In his latest book, Judson A. Brewer, psychiatrist and associate professor at Brown University, shares everything he’s learned over the past two decades of studying habit change and shows readers how to abandon unhealthy eating habits while creating better ones. Brewer joins us to discuss his book, The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop.
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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, Chilean musician, Ana Tijoux, joins me for a listening party for her latest album, Vida. We'll talk about the new series, Expats, with its director, Lulu Wang, and we'll learn about the Tenement Museum's newest exhibit. It is its first to feature the lives of a Black family. That is the plan. Let's get this started with our Mental Health Monday segment of the week.
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We continue our series, Mental Health Mondays, with a conversation about why we eat when we're not hungry. Neuroscientist, Dr. Judson Brewer's forthcoming book applies his two decades of research about how our brains form patterns, habits, and even addictions. The book, The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry and How to Stop, shows how convenience, food engineering, and emotions create the conditions for poor eating habits. Our current culture capitalizes on wants versus needs, and our survival wiring that was useful during cave-people times isn't as useful today.
He suggests that there are a few things you can do to get in touch with true hunger, including his method of mapping your habit loops and interrupting your habit loops with awareness. The book is out on Tuesday, January 30th. He joins us today with a preview. He's an addiction psychiatrist, who is a director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center, and an associate professor and behavioral and social scientist at Brown University. He's also the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Unwinding Anxiety. Dr. Judd, welcome.
Dr. Judson Brewer: Thanks for having me.
Alison Stewart: Listeners, what is a behavior that leads you to eat? When I say mindful eating, what does that mean to you? How do you know when you're actually hungry versus wanting to eat? How did you break yourself of habits that don't serve you? Our phone lines are open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You may join us on air and be part of the conversation that way, or you can always text to us at that number if you prefer. We also will let you know you can send us a DM via Instagram if you'd like to remain anonymous. That's @AllOfItWNYC.
Please note Dr. Judd joining us to share his research but what you hear today is not a substitute for medical or mental healthcare. If this segment is triggering for you, please note that the phone number for the National Eating Disorders Association is 1-800-931-2237. Just wanted to make sure if people needed that, that number's available to them. Dr. Judd, let's start with the brain. Our brain is made up of how you describe it, an old brain part and a new brain part. How does each function and describe where each part is?
Dr. Judson Brewer: Yes. I'd love to say that the brain is that simple, but I just want to highlight this is a heuristic for how the brain works as compared to the architecture itself. The way that it's set up for helping us, you've mentioned it earlier where we've got this survival brain, let's call them networks that are there to help us basically learn where food is so that we can remember to go back and find it in the future. This was back before there were refrigerators or food delivery or 24-hour diners. You can imagine our ancient ancestors had to find food.
When they found food, when they ate the food, their stomach sent this dopamine signal to their brain that says, "Remember what you ate and where you found it." This is the basis for what's now described in modern day as positive reinforcement. You trigger a behavior and a result, all you need to form any habit. The habit of going and remembering where the food is and finding it again is see food, eat the food, and then dopamine says, "Hey, remember where this is." From a neuroscience standpoint, we think of this as a reward. That's the basic premise.
It's also set up for negative reinforcement, meaning if we go out looking for food, we see the tiger, it runs after us, see the tiger, trigger, behavior is to run away, and then the reward is that we don't become the tiger's lunch.
That positive and negative reinforcement system is set up. It's evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the C-slug. Eric Kendell got the Nobel Prize back in 2000 showing that. Very, very well-known process that is still at play today.
Alison Stewart: Can you explain to us how a habit forms?
Dr. Judson Brewer: In this sense, think of this as a habit is something that we do automatically. Most habits are actually very, very helpful for us. Imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn everything from walking to putting on your clothes to making breakfast. We'd all be exhausted before we even had the coffee made because we'd have to be learning all of these things. I think of habits as set and forget. You set up the habit and you forget about the details. The way the habit is formed is through that basic positive and negative reinforcement process.
