Resolving Addictive and Emotional Overeating Behavior For Weight Loss And Disease Recovery

Introduction to Food Addiction 0:00

Well. Hello everybody. Uh please pay attention. We are all going to learn so much from one of the leading masters of understanding why we know so much about food. But we don't do it right. We don't do it to completion. We don't see the results. And of course I'm talking about my co host for this reverse heart disease. Natural Summit Doctor Joel ferman. Hi Joel, how are you, sir? Doing great. Thank you. I appreciate your interest in this subject. And you know what you're doing here with reaching all these people fantastic. Well, well, you know, people want to do the right thing but they fall into traps and we're going to talk about resolving addictive and emotional overeating behavior for success in weight loss and success and disease recovery. And you know, this has been something you've spoken on and written about your most recent book, um Eat to Live Eat for Life for Life. Thank you.

Eat to Live with such a smash it on the new york times best sellers list. So Eat for Life. Thank you. Goes into this. But you know, people have a hard time. Why do people have such a hard time particularly giving up meat, salt, oil, sugar, What's your take on that? Well, there's a lot of biological mechanisms going going on that makes people makes it difficult people to change their diet. And my um my experience has been when they understand the biological mechanisms of how the brain is working and how it's hard to make that shift. It does make it much easier for them to understand the difficulties and makes it possible to make the shift without knowing what they're feeling fatigued. They're feeling wiped out that they can't possibly stop the cravings when they know what's going on.

They can make the shift and they know that those cravings gonna go away and they know that the fatigue is gonna go away and they know how to deal with it. So we really have to give people at least a fundamental understanding of how food addiction happens and how you resolve it. And we're talking here about multiple mechanisms. The first mechanism is about the speed at which calories enter the blood and the amount of calories carried in the blood at one time. And what I'm saying this, what I'm saying right now is that certain foods enter the bloods incredibly rapidly like oil does or sugar or white flour when sugar, honey, maple syrup and white flour, like a bagel or pizza or italian bread enter the bloodstream as glucose. That surge of glucose in the bloodstream has an effect on the brain.

And one place that affects the brain is the same areas they're stimulated by opiates in the dopamine center of the brain and the chronic overstimulation of this dopamine center makes you become dopamine insensitive and X. And makes you desire to these foods chronically and crave them. So you crave these foods and you can't live

Why Sugar, Flour, and Oil Are Addictive 3:00

without them because you've chronically stimulated your dopamine center in the brain to be dependent on these foods. And what I'm saying right now here is that white flour and bagels and pizza. Our there's no biological difference. Eating candy and sugar, it enters the blood from his glucose and it doesn't really behave like a food. It behaves like a drug on the body. It really is a drug. It's a drug to the brain. It's a drug to our energy mechanisms because our body is trying to convert this high rush of sugar into energy.

But when you bought it, when the mitochondria makes energy, it utilize needs co factors, vitamins, minerals, it spews out reactive oxygen species. It needs phytochemicals to control the expression of the inflammation that's created from the concert from the um making of energy. So so the body shunts the most of this calories into fat storage instead of making energy. And it leaves people chronically lethargic, weaker and not feel like they don't feel like moving, Getting off the couch and at the same time it's accelerating the desire for these foods an addictive manner and people don't recognize.

But oil does the same thing because if you compare the caloric, the speed at which calories absorbed in the bloodstream from olive oil Or or or any other oil at 120 calories a tablespoon compared to an olive or walnut oil compared to a wall nut or sesame oil compared to sesame seeds, you went to the bloodstream, the calories rush into the bloodstream 3-5 minutes. So the combination compared to entering the bloodstream, reading a walnut over three hours. We're talking about one or two calories a minute with a nut versus 30 or 40 calories a minute with the oil and the flood of calories in the bloodstream has an effect on the brain to make to effect open. Mean, so overeating, just eating too much food at one time, particularly when you use oil and sweeteners in your diet is making you a drug like effect on the brain.

