Brian Baumal: Why Giving Up Sugar Is NOT Disordered Eating

Is eliminating sugar a symptom of an eating disorder, or is it the key to ultimate food freedom?

In this episode of the Kick Sugar Coach podcast, Florence sits down with Toronto-based psychotherapist Brian Maummel to untangle the complex intersection of food addiction, binge eating, and weight management. Drawing from his own lived experience with exercise bulimia and binge eating, as well as his deep clinical expertise, Brian breaks down why the popular "all foods fit" model simply doesn't work for everyone—and why choosing an abstinence model might be the most self-loving decision you can make.

Tune in to discover:

• The "All Foods Fit" Trap: Why traditional binge-eating recovery advice often fails people on the food addiction spectrum.
• The Trigger Food Test: A practical framework (3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months) to identify the foods causing your cravings and quiet your mental "food noise."
• Healing the Root: Why addressing low self-esteem and body shame must happen if you want to find lasting peace with food.
• Brian’s 1-Year Milestone: How going completely sugar-free erased Brian's chronic back pain and transformed his mental clarity.

If you are tired of the restrict-and-binge cycle and want to learn how to nurture a positive, sustainable relationship with food and your body, this episode is for you.

Transcript

Why This Topic Is So Nuanced

FLORENCE 0:02

Hello and welcome everybody to an interview today with Brian Maummel. And he's a registered psychotherapist located in Toronto, Canada. And he's one of the very few psychotherapists in the country that are working at the intersection of weight management, eating disorders, and food addiction. And he really understands these three unique fields and how to work with them. He has lived experience with weight management, exercise bulimia, and binge eating disorder. Rowan had those issues himself. And he now leads a sugar-free life. He's actually been sugar-free for one year now. And he brings both his own personal experience and his professional, you know, training and research and clinical experience to his work with patients. He's known for his thorough assessments that helps them figure out, okay, how do I meet this client where they're at? How do I, how do I create a treatment that's, you know, specific to them? Through his unique perspectives, he's seen that harm can come from restriction and dieting and eliminating whole food groups, that absolutely it can trigger disordered eating. Absolutely it does. But he's also seen, he's also seen that extraordinary success with clients who have removed trigger foods such as sugar from their meal plans, from their lives, from their diets, and have found long-term food recovery. So they're both true and there's nuance here and there's complexities. And Brian was saying, and we're really unpacking this. And I'm like, Brian, we really need to have you on the summit. Because it's hard to coach and do, in your case, I don't do therapy in a space when there's so much nuance. It's by no means one size fits all. So today, Brian is here to talk about why giving up sugar, you know, it's not an eating disorder. It's not disordered eating in and of itself, although dieting and restriction can lead to disordered eating. But he wants us to learn how to nurture a positive, loving, long-term, sustainable relationship with our food, our bodies, and our weight. Welcome, Brian.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Thank you. What a what a wonderful um introduction. I think you've hit the nail on the head with the intersectionality I have in my practice, the lived experience that I have uh personally, and the very thorough assessments that I do, because we can talk about this, and maybe your audience is familiar with it. Um, you don't want to deploy the wrong method of um of eating and recovery with the wrong uh patient or client. If um there are some uh patients that will do better uh in um a moderation model. Generally speaking, those are people who have eating disorders or disordered eating, and then there are people who will do better on an abstinence model, and those are generally people who um have food addiction or or sugar addiction. And we're gonna talk about the nuances of all of that because it's not just as simple as saying food addict eliminate, binge eater, moderate, and there's a lot of ongoing care that has to go into um these treatments to make sure that people not just start off on the right foot, but to make sure that they continue uh continue success.

