How To Never Binge Again! Howie Jacobson, Ph.D. and Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. Discuss the Never Binge Again Coaching Process

Transcription

1 How To Never Binge Again! Howie Jacobson, Ph.D. and Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. Discuss the Never Binge Again Coaching Process To See All the Ways We Can Help You Fix Your Food Problem and Master Your Life Please Click Below: You may reach Howie Jacobson at So Glenn, congratulations on the public release of Never Binge Again on Amazon. Thank you. Thanks. It's been kind of exciting. Yeah. You're a testing kind of guy so you've tested the market and asked a lot of questions and interacted with people and you sent me several versions of the book that started out as Screw the Pig and is now Never Binge Again. Women didn't like the Screw the Pig version. Okay, good to know. You've also been coaching people and you coached me several times, some of which we recorded and I'm curious now that you're getting a critical mass of coaching experience around this, what have you learned, what has surprised you about what it takes to coach people through this very, very clear and specific process?

2 That's a fabulous question and I have got a million thoughts that come to mind all at once. Why don't I start with what I learned from coaching you? Because if you recall our coaching session, towards the end -- for most people that don't quite understand the Never Binge Again process so far, it has to do with drawing really clear lines in the sand about what you never do, what you always do, what you do under certain conditions and what you do without restrictions whatsoever, all with regards to your way of eating. It's kind of like if you really sat down and defined a system of governance for yourself, made up your own diet plan and covered every situation, what would that plan be. We usually start with whatever the most troublesome trigger food or behavior is. And I'd like to zero in on one because I find that that helps people to understand the process and learn to listen for what we call the pig which is kind of like your inner self-destructive self, the devil on your shoulder if you will, except it's really an internal entity, it's more like the lizard brain. I'm wondering, why choose the hardest? There's a lot of social science research that suggests, win your easy battles, gain some self-esteem, why not start with the little piglet in the corner that you could deal with the easiest? You can do that and that's perfectly a legitimate way to go forward with that but what tends to happen is when people come to me, they've been really beaten down by a particular food or behavior. They often come to me wanting to revamp their whole food plan in one session and I tell them that's not necessarily a good idea because it's kind of an overwhelming adjustment and I want you to have some success first so that's why we zero in on one problem. But most people come to me when they had more plates of pasta than they care to admit or they ate a whole pizza or

3 they went to town with a whole bag of M&M's, something like that. And it's just been happening repeatedly and they want to get rid of that, or sometimes they're trying to institute a new positive habit like maybe they want to get to the gym five days a week or maybe they want to drink a whole quart of water in the morning or something like that and they're having trouble getting that behavioral routine in swing. It just means the world to them at that particular time and I like to listen very carefully to where people feel most troubled and make the biggest difference in the shortest period of time I can that's extremely empowering. What I typically won't do right away is do a massive revamping of portion control limits across the person's whole diet because trying to do that while you simultaneously learn to hear the pig is difficult. You're kind of going up against legitimate survival drive interests and I want people to first understand what it's like to draw a line on the sand and hear the pig before they attack that and really have some success and some power, so that's why. Got you. What I learned, Howie, actually as a result of the last coaching session that you and I did was that there comes a point, and I think in that coaching session you really wanted to go to bed every night knowing what you were going to eat the next day or at the very least using your fingers to check off an invisible checklist that said that there were at least two very specific things in the house that you would know that you had to plan. I don't remember, maybe you remember more specifically what it was. Let me just give you some feedback on that. So since that call, I have not had a Clif Bar, which was the problem, like those were my go-to faults

4 that I had convinced myself were healthy enough when they weren't. I was eating a whole bunch of them because they were small and who counts? And I have not had one since and they're in the house and I even went to Costco and bought a giant box of 72 granola bars which I keep in the car to give to homeless people. I started eating those so I stopped carrying them. So my pig was keeping homeless people hungry because I was eating their bars and so since our call, those are no longer food for me. That's fabulous. You put that into the pig slop category. Now I don't remember in the call that that was a specific rule that you wanted to adopt, was it? That was the main thing. I felt bad about wanting my family to change their patterns because of my weakness. I'm a strong believer in environment, so if you get it out of your house, you're not going to eat it. And what I was missing and what you really brought home to me during that call was you can go another level, you don't have to be scared of your environment. You don't have to walk around on tiptoes like Cato who's from the Pink Panther movie is going to jump out and attack you, that even if it's there, it doesn't have to have any power over you and that's what your coaching helped me accomplish around the foods we were talking about. Well I'm delighted to hear that. That's absolutely true because you can decide to be the kind of person who doesn't eat X, Y or Z or only eats X, Y or Z in these specific conditions. Once you've really articulated that line in the sand, then the torturous debate is over, then it doesn't matter how stimulated you feel by this particular situation or another particular situation and I have many coaching clients who are mothers with small children at home and they might bake muffins for their kids but they can't

