Holiday Re-run: Dr. Ifland On Processed Food Addiction and Recovery

Welcome to the Ketones and coffee podcast and welcome to our Holiday Re-Run episode and We are on our 2nd week of  revisiting the best of the best episodes through out the years we have on Ketones and coffee podcast. 

Hope you guys are enjoying these episodes so far.. and today 

You are in for another treat For this episode we are revisiting the interview with Dr. Joan Ifland 

On this Episode we Discussed

-Dr. Joan Ifland’s Introduction 

-My Food Story “Quitting Sugar”

-Dangers of Food Addiction

-The Business Model that keeps people Addicted

-Food Addicted Brain

-11 Signs of Food Addiction

-Cue Induced Cravings and Food Addiction

-How to protect yourself from Cueing

-My Breakthrough Discovery of Mirror Neurons

-Impact of Mirror Neurons on Food Addiction Recovery

-Knowledge of Consequences

-How can you Equip yourself to help other sufferers

-“This was NOT your fault”

Connect with Dr. Joan Ifland 

HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONERS

Training in the management of processed food addiction could stop the frustration of watching preventable diet-related diseases progress in your patients.

Shift outcomes to fulfill your purpose in restoring patients to vibrant health.

• To refer a patient to the Addiction Reset Community, please email gethelp@foodaddictionreset.com
• To inquire about support to address processed foods in your workplace, please email gethelp@foodaddictionreset.com

