Franchise Your Business

How to Stop Overeating as a Business Owner with Dr. Glenn Livingston

• Big Sky Franchise Team | Tom DuFore

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This week on the Franchise Your Business webinar series, we are joined by Glenn Livingston, Ph.D., founder of Defeat Your Cravings, LLC, and former CEO of a multi-million-dollar consulting firm serving Fortune 500 clients. His work has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The LA Times, and on ABC and CBS Radio.

In this session, Dr. Livingston shares insights from decades of research on overeating and binge behavior, including a self-funded study with more than 40,000 participants. He explores why entrepreneurs often struggle with cravings, how weight-loss injections fit into long-term habit change, and practical tools to break craving cycles.

This was a live recording on March 6, 2026 at approximately 1:00 PM Eastern USA.

This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team.
Big Sky Franchise Team is consistently recognized as one of the best franchise consulting firms in the United States, helping entrepreneurs franchise their businesses through a proven 3-Step franchise process rooted in ethical principles, hands-on guidance, and customized deliverables.  If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/. 

The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.  References to external data sources, studies, statistics, or other third-party content are not claimed as our own unless explicitly stated. We do our best to provide proper credit and citation where due. If we unintentionally fail to cite or credit a source, please let us know, and we’ll gladly ...

Welcome And Topic Setup

Tom DuFore

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on another edition of our Franchise Your Business podcast and webinar series. My name is Tom Dufour. I'm the founder and CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And if you're new to us here, these are live sessions we like to take on practical ideas and actual things that you can actualize to take one step little bit more forward in whatever the topic is about. And today's topic, by the way, is how to stop overeating for business owners. And I know that's a topic that maybe is something that folks might might not want to talk about or hear about, but I find it very interesting. And since we work mostly with successful entrepreneurs, I think this is a great topic to bring on. And Dr. Livingston is our guest today. And uh if you missed him, he was actually on our Multiply Your Success podcast maybe a year or so ago. It's been. And uh he is the founder of Defeat Your Cravings and former CEO of a multi-million dollar consulting firm serving Fortune 500

Why Entrepreneurs Overeat

Tom DuFore

clients. His work has been featured in major media outlets, including the New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, and a whole lot of other places. Uh Dr. Livingston has spent decades researching overeating and binge behavior, including a self-funded study with more than 40,000 participants. That is a lot of participation for research, folks. So uh that is the the real deal. So with that, uh Dr. Livingston, thank you so much for being here and being willing to share uh some of this information.

Glenn Livingston

Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully I can be useful and please call me Glenn. Absolutely.

Tom DuFore

Well, Glenn, I I'd love to um just uh talk a little bit about this idea of entrepreneurs, overeating founders. You know, what why is it that maybe these folks start to struggle with this in the first place?

Glenn Livingston

Well, you know, entrepreneurs are subject to a unique set of stressors where we're um much more driven than the general population. I've heard it said that an entrepreneur is someone who'll work 23 hours for himself because he doesn't want to work one hour for anybody else. Um we tend to be much more um hyper-focused so that when we're involved in a project, I don't know about you, but when I needed to get a project out, it was 90 days, leave me alone. That's there's nothing else on my that's all I can concentrate on for 90 days. Um, and unfortunately, that includes things like sleep and um getting good nutrition and having social contact and drinking enough water and um and and we make an extraordinary number of decisions over the course of the day. We shoulder a lot of risk on on our, you know, in our unique burdens, and we make an extraordinary number of decisions. That's relevant because willpower is just the ability to make good decisions, and you can only make so many each day. It's not like a genetic gift that you get. It's more like gas in the tank that you wake up with. And every time you make a decision, not just food decisions, even like who takes Jenny to soccer practice and what clothing you're going to wear today, um, you're wearing down your willpower. Then you add to that that we don't feel like we have the time to really feed ourselves. So we stop for all those bags and boxes and containers, or we're in environments where we're just inundated with bags and boxes and containers. Um, and it's kind of a perfect storm to that's set up to um, you know, turn us into 300-pound people with heart attacks and strokes and all the unfortunately diet preventable, diet reversible types of habits. So that, you know, there are ways to reverse this, there are ways to combat it, but you really you kind of step have to step back and accept that it's a different kind of lifestyle, um, that we're stressing our psyches, we're stressing our bodies to the max in a lot of ways. And we're gonna have to prioritize a little bit differently if you want to stop doing that. And I I can't tell you how many long time ago I used to go around doing focus groups and travel the country and stuff, and I can't tell you how many executives in the back room would say, Glenn, I can't stop overeating and it's killing me. You know? Um, but and and I remember when I first wrote the book, I people would get mad at me. They would say, you know, I'm not fat because I want to be fat. I'm I'm I'm fat because I'm effing hungry. And that's the experience that most people have, they get effing hungry. And it doesn't feel like this moral choice or this, you know, easy road to go this way or that way. It feels like just hand over the cheesecake and nobody gets hurt, you know? Um, and there's a reason for that, and then I'll slow down and let you ask questions and whatnot. But the reason for that is that our reptilian brains 100,000 years ago had to develop ways of requiring scarce resources. Food was not abundant 100,000 years ago, especially as we um, you know, went through the ice ages and we