FLORENCE 3:22

Yeah, because there's so many of us with uh who identify as being on the sugar addiction and ultra-processed food addiction spectrum, they're like, absolutely. But I also have a disordered eating uh situation, bulimia, maybe binge eating or over compulsive overeating, you know, or orthorexia, like the whole shebang, right? So what happens when you've got a patient who clearly falls into both camps?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Well, I think I'm very different than other people, maybe, especially if they don't have a food addiction lens. So I'm going to, in my mind, think of a patient I had a little under a year ago that straddled both of these um areas and used that as a frame of reference. So this patient had uh I don't want to say bulimia, this patient purged. Let's be very clear, this patient purge. This patient would eat very little during the day. So you would think purging not eating a lot, it's gotta be some sort of disordered eating, it's gotta be bulimia, it's gotta be um a binge restrict anorexia or um anorexia with a subtype of uh binge uh binge purge. But when you talk to her, she would say things like, Brian, I have no body image issues. Believe me, I have no body image issues. I don't care about the way I look. I'll go out, I will go on a beach anywhere. I will wear whatever I whatever I want. And for people in your audience that don't know, body image issues and eating disorders go hand in hand. Um I mean, basically, like any anything that gets paired together in in this life, the sun rising, the sun falling, um body image issues and eating disorders go hand in hand. So when she said my body, I you know, I'm happy with it wherever it is, I'm like, hmm, okay, tell me, tell me more. And then there were things that said, like, Brian, the reason I don't eat uh so much or why I delayed my eating is because I know that once I start eating, I can't stop throughout the day. Because I get so full, I'm so uncomfortable. I I have no off switch. I like I just sit there and I'm so bloated, I'm so tired, I can't move, I have no choice but to get rid of the food that's there so I can just be comfortable. So the behaviors of purging and of restriction fit disordered eater. But when you look at the thoughts around it, and and and uh you look at the thoughts around around it, the body image is okay, the thought of I I uh know that once I start eating I won't be able to stop, and the thought of I need to feel comfortable, those aren't eating disordered thoughts at all. So she has a food addiction and is just doing her best to manage it. And she has been told repeatedly, you've got bulimia, you've got anorexia, you've got an eye disorder. And I said, No, no, no, no, this is a food addiction. So right there we see the intersectionality and the complexity of what do you deal with first in in all of us? So there's just a quick example of how things can really start overlapping. And if you don't have a food addiction lens, or if you know nothing about it, you'll go, oh, there's purging, all right, that's bulimia. They're restricting, that's anorexia with with the with a binge purge kind of behavior. But if you have a food addiction lens, you can add that in, you know, in into your diagnostic toolkit to get a more fulsome assessment.

FLORENCE 8:02

And how did you treat her? And what was the outcome?

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Um, the outcome was I said, um, we are going to go on an abstinence model, and we are go and we are going to get you into a support group. She wanted a support group for addiction. Um, she said, I don't think one-on-one therapy is what I need to manage the addiction. I want a group of people, I want to have more regular meetings, I want to talk with others who had been through this. So I referred her to a food addiction support group that is located in uh in Ontario. But very, but she was very grateful for someone who recognized that it was not an eating disorder. That was a big thing. It's like, thank you, thank you for understanding that this is not an eating disorder because I didn't think it was.

FLORENCE 8:55

Did she follow up with you? Do you know how she did?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Um, no, I haven't heard, I haven't heard back after about uh eight to ten sessions that I that I saw with her, but I do have now many other people that I'm working with directly that have um an overlap of food addiction and eating disorder uh symptoms. So I've got another individual who I am working with who's got a number of psychiatric conditions, and I have to speak to a psychiatrist on occasion, and um I say to psychiatrist, I want us to conceptualize two things. Number one, how this person puts the food in his mouth, like why is the food going in, versus once it's in, how does he deal with it uh once it's there? And he says, Okay, Brian, tell me. So I think the I think what is happening is the food going into his mouth is caused by a food addiction, and then he deals with it uh through extreme dieting and very restrictive behaviors, and he gets very jealous of other people who have um thinner bodies, uh he limits calories quite a lot, um, he has a fear of carbs, but not necessarily um enough to completely abstain from all carbs. So with him, it's a matter of making sure that he understands he's got to get rid of all carbs, number one. That's the first thing to do, and then we deal with the disordered eating thoughts afterwards. So, my general protocol is if both are working, if both disordered eating and food addiction are there, address the food addiction first. Because I I think trying to go the other way doesn't make uh doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense.

Finding Trigger Foods And Food Noise

FLORENCE 11:20

Are you implying that anyone who might fall on the food addiction spectrum has to eliminate all carbohydrates?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