So so taking away this drug like effect. So the the primitive brain, the lower brain becomes now a master controller of your decision making because the primitive brain protects the cerebral brain. So now and also the concentrated calories in these sugars, damaged brain cells and make you less creative, less intelligent and somewhat distant Mick. There's a dose dependent relationship between the consumption of commercial baked goods and fast food and depression and most people imbibing in commercial bakers in the morning, they have, you know, cold cereal or bagels or you know, or breads and for lunch they have pizza and pasta and for dinner they have my quality cake diet, you know, more high glycemic carbohydrates usually with animal products which makes it even worse.

But in any case this chronic exposure to this way of eating, it keeps them chronically dependent on this way of eating. So they can't now they're they're chronically dis time, it means they've they're more of an addict. They're driven to eat these foods. They're no longer in control. They can't feel well unless they overeat on these foods less. They feel wiped out and they have these cravings, they're fighting all the time and their primitive brain now is protective of their addiction. The primitive brain, we call it cognitive dissidence become we prevent the body from developing anxiety and fighting within itself.

So you just keep doing that behavior and you don't want to change it because you block out of your mind that smoking is bad for you, so you can continue smoking and not thinking about it. You just keep smoking. You don't even think about how the damage you're doing with every smoke. You know, you just continue how a person could feed their child donuts out of soccer game and not really realizing they're damaging their child, but they can do it because they blocked out of their mind. Even that donuts donuts cause disease, they don't want to think that the primitive brain doesn't even think about it.

They've lost their passion for living their excitement about life. They're kind of dysthymia means they're not depressed, but they're not that excited about living either. They mostly work to make money so they can make spend it on alcohol, fast food restaurants and imbibing in in semi addictive and semi addictive substances. So they're in this rut, they're in this rut and they can't unless they understand how this rut works, they can't get out of it and you need a period of time of abstinence from alcohol and abstinence from cocaine and abstinence from sugar and oil and high and cheeses in these addictive caloric rushes you get from fast food in order for the brain to reset itself and while you're abstaining from smoking and abstaining from alcohol, abstaining from salt and abstaining from oil, you don't feel good, you feel worse. It's called withdrawal and you're shaky and you're weak and you're fatigued all the time and people don't like the way they feel.

That's why they have, you know, addiction recovery centers of people off drugs. So but but when people, it's it's not as bad with food as it is with drugs or even smoking, but you still, people generally do feel wiped out. I've seen people break out in a body rash as a withdrawal symptom that then resolves in a week and then they switch over to a healthy diet. I've seen people develop low grade fevers but the primary symptom people get when they cold turkey all their junk food diet and switch to a healthy diet. The primary withdrawal symptom is fatigue and brain fog fatigue and brain fog are the major symptoms they feel and I discussed with them how the body works and the cycles of digestion from the anabolic phase to the cata bolic phase because they don't understand the digestive cycle and with no understanding of how the body works, they can't really change their diet adequately.

Withdrawal, Toxic Hunger, and Detox 8:40

What I'm saying right now is that the body does most repair and healing and detoxification in the non feeding state. When you're not digesting food. When your body is digesting food it's taking in calories, it's burning part of those calories and it's storing those calories partially as glycogen in the liver and muscle tissue and partially is fat. So you're storing calories and then when you're not eating and you're finished digesting, you're burning up the calories that was stored like you're driving around and you're burning off the gasoline, you just filled in your car. You don't keep filling it with more gasoline, you keep burning off and then you fill it again.

Most people don't feel well when they burn the gasoline, they only feel well when they put the gasoline in the car because when you're burning off the gas, the gasoline, we're talking here about glycogen here, we stored glycogen in the liver and when the body is storing glycogen in the liver is not involved with the conjugating fat soluble toxins and making them water soluble for the kidney to excrete them, delivers, not busy doing the busy delivers detoxification abilities are inhibited by eating and enhanced by not eating.