The Reptile Brain And False Emergencies

Glenn Livingston

had to kind of fight for more scarce resources. And so it developed these routines for ultra-motivating us when we saw a cue that might lead to food and for making us miserable if we didn't follow those cues. And so it's it's it doesn't really feel like a conscious choice. And whenever the brain perceives an emergency, and in today's environment, it's usually a false emergency, then it it pushes the rational brain out of the way. So it doesn't matter how many books you read or what diet you're planning to follow on Monday morning, and it says, just eat, just nothing eat. Um and so that's why. That's why. Uh it's it's a fairly straightforward explanation with a couple of different levers. Um, and it's a little bit of a it's a painful experience when you're in it, but there are solutions to overcome it if you if you want to work on it.

Tom DuFore

So well, well, I think I think it's it's really great. Uh thank you for sharing. And, you know, certainly if it if it's uh someone who tunes in, if it's if it's not us that's tuning in, is there's a good chance someone we know, right, that is uh struggling with this. Um and so uh I I'd love for you to uh talk a little bit about uh you know, when you when when you said that the these executives that you'd be doing these studies, and the executives would literally be saying, I'm struggling with this, you know, this is what's going on, um and which which are are going to have similar, I would imagine, similar uh decision fatigue and stressful environments, similar to entrepreneurs and running a business, very similar in that regard. Absolutely. And and so uh when when you started kind of making this shift and this change to helping people uh through these, through these challenges and through these struggles that they're dealing with, you know, what are what are some of the things that you found that maybe have uh allowed someone to find success with some of the strategies they would even implement? You know, certainly I'd love some of the strategies are great, but you know, what are some of those success indicators you found?

Glenn Livingston

Well, the first guy that I helped with success was me. Um, because I I don't know if you know I used to be 300 pounds, and I I um if it wasn't nailed down or if the Woodbury Country Deli was out of pizza and Pop Tarts, I probably got there before you. Um, I I had a lifetime of struggle until I was about 40. And I I went all the traditional routes. I, you know, I'm a psychologist from a family of 17 psychotherapists. And when something breaks in the house, we all ask it how it feels, and nobody can fix it. So when you have a hammer, everything feels like a nail. And that was my journey. I really I tried to love myself thin. I thought if I I thought if I could fill that hole in my heart, then I wouldn't have to keep trying to fill that hole in my stomach. That's the essence of what I did. Um but I eventually realized because I was consulting four big food companies, that they were engineering these hyperpalatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt. And it was all designed to hit the bliss point in your reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied. Um and what I realized what was happening was that it was seducing the reptilian part of the brain into thinking this is where the good stuff is in these bags and boxes and containers. This is what you need to survive. Because let's face it, um, on the savannah 100,000 years ago, I couldn't go downstairs and get 100,000 calories and come back upstairs in 10 minutes, right? But for $100, I guarantee you, I could walk into the convenience store and buy 100,000 calories and go across the street and do it again. Um so I realized that I was going to have to separate from the reptilian brain. And this is the first indicator of success, people's willingness to recognize that there are these two parts of the brain. There's there's this reptilian brain that's eat, mate, or kill. You know, if it sees something in the environment, it says, Do I eat it? Do I mate with it or do I kill it? And then there's a neocortex

