained these changes long-term.
From Personal Journals to Global Reach
Glenn’s private journaling—tracking his cravings, writing down the lies his “inner pig” told him, and creating rebuttals—eventually became the foundation of his first book. What started as a personal experiment grew into a published method with more than a million readers. His coaching agency later helped thousands, demonstrating that for those who actively engaged with the tools, overeating dropped by nearly 90% in the first month.
Yet Glenn also observed that long-term success depended on more than rules. When people abandoned the tools, it was usually due to what he calls “organismic distress”—lack of sleep, poor nutrition, decision fatigue, or social isolation. These stressors drained willpower, leaving people vulnerable to cravings. His most recent book, Defeat Your Cravings, focuses on addressing both the brain’s primitive drives and the modern pressures that keep us stuck.
Childhood Origins and Emotional Links
One of the most moving parts of Glenn’s story is his reflection on how overeating began. As a baby, when his mother was overwhelmed by depression and fear of losing her husband to Vietnam, she kept chocolate syrup at ground level. Too exhausted to nurture him, she would tell him to “go get your Bosco.” That early self-soothing habit shaped his lifelong struggle with chocolate.
Understanding this history didn’t immediately solve the problem—in fact, it initially made his cravings worse by giving his “inner pig” new excuses. But it gave Glenn compassion for himself and his mother, and reinforced his belief that self-awareness and boundary-setting must work hand in hand.
Rules and Mindfulness: A Combined Approach
For Glenn, it’s not rules versus mindfulness—it’s rules and mindfulness together. Just as we respect traffic lights not because they restrict us, but because they keep us safe, food rules create structure that allows for freedom. Mindfulness then helps us recognize the emotions and stressors driving our cravings, ensuring that we don’t confuse loneliness or fatigue with true hunger.
Key Takeaways
- Overeating is not just about willpower or emotional wounds—it’s about how modern food exploits the brain’s survival mechanisms.
- Clear, personal food rules act as boundaries that create space between craving and choice.
- Rules and mindfulness work best together: structure plus awareness supports lasting change.
- Long-term success requires addressing “organismic distress”—sleep, nutrition, decision fatigue, and social connection.
- Compassion and self-awareness are essential; knowing where habits begin can dissolve shame and empower healing.
Glenn’s story is a reminder that freedom from cravings doesn’t come from perfection, but from practical tools, consistent practice, and self-understanding.
👉 Listen to the full conversation on the ANEW Insight Podcast.
👉 Start your own transformation with the Deprogram Diet Culture course.
👉 Prefer to dive deeper with a book? Get Deprogram Diet Culture.
Here is the Full transcript:
Dr. Supatra Tovar: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the ANEW Insight podcast. I’m Dr. Supatra Tovar. I’m so excited to have overeating specialist and psychologist Dr. Glenn Livingston with us today. Dr. Glenn, how are you? I.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I am great. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Me too. I’m very excited. Dr. Glenn and I are very similarly minded and we work in similar industries. Well, the same industry really. And so I’ve just been really excited to pick his brain. So I am going to read a little bit about Dr. Glenn, and then we’re gonna get into our questions.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: And
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: then you can just call me Glenn would be probably more efficient.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Sure. Of course. Okay. Dr. Glenn Livingston is a veteran psychologist and former CEO of a multimillion dollar consulting firm serving Fortune 500 food industry clients with decades of experience [00:01:00] researching binge eating and food psychology, including a landmark, self-funded study with. Get this you guys, over 40,000 participants.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Dr. Livingston now helps individuals escape the cycle of overeating through practical, sustainable, methods. His work has been featured in prominent media outlets like The New York Times, ABC, and CBS, and he is the author of eight books, people. His most current book is called Defeat Your Cravings.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Glenn, welcome.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Thank you for having me. I need someone to follow me around and introduce me like that at parties. That would be a, that would be a good thing. It, it, it all makes me sound a lot bigger than I am. I’m, I’m just a
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Yes.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: figured out the overreading thing, so Yeah.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Oh, well no, you have like amazing experience and I like to make my bios pop, I tell you. So, tell [00:02:00] me, Glenn, I would love to know what is your inspiration? This is a big part of, the first part of my podcast always, is really delving into what inspired people to go into the work that they do. I think that there’s something really deep and something that the audience can really glean from when they hear the why behind someone’s work.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Well, well, it’s not just an intellectual curiosity. It’s not like I’m a doctor who just decided to work with overeaters. This, this was the bane of my existence. I was almost 300 pounds and worse yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about food. I. I’d be you, being a great psychologist, it’s not so much about everything, although that’s a big part of it, it’s, it’s about getting people to love and trust you enough that they’ll listen to what you know, that requires that you lend them your soul. You have to be just a hundred percent present with them. In my twenties and thirties, I really had a hard time doing that. I would think I was decent anyway. I like to think I was decent [00:03:00] anyway, but I, I had a hard time being emotionally present a hundred percent because of my own food struggles.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And I’d be sitting with a high risk patient and thinking, can I get the next pizza or when can I get to the deli and dislodge my jaw like a snake and empty the, the delicatessen and tray into it? So, that, that was worse, particularly because I came from a family of 17 psychologists and psychotherapists yeah, something breaks in the house we all over and ask it how it feels.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And nobody can, nobody can fix it .