So when people, when they finish digesting a meal, maybe a few hours later when the body is no longer digesting, then people will start to feel shaky and fatigued when the liver enters detoxification mode called the cata bolic phase of the digestive cycle. But these people eating conventional american food that's not healthy, healthy and builds up a level of toxins in their body like free radicals and like advanced location and products. For example. Now this person feels wasted if they're not eating food they feel fatigued and uncomfortable. Plus the fact that they're craving these foods too. So the minute they start to feel fatigued and uncomfortable and a little stomach cramping a little headache e they want to eat food again, they just started burning up the glycogen from the other meal.

But they gotta eat again because they can't stand the fact that they're actually in a detox phase. So they have to always keep themselves in the anabolic phase or the eating phase. That's just a phase. They gotta be eating all the time. They got to eat every three or four hours they gotta eat, they gotta keep it, they got a snack at night, They got a snack, eat and snack and eat and they have to get bigger and they have to get heavier and they can't lose weight, losing weight makes you uncomfortable because you have to deal with the fatigue and that's where my approach involved with flooding the body with nutrients, reducing the toxic oh sis letting the body feel better when the non feeding state.

Getting people back instinctually with real hunger. Not this fake symptoms, I call toxic hunger that drive people to overeat. So there's some complicated biological mechanisms people first have to understand before we can even get to the next step. You know, it sounds like, you know, it'd be very challenging to get people off these addictive physiology is an addictive habits. What have you found more effective encouraging your patients to make sudden and dramatic change? Or, you know, inch by inch, gradual changes. What what works better?

You know, I have to say that all these doctors that move people in the right directions, doctors, therapists, nutritionists, sure, they're helping people and a lot of people can work and can make those changes using the baby step approach or making partial changes and making more changes. That works for some people. But I have to say for people who are significant food addicts and to enhance the percentage of people that can make the change permanently coming to a place where you actually go in full blast and don't dabble in your addictive substances.

Makes it easier for people to maintain the program long term and enhances the probability they're gonna stick with this, I'm saying, and I'm teaching people and teaching other physicians that you actually enhance the probability of your cohort sticking with the program long term if you get them to totally give up those addictive substances and not dabbling in part time. The alcoholic doesn't do well when they drink on the weekends, it stimulates the desire for more alcohol when the person is that sugar addict, letting them have donuts and bagels makes it difficult for them to resist that the next day.

And they go into these binges and it actually puts them under stress because they're all under emotional stress, which always makes them having to make decisions about whether they should go in or go out whether they should eat healthy or not, and they're in a constant challenge and then they don't see the benefits either. Because sometimes when you do this 80%, you don't see the miraculous results when you're not dropping £3 a week and you're not seeing your blood pressure go back to normal. So they don't get the reinforcement from seeing this, the miraculous benefits their disease process. They're not feeling good about themselves emotionally because they know they haven't lost their addictive attraction for those foods.

They haven't yet mastered the change in taste muscle that occurs when you finally give up those highly palatable over salted and sweetened foods and you still perpetuate cravings and ill feelings in your frequent imbibing on the foods that trigger your addiction, addictive eating. So I'm saying that um in my decades of doing this, I've moved more and more over the last 10 years to encouraging people to jump in with both feet instructing them that The money is in the last five If you can, the money's in the last 5%. Because now we really because because you know I have people that come to me that they come into the retreat here for example, they don't even know what they're coming to.

They they they've shocked by the way they're being, they're fed here because their families and their doctors push them here, you know what I mean? But the fact that they're doing it with 100% and they see the miraculous effects on the body and they have time away from their addictive triggers. It enhances the probability they can stay with this when they leave.