Glenn’s Backstory And Breakthrough

Glenn Livingston

that says, wait a minute, before you eat, mate, or kill that thing, what impact does that have on your long-term goals and the people that you love and what you're trying to accomplish in the world? And I said, I have to know when this thing is waking up, if I'm going to get control over it. Maybe this is not a game of loving my inner child back to health. Maybe this is more of a game of ruthless domination. Maybe I have to tell this thing to shut up and go back in this cage. It's kind of silly. Um, so here's what I did, and then I'll talk about the layers of sophistication that that came across with um with other people. Um, I decided, and I was not going to teach this, and this is rather embarrassing because I'm a sophisticated executive and you know, PhD and everything, and I never thought I'd be on shows like yours talking about this publicly. But I decided this was my inner pig. And I and I said that if I had a rule, for example, I'll only ever have chocolate on Saturdays and no more than four ounces. And it was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was in a coffee shop, and there's a big old chocolate bar on the counter calling to me, and I heard this voice that says, Oh, just start your silly diet again tomorrow. You worked out hard enough, you're not going to gain any weight. A little chocolate bar is not going to hurt. I would say, wait a minute, that's not me. That's my inner pig, and it's squealing for pig slop because chocolate on a Wednesday, according to my definitions, is slop. I don't need pig slop. I don't let fire animals tell me what to do. Like after all the sophisticated interventions that I tried, that that was the one it wasn't a miracle, but what the miracle was that I suddenly had these extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to make different decisions. And I had time to experiment with um what I could do to make different decisions. So for me personally, and it's different for the other people that have helped in many ways, but for me personally, it was all about pausing long enough to hear what the pig was saying. So it'll be just as easy to start tomorrow. And I would say, um, wait a minute, that's not true. That's neurologically false. Because what fires together wires together. That's the principle of neuroplasticity. So if I say it'll be just as easy to start tomorrow, and then I eat the chocolate, I will have reinforced the craving and I'll reinforce the tendency to say start tomorrow. So I'm more likely to say start tomorrow, tomorrow, and I'm going to have a deeper craving tomorrow. If you're in a hole, you better stop digging and always use the present moment to be healthy. And that little structure, the ability to pause, listen to what your, you can call it your food master. You don't have to call it your inner pig. Um, but for me, for eight years it was an inner pig, so it's hard for me to think of it in any other way. Um, the ability to pause and um disempower the logic of what your pig was saying, it reintroduced a feeling of cognitive dissonance because what happens when you say, Oh, I can just start tomorrow, is you're making it really comfortable to break your own rule. And you don't really want to be comfortable breaking your own rule. You want to be like, oh, you know, I promised myself this and I I want to be a man of integrity, I want to walk the walk, I want to, I want to be in control of my impulses, I want to be my pig's master. I don't want to be my pig's B-I-A-T-C-H. Um, you know, I want to be in control. I want to feel like I'm the one that's in control of my impulses. Um that that was enough for me over several years. It took me several years to do this. It doesn't take years anymore. But it was enough for me over several years keeping a journal, me versus my inner pig, to to recover. And I, you know, I lost about, at one point it was down to about 100 pounds. I maintained about an 80-pound weight loss at this point. Um and when I got divorced in 2016, I in 2015, as I was getting divorced, I wrote this into a book. I took the whole journal, put it into a book. Long story short, the book gets crazy popular, like over a million readers. Psychology Today asks me for to write for them. I get a million readers there also. And all of a sudden I have all these people saying, Lynn, I've got a pig inside me too. Help me help me to overcome my inner pig. And I thought, wait, this is what I'm famous for. Um, but you know, you kind of write you you go with what happens as an African words. The riding a bucking Bronco is not does not always take you where you thought it was going to take you. So I opened up a little agency, and over the next eight years, we have about 2,000 clients um all over the world asking for help to implement this method. And we learned a whole bunch of things. We learned, we learned that there aren't that many excuses. I thought 2,000 people, you'd have 2,000 different excuses to overeat. There's more like about four or five dozen of them. People tend to use the same excuses over and over again. And that made it possible for us to learn how to disempower those excuses really quickly. So we kind of came up with a little pamphlet and you know, wrote down our best refugee. I say we because I had uh I had two business partners and I had 10 coaches that were working along with me. And so um we came up with this pamphlet and we got down to the point that, and and I'm gonna pause soon. I just want to finish the story. Uh, we got down to the point where within a month, if people would work with us, some people, some people buy programs and then they disappear. Um, but the people who would work with us within a month, they would be down 84% in terms of their um binge eating episodes or reading episodes. And I thought, great, you know, that's about as good as I think we're going to do in the first month. But then when I followed up in month six or month 12, I would find that there were a whole bunch of people that dropped off and they just stopped doing it. Um, the people who kept doing it were down to around 80%, which was acceptable. But the people that stopped doing it, you know, they were basically back to where they were, if not worse. And I say, well, why in the world would people stop? Like, I don't tell anybody what to eat. I help people make their own rules. You know, they eat what they want to eat. I don't take any food away from people in any way, shape, or form. I give them back a sense of control and identity. What why in the world would you want to stop doing that? And so I did this survey, and they say, you know, I just get to the point where I figured, oh well, what the hell? I don't have any excuses. You took them all away, but I just really want to. So screw it, just do it. Um, we call it the screw it, just do it response. And I said, what is causing that? Like what and then I remembered that I had those experiences sometimes also along my way. I just kind of thought through them. And inevitably, what was causing that were the list of things that I told you about before that most entrepreneurs feel.