https://www.processedfoodaddiction.com

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Transcript

2:21

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Dr. Joan, it is an honor to have you on today, and there's so many topics to discuss here and go about this interview, and I'm sure regardless of, you know, where these, you know, where it leads, our listeners can pick up where we leave it at the end by going through, you know, books and textbooks that you've authored and co authored. If you yourself are struggling with food addiction or somebody, you know, stick around, Dr. Joan will get to help so many people listening on the show today, including myself as a, as a health coach, I want to understand this to help my clients as well. But before that, I want to talk story with you, doctor, you have been going at it for decades here and trying to understand the disease. of Food Addiction, and you've been on many, many platforms, podcasts, TV shows, written books, textbooks, academic articles, you name it, and you're still going at it to this day. And on your latest book, The Process, Food Addiction, Foundation Assessment and Recovery, which includes groundbreaking insights into how to, you know, approach a process with addiction. You had presented new approaches in this evidence based textbook. Going back to when you started, Dr. Joan, on another interview, you said this all started when you had Quit sugar yourself. What's the story there and what inspired you to start this quest against food addiction? So thank you, Lawrence. I appreciate this introduction. Yeah. I got off of sugars and flowers in 1996. I had been a yo yo dieter. I had two little kids. I was too sick to go back to work. I had this prestigious MBA. I should have been climbing a corporate ladder somewhere. And my allergies were too terrible. I was tired all the time, brain fogged, really couldn't think. I was too sick to go back to work after having these two little girls. And in, I was in a 12 step group for rotten personalities called Codependents Anonymous because I was raging. And I had been brought up by ragers and it was incredibly traumatizing. And I did not want to bring my children up that way, but I would just find myself in these. Out of body moments when I would be screaming and yelling and watching myself. It was so awful. And so I was doing therapy in women's groups and 12 step groups, anything I could get my hands on to make it stop, and it just wouldn't stop. And then one of the members of the Rotten Personalities Recovery Group, she suggested that I try Food Addicts in Recovery, another 12 step group, because she could hear the sugar driving the raging. Well, she didn't tell me why she was recommending me, and I was like in one of my thin phases. But by the end of the year, I'd regained the weight, I went and got the book, I didn't read the book, I just turned to the food plan, I said, This will never work. There's too much food on this food plan. And, but I did go and join the group. And within four days, the miracles just set in. The brain fog lifted and the fatigue lifted. And the bloating went away. And I thought, well, you know, great, great, great. But I won't lose any weight. By the end of the week, I'd lost two pounds. I was eating a lot of food, but no sugars and flours. And then the next week I noticed my allergies were much better. And a lifelong sinus infection was clearing up. And it was in the third week, though, that I, I still tear up when I think about this. That I decided to really devote my life to telling people about, at that time I thought it was sugar and flour, now I know it's all processed foods. The rating stopped, and I remember standing in my kitchen. I know what day it was. It was Thursday, January 18th, 1996. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, nobody's really needed to be yelled at in three weeks. They just are, they're so good. And I realized it wasn't about my family, it was about the sugars and flowers. And I went to the support group that weekend, and I asked them, I said, Do you, do you guys get less irritable on this food plan? And there were 20 people in the room, and I said, Yeah, yeah. It's like, dang, you know? Dang, all those years spent combing through my childhood issues, which are an issue, definitely, when I was having a chemical reaction in my brain. So I just dedicated myself in that moment. I want everybody in the world to know that this is, these are, these behavior issues are chemical reactions. And now I'm advanced. Of course, 27 years later, I now know that dairy and processed fats and excessive salt and, and I know the name of your show has caffeine in it, but it's not for everybody. And of course, food additives, as you mentioned. So, yeah, um, there's a different life out there waiting for everybody. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And you, you know, sometimes it takes, you know, an illness or a breaking point before we could link back to feeling good and link back to, okay, what's not working. Because for me, when I was experiencing, you know, In a major depression and chronic anxiety and just always in this race where, you know, with everybody else and that certainly doesn't help, right? And for me, stress, yes. And, you know, I, I put on a few pounds and I heard of keto and I didn't really look into it when the first time I heard about it. And, you know, a couple of years ago, I, I really looked into Keto because I, when COVID hit, you know, the gyms were closed and I racked up 30 pounds in a, in a timeline of maybe a couple of months. And I really looked into Keto. Okay, what, what is Keto? And I started Keto at the time and lo and behold, I lost the weight, but then it was more than that. I gained so much energy. I cut out. All the carbs, I cut out the sugars, I cut out the junk, processed foods, and I felt so amazing. I was able to link it back to what I was eating, and sometimes