I am not. Uh here's um here's what I say to my food addict patients, and this has maybe been in the last six months that I've started to say this, and I've gotten a lot of success with it. I first of all tell them that they are a food addict. I say, after I say, based on the assessment that we have done, I believe you have an addictive relationship with food. Um, I'm very careful in how I say that. I don't want to say, I mean, I I'm not averse to using the term food addiction at all. But I believe just saying an addictive relationship versus a disordered relationship allows for nuance in all of that. It's an addictive relationship, it's a disordered relationship. I'm saying we're gonna follow some of those protocols for disordered eating, and we're gonna follow some of those protocols for food addiction, but understand it's a relationship, not a diagnosis that I'm giving. But anyhow, your your question um was do I believe that people uh who are food addicts or have an addictive relationship with food always have to give up sugar all the time? And what I say or carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, right. What I say is, okay, so you have an addictive relationship with food, and the basic treatment that we are going to do is we are going to sanely, slowly, carefully, strategically, cleverly determine what your trigger foods are. And by trigger foods, I mean two things. We are going to see and determine the foods that cause you an acute overeating episode. So, you know, the the foods that once you start them, you can't stop them until they're all gone. We're gonna figure out those foods. But the second thing we're gonna do is we are going to monitor your food noise or your food cravings, because those have to come down over time. If they don't come down over time, all you're doing is white-knuckling the rest of your life. So the second trigger that we look for is a reduction in your food noise. And here's how I do that in particular. I say we're gonna start with the usual suspects of um food triggers, which would basically be um all flour-related uh products, pastas, breads, crackers, uh buns, everything like that. Um, all processed or all sugar-related uh products, chocolate, pastries, ice cream. We're just gonna start there and we're going to eliminate them. I say, do you is there anything you want to tell me that you know about your relationship with these foods? Have you noticed anything? Is there anything um where you is there any kind of food that you can within what I've told you that you can eat? And it's not gonna trigger you. Tell me about um about that. And and so there are people who say, you know what, Brian, there's some fruit I can eat, and then there's other fruit that I can't. And then you'll have other people who say, I can't go near any fruit. I know if I have any kind of fruit, I'm I'm I'm done for. So I ask them for their triggers, and uh I say, great, we're going to incorporate this along with the flour and the sugar, and we're going to monitor. And we're gonna monitor for uh three days, three weeks, and three months. I'm stealing this from a psychiatrist, I think it was Georgia Eve, who works, she works in food addiction. She says the same thing. Now that now, or we're gonna see, we're gonna try and figure out your trigger foods over three days, and we're gonna see if your food noise and cravings go down. If they don't go down after three days, we're gonna see if we can rework this again. And once we do that and figure out your trigger foods, we're gonna try for three weeks and see if your cravings go down. And if not, we're gonna try it again and give it a three-month um uh a three-month time period. And if it doesn't work after three months, or if we're not seeing the progress that you want, we may drop the food addiction model, or we may have to consider a more disordered uh framework. So that's how I tend to do it. If people say to me, Brian, I could eat a chocolate bar and I'm not addicted, or it doesn't cause me anything. I said, Great, please eat a chocolate bar. I have other people, if they put a little bit of ketchup or honey mustard sauce, it's game over for them.

FLORENCE 16:35

So for people who fall on the addiction spectrum, typically being told, hey, why don't you just eliminate your trigger foods? Why don't we do it for three days, three weeks, and three months and see who you do? And we should notice a reduction in food noise and static and urges and cravings and food obsession, and you should find more peace and you should feel more sane and stable with your food. All good. We know that would happen. It would happen to almost any human being on the planet. But addiction's tricky. It's not just the information that these foods are triggering and addictive. You know, it's really hard. There's a lot of slip, there's a lot of relapse in this space.

Slip Ups Virtual Sponsorship And Learning

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

FLORENCE 17:15

So, how do you navigate that when someone's coming back to you week over week to say, well, I was doing mostly good, but I didn't make it my three weeks because on day seven I got into whatever.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

So one thing that I do is I will say, Do you want me to be your virtual sponsor? And what I mean by that is um I will just simply text, uh text them if they want once or twice a day, hey, how's it going? Um, this is your check-in period. How are things doing? Um, are you where you want to be? Um uh have you had any slip-ups? Um, and is that and I will say, if you have, does that slip up lead to increased food noise? Because if it isn't leading to increased food noise, we may get some valuable information here about some things that you may want to consider um trying or adjusting, or maybe start having limited exposure to. So a slip-up is something where I'm gonna uh maybe offer them that virtual sponsorship. And I may say, you know what? There could be some valuable information if it doesn't cause you a full uh relapse. It doesn't cause an increase in food noise, it doesn't cause an increase in chronic repetitive uh eating. So that's how I tend to deal with it.

Is Cutting Sugar Disordered Eating

FLORENCE 18:43

Okay. High touch support, right? Because almost everyone I know that high touch support, being in groups, having that daily connection, having that steady, steady sense that I'm not in this alone and someone's got my back, and there's someone to kind of hold me. The support and accountability piece can be really helpful. Got it. Really great that you offer that. So, in terms of there is in the disordered eating world or the eating disorder world, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's, there's a belief that eliminating sugar or flour or ultra-processed foods or trigger foods is really just a form of disordered eating. So, what would you say to that?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Well, I think we're I I mean, the word form of disordered eating or the phrase form of disordered eating is um worth talking about. Or maybe let's say it this it is a symptom, uh a symptom of uh disordered eating. Particularly, it could be uh it could be a behavioral symptom of disordered eating. But I'm gonna cut it or I'm gonna I'm gonna make a very clear distinction right now. Um you you said uh cutting out trigger foods is a form of disordered eating. That's like saying, in my view, a cough is a form of lung cancer. That's not the case until a full evaluation is is done. Okay, so um yeah, it is true that the behavior of giving up certain food groups could be a symptom of disordered eating. But I hope any doctor out there, if I went, wouldn't it would not say, ah, that's lung cancer, because it's not. So we can delve into this in a lot more detail if if uh if um if you want. It is only one symptom of many that have to come together in order to form this uh an eating disorder.