5 eat the muffins themselves. And once they've really thought through and articulated what conditions they really believe are healthy for them to have the muffins in and we iron out any excuses the pig might have to eat them in other conditions, then it's not just having the environment, small children often want to put things in your mouth, say, "Here mommy, take a bite of what I'm having." I remember a session with one woman who said, "Well, I'm not going to tell my daughter that I don't eat muffins because they're pig slop. Am I a bad mother that I'm feeding my daughter pig slop and I'm not going to eat pig slop?" And I explained to her that one man's pig slop is another man's treat. One woman's pig slop is another woman's treat and there are also some things that we do when we're kids that we don't do when we're grown up, right? Kids wear diapers and adults don't. I'm really glad to hear that you were able to draw that line, but that's not what I was going to say that I actually learned from coaching you. What I learned from coaching you was I remember when we got towards the end of the session -- and I recall you trying to draw a different line about a positive behavior having to do with preparing what you were going to eat the next day, or at least having a mental checklist about what you were going to eat the next day. We can go back and listen to that session if we want to tell the listeners what specifically about the thing was. And I remember that what I will frequently do at that juncture, after the person is really clear on the rule that they want to commit to and why they want to commit to it is I'll ask them if they have any doubts whatsoever that they'll be able to do this between now and the last day of their life. "Between now and the day that you die, how confident are you that you'll be able to stick with this particular rule?"

6 Normally they'll say, "Well, 25, 35, 40 percent," and I'll say, "Okay well what is your pig saying? What are the circumstances under which you're going to break this rule?" And we really force the pig to the surface and it's a kind of uncomfortable process to go through because your pig lives inside of you and you haven't really achieved that separation yet. But people typically can't get to a hundred percent even after they have articulated every last reason that their pig can think of for them to break the rule. I remember we talked about, "Well gee, what are you going to do when you're out of town? How are you going to prepare if you're out of town?" And then we decided you were going to write it on your toothbrush, you had some answer for that, right? I forgot exactly what it was but you were convinced that was a good answer after reason after reason and we got you up to about 92 percent and you said that we really moved the dial. And at that point I kind of ended the session with you and I said, "Okay well, we'll have to work on it some more." Subsequent to that point, I've really had an insight which is that acquisition of a hundred percent confidence has to be a leap of faith because there's no way that you can be a hundred percent confident because you really haven't experienced this level of control before and you don't know all of the benefits that are going to accrue from having this level of control and mostly you're just used to hearing your pig squeal about how deprived you're going to feel, how uncomfortable you're going to be, how weak you are that it's not going to be possible to comply with this hundred percent rule when you encounter a situation which makes you too hungry, angry, lonely, tired or bored or something like that. It's impossible to completely get rid of that voice before you've had the experience. And so, jumping to one hundred percent is something that you do with a kind of leap of faith that won't make any logical sense. And

7 you do it because you want to put all possibility of doubt and failure out of your mind so you can 100 percent concentrate on the goal and visualize yourself having achieved it. And by doing that, you make the pig's voice crystal clear, then all doubt, all insecurity, all uncertainty winds up being assigned to the pig's voice and you're much more likely to succeed when that happens. It's kind of an intellectual leap that you make because you realize that at a time when you were of sound mind and body and you took the time to think through all of the pros and cons and whether you really want to implement this rule or not when you really intellectually analyze it using your best thinking, you decided, yes I want to do this. Well, you can't wait at that point to feel like it. You can't wait to feel like it's the right thing to do. You kind of have to do it and say, "I'm a hundred percent confident and I will be a hundred percent confident because I'm choosing to separate myself from that voice of doubt which is the pig and I have to be a hundred percent confident because without that 100 percent confidence, I won't be able to hear what the pig has to say." Does that make sense? Yeah and it feels very true, especially you know, I've been heating a whole food plant-based diet for many years and to me it's very easy it's second nature, but other people look at me and say, "Oh I could never do that, I could never do that, I could never have the willpower." And so they can't imagine what I know to be true. It's just like if you haven't climbed the mountain yet, you can only have faith in what's on the other side. This idea that you can have faith in future confidence, maybe you can talk about like other times you accomplish something you weren't sure you could accomplish to establish the principle that you can do more than you think you can at this moment even if the specifics will elude you.