Naming The Inner Pig And Rules

Glenn Livingston

The um lack of regular nutrition, regular sleep, the lack of enough social contact, making too many decisions, not having enough time away from the rat race to kind of think things through. And um we call it all under the rubric of organismic distress. It's a it's a psychological term that really means stress, where you're really stressed out and your brain thinks there's an emergency and it has to accumulate resources quickly to deal with the emergency. And that that's where this was all coming from. And so we started to implement things that would interfere with that. We had little nutrition checklists, we had um, you know, we told people to take two five-minute breaks every day, like put down your cell phone, walk away from the computer, nobody can talk to you. Go hide in the bathroom if you have to go hide in the bathroom, but take two five-minute breaks a day. And people would say, you know, it's kind of miraculous, just that extra five-minute break, and I feel like a new person again. Preferably it will be longer, preferably there will be more of them. But two, five minutes of breaks was enough to make a difference. Um, you know, we discovered that if people reviewed their social networks, they didn't necessarily have to be partying all the time, but they needed to feel like they weren't isolated, like they could reach their social network if they needed to. It was the perception that you were isolated from the tribe that was causing the false experience of an emergency. Um we we learned about certain type of breathing called parasympathetic breathing, where you breathe in for a count of seven, you breathe out for a count of 11. That signals the brain that there's no hungry tiger chasing you, and it's okay to think and you know come back into your rational brain. And we just we focus a lot on those on those methods to calm people down and help them to um help them to stick to their plans. And that's what I've done for the last 10 years, is I've I've um I read a whole bunch of books about it. The the best one is the last one, uh Defeat Your Cravings. And um, that's what I did. Yeah.

Tom DuFore

Yeah, fantastic. Well, uh, and and I'd love for you to share again, Defeat Your Cravings, you said was the book. Uh so it, you know, someone who you just shared just some great information. So someone might say, Oh my goodness, uh Glenn, I'd love to, you know, read one of your books or learn more. You know, what where can they go? What should they do?

Glenn Livingston

Oh, I didn't mean to be so promotional so early in the interview, but but um if you go to defeatyourcravings.com and click on the big blue button, you'll get a copy of the book in uh the button says free book. And ironically, there's a free book behind that, so you can get it in Kindle, Nook, or PDF for free. The traditional formats have more traditional charges. Um, and you not only get the book, but you get a set of recorded coaching sessions so you can see how this works in practice, and you get um a food plan starter template so you can adjust it to the way that you want to eat and a whole bunch of other things to recover from mistakes and things like that. So that's it to futurecravings.com. But I I recommend you start by reading the book.