FLORENCE 20:58

So for people who have gone to eating disorder treatment and and were told that that eliminating sugar, uh, that they need to learn how to moderate sugar, make peace with all foods fit, that whole philosophy. What would you say to them if they've reached out to you and they're still struggling with food?

SPEAKER_00 21:17

I actually have a case like this right now. Um, and it's someone I'm offering virtual support to reminds me as soon as I get off the call, I've got to send a text to her and ask her how things are going. But this patient went through a fairly well-known binge eating program in Toronto, um, had done bariatric surgery and was not succeeding on the bariatric surgery when she reached out to me. I did my assessment and I said, Yeah, do you have an addictive relationship with food? And then one of the questions I asked her, I said, was, I said, when they told you in this really well-regarded eating disorder program that you could moderate and that all foods are good foods, I said, when you heard that, what what were you thinking? And she said, they don't understand it. They don't get it. They don't know what I'm going through. So what I would say to people who are told that all foods are good foods, really listen back to yourself. I think that the food addicts tend to know they've got a different relationship or a really problematic relationship with food. And they know that certain foods don't fit. I would say if you think that's the case, get an assessment from someone who recognizes food addiction to see if indeed you are a food addict, and then treat yourself accordingly. But most binge eating programs are run by um medical doctors, nurses, uh they're they're funded. If they're inpatient, they're funded by government and they've got strict requirements. And a lot of those professions in very highly regulated environments have to follow the science and the research, and they have to follow the DSM. And as you know, food addiction is not there yet in the DSM, and it's getting there in the research. I was at the Food Addiction Conference in London a couple of weeks ago, and the number of research studies in food addiction has exponentially grown over the last number of years. I think there are 400 of them now compared to maybe a dozen a while ago. So it's happening. But know that those programs are going to default to disordered eating. People who have worked in eating disorders for decades are going to keep doing what they what they know. Um so I would say trust your instinct and realize that the programs you're in and the people you're seeing probably don't recognize food addiction yet. That's what I would tell them.

When Moderation Advice Backfires

Assessment First Avoiding Binge Restrict Cycles

FLORENCE 24:40

Yeah. And there we all have ex, I have personal experience, and I know I'm not alone of I ate sugar all day long as a child. Really, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all my snacks. Every meal had refined carbohydrates in it. And when I was in my little early to mid-20s, sorry, early to mid-teens, I started to gain weight. I started having my cycle. I started having mood swings, I started getting acne. Like I was starting to be really profoundly affected by this, probably quicker and more intense ways than many people. And I started to become aware that I think I need to do something different with how I'm eating. And I went on my first diet. And it was by my early 20s that I realized I used to be able to eat two Oreos and feel like, oh, that was lovely. Now I topped my sugar tank up all day long. And I didn't binge and I didn't overeat and I wasn't obsessed about it. And every meal it was there, and I grabbed a snack whenever I wanted. And I was relatively thin until my teens. And then I really, really got quite overweight. But it wasn't until I got really overweight that I started to look at my consumption of sugar and then I started to diet and pull back and restrict and had good reasons, was really excited about doing it. I remember reading somewhere back in the 19 late 1970s, early 80s, right? Like this, you know, don't drink your calories if you want to lose weight. So I said, okay, there goes the pop. Like, and I actually let go of the pop pretty easy, but I didn't let go of sugar pretty easy. But ah, you know, give it a few years. And all of a sudden I realized I used to eat three Oreos and now I'm eating three rows of Oreos. Great. Now I'm aware that I have both a sugar addiction in play and now I have an eating disorder in play. And I just felt like I did explode disordered eating behaviors. So a lot of people have that experience that when we try and pull back, there's this backlash, and then restriction leads to binging, and that does seem to ensue. So what do we do? How do we pull back? If you're like, okay, Brian, I believe you're right. I think I think I fall on that spectrum, that food addiction spectrum. How do I pull back without creating this binge restriction backlash?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Well, I'll talk clinically first. Okay. Um, you had mentioned uh that there was some disordered eating in your in your house. So one of the first things, like one of the first things that I will do, not one of the first things, the first thing that I do is I assess people's historic and current relationships with food. Sometimes that can take two or three sessions. I honestly mean it. Like if if I don't have a sense of someone after one session, I will say, we've got to come back. Like I I don't know where you are yet. And I say that's not because of you, it's not because of me. It's because it's so nuanced and it's so complex. And we've got to sort through a number of things, and the symptoms between disorder or let's say binge eating disorder and food addiction are so similar that I'm not sure yet. So the question is how do we pull back? And I and through my assessment, I will determine people's prior relationship with food. And if there's any disordered eating in that, I'm going to be really, really, really, really careful if I have to recommend an abstinence program to them. Because I don't want to trigger any disordered eating. And that's when I begin to look for, you know, are there present body image concerns? Because body image drives um a lot of disordered eating. Is there low self-esteem going on? Because um low self-esteem basically makes people think that the only thing that is good about them is their weight. I can't control my marriage, I can't control my kids, I can't control the economy, at least I can control what I put in my mouth and how how I look. Those are all low self-esteem thoughts. So if there's disordered eating, low self-esteem, um perfectionism, um highly depression for that matter, um in uh in in their um uh in their present history, all of those go into the formulation of how I tell people to address their food issues. So if I have a food addict that has body image issues, that has perfectionism, and that has low self-esteem, well, I'll be honest with you, as it stands right now, I don't know what I would do with them. What I can say is I would proceed exceptionally carefully. If you had to twist my arm, my general protocol would be to address the food addiction at first, and then uh immediately after address the disordered eating patience. Because that's someone who if uh they pull back from sugar and carbohydrates, and uh and and if they abstain, if they have perfectionism, low self-esteem, body in addition, that's that's likely to trigger an eating disorder right there. So I I would make sure that they want to stay in care with me for a long time so that we can address all of all of this. I write out a very clear treatment plan, and I would say, here are things you have to look for. I would say, if we get you off sugar successfully, we have to talk and I'm gonna check with you. Are you are you starting to weigh yourself three times a day now? Are you starting to look for compliments from people now that you're coming off uh carbohydrates and now that you're abstaining, now that your weight's coming down? Because if they say yes and yes and yes, then there's an eating disorder. But I don't want to get them, I don't want to get them to that point. I don't want to trigger an eating disorder in them. That's unprofessional of me, as far as I'm concerned. I I I've said to some people, I say, if I ever trigger an eating disorder in you, report me to my college because that that's really bad or my regulator, that's really bad practice for me to do. So, anyhow, that's a little bit about how seriously I take it and how I would do it. I if I had to just get rid of the um triggering foods and immediately address all of the other uh symptoms.