it, sometimes it takes, like, if you're in pain, sometimes it takes suffering before we Could actually, you know, two and two together. So for the average person here, Dr. Joan, the term food addiction might be a tricky subject because even in the low carb community, I don't see many talking about it. But what do the average person not understand about this disease? It is definitely not. You know, seen in the category of alcohol addiction, drug addiction, which are viewed to be most damaging to a human being in your profession. As somebody who has seen everything in the food addiction world, I'm not in the business of scaring people here, but, uh, how damaging is it really? Why is it that a lot of people is not acknowledging it like a disease and how does it differ from other addictions? Well, it's, it's a highly profitable addiction. And I, I wondered for years why I had this prestigious MBA and now I know because this is a profitable addiction. Not only is it creating incredible profits for the processed food industry, it's creating incredible profits for the medical services industry, the pharmaceuticals and surgery. A million Americans will die from diet related diseases every year. And it's. It's deadly. It's a deadly addiction. So we know that when you're eating a lot of fat and a lot of sugar, your cells are absorbing so much fat and sugar that they can't process it and clean out the debris, kind of, from the processing of it. And so that trash, if you will, builds up in the cells. And it's why So many different diseases. These are not separate diseases for me. So many separate diseases just go away. Now, I'm so glad that you brought up the issue of stress, because stress is another very destructive force on westernized and increasingly around the world bodies. So this is why we have an online community. We broadcast positivity, 17 hours out of 24 on zoom and people have been so beat down by the weight gain and the judgment and the rejection and the vilification and the stigmatization from body shapes that they, they really need this process of rebuilding their confidence. Uh, sometimes people have. Well, we do have some evidence that this really starts at birth because children, babies can detect the sugar that the mother's eating through the breast milk. And if they're on formula, that formula could be a 52 percent sugar and corn syrup solids. Yeah. So it's a very severe, it's the most severe addiction ever because it starts very early in childhood. And the tobacco industry came into processed foods in the mid 1980s. Now, if you just look at this moment in history, three years, the tobacco industry, the two biggest tobacco companies, bought Kraft, Nabisco, and General Foods. In three years. And all you have to do is like, whoa! You know, why would people Who make their money from addiction. So addiction is you sell a worthless product, you addict the person to it, and then they're compelled to buy it. So why would people who make their money that way move into processed foods? And you just see the whole thing become so clear. There's an addiction business model, and there's a process. of addicting people to substances hidden in products. We know what happened. Looking at the landscape that we're, you know, is every day it's getting harder and harder to navigate a life, a healthy lifestyle because it's everywhere. You know, stress can actually induce some of these addiction and, you know, if you're living in a stressful world in a, you know, in a constant race looking, you know, position yourself in an industry and you look at, you know, maybe an economy that's not really, you know, in my generation, an economy like, you know, going in this economy, trying to navigate this, Obviously, if you opt into a processed food, it's going to be a little cheaper to live this way. It looks a little cheaper. It looks a little cheaper. But the hidden costs, you know, the co pay on your medical expenses and the change in sizes and all the clothes that you have to buy and you're too tired to, sometimes, to To work, or you're too sick to work, or you're too brain fogged to apply for a promotion, or you're too depressed. Those are all devastating hidden causes. Did you know that 44 percent of Americans are obese? Yes. Yes. Yes. And it's a very expensive addiction, actually, very expensive addiction. Buying 60 cents worth. I know this is a carb meal, but if people are like, Oh, if they bought into the lie, I can't afford this. I can't afford to eat healthy. I just want to point out, and you know, this isn't for your community that a cup of. Organic beans and a cup of organic brown rice is 60 cents. So I know that that's not something your community would buy, but that's the point, is that it's not, it's not expensive to eat healthy. Mmm. Mmm. You know, I have discovered, you know, A healthy way of eating because I wanted to do my best, you know, but before I realized that I had to awaken and, you know, maybe people are not putting two and two to get together and even though I was in so much. You know, pain before with depression and anxiety, I still consider myself lucky because if not for that, I, I don't think I would have made this lifestyle change. Right. Right. Right. And food, I think anybody who gets on a keto food plan is lucky. Yeah. Yeah. I used an extreme keto food plan. I developed epilepsy during my doctoral program and I used a keto food plan to recover from it. It's not something that The doctors thought I would recover from, but I did. So I'm very sympathetic to the ketogenic food plan, but I have heard reports of people struggling with binging on a keto food plan where they can kind of hang on Monday through Friday, but then they lose it over the weekends, or they can hang on one week and then the other week they binge. So if you think that that might be happening, um, In your audience, I can talk about that a little bit. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, sometimes maybe that culture could play a part in that, you know, food is ingrained in our, It's a huge part of it, right? Others may not be so lucky like us that we had discovered this because of so much pain that it's not worth it for us anymore to go back into it. When you realize that it's an addiction, you know that very specific things are happening in the brain. Your reward cells are pumping out cravings and your stress cells. are pumping it through a mechanism, they're pumping out adrenaline. And that is taking up so much of the brain's energy that the choice center in the brain is not getting enough blood flow to actually make choices. The addiction is driving the behavior. Choices are not driving the behavior. So, it's, it is really lucky. If you can basically put an addiction, you basically have to put an addiction into remission in order to work a keto food plan consistently. And if you're having trouble, if you're constantly lapsing and now you can't get your body to go back into ketosis, consider getting treatment for the addiction. Yep. How does one, let's, let's get to that in a second. I want to discuss that in detail. How does, how does food addiction manifest in people? How do I know that I have it? You know, how do we identify these patterns in ourselves? Because is it necessary for one to have to identify themselves as a food addict? If you do, you're, you're really lucky. If you can just accept this is not your fault. This is a very sophisticated, powerful business model. These are the same people who got two thirds of American adults to smoke. And now they've gotten 80. I think it's 83 percent of Americans are now overweight or obese. These are very, they hire. Addiction scientists, they hire neurologists to, to make their products addictive and to make the marketing addictive. So this is, if you can just really hold on to that, this is not my fault. My government stood by and let these corporations do this to me. If you can grab onto that, then you can move through the shame. You can. Well, you know, just burst through the shame and get treatment. So, what is treatment? So, no, you asked, how do you know? How do you know? There are 11 signs. I can run through them. 11 signs. Okay. Let's do it. So, unintended use. You have a plan, you're not going to eat that, and then you eat it. A failure to cut back. So those 83 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese, they don't want to be. Time spent, you're thinking about your craving, you're going to get, you're eating it, you're sleeping it off, and it's all time spent. Cravings, failure to fulfill roles. You know that you want to apply for a promotion, but you're just too brain fogged. Or you're too big to get down on the floor with your kids anymore. And then relationship problems. You, you're too brain fogged and craving to focus on another person to do things for them. And then activities given up because you don't want to go cause you've gained weight or because you're too tired or because the cravings are too intense and you want to go home and eat. And then there's hazardous use eating in the car while driving. Obese people have more accidents, but they're still eating and then use in spite of knowledge of consequences. 88 percent of Americans have a diet related poor test result. High cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, high blood glucose, or hip to waist ratio is off. 88 percent of Americans are eating in spite of knowledge of consequences. And then tolerance, eating more of The food over time, you're buying it more often or you're buying it in a bigger container and then that withdrawal. And that is if you're eating for a reason other than hunger, you're eating because you're depressed or you're anxious or you're tired or you have a headache or you have a stomach ache. Yeah. You're, what you're doing there is you're avoiding withdrawal. And most people will have six or more of those. And six or more is the cutoff for a severe addiction. And it just, it's very, it's, it's not realistic to think that you can recover from a severe addiction on your own. This is, we're around the world, we're on zoom, we're on devices and it's repeat messaging, getting your food cleaned up. Yes. But then. Your brain stores all these messages. Oh, that's yummy. Oh, I deserve that. And you have to reprogram the brain. Yeah. Yes. When it looks at that food, instead of thinking that's yummy, it goes over to, Oh no, that's, that's poisonous. That's painful. It's a lot of reconditioning of brain cells. Yeah. But Dr. Joan, we are against a giant here. We are constantly on our phones, constantly being fed. I, I would go through my phone right now. Let me tell you, if, if I, if I swipe three times, I'm going to find another McDonald's advertisement here, you know, getting me to get food. And if I didn't Already know that these are damaging it will, I would be so vulnerable, especially now it's, it's Friday. It's the weekend, right? I am looking to if, if I'm an average person, I'm looking to maybe relax on my diet on a, on a Friday night. This is a slippery slope. Dr. Joan, we have, we are against. You know, this is probably why, you know, you've been at it for, for many, many years now. And what are we against here? Because you, you did say, um, these people, you know, big corporation, our government, you did mention that doesn't really have our own best interests. And have, what do you mean by the government letting these big corporations have at it? Is, are there countries that ban these type of food? No, other than, you know, in North America, how would, how would the government compare? Cause I know in the UK they ban some foods. The States have foods that, that are banned in, in UK. Yeah, Europe has banned a lot of ingredients that are in food in the US. For example, Ireland really made a good attempt to cut back on advertising to children. What you, what you did