Tom DuFore

Yeah. Okay. Very, very, very good. Thank you so much. And I don't think it's promotional at all. I mean, I think this is a fascinating topic and one. And I love that you are out willing to have these conversations and just talk about this because you have a unique found uh a unique, in my opinion, a very unique perspective, having previously worked for some of these uh organizations that were producing the foods and these items that we're eating, uh, and recognizing, oh my word, you you saw firsthand what was going on there, and then kind of like a pendulum swung all the way to the other side to start helping folks uh uh push through this. So I think it's just a really unique perspective and vantage point, and you've personally gone through it yourself. Um and you're a living testimony to to your own work.

Glenn Livingston

So you you ask me, Tom, what distinguishes people that were successful versus those that weren't? Yes. Um there's one thing that's a really big deal. Most people have this ideal diet in mind. You know, like uh for me, it was the raw vegan diet. I was gonna eat no meat or cooked products whatsoever. I was only going to have, you know, fruit, more fruit, and leafy green vegetables. And that that was gonna be my life. Um, for other people, it's the carnivore diet. For other people, it's um, you know, 700 calories a day to get down to their goal weight pretty quickly. And what happens is when you go on some of those extreme diets, even if it is the best way to eat, like I still intellectually believe that probably not having cooked products and you know, eating mostly fruits and vegetables is probably the healthiest way to eat. But it's very difficult to sustain, particularly in our society, particularly by yourself. What I find is people do best when they start with one simple rule. So rather than say, you know, I'm gonna be horrible and then I'm gonna be really good, and then I'm gonna be horrible, and then I'm gonna be really good. You know, you remember the um the nursery rhyme, when she

Willpower, Neuroplasticity, And Identity

Glenn Livingston

was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid. That's how most people eat. The problem with that is you're signaling your brain that you live in a feast and famine environment. And our brains are set up, if food is scarce, to hoard it when it becomes available. So that urge you feel to dislodge your jaw and empty the entire contents of the deli tray into it. That's because your brain felt like you were trying too hard to lose weight before. Um, and so I tell people the fast. This way to lose weight is slowly. Let's start with one simple rule. Like I remember this truck driver who said, um, I'll tell you what, I have to eat at fast food establishments three times a day. I can't stop doing that. But I'll tell you what, I won't go back for seconds. And that that was something that was doable for him. And what happens when you do that? You see yourself clearing this hurdle day after day, day after day, day after day. Not just the first couple of days when you have your mojo, but two weeks from now, when you wake up without your mojo, you say, Oh, I can still do it. You trigger something we call the identity function in your brain. You start to say, I'm not just someone who's white knuckling this. I'm actually a person who doesn't go back for seconds. That's my identity. I'm someone who doesn't go back for seconds. That gives you a lot of juice and confidence to go forward. And so I find that people are much more successful when they start with one simple rule. And it doesn't have to be giving up something. It could be that I always put my fork down between bites or I take three deep breaths before every meal. It doesn't have to be giving up something, but it has to be something you do without fail, or that you could and would do without fail, that wouldn't be too burdensome. It doesn't feel like a major, you know, major reworking of your whole eating and exercise routine. It's just one simple thing. Do that for a couple of weeks. Define that rule. As soon as you do, you're going to hear this voice inside of you that says, This is stupid. Um, that guy Glenn is an idiot. He's got a pig inside of him anyway. Why am I listening to him? Um, you're going to hear that voice, and that's what we want. That's the voice of your reptilian brain. That's the rationalization that you want to say, okay, wait a minute. I know now that I'm awake, I know there's something wrong with what this voice is saying. I might not know what it is. I know it feels like every bone in my body should listen to it, but what if I didn't? And then you take one of those 7-Eleven breaths, breathe in for a kind of seven, breathe out for a kind of eleven, and say, Why is my pig wrong? What's wrong with what it's saying? And it's usually winning with a half truth and a bigger lie. I gave you the example of starting in tomorrow. Another example might be, oh, your parents were fat, so you're doomed. And you might as well just eat whatever you want to. And so you could take a breath and you could say, well, okay, what's the truth there? The truth is that obesity is genetic. There is a there is a percent of the variance that's accounted for by by genetics. It's a little less than half. Diet and lifestyle is still more important. So I have a the truth is I have a bigger mountain to climb than most people because my parents were fat, and I have that. Not everybody does. I do. But it's a very climbable mountain. And it's certainly not true that binging as much as possible and getting as fat as I can is a good idea because my parents were fat, right? So let's look at reality, let's look at the mountain I have to climb, but you know, let's let's get to climbing it anyway. Um so so you do that kind of thing, and then you um and there's some other things you can study to understand the way that binges are extinguished over time, because it it doesn't go straight down like this. Sorry about that. It doesn't it doesn't go straight down, it goes in more of a honeymoon curve and then a really big spike and then it goes down than a couple little spikes. Um so you can study how that happens so that you're not surprised and you you don't think when you get this extinction burst, that's what they call it. Um, and there are there are physiological reasons for that. You don't think that this is gonna last forever. Because what happens is most people get to you know somewhere in the five to 10 day range, and then they think, oh, I can't do this. This is horrible. This is torture, this is gonna last forever, but it won't. You just have to power through, and then it starts to come down. And then at the end, your brain will label that association, that pathway as dormant. It'll say, Well, it doesn't seem to work if I get Glenol excited when he passes the Dunkin' Donuts sign anymore. So I don't want to waste his energy. So I'm gonna label this as dormant. Maybe in the future it'll work, maybe he'll decide to go back and reward me when I throw up all this energy then. But in the meantime, I can't waste the survival energy. I have to find calories elsewhere. But that that takes somewhere between 30 and 45 days to get to that point. Um so that's that's how you do it.