Healing Body Image Shame And Self Esteem

FLORENCE 31:52

Yeah, I think it's it's universally understood that there's no definition of full recovery from a disordered eating or eating disorder or from food. Probably more the disordered eating without recovery from body image issues. So if that's in play, what is some of your best advice on how people can begin to heal body image issues? And I you've heard it, I've heard it. We all know women from very, very young ages are bombarded. We can all tell horror stories of children that are at the dinner table and everyone's eating pizza, but someone's, you know, you need to desalad and chicken because you're overweight, or they're putting on a diet at the age of six. Or I have clients who've been at Weight Watchers with their mothers as young as nine and eleven. But most girls, by the time they're in their teens, I mean, the statistics now is that children in elementary school are already weight conscious. They think they're fat and overweight. Now, many of the children are, unfortunately. But even normal weight, underweight, normal children are, you know, weight conscious. So what do how do we begin to heal this?

SPEAKER_00 33:01

First of all, I have to take a bit of a sidestep um or not not give a direct answer. Because when you gave those scenarios, you know, everyone's eating pizza, uh, but but the overweight child is getting white chicken breasts. I'm cringing inside.

FLORENCE 33:21

Right?

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Like I am just I I was I don't know, I don't, I don't know if you saw it, I was just like this. I know putting, yeah, because it hurts. It's it it it um physically hurts me to hear you give that example, let alone having a a patient give it to me. What my brand of therapy says that if I have a reaction like that, to consider including it in the therapy in some kind of way. So now I'll come back to your answer and start in, which is how to address it. One of the first things I will do is I may say to someone, I may say, My God, as you were telling me that, I think I was imagining the embarrassment and the shame that you must have gone through. That must have been horrible for you because I'm putting my palm into my or putting my forehead into my palm. So you know on a therapeutic level, just a basic empathy towards someone who's going through that. Yeah, yeah, and I would say, you know, you didn't have a choice at that time. And in situations like that, it is you as an overweight nine-year-old child versus every other member of your family, and you know what, you are you will lose every time as a nine-year-old, like as a young child, um being told to eat like this. You you just don't have the mental capacity at that age to handle it or to express what you're really feeling, so understand you were in a very vulnerable, difficult position at that time. And then I would talk to people about it. I would say, how are things similar or different? I would say, what do you want to tell people? If you were sitting there now, if you are now a 35-year-old woman, what would 35-year-old Nancy say to Nancy's nine-year-old family? What would you want to tell them? Let's get that out in the open. And if you want to be frustrated with them, be frustrated with them. And then I would say, how can we take this mobilized frustration that you have and use it properly? Are you happy with your body now? Forget about your family. Are you happy with where you want to be now? And I'm asking, you know, that that's part of part of this, is me just asking them plainly, forget about your family, forget about your weight, forget about an idealized version of yourself. Are you happy with where you are? And um I'll I'll listen to their answer. And I may say, is your answer still based a little bit on the nine-year-old experience that you had, or is it based a little bit on some social media stuff? You know, so I would probe that answer a little um uh a little bit. You know, what makes this even more complex is that I don't want to define for people how they should look or how they should weigh. Um, I don't want to say to people, you're perfect the way you are. I mean, if they say that to me, I'll go, yeah, you are. And if they're not perfect, uh, or if they don't consider themselves, if they consider themselves imperfect, I'll say, well, what where do you want to be? And if they want to get into disordered eating territory, I'd say you can't do that. But you know, me giving them a defined body image of you're perfect, you're not perfect, whatever, is is almost re-traumatizing to them. So part of what people have to do is really sort through am I happy with where I am right uh right now, um, and can I get myself to where I want to be? Um and I would also say in your thinking, include humility, include a big dose of humble pop. Because um if you think you're going to get to be um a social media influencer with a perfect body, it's not going to happen. There has to be a certain degree of humility in uh in all of this. I think I've probably given you more things to question than I have answers here, but um it's a very difficult question you you just asked.