Why Full Commitment Works Best 15:00

And they've learned so much of the intellectual um you know, benefits of living this way. And here's the thing, let me ask you a question why would a person be their own worst enemy and eat in a manner to self destruct their own health and why and if and what the answer is because they're an addict and why shouldn't a person make every day count? And every meal count. And why should why is it seen that eating for excellent health is too radical? Is bypass surgery radical is taking out a brain tumor radical is putting stents, putting stents that's not radical, but eating healthfully is radical.

So I've gotten more, you could say aggressive Over the last 30 years in seeing too many people fail when they still are participating and keeping one toe in the other world and I've had so many people lose weight and gain it back again and yo yo their weight or people who can't, you know, who are just not getting the benefits there and and people with things like diabetes and early stage renal insufficiency with creatinine of 1.3 to 1.7, you know what I mean, who aren't going to see improvement until they do this 100%.

Anyway, with when you have, when you start to see, you know, degenerative illness like that, it's chronic illness. So it gives me the benefit to better predict the outcome to say. And I say to a person, I'll say to them, do you want to like, unleash all miraculous self healing power of the body? Do you want to totally get well and really reach an ideal weight and protect yourself totally and get yourself and have no chance of having a heart attack or you want to still dabble in disease and maybe have it still having at risk.

And you know, or do you want to drop this excess weight and get totally back to normal weight. You just wanna lose half the weight and you'd be surprised more than 90% of the time. People say no, I want it all, I want to have all my weight, go back to normal, I want to not have high blood pressure anymore. I don't want to take medications, I don't wanna be diabetic anymore. My I don't want my psoriasis to go away. I want my asthma completely clear. I want to no longer have headaches and I want to think more clearly more focused and more creatively and you want to achieve all that.

Then I'll say then don't decide what you like to eat and what you feel like eating and what you think you should eat and what you learn, you should eat what you, you know, just eat what I tell you to eat because I can guarantee you that because I'm not expecting you to love it right away because it takes time for your taste preferences to change. You don't know all the recipes yet. Just do it and we'll and we'll re evaluate in a month and well, then we'll test what real nutritional excellence can do.

That's your version of nutritional excellence. What's got you in the problem to begin with because you wouldn't be here sick without losing weight if you were, what you were doing was correct and what you knew was correct. And then when you come back and we'll evaluate this, then I promise you that I will get you to love eating this way if you give it enough time and you learn the recipes and you learn the science and you know, and it inevitably happens. Um So I'm encouraging people to go for it. You know, how did this, what's that?

Nike statement was Mikey staying. Just do it. Just do it. Yeah, that's right. Just do it and and you know what, it may be a little tough at the first week or two, but cold turkey and all the junk people eventually feel better better quicker. Otherwise you prolong the agony three follow up questions because there was there was a lot of incredibly powerful information. Number one, uh somebody says, I got to learn more about this, You've written seven new york times, bestselling books, which one is gonna teach us the most about toxic hunger and food addiction and strategies. The end of dieting.

The end of dieting. I'm saying, you know, the art here is we, you know, I'm even saying that we even want to get the amount of food, the type of food right? And the amount of calories right to we all want to get it right in that range where the person feels satisfied, but they're still losing weight, you know, and they're not yo yoing their weight but being too aggressive trying to lose their weight by going on a, you know, when you're taking a person who's a food addict and they have an addictive relationship with these foods And then if they go on a juice diet or the intermittent fast to 500 calories a day or they go on a water fast with these people's brains and their dopamine um insensitivity, they get more food paranoid after the fast, they get more, they slows the metabolic rate to around but they become more they get. So food paranoid, they gain the weight back and then some and they wanted being heavy than when they started because they went too aggressive in the wrong direction. So I'm advocating a robust amount of good tasting healthy food.

And to get that weight loss to about 2 to £3 a week. And to keep that £2 a week going and not to look for and don't use the extremes unless you need to unless you're already not a food addict at an ideal weight, then you might fast to get rid of asthma or else difficult itis but we're not using water fasting to deal with people who are obese food addicts. We want to get them in that right change of moderate caloric restriction, not extreme caloric restriction because they can maintain it long term and that's the key.