If something is rewarding, like, "Oh, here's some food," or, "Ooh, the way I made coffee this morning was good," we lay down that memory because our brain says, "Hey, remember what you did." The next time we're queued, "Oh, it's morning," there's the trigger, the behavior is we make coffee, and then the result or the reward is that we get that good-tasting coffee again. We can set habits up pretty quickly. We can learn those very, very quickly.
Alison Stewart: This text that we got just feeds right into that, no pun intended. It says, "I find myself making excuses to stay up late, laundry, et cetera, but then wind up 'rewarding myself' by snacking and overeating."
Dr. Judson Brewer: This is where it gets really interesting because, in modern day, we have learned to associate food not with eating when we need to eat, not when we're hungry, but with all sorts of other things. We soothe ourselves with food. This is where stress eating comes in. This is where the whole term comfort food comes in. That works through this same mechanism, negative reinforcement. Let's say that we feel stressed out and there's the trigger. We eat some candy or something soothing, some ice cream, some chocolate. There's the behavior. Then we avoid that unpleasant feeling where we feel a little bit better because hey, chocolate tastes good.
Then we learn, "Hey, when you're stressed out, you should eat some chocolate." The same thing can be true using the example of the text of at night, maybe we go to relax and we watch television or streaming show or a movie and, "Hey, maybe I'll have a little bit of food. I'm not even hungry, but some popcorn or whatever," because we've learned to associate food with relaxation. Then suddenly, that becomes our new habit where we're like, "Oh, well, if I'm going to watch a show, I need to have some food."
This is so prevalent now that there's a scientific term that's used to describe this. It's called hedonic hunger, which is a misnomer because we're not actually hungry, but it means that we're eating because of emotion, not because of actual physiologic hunger. The contrast to that is homeostatic hunger, which is the normal mechanism that says, "Hey, you're not in balance. You need to get back to your baseline. Eat some food."
Alison Stewart: I'd love for you to explain the acronym HALT and how HALT factors into the conversation we're having today about why we eat.
Dr. Judson Brewer: I learned this back in residency when I was learning to work with people who were struggling with addictions. HALT stands for hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I learned that in the setting where people are more vulnerable to relapse, if somebody is trying to not do something, whether it's avoid alcohol or cocaine or heroin or some other drug, or even cigarettes, they're going to be more vulnerable to relapse when they're hungry, when they're angry, when they're lonely, when they're tired.
We can think of this acronym as being a marker for what's happening in our brain where the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in cognitive control, let's say, it's associated with cognitive control, it's the youngest and the weakest part of the brain as compared to these older, stronger habitual mechanisms. When we get hungry, angry, lonely, tired, especially when-- there's a lot of evidence showing that when we get stressed or anxious, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. We can't actually rely on willpower or cognitive control to help us control our urges.
Alison Stewart: My guest is Dr. Judson Brewer. The name of his forthcoming book is The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry and How to Stop. It will be out January 30th. Listeners, we'd like to invite you into this conversation. What is a behavior that leads you to eat? When I say mindful eating, what does that mean to you, if anything? How do you know when you're actually hungry versus wanting to eat? Did you break yourself of a habit or any habits that don't serve you any longer?
Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air. You can also text to us at that number. If you'd like to remain anonymous, you can send us a DM @AllOfItWNYC via Instagram, or maybe you have a question for Dr. Judd about his research. Let's talk to Alicia, who is calling in from Queens. Hi Alicia, you're on the air. Thank you for calling in.
Alicia: Thank you so much for having me.
Alison Stewart: Tell us about your story.
Alicia: The one thing that helped me learn to eat more intuitively and listen to the signals my body was giving me was quitting dieting. I have been on the dieting yo-yo mostly my entire life since I was a teenager and a high school athlete. The dieting made me think about food constantly. If it was counting my calories or if I was doing a color-coded system via an app or if I was counting macros, when I was doing CrossFit. I just became so confused about when it was okay to eat, and when it was not. I eventually just decided I was going to give all that up and just try listening to myself.