in your lead in to this question is you identified the key point. I think our program is the only program that recognizes the role of cuing, advertising, reminding, stimulating the addiction. So these cells that flood the brain with cravings, it's not just eating the food that will cause that. It's actually any kind of a reminder, any kind of a message, any kind of a signal, any kind of an association. So you, you're constantly, your brain is constantly being flooded with cravings. And that, those brain chemicals control your behavior. So you go through one of these episodes, I call it the zombie walk. You've gotten, you know, a big flood of craving chemicals. Your frontal lobe is screaming, no, no, no. But you're walking over like a zombie and getting the stuff and putting it in your mouth. That's not you. That's the addiction. Unconscious eating. It's, well, there, there is also unconscious eating, but this is addictive eating. So this is, this clump of reward brain cells has control of your behavior. This you is in this frontal lobe. You that makes good decisions and protects yourself is in this frontal lobe. But the addiction is so deep that it's pulling the blood supply away from those brain cells and you can't, it's a fight. It's like a competition between these two parts of the brain. And the stress centers are on the side of the addiction. They're in their own dance back there. So I will say that the part of the brain that makes the difference is your, you have this innate urge to imitate other people. I think it's a survival mechanism where if you were in a tribe, you were in that tribe because you did what they did. And they would accept you. And that's how you found food, water, shelter, protection from predators. And your children got raised. So people who could conform, could join in, could belong, those are the people who lived and passed down their genes. Well, we still have that. And the corporations use that mercilessly. You know, they have commercials for the future people that you want to belong with. And they're eating this food. So you want to eat this food too. It's just horrendous. This all falls under the big umbrella of cuing. And it is merciless. So training in how to protect yourself against cuing is a big part of what we do. And I see in our members that they are surprised that it's an issue. Because they might've been through dozens of weight loss programs. Nobody ever mentioned it. In fact, some recovery programs vehemently deny its existence. It's like, you should be able to be in your house, where people are eating processed foods, with processed foods everywhere, and you should be okay. That is not true. All of that cuing is pumping. Pumping cravings into your brain. You're not asking for it. You're not cooperating with it. You don't want it. But to think that you could do this and have a house full of other people who are eating processed foods, and processed foods are available, that's not realistic. You've got to negotiate with the household members. These foods have to be in your own personal locked box. Yeah. Where I can't get them, etc. There are all these strategies that we teach. Those are really valid points. And for me, looking at this as an average person, I, the first thing that comes to mind is when you, somebody wants to start his or her own recovery is the identifying piece is because if I fail to identify addiction. Within my behavior, then otherwise I wouldn't be able to link it. To my actions, meaning if I fail to identify this in myself, and if I fail to even identify food addiction as an addiction, first of all, like if I don't see food addiction as an addiction, how does a normal person should. use food properly because, and how does a food addict use food? I want to differentiate those two, because I think if we do identify what the difference of these two are, it will be easier for maybe our listeners to identify it in themselves if they use this food as this way. This is a super excellent question. So a normal eater. Eats a meal, like I would eat six ounces of protein. I know that in your community, plant proteins are not normal. But, you know, protein, I would have some vegetables. And I used to eat a starch. And I would have two teaspoons of oil with every meal. Olive, cold pressed olive oil. Not, not a vegetable oil. And my lunch would be four ounces of protein and a big pile of raw vegetables. And two teaspoons of olive oil and my dinner would be the same. I might have a smaller meal if it's a really busy day and I'm hungry at the end of the day. I have a small meal at the end of the day. In other words, I'm not thinking about food. The cue for me to go to the kitchen and make a meal is hunger, hunger from, from my stomach. Now, a food addicted person might wake up and skip breakfast, which sets off a food seeking mechanism. And they're intensely craving by 10 o'clock, you know, they wake up, I'm not going to eat. I binged last night. I'm not going to eat. And by 10 o'clock, they're just the zombie walk over to the, the vending machine or to the break room and they're eating and then they're off. Then there's stuff hidden in their desk. Or there's there's stuff around the house and they could like you use the term unconscious eating. They might in the evening, for example, sit down in front of the TV with a big bag of snacks of some kind. And it could be gone by the end of the evening and they don't remember eating it. They're constantly thinking about food. They're constantly going to get it. It's all over their house. They've got it stashed away here and there in their car. Everything is a trigger for thinking about food. They see somebody that they've eaten with. That somebody is now a trigger. There's this whole terrible process of cue association. So if you sit on a park bench and you eat some big ooey gooey thing, every time you pass that park bench, You're going to be thinking about that big thing and