The Trouble with Thinking Outside the Box & What Hunger is Really Telling You

Ever feel your phone buzz in your pocket—only to check and find nothing there? It feels completely real, and it happens to just about everyone. But it’s not your phone—it’s your brain playing a trick on you. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rewired-the-psychology-technology/201305/phantom-pocket-vibration-syndrome We’re constantly told that creativity comes from “thinking outside the box.” But what if that idea is actually holding you back? It turns out that constraints—rules, limits, and boundaries—often lead to better, more innovative results. David Epstein, bestselling author and former Sports Illustrated senior writer, explains why. David is author of the book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better (https://amzn.to/48c69lO). He reveals how structure can sharpen thinking, improve performance, and lead to better outcomes than unlimited freedom ever could. Hunger feels simple—you’re hungry, you eat. But it’s not that straightforward. There are different kinds of hunger and they don’t all come from physical need. Dr. Jason Fung, expert in body weight and metabolism is author of The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body’s Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food (https://amzn.to/4vRAaBr). He explains how hunger actually works, why it can drive overeating, and how understanding it can help you take better control of what—and how much you eat —and still feel satisfied. If a first date doesn’t go great, it’s easy to assume there’s no point in trying again. But unless it was truly awful, passing on a second date might be a mistake. That second date might go better than you expect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16866745/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AQUA TRU: Take the guesswork out of pure, great-tasting water. Head to https://AquaTru.com now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back. POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 RULA: This Mental Health Awareness Month, don’t just think about your mental health - actually take the step to take care of it. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your everyday with luxury you will actual use! Go to ⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES : We love the Planet Visionaries podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you are listening to this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:45Mike Carruthers?

  Today, on Something You Should Know, why you sometimes think your phone is buzzing when it isn't. Then, how many times have you been told to "think outside the box"? No boundaries, no limits. That may be bad advice.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Boundaries and limitations force us to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration. We think we want more freedom, but in fact, that leads us to just do basically the same old thing, and in many cases, it isn't good for our work or our well-being.

• 2:15Mike Carruthers?

  Also, if the first date wasn't great, should you try a second date? Probably. And understanding why we eat and overeat. Sometimes, it's just conditioning.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  For example, like it's breakfast time, you eat. It's lunchtime, you eat. It's snack time, you eat. You go to a sporting event, you eat. But it's not the physical hunger, it's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise.

• 2:39Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like a thousand dollars to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away a million dollars in Shop Cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win a thousand dollars in Shop Cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place.

• 3:22Mike Carruthers?

  So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the one million dollar Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply.

• 4:04Mike Carruthers?

  Official rules available at shop.com.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Hi and welcome. I want to start by addressing something that comes up fairly frequently in the comments in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, where someone will get upset and accuse me of ripping off another podcast, Stuff You Should Know, in coming up with the name for this podcast, Something You Should Know. And that's not the way it happened. Something You Should Know was a radio show that I hosted for years and years on hundreds of radio stations around the country. And it started long before podcasting was even a word or a thing. And so, we just evolved the radio show into a podcast.

• 5:05Mike Carruthers?

  And at the time, we didn't even know about Stuff You Should Know. So, they're two very different podcasts. Stuff You Should Know is a wonderful podcast, does very well, but we didn't rip off the name. First up today, have you ever felt your phone buzz, only to check it and realize, "Nobody called, nobody texted, nothing." It's often called phantom vibration syndrome, and it's not about your phone, it's about your brain. Researchers have found it's especially common in people who are highly connected to their devices, like heavy texters, or people who feel the need to respond quickly. In other words, your brain gets so used to expecting a notification that it starts predicting

• 5:49Mike Carruthers?

  one, and occasionally gets it wrong. Earlier, research did link it to anxiety, especially social or relationship anxiety, but newer studies suggest it's more about habit and anticipation than it is about insecurity. It's a bit like hearing your name in a noisy room when no one actually said it. Your brain is constantly scanning for important signals, and sometimes it just jumps the gun. The interesting part is that it's usually harmless, but frequent phantom buzzing has been linked to higher stress levels and even burnout. Basically, a sign your brain may be a little too tuned in. And that is something you should know.

• 6:35Mike Carruthers?

  You know, we're always told to think outside the box, break the rules, keep your options open. The more freedom you have, the better your ideas will be. Well, but what if that's exactly backwards? What if having too many choices actually makes it harder to think, harder to decide, and harder to create anything useful? And what if the real breakthroughs, the ideas that actually work, often come from working within limits, not escaping them? It turns out constraints aren't just something to overcome. They can be a powerful advantage. My guest argues that the right boundaries can boost creativity,

• 7:18Mike Carruthers?

  sharpen your focus, and lead to better outcomes than unlimited freedom ever could. David Epstein is a bestselling author and former senior writer for Sports Illustrated. His latest book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Hey, David, welcome.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here.

• 7:38Mike Carruthers?

  So the idea that constraints are a good thing sort of flies in the face of what many of us have come to believe, which is freedom is better. Constraints are a bad thing. We should be able to think and do without constraints. So why are constraints a good idea?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Boundaries and limitations force us to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration in a way that nothing else does. We think we want more freedom in our personal and professional lives, but in fact, that leads us to just do basically the same old thing and in many cases, isn't good for our work or our well-being.