Definitely using mindfulness practices as well, but also not punishing myself if I do eat that piece of stress chocolate as well. I have found I've created a much more healthy relationship with food. I don't think about it all the time. I keep healthier food in my house. I'm able to discern what I want to eat based on what my body needs. Thank you so much for having me on the show, and thank you for the segment.
Alison Stewart: I have two follow-up questions if you don't mind. One, what was it like that first week, Alicia, when you made this choice?
Alicia: Confusing and weird, I would say. You have all the right food in the house, and then you're like, "Well, what do I do with this? Where's my snack? I'm hungry. I'm watching a TV show," as you're just talking about. Again, learning to listen to my body, and I'm like, "Okay, I feel a hunger, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I'm going to eat. I'm not going to put it off. I'm not going to worry about what time it is. I'm just going to eat now when I'm hungry." That has led me to not have to snack as much or not have to turn to the stress chocolate as often.
Alison Stewart: Alicia, thank you so much for calling and letting me ask you a question. Dr. Judd, did you want to respond to what you heard from Alicia?
Dr. Judson Brewer: I'd be happy to. Alicia, I'm so glad you bring forward this idea about listening to our bodies because it is so foreign to so many of us. We are so used to being very divorced from our bodies. Becoming reacquainted and re-familiarized and even reuniting with our body is really important. The way I think of this is our thinking brain is much weaker than our feeling body so that the strength and the wisdom comes from listening to our bodies.
Intuitive eating it's been around for I think, a couple of decades now. My lab has been able to actually study some of the mechanisms underlying what it's like when we just do this radical thing and pay attention and listen to our bodies. We published a study a couple of years ago, where we could actually have people pay attention as they ate, and we could determine how quickly the reward value in their brain changes from overeating to eating the right amount or not eating junk food or things like that. It turns out it only takes 10 or 15 times of somebody really paying attention as they overeat, for example, for that reward value to drop below zero.
The good news is, we've got all the tools that we need. It's about bringing awareness and listening to our bodies. Also, it doesn't take that much time, which is good. If you've been overeating for 30 years, or we've been yo-yo dieting forever, we can actually step off that train, and onto something that's going to not only be healthier for us, because we're listening to our bodies, but much kinder.
You also I think mentioned this bit around how we judge ourselves, we beat ourselves up. Whenever we set food rules, then we set up the opportunity to put ourselves in food jail for violating our own rules. All of this is just based on thinking, often not based on listening to our own bodies. Here, we can actually throw away the key because we don't need that jail anymore when we truly listen to our bodies, and it's a much kinder way to go through life.
Alison Stewart: In The Hunger Habit, you explain the reasons why people snack and you talked about someone named Jackie, a grad student who-- and in the way you describe it, she pounds carrots when she's stressed. The way she eats them is as important as them being carrots because you think, "Oh, what's wrong with eating the carrots?" She's just shoving them in her face. Describe for us or explain to us why the method of eating in that situation is as important as what she's eating.
Dr. Judson Brewer: Right. I think of this as mindless eating and so she would eat carrots. She was struggling with I think it was statistics in the class she was taking at Yale and was really stressed out. She had learned that she needed to eat something crunchy, or she thought she needed to eat something crunchy as a way to help her stress eat as she was studying for statistics.
With carrots, they might help her eyesight but they're not going to help her study for statistics. Here she learned that she was just mindlessly as she put it, pounding those carrots. Then when she started paying attention to the process itself, she could ask, "What do I actually need," which is to work with the stress that was coming with the statistics studying as compared to what she was just eating what she wanted, which was this habit of eating carrots.
Alison Stewart: My guest is Dr. Judson Brewer. The name of the book is The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop. We'll take some of your calls and your text and we'll have more with Dr. Judd after a quick break. This is All Of It.