get cravings and it's progressive. It gets worse and worse over time. It's the life of a normal eater. They have their brain, their frontal lobe, their creative, and they're thinking about other people. They're connected to other people. They have a lot of great life, life management skills, relationship management, sleep management movement, et cetera. The life of a processed food addicted person is miserable. They're sick, they're tired, they have cravings all the time. They're beating themselves up because they eat things that they know they don't want to eat. And addictions are horrible. They're horrible. And if you've had an addiction since you were born, you don't even have a memory of how Wonderful. It can be to be free from it. Yes. I want you to clarify something for us here in the context of as your collective efforts in the quest for helping people with food addiction, which is decades of helping people with food addiction disease. In an interview, you said nothing worked until you truly understood it while you're working on the, what did you mean by that? Was that a build up frustration for you? For you up until that point, or was that a breakthrough that you had that made you realize that it, in that moment, it hasn't worked up until 2018 when you worked on the textbook, right? So in that, that first moment in 1996, I started off on a 22 year journey to get people off of processed foods. I thought like it happened with me, like, Oh, I'll just tell them about it. Well, that's just like telling an alcoholic about water. And I did handouts. I wrote a popular book. I got on TV. I gave talks all over the place. And I was being interviewed for, um, one of the big morning shows in New York. And the last producer came on the phone and said, You know what? You don't have a degree in your field. So I said, Oh, well, I'll get a PhD. There was one thing that worked. I did my internship in a small faith organization, and it spread like wildfire through that little organization. And by the end of two years, they were off their meds. They lost the weight. They weren't sick anymore, an older population, but I missed the significance of it. Um, they were used to imitating each other. They were used to being a tribe. They had been going together for worship for 40 years. So once a couple of them started this, the rest of them, their natural inclination to imitate people they know well kicked in and they all did it. I missed the significance of that. So fast forward, I'm writing the textbook. I had a prepared meal company. I got a doctoral divorce after my doctorate and I used the proceedings to start a meal company and it was, again, it was like saying to an alcoholic, I'm going to deliver this fabulous water to your house. You just drink that water and you're going to see how good you feel and you won't lose your car and you won't lose your family and you won't lose your house and you won't lose your job. Isn't, doesn't that sound great? Oh, yeah. Except you forgot to treat the addiction. You forgot to get those reward center brain cells to calm down, the stress center to calm down, and the frontal lobe to come back online. So, come, um, I wrote the textbook. I realized it's a severe addiction, and many people have been severely traumatized by it, with things like glee induced depression and anxiety. The vilification for body shape parents who were addicted and not emotionally available. And I knew it had to be a kind of immersion recovery for severe addictions. Normally people would go away for a couple of years to residential treatment a couple of years. They would be in halfway houses. They would be in protected environments protected by what I mean by protected, no queuing and no availability. So that's the key to everything. If you can set up your own home for no queuing, no availability, and you can reprogram your brain not to react to queues on the road and at your workplace or your school, that's the battle. So, you know, I had a daily phone call, I had a Facebook group, but the breakthrough came in late 2017. When I got on Zoom for the first time, my first thought was, Oh my gosh, we could deliver the right level of service, which is pretty much 24 hour a day service over Zoom. We could do this on Zoom. And indeed, the first week of January 2018, we had an all day program. And people who had been trying to have one clean day for decades. And you wake up, I'm going to have a clean day by 10 o'clock. You're eating the bad stuff. They all had a clean day on the first day. Well, I didn't know about this urge to imitate. I missed that factor. When I did my doctoral internship, I missed it, but I wasn't going to miss it. Again. I immediately went back to the research and there was, there's a very special, but. Powerful, dominant force in the brain. It's named mirror neurons. And this, these are the brain cells that actually copy, copy, copy, copy. They're watching people. They're watching what they do. And they, they send signals down to the parallel brain cells in your brain. Like if you see somebody eating. Your mirror neurons will stimulate your cravings. So, once I got the mechanism, Oh, it's mirror neurons. Mirror neurons will flip the balance of power in the brain. In an addicted person, there's this unholy alliance between the hyperactive reward system and the hyperactive stress system. And they dominate that alliance dominates the brain. But if you can get mirror neurons to swing over to healthy behavior, mirror neurons are more powerful than the addiction. And that's what I saw on January 1st, 2018. I saw the impact of mirror neurons, mirror neuron engagement. So once you have mirror neuron engagement, everything becomes easy. Easier. Because the messaging in your brain changes. Oh, I want to go make a healthy, clean meal. This is quite different from the messaging from decades, which is, Oh, I have to, but I don't want to. I have to, but I'd really rather