We want the changes they make to the expectation they're gonna make it taste great, improve their taste muscle and maintain this long term. Okay, that was the second question. Your thoughts because I know you have a long tradition in being a speaker regarding water fasting, juice fasting. So it may give a quick drop. But you're concerned it's gonna yo yo back up because you really haven't changed habits. It's a short term tool that doesn't translate to long term success. That's right and that's right and and a few weeks of changes, not enough. Okay, a few weeks of change.

The Eat to Live Retreat Approach 21:00

Do not does not give the brain the chance to re address and to get to their two more dopamine and central nervous system normalcy we know with drug addiction, it's the same way a person coming off cocaine, they need more than three months to increase their chance to decrease their chances of cocaine recidivism. It's the same thing with food if they keep dabbling it so they need some time. Um So we're saying it really pays for a person to do the two and if you just like so you cut back your calories, you um you know, you're doing a juice fast or fast for a couple of weeks or two. You come out of that.

You still have addictive tendencies in the brain. You can't get rid of that addictive mindset and then you slow metabolism down too much. Because we're talking about moderate caloric restriction then slows metabolism down a little bit, which slows the aging process but doesn't slow metabolism down so much. You're not gonna still lose weight, continue to lose weight at the same pace. And you have tantalized the listeners to this segment of the summit by using the term at my retreat. Not everybody knows that they can go to dr furman dot com and learn about your live to eat retreat in san Diego.

Uh Tell us a little bit about, you know, food addiction experience and what you would do for a seriously addicted to oil, Salt, sugar, meat causing disease. How do you approach it at your retreat? Yeah, but by the way it's eat to live not live to eat. I'm glad we're here. They live to eat right. You know, people always say, you know, they say, um well when they walk in, it's live to eat. When they walk out and eat to live, that's right. It's funny because they walk in, they say I'd rather be dead than eat this way.

Just shoot me right now because who wants to, who wants to live if I can't have my food? I really love to eat my cheesecake and my ice cream and my steaks and my my burgers and my pizza, what good is living then if you can't have that food, right? They think that they're, you know, but anyway, so they sign up for the eat to live retreat in san Diego. And tell us that serious food addict that has all these roadblocks the success and probably a whole history of failed attempts to lose weight and improve their health.

What is being done for them and maybe an example that comes to mind out of the thousands you've treated. Yeah, I have so many great examples um that that give you an answer the question, Okay, let me give you one example cause this girl comes in, she she's I'm 19 years old and she weighs £380 and she doesn't want to be here. She's here because her parents said it's either this or it's that and she, you know, it was the best, least of the least damaging choice. You know, going to some kind of so she comes here and she says, I'm not going to eat this way when I go home. My friends, I like sushi, I like pizza and my social life and I'm not going to change the way I'm wasting my time here. And my parents are forcing me to be here and there's no way I'm gonna eat like this, you know?

So I, you know, I'm trying to counsel her and saying, well, um let's give it a try. You know, maybe you'll be surprised how your taste buds, by the way, she couldn't even focus and concentrate on college. She's like, she couldn't even, she couldn't even so we even have to have the nurse do some reading to her because she couldn't even concentrate to read a book. You know, that's her brain was so affected by the age of 19, of all the junk, all the poor diet. But but little by little a few weeks later she started to realize that there were a lot of good tasting foods that we're serving here and with a little time, like the first six weeks, she started to as she lost a lot of weight and she started to see she was feeling better. The brain fog lifted and she was able to concentrate on reading and she started to enjoy things more about the external world.

She was able to hike long distances now and she could enjoy nature walk down to the lake and she was feeling a lot better. Her face was slimming down, she lost £80 in the three months time she was here. But over that three month period she came to love this way of eating and to recognize that she has enthusiasm for having a real life and a full life with a family with Children, with finishing college, with able to be physically active, even though she left here and she still weighed £300.03 80 as she went home, she continued to lose weight and almost a similar rate and it completely invigorated herself about what she could accomplish in life and her expectations for herself.