8 Well and particularly when it comes to transitioning from packaged industrial, supersized, hyper-palatable foods to more of a whole foods plant-based diet, I think Carol Munter has got a very interesting, almost completely opposite approach to what I do. But I think she's the one who said that you don't know that underneath your craving for chocolate is a craving for lettuce. What I mean by that and I think that that's true to a certain extent. I don't think that lettuce can produce nearly the same food high that chocolate can. But I think that what's happened is that the food industry has hijacked the biological craving for the phytonutrients and assortment of enzymes and naturally occurring nutrition which is laden in lettuce and provides us with energy and cleansing and all of the good things that our body needs. I think that what happens is that industry has figured out how to hijack that survival drive and kind of distort and pervert it towards the chocolate and there's no way you can know it. People listening to us now are thinking, "Yeah right, like I'm going to reach for a head for romaine instead of a chocolate bar." But you know what? If you do it, if you say, "I'm not going to have chocolate and you start having romaine lettuce," you're going to be surprised that the same time that you were craving chocolate, you're going to say, "You know, this sounds really weird but I'm starting to crave romaine lettuce," or something, or some other naturally occurring nutritionally fulfilling actual food. And I think that that's a big part of the difficulty people have making the leap is that they just haven't had the experience of getting away from those industrialized foods and those industrialized foods produce such a high that they make you forget your natural biological cravings and you start to believe that you absolutely can't survive without them when the truth is you can't really survive without the other stuff. So you can't really survive without the nutrition on the other side but you try to tell someone

9 that at the moment that they're hooked on chocolate bars and you're not going to get really far. Got you. So when you're coaching someone, what gives you the feeling that this sort of puffed up confidence, this confidence that they may not entirely feel would have to have faith in is going to be good enough? What I found is that before you can do that, you need to really have them articulate their motivation. What I like to ask people is what's the trigger food or behavior that you want to change or regulate or eliminate or something you want to add. Let's stay with the example with someone who wants to manage chocolate. They feel like they're overdoing chocolate in their life. And I say, well you know there are couple of alternatives, some people feel like they are so beaten down by the chocolate that it would just be a tremendous relief to know that they were never going to have one bite ever again and other people feel like it's kind of out of control but there were times in their life when they had a little here and there and it was really a nice thing and maybe it's not the healthiest food in the world but it's not awful for them and they would like to have it at social events or -- you know I have a woman who likes to have one square after dinner every night and they want to just come up with a conditional rule. And the third condition is to just keep doing what you're doing. And so I ask them to imagine those three conditions and not to decide at all, to put off the decision for the moment. Let's talk about the benefits of each of those three conditions, right? So the first benefit would be you give up chocolate altogether, what is it that's going to improve in your life if you give up chocolate altogether? Let's say it's been a year and you haven't had one bite of chocolate, what am I going to see that's different? And the person might say, "Well, you know I'm going to be 30 pounds thinner

10 and my blood sugar will be more even and I will be calmer because I won't be dealing with the stimulants in chocolate as much as I have and probably my skin will be a little bit clearer because it tends to break out when I have chocolate and I'm going to be confident that I'm not going to get diabetes. I had a little bit of a scare with that and my mom had diabetes and my dad had diabetes and my grandmother had it and my grandmother actually got her leg amputated and I don't want to deal with that fear. So I'm going to have a lot more confidence and tranquility in my life knowing that I'm not going to have another bite of chocolate." And then I'll say, "Okay now let's move to the conditional rule. So suppose you were just going to have chocolate on the weekends in social environments and never more than one bar, whatever your rule happens to be." And they would have come up with this rule, I would have interviewed them of what they thought the rule could be. And they'll say, "Well you know I think I would still have most of that level of confidence. I might have some of the fear of diabetes still and high triglycerides and once in a while I'd have a little bit of up and down but since it's just on the weekend it will probably be okay and I don't feel quite as good as I do in the other situation but I feel pretty good." I say, "Well what if you continue doing?" And then they envision themselves a year from now being 20 pounds heavier and having pimples and yes they get to enjoy the high of chocolate but look at all this other stuff that's happening. And when I got them to articulate that, I say, "Okay now, let's give your pig a chance. Let's give your pig a chance to argue for each of these conditions. What does your pig say you're going to deprive yourself of if you never have a bite of chocolate again?" And the pig will say, "Oh my God, first of all you can't do that. It's not possible. You don't know all the situations you're going to be in and what if you need something to give you energy and what if you need something to entertain you when you're