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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are having another edition of Mental Health Mondays. Our guest is Dr. Judson Brewer. The name of his forthcoming book, The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop. Dr. Judd has been a longtime researcher around the issues of habit and addiction. From Instagram, Dr. Judd says, "Could Dr. Judd speak about ultra-processed foods and how these added ingredients in lots of common foods have been designed to make people eat more messing with our intuitive feelings about hunger and fullness?"
Dr. Judson Brewer: I'd be happy to. There have been articles and even books written about this entire topic. I encourage people to read, for example, Michael Moss's work on this. I think he published his New York Times Magazine and article and then book shortly thereafter, back about 10 years ago. The short story here is that I think I could sum it up with there was an Onion headline, my favorite peer-reviewed journal, The Onion. The satirical Journal said, "Doritos celebrates its one millionth ingredient."
I think that really sums up what these food engineers dedicate their lives to do, which is to develop things like the bliss point, vanishing caloric density, all of these terms that fool our bodies into wanting more. Somebody put it beautifully the other day where they said-- I said, "What's it tastes like?" They said, "Well, it tastes like more." Because that's what they are engineering us to do with these ultra-processed food, which is not to listen to our bodies, not to pay attention to what things taste like, but to consume as much and as quickly
as possible.
Alison Stewart: What's the first step to recognizing true hunger from some hunger that's been induced by something other than needing nutrition?
Dr. Judson Brewer: It's a great question. I like to have people pause and ask the question, why am I eating? Just asking that question can help them drop into their body and ask, "Ah, am I actually hungry right now? Why am I reaching for this food? Am I stressed? Am I lonely? Am I tired? Am I bored or is my stomach rumbling saying, 'Hey, it's been a while?'"
Alison Stewart: This might help out Jean, who's calling in from Kew Gardens. Hi, Jean, thank you so much for calling in.
Jean: Thanks for having me. I got pregnant, and the moment I came back from the hospital with my baby, I tripled my calories for breastfeeding. My husband was both surprised and terrified at the same time seeing me sit down and eat mountains of food. It was great for breastfeeding, but it's been over a year and I stopped breastfeeding, but I cannot stop these cravings and hunger. My body changed. I don't know how to shift back. When I don't eat at night, I'll try things like brushing my teeth so I don't want to eat again my teeth are brushed. I lie down in my bed, and I just feel hungry. I don't know what to do.
Alison Stewart: Yes. First few steps.
Dr. Judson Brewer: Yes, that's a great question. One, I like how you're exploring like, "Oh, if I brush my teeth, that might be a way to help break the habit." I think here-- Let me ask you this. When you eat dinner, do you feel full at the end of dinner?
Alison Stewart: Hang a second. We will make sure that your line is up so you can answer. Jean, go ahead.
Jean: I'm here. Am I full after dinner?
Dr. Judson Brewer: Yes.
Jean: This is mom life one-on-one. I eat my kid's scraps. I don't know if I'm really full. I'm just rushing from thing to thing because I'm trying to get my kids to bath, then to get to bed.
Dr. Judson Brewer: I think that you're highlighting something really important. One, just for all the moms out there, I'm sure they can feel your pain in terms of there's no great, "Hey, here's how suddenly to make my life easy for new mothers." I just want to say I'm sure a lot of folks are nodding their heads right now and highlight how tough it can be when you just don't feel like you have time. When there isn't time, this is the time to be--
When you're in the middle of a process, so when you've got your kid's scraps, for example, just pausing and getting curious, like, "Oh, am I actually hungry or am I mopping up the plate right now?" Curiosity can go a long way, not necessarily to make you have to do one more thing because you might not have time for that, but just to start to bring in this question like, "Oh, am I actually eating out of hunger or is this habit or something else?" That can go a long way for helping you just start to identify where you're eating when you're not hungry versus when you're truly hungry.
Alison Stewart: Why does the willpower argument-- if you just had willpower, you'd be able to handle your eating. What's wrong with that argument? That has been the argument since the beginning of time.