Tom DuFore

Yeah. Oh, thank you. And uh, you know, one one thing you you mentioned about this self-funded study with these more than 40,000 participants. And I don't know if some of the information you've shared was has come from that study, but uh uh I uh I'd love for you just to share maybe some of the things you've learned or taken away that that you maybe haven't covered because I I think that's significant.

Glenn Livingston

First of all, that study was done in the days when internet clicks were cheap. I was getting visitors for a penny or two over to my website. That's how I was able to get 40,000 people without going

From Book To Coaching Results

Glenn Livingston

broke. Um, but this was important to me. And I, you know, I did spend well, maybe $10,000 over the years on on traffic. Maybe maybe more, I forget. But but um that study led me to the wrong conclusion. And it was the last thing that led me to the wrong conclusion. At that point, I thought that there were specific emotions behind every binge impulse. And what I found in the study, it validated that in some ways, although it was a small validation. I found that people who craved chocolate, they tended to be lonely or depressed or brokenhearted. And people who crave salty, crunchy things, like salty, crunchy carbs, chips, and things like that, they tended to be stressed at work. And people who craved soft, chewy things like pizza or pasta or bagels, they tended to be stressed at home. And so I thought, okay, well, now I have the key. Now I just have to figure out how do you solve loneliness or being brokenhearted, as if that's easy. Um, and how do you solve um, you know, how do you solve stress at work, how do you solve stress at home? And there were a number of things I was ignoring in that simplistic formulation. Um, but this actually led me to the idea of the pig inside of me because I called my mom. My mom was a chocolate binger, also, and I said, Mom, you know I struggle with chocolate. You know I'm overweight and I'm really trying to figure this out. And, you know, I love you, and whatever happened, it happened 40 years ago. This was a long time ago now. I'm 61 now. I said, Mom, why do you think I go to chocolate when I feel lonely or brokenhearted or depressed? You know, I know I'm not in a great marriage and I have these feelings, but why do I rent the chocolate and why do you rent the chocolate at those times? And she got this horrible look on her face. Just this like horrible, ashamed look on her face. And she says, Honey, I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. And I said, Mom, it's, you know, this was 40 years ago. I don't care. I love you, I forgive you, I just want to figure it out. And she said, Well, when you were a boy, maybe one year old, um, your dad, my husband, was a captain in the army, and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam in 1965. And I was terrified I was going to be, you know, a widow with two kids. I was terrified that's what was going to happen. You know, we were trying to have your sister, and um, I was just terrified. At the same time, your grandfather and my dad had just gotten out of prison, and I didn't know he was guilty, but he was. And he had disappeared for a couple of years, and I was horribly depressed. So half the time when you came running up to me for love or nurturance or cuddles or play, I didn't have it in me to give it to you. I was sitting and staring at the wall. And so what I did is I kept a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup in a refrigerator on the floor. And I'd say, go get your Bosco, right? And so, man, if this was a movie, there it is. That's the movie movement. This this was this is the cause. This is why I'm messed up with chocolate. Um, and you would think if this were a movie, that mom and I would have a big cry and a big hug and I would never have a problem again, right? But I actually, my problem got worse. The reason my problem got worse was because there was this little voice in my head that said, you know what, Glenn? You're right. Our mama didn't love us enough. And she left a great big chocolate-sized hole in our heart. And until you can find the love of your life or get out of the marriage or fix the marriage, you're gonna have to go right on eating chocolate. Yippee, let's go get some more. And it like took advantage of it. And I said, There's something wrong here. This doesn't make sense. Um, and at that point, I started formulating the idea that emotional eating wasn't what people thought it was. People think like emotions is this fire, and you have this fire and it gets out and it burns down the house. And so the only way to fix it is to put out the fire. But we light fires in houses all the time. We just have really good fireplaces. And it might be a lot easier to build a really good fireplace than to put out the fire. So at that point, I stopped looking for ways to solve my loneliness or depression. I mean, I didn't stop looking. I worked on that