11 bored and what if you need to eat something quick and how are you going to enjoy going to Starbucks without chocolate and what are you going to have at night after dinner?" And it's going to go on and on and on about all these things. And so on and so on, you'll ask for them to describe what the pig would say in each of those situations and of course when you get to the final situation where the pig is trying to argue for why they should just keep doing what they're doing, all the pig can really say is, "Because it's so good. It tastes so good." And it likes the way it feels afterwards. So then at that point, you ask the person to weigh those three situations and ask themselves, now they're kind of in a more fully informed state about what they would be giving up if they chose door number 1, door number 2 or door number 3 and you ask them to choose. And usually you ask them to consider which one they're leaning to. And usually they have a pretty clear choice at that point. And one of the things you point out along the way is that when you're talking about continuing to do what you're doing, the pig says that if you don't do that, you're going to give up all these wonderful tastes and everything like that and you're not going to be able to do what other people do. But then you point out to them, "Well, did the pig tell you that if you choose to keep doing what you're doing you're going to give up all those things in door number 1 and door number 2?" And that usually is very convincing to them and it makes it possible for people to at the very least make an intellectual decision about what would be best. And then they'll say -- so for example, maybe they'll say, "I would really like to never have one bite of chocolate again as long as I live but that's the scariest thought ever. I just can't imagine that I could ever possibly do that," and I say, "Okay. Well, is it really the best of your thinking that we would install a routine that would prevent you from having chocolate ever again?" And

12 they'll say, "Yes, intellectually I believe that. I'm usually kind of hesitant and frightened at this point." I say, "Okay, well let's now assume that we're going to do that." And then I'll ask them a series of questions about their level of confidence, "How confident are you that you'll never going to have one bite of chocolate between now and the day that you die?" And I'll explain to them that at this point we're really starting to force a separation between them and the pig and that's going to be a little uncomfortable. But we want to give the pig a fighting chance. So the pig should come up with all the reasons that they can't be confident that they're going to do that. Then outcome the scenarios, "I'm going to be at a birthday party and birthdays are special and I could just have chocolate one day a year on my birthday." Then have a little conversation with them about that and you say, "Well, do you want to go back to door number 1 and door number 2? Do we want to change your mind?" And they'll almost always say no at that point because you've really intellectually laid out all the options for them. They're really pretty secure about the choice. So it's just a matter of dealing with the pig's energy at that point. You continue to ask them, "What other reasons does the pig have for getting you to break this and how confident are you that you never will again?" They'll usually get to a point that the pig has no more reasons but they're still not a hundred percent confident. And that's the point at which I say, "Well this is where you need to make a leap of faith. This is where your pig is going to keep working to find other reasons and as long as you live, the pig is going to find other reasons for you to break it and that's why we need to make the leap of faith at this point and make it an intellectual choice to be 100 percent confident in our ability to never have even one

13 bite of chocolate for the rest of your life." Are you following me? Am I making sense? My recollection of that part of the conversation, I don't remember --- I guess you've figured out the leap of faith thing later but you said to me something that was very impactful. It would have gotten up to like percent but I wasn't giving you all of it. And I really wanted to because I wanted to please you and I wanted to please you doubly because we were being recorded. But when I was being honest, I wasn't there yet and then at that point you just said, "Well you know what? Now is the time you just have to make a decision." And what I heard was like, "Grow up, dude!" Not in your voice but in mine. Okay you know, we could pussyfoot around this all day, it's like asymptotically approaching infinity, like it turned into some sort of a mind game, like it was never going to get to a hundred percent. It was simply impossible. And at that point you said, "Well look, you're close enough, just decide." Ambivalence is the pig's best friend. The pig's goal is to keep you in that ambivalent state because as long as you're ambivalent, the rule doesn't get laid down and it has hope. And so ambivalence is the pig's best friend. It always wants to keep that little bit of uncertainty there. It doesn't want you to just grow up and make that choice. You're exactly right. It was from that session that I really recognized that I had to encourage people to make that leap of faith and I figured a nicer way of saying it would be to talk about a leap of faith and say, "Just grow up." That's how I figured that out. I had one more question about follow-up coaching. In my experience both as a coach and as a coachee, I can have many different people like