eat the junk in the refrigerator. The battle between the frontal lobe and the addicted brain cells. It's over. Your mirror neurons are making you go and, and make that clean meal, and you want to. You want to you want to be like the people you're seeing on your zoom screen all day. It was a huge breakthrough to know that we could deliver that urge to belong over zoom. Yeah. So that's how it works. That is interesting. And I want to get back to somebody that's in it right now. And. I want to know because again, like you said, we are against something that, you know, is bigger than you are, and you can't possibly. Do this on your own, knowing what it does to you, like how important is knowing the damage that food causes to somebody that's wanting to get better? How does, how should one see food then? Or is it just, is it as easy as that? Is it look, is it as easy as, you know, we're not vilifying food here, but what, how should we look at? How, how does. And a food addict look at food going forward. You're, you're asking a really interesting question. So it's knowledge of consequences. Mm-Hmm. And in an addicted person it cuts, it cuts in a painful way. Mm-Hmm. I hear people say this with just despair, spare, I know better and I still eat it. And they use that to beat themselves up. Now, when you're in a recovery program, what we do is we reprogram the addicted brain cells so that instead of the association being yummy, I deserve that, all the rationalization, you reprogram that brain cell to say, Oh no, that's painful. So how do you do that? It's the same way you learn a language, like what do I have right next to my desk? Index cards. So if I were learning a foreign language, say I wanted to go to France, and I wanted to, I wanted to know how to say car. I would write car, and then on the other side I would put voiture. And I would say car, voiture, car, voiture, car, voiture, over and over again. I get to France, I hear French being spoken all over, I'm being cued into my, the French part of my brain. I see a car, I think, what you, I come back to New York. I hear New York being spoken all over the place. I see a car, I think car. So queuing in combination with its Pavlovian conditioning of a brain cell. So that now when I see processed foods, I think sick. I think headache. So what we do is we have people write the name of the food that's driving them crazy, that they don't want to eat that has consequences. And then on the other side of the car, we have them write down the pain. Okay. So donut sick, donut sick, donut sick, donut sick. And after a while you look at a donut and you think, Oh, sick. It's a good process of conditioning, but the main. The main force is the mirror neurons that will get you, you can be eating clean within days on our system. You can come in hour after hour after hour, your mirror neurons decide who to copy based on how often they see that person. So if you, if you're in a program where you can be around healthy people over and over again, Constantly, we have people just play it in the background, get on with your life, just play the arc. It's the addiction reset community, play the arc in the background. And they do. And they're mirror neurons just after a while think, Oh, what do these people do? We need to copy them. And it's a very gentle, very gentle, but effective process. It's it's people just love it because they're not fighting. They're not, they're no longer in that competition between their frontal lobe that knows better and the addicted brain cells that are controlling behavior. The addicted brain cells that are mercilessly being stimulated by these addiction companies. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? You are, you are making sense and we are definitely getting to know a lot of things here that are. Fairly not, fairly new to a lot of our listeners here, and I urge everybody here that's listening is to look into Dr. Jones research. Dr. Jones, where can they go if you want to, if they want to understand more about this? Processedfoodaddiction. com Processedfoodaddiction. com and we'll link that down, link it down below here. Dr. Jones, I want to ask you. What obviously you are, you've been going at it for years and the desire that you have to help people here, it's like, I want to know what, what's your biggest fear if, if this goes, because like you said, like 44 percent of, of the population in the United States are obese and it's growing exponentially. You know, you know, year after year and ever since the inception of food additives, processed foods, obesity rates has been going up and it's not, it's, it doesn't seem like it's going down anytime soon. The trajectory there's, there are, you can see like there are, the trajectory is just, it keeps going. It's frightening. What's your biggest fear? Yeah. Um, the, the, my biggest fear is already realized. And as people are suffering, they're spending their entire lives with brain fog and depression and they never get to experience how much fun it is to be a human. I would like to mention, if it's okay with you, is that we offer a training. It's a six month training leading to being a manager in our company and making a small income. Followed by a year of honing your skills. It's a lot of science. It's a lot of fun. No exams, no deadlines, nothing stressful, but people can become equipped to help another person. I'm very sad today because I learned of yet another person who died, died, I mean died at a young age from this. Somebody who just couldn't, couldn't get off the processed foods. And addictions are deadly. And I know the drama of the opiate epidemic, that's very dramatic. You inject the wrong thing, you're dead. This is, um, as lethal, it's as mortal, the mortality rates are there. But it takes years, and it's a very painful deterioration. So, first of all, I would like for everybody to know that if you have gotten An uncurable diagnosis. There's nothing