Whereas before she was just accepted the fact that she was obese sickly and not going to feel well, but just was gonna at least enjoy whatever life she had, it transformed her whole expectations in life. So now she's enthusiastically about life and became such a tremendous supporter and role model for other people who who having trouble who, who want, who are thinking about eating this way or changing their diet to a healthy diet. And I had and I could go on and on and on. You know, a person, you know, they come here sometimes they're here and they don't even want to be here and there so sure they can't do this and they're never gonna be able to stay with doing this until they realize wow this really does taste good and wow my taste buds did change and wow my food preferences did change and wow I do feel so much better and wow, I like being physically active and like enjoying the world around me and their emotional outlook on life changes, they become more positive.

They all say the brain fog lifts and we teach them this idea of not just gratitude but appreciation of the miracle that's in real food, the miracle nutrient content of food and how it relates to the beauty of nature and how we can feel emotions for the outside world and we can even care and feel and emote for other people better. We have more interconnect, we connect with other people better and feel more for them and we feel better about ourselves when the more you're an addict and the more the more you are intimately involved with meeting your own addictive needs.

It clouds the world where your fingertips end and somewhat makes you more narcissistic lee involved with the with the with the obtaining of your addictive substance of choice. You know how a cocaine addict or a heroin addict and steal and cheat and hurt other people and do anything just to get their hands on their their their cocaine food addicts not so severe, but still a lot of food addicts are somewhat severe and it does make their life more narrowly consumed with their, with meeting with imbibing in their addictive substances and when they stop needing and craving those elements, they start to feel that they're becoming more who they were intended to be, they become more of a humanitarian, they become more feeling about themselves and they develop more self esteem, not based on impressing other people and how people see them, but more self esteem, feeling confident in who they are and more self esteem and the ability of not needing the approval of other people and people, a lot of people can't eat so helpfully

Transformation, Mindset, and Final Advice 28:00

when they're looking for other people's approval all the time because they haven't built self esteem for the right reasons. So we're getting to a person and like you're saying in your practice, you use the term mindfulness, right? So we're mindful in the way they chew, we're mindful in the way they speak to other people that they're and they and that you're getting good will because you're a role model now and because you're using creative goodwill for them and you feel good about having the opportunity to benefit another person and you connect with them and you care about people more and you appreciate the world around you more and you like your own life better. So these people when you're asking me that question, we're making this change, the individual undergoing this change sees the benefits to their own life and if they benefit and they get happier as they get healthier and they're not gonna want to give that up.

And so yes, it's a very profound change that happens on a deep emotional level and we facilitate that with teaching with counseling with, as you said, coaching and support with, you know, all these things are facilitated so people can make their change and they then eventually feel this is the way they prefer to live and eat, it's not forced on them. I don't think there's been a more powerful segment of this summit in terms of deep rooted obstacles and pathways to overcome them for success and health and we all know, we talked a little bit more maybe about weight, but weight as a factor in heart disease, Weight as a factor and blood pressure, it all ties into reversing heart disease naturally summit. So thank you for your pioneering work and using, you know, literally food as medicine here and food as a road map to break addiction.

And again, people can go over to dr furman dot com and read about your retreat and uh of course pick up the end of dieting, which will lay all this out because, you know, it's impossible in our 30 35 minutes or somebody to incorporate, you know, the wealth of, you know, uh knowledge that you just shared with us, I'm blown away Really? So thank you so much, Dr furman. Any last words, Any final comments where people can find you or, well, just so excited that people are listening and that they're gonna have an opportunity to reach them. And then my last words are um don't accept being sick, don't accept taking drugs the rest of your life.

Don't underestimate the healing powers of the human body when you feed it optimally. So, you know, go for it. Great, thank you so much and thank you everybody for listening.