Organismic Distress And Quick Fixes

Glenn Livingston

my whole life. But um, but I stopped expecting that that was the solution, or stopped telling myself that I was going to have to overeat until I could fix that. And instead, I worked on the fireplace. And the fireplace was all of these rational refutations that you know prevented the fire from getting out. I then also learned that there's actually a two-rate, a two-way relationship between emotions and overeating. Um, so people think that let's let's work with anxiety, because that's probably the most frequent one people tell me about. People tell me they can't sleep without eating a whole big plate of carbs because they feel too anxious. And I say, well, anxiety is a physiological experience with a cognitive label on it. Um, your heart rate goes up, you start respiring a little more, your galvanic skin response goes up, your blood pressure goes up a little bit. We can measure those things. There are studies in animals where we've rewarded them for feeling what we think is anxious when their heart rate goes up, when their blood pressure goes up, and we give them a sugar reward when that happens. Don't you know that when you do that, those animals produce higher blood pressure, more perspiration? And so it actually goes both ways. You are operantly conditioning, you can look that up, operant conditioning, you're operatingly conditioning the anxiety with the sugar. And what actually happens, it's the same thing with smoking. If you if you stop smoking, smoking actually makes you more nervous and stressed out overall. Um, but then when you have the cigarette, it comes down to normal. It's kind of the same thing with emotional eating. Like that you're you're teaching yourself the emotional leading is making you more anxious and nervous overall. And then for the moment that you have it, it comes down to normal because um you're overloading the digestive system. There's not enough energy for the nervous system to conduct the emotions. So this is a two-way thing here. And then I learned there was a way to reframe emotional leading. Most people say, well, I'm eating for comfort. You know, it's like the golden girls, let's go get the cheesecake. Um, you know, one of us got dumped or whatever, I'll get the cheesecake. And ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha. Well, if you think you're a comfort eater, you're giving your pig an excuse to, you know, generate more cravings and make you eat more. Um, if you tell yourself instead, no, I'm trying to get high with food. That's what I'm doing. Because these things that I'm eating, cheesecake, chocolate bars, you know, Doritos, Pop-Tars, we didn't have those on the savannah. Those are unnaturally concentrated forms of calories and taste stimulation. Um, you're you're actually getting high with food. It's perfectly legal. You're going to find a lot of support for it in our society. We live in a world where everybody tacitly supports each other to slowly kill themselves with food. You know, everything in moderation, ho, ho, ha ha, hee, hee, let's do it. While we all sit between four wheel walls and stare at our computer screens and hope electrons flow into our bank account, um, especially entrepreneurs, right? So, how did I get onto all this? So, so you were asking about that study. That study was the last vestige of my trying to prove that you had to solve emotional problems in order to stop overeating. That's when I said, okay, this is just wrong. Um, I need to work at it from another angle. That's that's how that study helped me.

Tom DuFore

Well, I I appreciate you share that. That that's really great insight. And uh, you know, as it being a good scientist, it sounds like, with we, you know, you the the data showed you something and you learned and uh and and you then took that new form knowledge and moved to the next thing, right? It it just led you one step closer to where you were looking to go. So I I think I think that's wonderful. Um well uh Glenn, this has been phenomenal uh with all of the information you've shared here. Um, you know, I I guess in terms of uh you know a first step. I know you talked about the book. You know, what's a first step? Someone that tune to tunes into this that that they might be able to take to kind of start heading down this direction to to um uh uh take to learn from what you've been sharing here.