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Oh my gosh. I can only imagine your holidays.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: But, but that’s just always been the nearest and dearest thing to my heart. And I, I thought that if you have a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. And so I thought if I could heal the hole in my heart, then I’d stop trying to fill the hole in my stomach. And so I, I took a very traditional approach.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I went to all the best psychologists and psychiatrists and Overeaters Anonymous and nutritionists. And I took medication and, I kind of cried and [00:04:00] screamed and confessed all the guilt in my soul. And it helped me as a person. I think it made me a more compassionate person. I forgave myself for a lot of things, but it didn’t help me so much with food.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I, I get like a little thinner, a lot fatter, a little thinner, a lot fatter. And at the same time I was consulting for industry. I had time for a second career because I was married for 28 years to a woman that traveled for business and we didn’t have kids and I didn’t commute, so what am I gonna do? I started consulting for industry and I was on the wrong side of the war.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I was helping sell sugar and, know, hyper palatable concentrations of starch and salt and excitotoxins and, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s all geared or hitting the bliss point in the reptilian brain without enough nutrition to feel satisfied
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Yes.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: All these fat cats and white suits with mustaches are laughing all the way to the bank when you’re looking for love at the bottom of a bag or a box or a container.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And, and that was me for[00:05:00]
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Oh my gosh. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: But, but over the years, I slowly figured out that, well, wait a minute. If they’re targeting the reptilian brain, like the part of the brain that’s really responsible for our survival drives, it doesn’t necessarily know love. It’s much more like a bad college drinking game.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Like this is the reptilian brain. It’s kind of back here in the, in the, in the brainstem, and it looks at something in the environment and it says, do I eat it? Do I mate with it or do I kill it? Love is from the mammalian brain that says, before you eat, mate or kill that thing, what impact does that have on your tribe and the people that you love? And then the neocortex on top of that can introduce a delay for your longer term goals before you eat, mate or kill that thing, what impact does that have on weight loss and fitness, but also music and spirituality and art and your role in , and your work and everything that we think of that makes us human that’s kind of up here in the brain, that’s not, that’s not back here,
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Back
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: [00:06:00] here is eat, mate, or kill what’s really going on. we push all of our best thinking aside and say just hand over the cheesecake and nobody gets hurt, is, is that this thing is getting active, this thing is getting active, and we’re designed from an evolutionary vantage point be able to push the higher brain out of the way when we need to take action to survive. If there is a hungry tiger chasing you, that’s not the time that you can rest and digest and chill and think about your long-term goals. That’s time to breathe fast and get the hell out of there. Similarly, in a primitive environment when food was relatively scarce and we had to compete for it, when you perceived the availability of food resources, you’d have to push your rational brain out of the way, um, and just take action and go get them. There wasn’t time for really think and make decisions. It’s so that’s what’s going on. It’s a very physiologically [00:07:00] and evolutionarily healthy mechanism, but it doesn’t work in the modern food environment, ’cause I can go downstairs and buy a hundred thousand calories for a hundred dollars. And then I can go across the street and do the same thing. Right?