FLORENCE 38:28

Yeah, it is an it's a really deep, devastating wound. Like really, it's the core horror and the torment of this, you know, the trifecta, the weight, the body image, the food addiction and the disordered eating. Um, but the the pain of feeling like you're trapped in an overweight body and you just can't seem to get it to shift down and stay where you want it to be in that on-again yo-yo dieting nightmare. So, so, so many people have experienced and are in the middle of. But it just seems to me that fundamentally they can everyone can get to a point where whatever the size and the shape of their body is, the ability of their body, the age of their body, the look of their body, that they can get to a point of profound radical self-love. Everyone can do it. It's our normal state. All we need to do is clear the things that are in the way of that. And it's our normal, natural state. It's the clouds that you know are in the sun's always there, the self-love's always there. But how do we get back to that place of being able to accept our body and then from that place go, all right, and I think I I see a different future for me. I see a future where I have lost some weight.

The Endorphin Shift To Self Acceptance

SPEAKER_00 39:46

I I'm gonna go to my own store with with this. So I 21 years ago, I had exercise bulimia. And then that almost immediately following that, like with without any days in between, it went to binge eating disorder. And for nine years, I had binge eating uh disorder. Um, and when I was ready to take care of all of this, um, here's the following story. I had maybe worked out and started changing my eating for about six months. Um, and I I I will say I I maybe lost about 15 to 20 pounds, and that still had a lot of weight to lose. That's not the point um in all of this. Um but uh but um I remember it was really early days uh in in my journey, and I was doing bicep curls in my gym. And nothing special about these bicep curls at all, except for the fact that when I do resistance workouts, I get an endorphin rush. Some people don't, it's not uncommon, but not everyone gets it. But I'm lifting these 10-pound um uh uh weights, doing bicep curls, and the endorphin rush comes over me. And I had a profound thought at that time. And the thought was this is what I'm after. This is what I'm after the endorphin rush. And I'm after the good feelings that come from the endorphin rush and the good sleep that I'm going to get from the endorphin rush. And then I said to myself, I can lift these weights, I could be 150 pounds, 350 pounds, 650 pounds, if I can do this at any weight, if I can get this endorphin rush at any weight, what difference does weight make for me? It was so profound. I said to myself, I don't care if I lose another pound or not, because this feeling is what I'm after. And it it was just immensely powerful. And I had gone through um about eight or nine years of therapist training, my own therapy, to get me to that point. And what got me to to realize um that I was after an endorphin rush was again a lot of humility and a lot of uh my ability to deal with embarrassment, if you will, and to say, you know what? I don't care what other people think about my body anymore. If anyone laughs at my body, or if anyone says anything about my body, I'm gonna say, yeah, but do you get an endorphin rush lifting lifting weights? Because that's what I do, and I like it. And I like my body for giving me that opportunity. And it was so, so profound. And I would tell patients that story, and I had about two or three of them. Um, they would try, you know, they they asked uh a question, they said, Well, Brian, if you were happy with the weight you were at, and if you were happy that, like, how is it that you continue to lose the weight? Like, why did you even bother doing anything anymore? I said, Well, because I was so happy where I was, I was so happy getting some Dortmund Rush and happy in my body that I felt I could take a risk. I felt I could take a risk. Maybe I could try spinning classes, maybe I could try something else. Because if I fail, I'm gonna come back to a place that I like. And that's the thing. I could come back to a place that I like. So liking where I was allowed me to take a risk. Because if I failed, Wouldn't make a difference.