we can do. You'll have to take this medication or you have to have this surgery. Please come and talk to us. We are starting a whole new branch of our company called the remission optimistic community. It's based on, I'm going to plug somebody else's book. It's based on Kelly Turner's radical remission. She's got a video series, radical remission docu series. And it takes a combination of clean food, spirituality, intuition, sometimes supplements, thinking, and release from negative thinking to beat an addiction, some movement of some kind to beat an addiction. But what we realize is that all the things that are there to beat the addiction, we do all those things. They also put these diseases into remission. So Kelly Turner talks a lot about cancer, diabetes, heart disease, gut issues. You know, you might have had irritable bowel or Crohn's for your whole life. You can put that into remission. Depression, anxiety, even dementia. I am in radical recovery from a brain injury three years ago. From a collision. I have full force. I mean, my brain is better than it ever was because last year I discovered coherent breathing It's just there are all these free things coherent breathing and Qigong and socializing That when you put them all together Can put diseases into remission. So if your food addiction has advanced and you now have a diet related disease Don't give up Love that. Why? I want, before we end the conversation here, I believe that this, it is hard to go at it by yourself. If you are a food addict, this is not something that you can battle on your own. You need those mirror neurons. You need to protect your mirror neurons. Why shouldn't they go at it alone? And why should they join a community? Because their mirror neurons will constantly drag them off to doing what the people around them are doing. Once you understand that mirror neurons are the dominant force, that urge to imitate, that longing to belong, is the dominant force in your brain. Then you know you've got to be around people who are healthy. One research, this is in the research, I'm not making this up. Here's a whole book, the book is called Connected. It's by two researchers at Harvard. And they saw that you can catch obesity from your social circle. So you can catch recovery, you can catch control from an online social circle. And once you really get that. All the blame falls away. You know, you're surrounded by people who eat processed foods. Americans are eating 73 percent of their food in processed substances. So your mirror neurons are not going to let you stop eating the processed foods. One researcher, his name is Bahr, B A H R. He went so far as to say, If your social circle is not losing weight, you cannot lose weight. And I just, I know that's true. In my own story, I, when I went into my doctoral program, after eight years in my support group, my addict, my addict said, Oh, you don't have time to go to that support group anymore. I didn't know about mirror neurons. It took 11 years before I fell apart again. When my dad died. And he loved a particular suite. That suite was everywhere for days. And I've, I've lapsed. And I couldn't get back. And I did find an online group. It was a, it wasn't my kind of group, but it was enough to get me sober again. So be kind to yourself when you understand the dynamics, when you understand what was done to your brain without your cooperation, knowledge, approval, consent, be kind to yourself. Say, Oh, all right. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault. This wasn't my fault. The dieting just sets up weight regain. It wakes up the food seeking brain. Now you've got the addicted brain, the stress brain, and the food seeking brain, all hyperactive. This was not your fault. Be nice to yourself. Okay. I am going to be, you know, really listening to this because I really want to understand this and I'm sure that a lot of people out here, you know, I'm, you know, listening to you talk is, you know, this, these are not talked about a lot. These are some, some of these are sensitive information. Because, you know, what food is for, for people and what it means for other people. And if you are somebody that want to learn more about this, you can go, is it foodaddictionreset. com? You can go there if you're, if you want to, if you're interested in the community, if you want to just know about Processed Food Addiction, go to processedfoodaddiction. com, but take the self quiz. Sign up for the free information, get into our system because we do a lot of free workshops. Awesome. And, uh, thank you so much for coming on today, Dr. Joan Finlan. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story being vulnerable here for our listeners. And I am so happy for our listeners here. And I've learned so much from you about food addiction and just how to, you know, your story will resonate to somebody and it did resonate to me. And it has your story and my story has a little, um, parallels there, but I am, I am glad that you, you know, come on and. shared your story here. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you. All right. Dr. Joan, thank you so much for coming on and appreciate you. Bye. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to another great episode here on the ketones and coffee podcast. And we've had such a pleasure of hosting yet another amazing guest here, guys. If you're eager to learn more about the secrets of succeeding on the ketogenic lifestyle, be sure to check out the show notes. As a special treat for our loyal listeners, I'm offering an exclusive opportunity for a free consultation call. Discover how you can achieve success on the ketogenic lifestyle by simply referring to the details provided in the show notes. Take advantage, guys, of this unique chance to enhance your journey to a healthier you. And stay tuned for more captivating episodes. And until next time, guys, keep embracing the power of ketones.