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I started to say to myself, well, this is all very primitive and they, these companies have, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to pay rocket scientists to figure out how to do this. I could tell you stories about other things that they did to take advantage of that survival impulse. And this has nothing to do with having been in a bad marriage or being a little, lonely or broken hearted or depressed, or, that my mother did something to me when I was two or whatever.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: This, this is not about my personal psychology. This is not about that hole in my emotional heart. Thi this was about this thing getting too stimulated and active and pushing the rest of Glenn outta the way. And, and so like, I was not, I was [00:08:00] a child and family psychologist. I was not going to teach this stuff. And I did something a little crazy. I decided, I have to know when this thing is awake. If I was gonna get better.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And so I’m always a little embarrassed about this and no one has to use these words, but this is what I did ’cause it was me personally. I said, this thing is my inner pig, and I’m gonna draw a very clear line in the sand.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: People are frightened of very clear lines when it comes to food, which is really interesting. We’re talk about that later. I’m gonna say something like, i’m never gonna have chocolate on a weekday again. So here’s that line in the sand and it functions like a trip wire. It’s, I’m only ever gonna have chocolate on a weekend and no more than, two ounces after a workout. And by defining that really clear line, this thing would wake me up when my reptilian brain was trying to get through. And I would say, let’s say I’m at I’m at a Starbucks on a Wednesday, and there’s a big chocolate bar on the counter, I hear this voice in my head that says, you know what, Glenn? It’ll be just as easy to start your silly [00:09:00] rule again tomorrow. You worked out hard enough and a little is not going to kill you. Go ahead. We’ll just start again tomorrow yipee. Let’s go get some right?
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And I say wait a minute, that’s not me that’s pig slop.,
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Chocolate on a Wednesday afternoon is pig slop. I don’t eat pig slop, so I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. And so I wish I could tell you that was a miracle and that I was all better right away, but it wasn’t. What happened though was I got clarity and I, I got a little bit of space between stimulus and response to make the right decision just a little bit more space and over the next eight years for me personally, I, I can teach people how to do this in a month now, but for me it took eight years ’cause I didn’t have all these tools. I started challenging the things that my pig was saying. For example, if the pig says it’ll be just as easy to start again tomorrow, I would say, wait a minute, that’s not true. Because the way that neuroplasticity works, [00:10:00] what fires together wires together. So if I have a craving for chocolate and I say, I’ll just start again tomorrow, and then I eat the chocolate, I’ve reinforced the craving and I’ve reinforced the idea that I can just start tomorrow. My craving’s gonna be worse tomorrow, and I’m gonna be more likely to say, I’ll just start tomorrow, tomorrow. So if you’re in a hole, you better stop digging. You can only use the present moment to be healthy. And I’m almost done and then I’ll pause, and you can ask me whatever you want. I, I know I got wound up about these kind of things. But the basics are important. And, and, and in that space between stimulus and response, I had a few extra microseconds to make the right decision. Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn’t. I no longer felt confused. I no longer felt like this had something to do with my very deep personal history or something that was broken inside.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I didn’t think I had a disease. I said, this thing is just too powerful. It wakes up and it does what it wants to do, and I’m just starting to get a little [00:11:00] control here. I focused on that in my journal. I kept a log of all the things that Pig said and all the things that it was wrong about, and I gradually pulled this apart and it became easier and easier to make decisions. I found it was important to make that I could and would follow as opposed to trying to follow a strict diet. I found that the control was more important than the particular diet that I was following.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And setting low bars worked a lot better than setting high bars, to start with.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I get better. I, I, I’m maintaining about 75, 80 pounds from, from where I was. My blood numbers come down at one point. My triglycerides were over a thousand. I was, I was not healthy, I was not well
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: prevalence, get better over that period of time. In 20 15, I’m kind of headed towards a divorce and I realize I’m gonna have to do something different. So I call I call the CEO of a publishing company that I had a minor stake in from all of my business dealings. And I said, I’m trying to figure out what to do. And he says, well, [00:12:00] we need to write our own book because we need to show other authors that we know what we’re doing with marketing and I need you to be able to go out and talk about it. And I said, well, I have this crazy journal. He says, I love it. Put it into a book. I take a few months, I put it into a book. Two weeks later, he calls me back and he says, Glenn I don’t eat pigs slop. I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. And he proceeds to lose 90 pounds.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: So, so we kind of had proof of concept and I mean, it’s not a double blind, statistically controlled, you know, third party university medical study, but it was my friend and I and we publish it and we, we were in marketing for a lot of years. We kind of knew what we were doing, but I had no idea. I had no idea how it was gonna take off. And out there, I started going on shows like this and talking about it. And before I know it, we have a million readers.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Wow.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I got a gig on Psychology Today. I got a million readers there too. Wrote a bunch more books. Wound up running an agency with 2000 clients over the next eight years or so, and [00:13:00] we were keeping stats on the agency about the efficacy, and we’d find it was really good for people who would engage. Some people, sometimes people buy programs and they don’t engage, but for the people who would engage with their coaches, we had an 84% reduction, 89.4% reduction in overeating in the first month.