FLORENCE 44:02

Right. It was like it was an add-on. It was a bonus. It was the next step. It was higher, higher.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Can I can I get more endorphins by doing, you know, like that, that's that's really the thing. It did, it wasn't about the weight, right? Any anymore.

FLORENCE 44:17

Yeah. And I think that's pretty universal advice for people who do struggle with self-rejection, body image issues, a real deep, achy wound. That if I could only lose the weight, then I would be lovable, then I would be safe in the world, then I would be acceptable, then I wouldn't be shamed, then I wouldn't be as vulnerable to all the stigma and crap that comes with you know being overweight in our culture. But I was gonna say, but the truth is that it actually doesn't stand between you and anything that you truly want, right? That that the big, big, big aha for many people is that, oh, if I could just get the the red, flashy Ferrari, then I'd be happy, right? But you don't actually need the weight loss to get the feeling good feelings that those are accessible. You can pull this out of the middle and not that you need to let let that go. No one's gonna shame or criticize anybody for wanting to get more fit or be more healthy or be more of an ideal weight, whatever, right? Like that's your life, your choice, your desire. You get to decide who you are and what you want, and you're entitled to it. But just the idea that you're holding off if you lose weight, then well, skip, you know, skip the weight loss part and just go to the good feelings because there's ways to do that.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

Because I'm there is oh oh no, it makes complete sense. And that is the roadmap. Um, as a therapist, the issue that I encounter, you know, one of the golden rules of the kind of therapy that I practice is meet the patient where they're at. So if they are at the point of thinking I lose weight and then I'm happy, you don't come in and say, no, no, no, no, it's completely the opposite. I mean, you want to get to that point. Um and and I say you want to get to that point. You you want to have them discover that point and um having work for for them. But I I mean, I can't just deliver a message and say, well, it's completely opposite to what you're to to what you're thinking. As a therapist, I've got to meet them where they are and sort of see what shifting has to go on at that point. It becomes very individual to um to to uh um to the patient and and what their own uh issues, uh issues are. So I think those of us like you and I that have gone through it know the answer. But that's why I said prior to having lifting these uh or doing these bicep curls and getting that endorphin rush, I could spent nine years training as a therapist doing my own therapy. And my goal is to actually not have people take nine years to do that, quite frankly, because you do damage to yourself and so on. But it does take a while, I think, for that mess for our message to sink in when their thought of first I lose weight, then I'm happy, when that thought process is so ingrained in people.

One Year Sugar Free And Pain Relief

FLORENCE 47:22

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'll love myself when, I'll be acceptable when I'll stop this stunning and shocking self-criticisms. Yeah, self-rejection, um, that all that can happen beforehand. And I know people are afraid, they're I'm afraid to self-love beforehand. And I think it means that if I'm acceptable, I'm if I'm acceptable myself as it is, then I won't lose the weight. It's the exact opposite. It's all the exact opposite. It's just it's an illusion. I would like to end this interview by giving you the opportunity to talk a little bit about your past year. So you've been sugar-free for a year, and what's that been like for you? And what inspired you to finally decide, no, I think I need the abstinence model for me.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Wonderful, wonderful question. And before I I um I get there, like I said, let's make it very clear because I um that that um an abstinence model or getting rid of carbs and sugars is not an eating disorder. It's one possible symptom of of it. So for me, why did I decide to um to to do that? I decided to do it because um I have uh chronic high blood pressure. So I work out a lot, I eat pretty wet, but I have chronic high blood pressure, chronic, uh, chronic cholesterol, uh 56 or chronic high cholesterol, 56, um, 56 years old, and things just weren't working for me. And I thought, all right, it may be time to take the messages that I've been hearing from the food addiction model and give it a try for myself. And what I noticed immediately, and what I what I'm thrilled about is I also have a steel rod in my back and a fused spine uh uh from from a very curved spine uh as a teenager that just had to be corrected. So I have many different kinds of back pain. I I just don't have one. I've got many different kinds. And after being um carbohydrate free for about six weeks, virtually all of that pain, all of that pain is gone. I can't believe it. I I I I I I cannot I cannot believe it. So if you want to know the main reason why I excuse me, why I am carb uh carb free or very cautious, limiting my carb intake to about 20 20 grams of total carbs a day. I'm pain free. I'm virtually pain free. Um and I hope your listeners and your audience can hear how excited I am. That is at 56. I never thought I would get that. I thought I'm 56 years old, my body is starting to wear down. Um I used to do high intense or still do high intensity, um uh high intensity uh whatever, um H I I T, whatever those four letters stand for.