14 running my head. And when I'm talking to my coach, generally, the most strategic, highest thinking, progressive, ambitious person is in my head who makes lists of things that I'm going to do and makes resolutions and makes commitments. And then later on based on different environmental triggers or internal states, like that person is like locked in the bathroom and then the pigs are all frolicking on the boardroom table and making all the decisions. Do you work with people on unifying their will? Do you understand what I'm asking about? Yes I do. Your pig is saying that it's not possible for you to maintain the insights that you've developed during a very introspective, constructively organized session with a thinking partner like a coach because in the moment of impulse you're not going to have access to all of those thoughts and it's all going to be out the window. And the difference in the Never Binge Again philosophy is we put rules in place which are unassailable at the moment of impulse. We set it up so that you're going to recognize when the pig is talking no matter whether you can recall everything that we talked about during the session, no matter whether you're in that contemplative, introspective, constructive state or not, it's just something that recognize you made a rule about and you don't do, or that you do do, whatever the rule happened to be. That said, people do make mistakes, they do sometimes change their mind. Beyond that, to really thoroughly install a custom food plan for each individual tends to take several sessions over the course of several weeks to two or three months because they need to live with the new rules and kind of weigh whether there was anything that they legitimately forgot or sometimes people over restricted themselves and didn't leave themselves with enough nutrition or enough viable outlet for a particular situation and there are actually changes that need to be made to the food plan. That's why it's kind of a paradoxical way of looking at things.

15 The Never Binge Again philosophy means that you set up the mountain with a hundred percent determination and the willingness to purge all notions of failure and doubt out of your head. It doesn't mean that you don't change it later on with a similar amount of forethought and introspection, or that you never ever make mistakes. You purge all the doubt from your head and you pedal towards the top of that hill with every fiber of your being but sometimes people do fall. What we do is get up again and figure what went wrong and maybe the pig snuck in a squeal that we didn't recognize before and maybe we have to alter the rule a little bit. And so what I tell people is they're going to never binge again until they never binge again. You know what I mean? We're going to make this rule, we're going to take this mindset, we're going to aim for the top of the mountain and we're going to never binge again and if you do that and you really get the philosophy, then inevitably, you make it up the mountain sooner or later. That's the philosophy of success, that's how people accomplish great things in this world is they set their sights on them and they get up until they get there. What I avoid doing is creating an ongoing dependency. I typically will not schedule the next session after the end of the first session and I'll tell people to live with it for a little while and call me when you're ready to work on it a little more. And some people call me the next week and some people call me two months later. Most of the time I get a story like you told me which was a story of success or 95 percent success. Sometimes I get a call with someone that fell down and then they felt guilty and they were scared to call but I found that I really need them to take the initiative to make the next call otherwise they're starting to use me as an external superego to have me as their sense of freewill and tell them exactly what's to do and that defeats the whole purpose of the philosophy behind this.

16 And it's a practical matter, two, three months later, five, six sessions later, most people have a plan where they feel like they don't need me. And I like that. I'm really not looking to set up ongoing sessions with anybody because I want to restore a sense of freewill and agency. I want people to walk away with a sense of mastery over their own impulses and in the end to walk away saying, "You know what? I am more than my appetites. I've got a soul, I've got a set of goals, I've got family and friends and aspirations and things that I want to accomplish in this world and I can make a conscious choice like every other human being can to step beyond this and accomplish those things and put those things before all these crazy things that the pig wants me to do." Got you. It's interesting that your coaching methodology goes a little bit against what a lot of coaches are taught is in their self-interest, be proactive, always schedule the next one. I know how to do that kind of coaching too and I have ongoing coaching clients that work on other goals with me. I have business coaching clients that I work with regularly for years and I don't worry about creating dependency with them because their business is getting better. I've done personal coaching for years at a time with people and I think had a tremendous impact on their lives and their families and their goals and aspirations. But specifically for the purpose of controlling yourself, I think that it's dangerous to work in that paradigm. Right. This is a different kind of coaching. It's building a different muscle in people. The pig really wants to create a dependency because what you have to watch out for in any way whatsoever is the pig telling you that you're

17 weak, because the pig is always trying to batter you down and saying, "You don't have to stick to this," and telling you that you can't do this without Glenn is another way that it says that you're weak. I think people call it coaching because it's the easiest way to describe talking to another person and getting some custom advice about your problems but I really think of it more as a type of education than coaching, which is a very, very specific type of education and information that people can use or not use depending upon their motivation. There's certainly no treatment involved. I am not doing this under my professional license. Most people know I'm a licensed psychologist but I'm not treating them for an impulse disorder because treatment involves that I take primary responsibility for curing what's sick inside the patient and that I have to diagnose them and give them a medicine, that they have some kind of a disease in the first place and that's just a wrong model. That's just a wrong model. This is really about helping people understand the various ways in which they have abdicated responsibility and freewill and take it back. In a sense, the model of there's something wrong with them or there is a disease inside them is exactly what the pig wants. Yup. You are sneaky, my friend. Yeah. The pig is a lot sneakier than me. Yeah. You're like Zorro against our pigs. That's me. I'm a pig fighter.

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