Dr. Judson Brewer: Yes, I was going to say not that we're going to solve these existential questions right now. I'll just put it lightly and to say, willpower is more myth than muscle. From a neuroscience perspective, when you look at the equations of behavior change, they don't actually include a variable for willpower at all. What they do include is a variable for awareness. The way that works is that when we pay attention when we eat something, for example, it's going to give us a reward value and it's going to say, "Hey, that was good. Do it again," or, "Hey, that wasn't so good. Don't do that."
For example, when we've done these studies with people overeating, we have them pay attention, and very quickly, I said earlier, 10 to 15 times, that reward value drops below zero. What that highlights is willpower is more myth than muscle. It's not about willpower. It's about paying attention and seeing that something is not rewarding. That's how we actually tap into the power of our brain to become-- Well, I think of this as becoming disenchanted with an old habit.
For example, when we truly overeat and we feel bloated and terrible and we can't sleep at night, all of those things can-- our body signal is saying, "Hey, are you sure you want to do this? This is not so rewarding." It's not, "Hey, you shouldn't do that again." That doesn't actually help us change behavior. It just gives us a story we tell ourselves so we can beat ourselves up later and say, "Oh, you need more willpower." The problem is that you can't go buy willpower at the store. It may be more myth than muscle. What we can do instead is leverage the strength of our brain, which is where awareness comes in.
We all have awareness. We have the ability to foster that awareness through things like curiosity. That's where real behavior change happens.
Alison Stewart: We're getting a lot of texts and questions about, is there a relationship between ADHD and overeating.
Dr. Judson Brewer: It's a good question. I have not actually seen any specific studies on that, so I can't comment scientifically. I'm not sure that, clinically-- Certainly, I've had a lot of patients with ADHD, but that has not necessarily been directly related to overeating. Certainly, somebody could have ADHD and they could overeat. Often we associate those two, but I don't know of any specific causal connections between them.
Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mercedes from Forest Hills. Hi, Mercedes. Thank you for calling in.
Mercedes: Hi, Allison. Big fan.
Alison Stewart: Thanks.
Mercedes: I just wanted to say that I'm a bit of a foodie. I find that cooking and especially cooking from scratch is a really good way to build a lot of good habits, because if you're sitting there in the morning thinking about what you're going to make for lunch, what you're going to make for dinner, it displaces that whole impulse to go snack out of your head.
You're still thinking about food, but you're thinking about what you're going to make later that's going to be healthy, that's going to feed you right.
Also, because you're cooking from scratch, you're avoiding all the extra salt and sugar and fat, all the additives that they put into food to make it travel better, which now since I've been cooking for myself-- I used to be able to eat a whole tray of Andaman cinnamon rolls in one sitting. Now, I can't, because I can taste the additives that they put in there and all that extra sugar. It just doesn't taste right to me. It does help you build some better habits and it helps you-- Also, if I bake a cake, I'm not going to sit there and eat the whole thing in one sitting. I put a lot of effort into baking this thing, I am going to eat it mindfully.
Alison Stewart: Mercedes, thank you for calling. How does food preparation-- how our food gets to us factor into this?
Dr. Judson Brewer: Mercedes is highlighting a couple of things. In The Hunger Habit, I talk about these as step two and step three of this three-step methodology. Step two, she's highlighting how when we really pay attention to something that's manufactured to get us to crave it, we can taste those additives. We can taste how they're sickly sweet. I write in the book about how I used to be addicted to gummy worms and how they basically-- When I really paid attention, they tasted like petroleum. That was the best way I could describe it.
Our bodies have these natural mechanisms to say, "Hey, this really isn't that great." That's where we start to become disenchanted with these old habits. Mercedes is also highlighting something really important. We haven't been able to engineer anything yet. I wouldn't count on us as being able to do this to beat millions of years of evolution of food basically. It's hard to beat natural whole-food types of foods.