FLORENCE 50:45

High intensity interval training.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

That's it, thank you. Uh F45 is the brand. I know, yeah, yeah. I know it. So I would come out of those classes in a crap ton of pain. I could not walk up a flight of stairs afterwards. My back would be hurting afterwards. I had to give it up. And I just thought, yeah, I'm I'm in my mid-50s. I have to live with some pain. That was what I thought. And then I went carb free and it's gone. That's the greatest gift there is. Um, so I've done really well with it. My energy levels are up significantly. My clear the my mental clarity is up um significantly. So it has really done uh uh wonders for for me. I can't believe it. And um I've done this on my own. Um, we talked a little bit about this. Um, I didn't use any uh uh any help. And I think the only reason I could do this is because I have healed my disordered relationship with food. I have healed my body image issues. I'm not doing this to get into a size 32G anymore because you know what? That's not happening. If that's my goal, I would have abandoned that a longer, I would have abandoned this about six months ago because it's just not happening. So I had to heal my disordered relationship with food in order to be able to do this. I had to heal my body image issues and my self-esteem issues in order to um to do this. The diet, uh sorry, not not a diet, but the way I'm eating now enhances my lifestyle rather than the other way uh around, where the way I eat sort of or or rather my lifestyle enhances how I eat or that kind of thing. Like it's just um how I live is the most important thing to me. And having my eating support map um is is really uh is really what I'm going for. And abstinence appears to be the way to do it.

FLORENCE 53:07

And did you at any point in time feel like you fall on the addiction spectrum, or is it just that you've chosen to do abstinence as an experiment and be wonderfully surprised that it's helped with pain and it's made you feel fantastic?

SPEAKER_00 53:20

I would say more of the second, yeah, but here's something anecdotal. Yeah. Um, so as an eating disorder therapy, you know, I work with food addiction, I work with eating disorders, so as an eating disorder therapist, I do see the benefits of moderation. I practiced moderation for a very, very, very long time. But what I noticed when I started abstinence was my own food cravings and my own food noise went down even further. So I have asked myself, is it possible that I was an early stage food addict if we use Vera Tarman's labeling or a low-level food uh food addict? Is it possible that that that could be if my own cravings have have come down? I don't know the answer to that, to to be honest with you, but I am glad that my cravings have come back come down to an even more manageable level.

FLORENCE 54:26

And would you say it's almost crickets, like that you barely think of food now, that it's it's just every now and then, or how often are you do you have nervous?

SPEAKER_00 54:35

I would say it happens um Friday nights and Saturday nights. Okay for me. And I I I think it's just more situational. I I work uh I work 12, 14 hour days. I love my work. You you probably do as well. And I'm just I I come out of my office um into my home. I'm so tired, I can just eat my dinner, my regular dinner, and go to sleep. But on Friday and Saturday nights, it's a little bit more uh it's a little bit more um difficult. And what I will do in about 90% of those cases, I will just snack on um foods that don't contain carbohydrates.

FLORENCE 55:15

Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

Key Takeaways And Final Challenge

SPEAKER_00 55:18

Yeah, eat as much as I would like of uh of them.

FLORENCE 55:22

Yeah, wonderful. Really at the end of the day, I here's what here's how I would summarize what I've heard is that you know, this just requires nuance. It requires experimentation, it requires meeting yourself where you're at, making sure you're being supported by someone who's willing to meet you where you're at, stay open-minded, give things a try. That there's no way of really knowing sometimes what's going to be the right fit until you try it on and just be given permission to be honest with yourself about what's working and not.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

I would say work with a professional that is food addiction informed or understands it or recognizes it, or can refer you to someone like you or me that does have a food addiction paradigm and can consider that in our treatment plan. But yes, it is complicated, and that is part of the frustration around all of this. But our job is to make it easy and palatable for uh for for people. Like I said, took me nine years to get to to to start dealing with my eating disorder, nine years of therapy and training. I would like to see people do that in nine weeks or nine months. So that's our our that's our job is to is to make the complex more palatable for people.

FLORENCE 56:50

Yeah, yeah, beautiful. I would I would say we'd have to be starting at elementary school. I think by the time most people, you know, reach out for help, it's been decades of struggle, really. Like we're it's all decades of decades of struggle, on again, off again, slips and relapses. Think you've got it. And then you're like, what? How would I wind up here? I was doing so well. It's that's the norm, it seems. Like I think, I think your nine years is actually short, Brian. You did really well.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

I appreciate hearing that. Thank you, Florence. I really appreciate hearing that.

FLORENCE 57:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were on the fast track there. Awesome. Any final words you'd like to share before we wrap up today?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

If you ever hear abstinence is an eating disorder, question it. That's all I gotta say.

FLORENCE 57:33

I love it. Thanks everybody for tuning in today. Hope you enjoyed this. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 57:36

My pleasure. Take care. Bye.