Glenn Livingston

Take a deep breath. Ask yourself if I could only do one thing, if I can only make one change, and it's gotta be an easy change, but it would make a big difference. It it would be the difference between

Where To Start And Free Resources

Glenn Livingston

the ship pointing in the wrong direction and the ship pointing in the right direction, even though it's not going very fast in the right direction. How would you implement that one thing? How would you set up a rule to implement that? Um, you know, like like I I um I don't eat after eight o'clock, or I always start my day with two big green smoothies or 16 ounces of green smoothies, or you know, I put my phone in another room before I go to bed at night. Some one discipline, freedom is built upon discipline. It's not the way that people think, it doesn't oppose it, it's actually built upon it. If there was one discipline that you could adopt, what would it be? I can't tell you what that is, but you know what that is if you take a breath. I s I swear to you, you know what that is. Once you know that what that is, and and make it easy, make it something you feel like is easy, then start listening for your inner food monster or your inner pig or whatever you want to call it. Just don't make it a cute pet or your inner wounded child. This is this is something you don't want to be in charge. Start listening for your inner food monster to speak up and try to convince you to break the rule. Because that's that's what this state of addiction is. It's feeling both ways about something, and this really just bifurcates the brain and makes it possible to see that. Write down what it says. Write it out in full, write down exactly what it wants you to do. Your parents were obese, so you're doomed. Just go ahead and eat the whole cheesecake now. You know, or you can start again tomorrow, you can make up for it next week, whatever it is. Take another breath, talking about these 7-Eleven breaths, and ask yourself, why is that wrong? Write that down. Do this all in writing. There are limitations of short-term memory, which will prevent you from getting at the whole truth. So do it in writing. And then the last step is to ask yourself, well, what's going to make me a happier or better person if I stick to my plan? If I don't break the rule. Um, and this takes a little time to figure out. But like for me, for example, if I only had chocolate once a week, I was going to be much less concerned about cardiovascular events. Um, I was going to, I really like to work out and I wasn't going to have to drag 80 pounds around with me every day when I wanted to work out. Uh I like uh I like climbing mountains. I could get up at the top about an hour or two faster if I if I was doing this. Um I wanted to be around for my niece and my nephew. Um I, you know, I was married at the time. I wanted to be a good husband. So, you know, make a list of reasons, your your big why, why you want to stick to this. And then, you know, keep that within arm's reach, keep it on your smartphone or in a little piece of paper in your coat jacket or something, and read that whenever your pig speaks up after you've gone for the refutation. That's the core of the method for overcoming overeating that I found. Um and you know, are you ready to go further? Then come join us. And there's um an awful

One Simple Rule Beats Extreme Diets

Glenn Livingston

lot of stuff for free on the site. Um don't read the old books first. The defeat your I've got eight books on the market. Defeat your cravings is the book that was most recently written, incorporates the science of addiction formation and addictions extinction, and has the benefit of my having worked with 2,000 people. The first book is the most popular book that was read by millions of people, but that book is just basically me in an angry diet trout against my inner pig. And it's very popular because it's, you know, it's kind of cool and people can relate to it, but it doesn't tell you what everything you really need to know to overcome this. So by all means, go back and read that one after if you want to. But uh go to go to Defeat Your Cravings first.

Tom DuFore

Perfect. Well, we'll make sure we include that in uh in the notes when this gets published. I'm so grateful for you uh to be here again and sharing this information, Glenn. And uh for those of you that are tuning in, if you have not subscribed to our podcast at the Franchise Your Business Podcast or the Multiply Your Success podcast, uh please do so in your favorite podcast uh uh uh station. And then uh, of course, you can catch all this on our YouTube channel, which is Big Sky Franchise Team on YouTube. So grateful for having everyone here. Enjoy your weekend. Hopefully, the weather is starting to break wherever you're located across the country, starting to see some glimmers of spring in the air. And uh really appreciate you all being here. Have a great rest of your day.

Head Shot

Tom DuFore

Host