She's also highlighting how good it tastes and feels when we're eating non-processed foods. Our bodies are saying, "Thank you. This is what I need." They're giving us that reward signal by saying, "This not only tastes good, but we don't get the sugar rush and crash. We have sustained energy," and things like that. I'll just add one other piece to that, which is, when we put all that love into cooking, [laughs] it's like we don't necessarily need to consume it quickly, because our body isn't saying, "Hey, eat more. Eat more. Eat more."
It's saying, "Wow, this was delicious. Let's enjoy this." Let's pay attention as we eat.
Alison Stewart: We're getting a lot of different calls, different variations of a theme, which is, what about cultural triggers? Whether it is a grandparent who says, "Please eat this. It ma1kes me happy when you eat, to people who are members of the clean plate club or come from a place where there's food scarcity and they've developed the habit, I guess, of just trying to accumulate as much as possible." How can we help or how can our brains help us wade through these cultural waters?
Dr. Judson Brewer: I'm glad you bring that forward. There are so many different cultural things that we've learned whether it's as a kid or even as an adult. Here, I would say the same principle applies, which is, if we can pay attention, we can then be able to pause and ask, "Am I eating because this is a sign of love to my grandparent [laughs]?" Because they're like, "Oh, if you don't eat this, you don't love me." We can step back and show them and we can-- I think of this as meeting our needs. Like, "Do I need to eat right now or am I full?" as compared to feeding our wants.
That actually helps us work with any of these types of cultural things where we've associated eating with X. On top of that, we can then go to our grandparents and give them a big hug [laughs]. That's a zero-calorie way to show our love.
Alison Stewart: It sounds, please, correct me if I'm wrong, that we associate eating with things. Eating should just be eating. Maybe not associated with good times or bad times or happy times or sad times or just eating should happen when your body needs food.
Dr. Judson Brewer: In general, yes. That's how our bodies have evolved. I would say culturally, again, it goes back to the culture, how many meals do we spend with other people as connecting events, as celebrations, as consolations, et cetera? It's not that we need to completely divorce the food from people, but we can simply start bringing awareness in as we're having that conversation, pay attention as we eat, and then pay attention to the conversation, for example.
Alison Stewart: I'm going to finish up with this question from Instagram because I think it-- excuse me, from Twitter, because I think it really gets to a lot that's in your book and a lot of what everybody on the phone is talking about. "COVID was eat-from-home and can't cancel the habit of mulching all day. How can I regain my natural hunger? How much time does it take to rewire? A week, 22 days, rest of my natural life?"
Dr. Judson Brewer: [laughs]
Alison Stewart: What are some of the first steps to break a habit and how long does it take?
Dr. Judson Brewer: It's a great question. The steps really begin with awareness, and they continue with awareness and they end with awareness. I'll also add in there kindness. Kindness and awareness are our best friends, and they go together. If we're constantly beating ourselves up, we're actually spending a lot of energy and taking it away from bringing that curiosity in to help us pay attention. Awareness, awareness, awareness takes us a long way. There is no formula for changing how quickly we eat. What we found in one of our studies, as I mentioned earlier, is that process can change pretty quickly.
10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention as they overeat, that reward value drops below zero and they start to shift that behavior. It can happen pretty quickly. I would say, just be careful about things that you read on the internet. There will be plenty of people that will say definitively how long it takes to break or to make a habit. Virtually, none of that is based on research.
Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, is there any myth you'd like to take on? Anything from your book that you'd like people to know about? [crosstalk]
Dr. Judson Brewer: I think the biggest myth that we've covered is around willpower. A lot of people feel like they just need more willpower. I just want to say, definitively, it's not your fault. This isn't about something being wrong with you. This is really about just not knowing how your brain works and then learning how to work with your brain. This includes bringing in a lot of kindness through the process.
Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry and How to Stop. It is out January 30th. My guest has been Dr. Judson Brewer. Thanks to everybody who called in and shared and texted and sent us DMs. Dr. Judd, thank you so much for being with us.
Dr. Judson Brewer: My pleasure.
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