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Wow.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: it was really good and, and basically I taught people to fix their thinking and take away their excuses really quickly.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: At the six month and one year market wasn’t as good, there it was more like 55, 60%. It was bimodal, meaning that there were two frequent responses. One was Hey Doc, I just wait. You took away all my excuses. I don’t have any good reasons to do this anymore, but oh, well, what the hell? I just really want to screw it.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Just do it.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: They stop using the tools, right.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Then the rest were up like 75, 80% and they were people who had kept using the tools. And I thought, well, why would you stop using the tools? Like, like you’re making [00:14:00] the rules. Nobody’s telling you what to do, nobody’s telling you what you can or can’t eat. It’s a miserable life when you feel like you can’t control your food. Like everything from the most mild case where you’re just eating beyond your own worst judgment, on own best judgment, to feeling like you can’t stop eating all day long. It’s, it’s not a happy life. And this is not an invasive procedure.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: There are no pills or powders or potions you have to buy. There are no surgery procedures you have to go through. There’s no recovery. Like why would people stop doing this? So I really get interested in investigating that over the next year. And what I found was it all clusters around what we, psychologists would call organismic distress, where the brain perceives there to be an emergency. Not enough nutrition, not enough sleep. Too many decisions to make. Willpower is mostly just the ability to make good decisions, and you can only make so many good decisions every day. So when people are overwhelmed in [00:15:00] business or they’ve got five kids, or they just have to figure out who’s taking Jenny to soccer practice, too many decisions, and it wears down their executive function, it wears down their willpower, feeling isolated from your tribe. You don’t have to be a social butterfly, but you do have to feel like you have a tribe.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: So all of these different forms of organismic distress, including not good enough nutrition, which was the key that seemed to be driving the screw, just do it response.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: So eighth book and best book, which includes the science of cravings, extinction and how to overcome the screw it just do it response is called Defeat Your Cravings. And I’ve been been promoting that one for a couple of years ’cause I think that’s where it’s at.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: So I love it. There’s, I am a not food rules person, so when I hear about food rules, I’m like, whoa. I always kind of, and then the main reason why is because I think that tends to feed into the cravings themselves when we make something taboo or we say we cannot eat something. But I think the, the way [00:16:00] that you have distinguished it is that you’re not necessarily
Dr. Supatra Tovar: you would, you are making a rule, but what you’re hoping for is the breadth of time
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: it takes for somebody who may just go immediately into their craving. You’re asking for a pause. And I think that that is a really powerful way to kind of in and, and in essence, it’s kind of urge surfing.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Where you want the thing, but if you just kind of hold out and think about it a little bit more, you may not want it. And the reason why you may not want it is because you’re experiencing this distress, this sudden, onset of, of, whatever stress it is or despair or loneliness or, or whatever you’re feeling, and you realize that, that you’re craving
Dr. Supatra Tovar: is related to that distress. That’s where I really kind of [00:17:00] delve in with people is, what is behind the actual urge. And so my question for you is when you found yourself overweight and not, not happy with yourself and with your body, what do you think were the main drivers of overweight. I, I mean, I would say you, you worked in the food industry.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: They, hire craveability experts. That’s probably what you were, termed at the time. Do you think that your early nutrition was a, a part of the problem?
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: The fact that I didn’t know what a vegetable was until I was 16?
Dr. Supatra Tovar: There you go. So tell me about that. What do you think led to the problem in the first place?
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Sure. I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you two things first about your concern about the rules. One is that the vast majority of our clients are not necessarily making a rule that says have to give up sugar entirely, or they have to give up [00:18:00] pizza entirely, like two outta three people come up with some conditions that they’ll have it twice a week or something like that, and you can change the rules whenever you want to.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: We use the
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: word never so that there’s really an alarm set so you really know you can identify when this thing is so that you can pause, so that you can, so that that’s what that’s about.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I say, it’s kind of like we present it to our pigs as if it were set in stone or our food monsters as if it were set in stone. The same way that I told my niece Sarah, that she couldn’t cross the street without holding my hand ever when she was too, never, ever, not, not when she’s a big girl. I didn’t want her thinking about it. It was too scary. But of course I’m gonna teach her how to do that later on as she evolves and gains experience and wisdom. So what. I wanna answer your question directly, what led to problem in the first place? I mean, I could tell you an emotional story about my mom after I got through that 40,000 person study, which showed that people who [00:19:00] struggled with chocolate like me, ’cause my binges always started with chocolate, that they tended to be lonely or brokenhearted or a little depressed. I called my mom and I said, mom, I know I’m not in a great marriage and I’m a little lonely and broken hearted, it makes sense. But how did this all start? Where did it, where did it come from? And she got this horrible look on her face. This was on Skype. And remember the days when we had Skype
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Oh yeah.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: And, and she gets this horrible look on her face and
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: she goes, oh honey, I’m so sorry. I think I was 41 years old or something at the time, and I said, mom, it was 40 years ago. I love you. I forgive you for whatever it is. I just want to figure it out. And you’re a therapist and you struggle with chocolate also. Let’s see if we can figure this out. So she says, you know what, honey? When you were 1-year-old in 1965, your dad was a captain in the army and I was frightened that he was gonna be taken to Vietnam. We’re trying to get pregnant with your sister. I thought I’m gonna be a, an army widowed with two little [00:20:00] kids. At the same time, your grandfather and my dad had just gotten outta prison and I had no idea where he was.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: He was gone for two years, and I had idolized him and I was horrifically depressed. I felt awfully abandoned, and I was anxious about being abandoned again. I didn’t have the wherewithal to hug you and love you and and feed you the right thing and kiss you when you really needed it. I, I kept a big bottle of chocolate bosco syrup in a refrigerator on the floor. And when you would
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Wow.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: come over
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: to me and I wanted to just stare at the wall, I would say, go get your Bosco honey. And you’d go crawling over to the refrigerator and you’d open up the Bosco and you’d suck on, on the bottle and you’d go into a chocolate sugar coma.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Wow.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: So, but, but now. So it was a good moment.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: It was a really good moment. My mom and I had a little cry and a metaphorical hug ’cause we were at a distance and I hated myself less like, like some of my self hatred dissolved at that point. [00:21:00] I could ask my mother all types of things about that time in her life, which was very meaningful.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: It brought us closer, good conversation to have, but my chocolate eating got worse after that.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: The reason that got worse was ’cause there was this crazy voice in my head that said, I’m, I’m not schizophrenic, but we all have different thoughts and you can partition them if you want to.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Of course.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: and this voice in my head said, you know what, Glenn, you’re right.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: Our mama didn’t love us enough and she left a great big chocolate size hole in your heart. And until you can either fix this marriage or get out and find the love of your life you’re gonna have to go right on eating chocolate yippy, let’s go get some now. So that voice of justification got stronger. It, it had a
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Interesting. Yes.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: reason. And so for me, now, I know that other people work it out by solving the emotional, leading part of the equation. But for me, it turned out to be a lot faster to figure out how to sever the link between the emotions and the overeating, but by being able to wake up [00:22:00] and knowing exactly what role I want the chocolate to play in my life, like I, I knew where the boundaries are. The same way that you, know where a red light is, you know where a stop sign is when you’re driving around and yes, you feel rebellious when you come up against a red light.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I don’t wanna stop at the red lights. I’ve got places to go and people to say, and things to do,
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Hmm.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: I do stop. I also, I’m kind of mindful when I’m driving, I’m not rigidly obeying the rules. I know what the rules are, I know where the boundaries are, and because of that, I know that I’m gonna be safe.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: ’cause there are all these dangerous intersections that wouldn’t work without traffic lights and so therefore I, I can be mindful while I’m driving. So for me it’s not a rules versus mindfulness type of thing. It’s a rules and mindfulness kind of thing. And they really, support each other.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Wow. That’s so powerful and it, it’s heartbreaking to hear, I’m sure from your mom, having that self-awareness it was difficult [00:23:00] to be able to admit that to you, but even though it increased your chocolate consumption more after having that conversation, having that realization, I think is everything.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: That’s what I do a lot with my clients is we really do that deep dive into our past and to see, what are the origins, what were the messages that we got from our childhood? What were the food rules from our childhood because we’re tiny little sponges growing up, and that’s how these things develop.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: And when they persist over time, they become subconscious and unconscious. And what you did was you made the subconscious conscious. It did, take you and, and made you backslide for a time.
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: For For a period. For a period.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: But with awareness, and that’s, that’s at the heart of the work that I do, is that I think [00:24:00] self-awareness is the key to really, truly tuning into your body and listening and understanding what your body is trying to tell you as opposed to what your, your mind is trying to tell you and discerning the difference.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: So I think that that’s really powerful work and we are gonna. Touch on this a lot more in the next section. We’re out of time for this first half of this podcast, but I really wanna get into the inner workings of your book, the takeaways that we can provide our audience actionable things that they can do,
Dr. Glenn Scott Livingston: You got it.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: To tackle.
Dr. Supatra Tovar: Overeating and emotional eating. So you guys come back for the second half of this amazing interview with the overeating specialist and psychologist, Dr. Glenn Livingston. Dr. Glenn, thank you for joining us for this first half.
[00:25:00]
Recent Comments