• 8:20Mike Carruthers?

  So give me a couple of examples of how constraints are better and that lack of constraints is not better.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  If we look at things like creativity, for example, there was a recent international survey by psychologists looking at known creativity myths. So these are things that we know from psychological research are not true. And the most popular one was that people are most creative when they are most free. And in fact, psychologists have something called the green eggs and ham effect, which is named for Dr. Seuss, who famously wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And that forced him to experiment with rhythm in a way that nobody else ever had. And the reason psychologists call it the green eggs and ham effect is not so much because they care about Dr. Seuss,

• 9:13Speaker 01

  but because our brains, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, "You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly." And so if we are given full freedom, we only go down what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance, meaning we will only do things that come easily, basically, meaning solutions we've seen before. So in many cases, in order to be creative, you actually have to have constraints. Otherwise, you'll just go down that path of least resistance and do the same things that you've always done. So that's a case where if we want to be more creative in our work and our lives, we usually, the quickest thing to do is to block,

• 9:57Speaker 01

  use what's called a preclude constraint, preclude the previous solution. You block the solution that you're familiar with. And that drives creativity.

• 10:06Mike Carruthers?

  Well, when you think about it, I mean, we kind of crave those constraints because if you're supposed to do something and you have no limits, well, you don't even, where would you even start? Like, I crave constraints because at least I know what the rules are.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I profiled this company called General Magic that basically saw the future. You know, they were building the iPhone 20 years early, basically. I mean, they really saw the future. And they had everything, talent, resources. But because they had so much, they could do anything. And so they did do anything. They didn't really define the problem they were solving, who their customer was, what the boundaries were. So when I would interview people who worked there, they'd say, "We just had so much trouble figuring out what not to do." An emblematic interview was with an engineer there, a guy named Steve Perlman. So this is again, they were making a personal communicator, basically, starting in the late eighties.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And he had to write the calendar app for the communicator. And he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096. He checks it in, thinks he's done. And then someone comes to him from another team and says, "Hey, somebody might write historical applications. You have to make it go farther back than that." So he writes it to go from year one. And then he thinks he's done. And then another team comes to him and says, "Why are you starting with that arbitrary religious context? Make it go back all the way to the beginning of astronomical time." So he writes it to go from the beginning of the universe into the future. And if he had stuck with 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code. And instead, it dragged on for months. And this was just emblematic, where there were no defined boundaries early in the project. And so everything just grew.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Everybody that had a cool idea, they just did it. And the project ended up becoming a disaster. I mean, it was the first so-called concept IPO. Goldman Sachs took the company public before they had a product, just based on the idea, because it was so visionary. And it turned into an absolute disaster, because they did not have helpful boundaries in place.

• 12:13Mike Carruthers?

  And yet, we have all heard the phrase, which is the opposite of the title of your book, that you need to think outside the box. And that's kind of become a very dated phrase now, because it's been so overused. Still, we're told that you've got to think differently. You've got to come up with something no one's ever done before. You've got to eliminate the constraints and just let yourself run wild.

• 12:39Mike Carruthers?

  And I've always thought, well, I don't get that because of what you just said, that then people will go nuts and nothing ever happens.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  And it's interesting, I mean, when you mentioned outside the box, obviously I'm playing on that cliche, the quickest way to get people to think in a new and unusual way is to box them in, not to say, "Go think outside of," you know, "Just go be creative," is to take something away. So, for example, I've spent a lot of time interviewing people at NASA for various projects, and they had a mission, one's called LCROSS, it's an acronym, obviously, but the team for this mission ended up with half the time and half the budget that they expected to have. And so first they complained a bunch, and then they said, "Hey, if we were still going to get this done, how would we do it?" And that led them to start repurposing

• 13:33Speaker 01

  other technologies. They took imaging equipment from Army tanks and engine temperature sensors, like, right out of NASCAR, and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And they just never would have bothered to do those kinds of things if they weren't forced. So you might say, "Well, that's outside the box thinking," but really it comes from these limitations that disallowed the tools that they were used to. So it's actually, being blocked in productive ways is the quickest way to make people creative or do what, you know, we often refer to as out-of-the-box thinking.

• 14:08Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, if you can do anything with anything, then you end up doing nothing. But if, but like you say, if you constrain people and say, "You need to solve this problem," and here it's, I remember the old TV show MacGyver, where he used to be-

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 14:25Mike Carruthers?

  He used to have to use bubble gum and a twig to make, you know, the car start. And somehow he'd figure it out, because that's all he had to do.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Or people often think of the, I mean, I think he made defibrillators out of like candlesticks, a microphone and a placemat once or something. But people think of that scene from Apollo 13, you know, where they have to do the square peg in the round hole trick. And it's just dump out all the stuff and here's what we have to use. And they figure it out. And that is so similar to this body of research that shows that if you pick different pieces and force people to create something, they get incredibly creative. I will say, in that body of research, there is certainly such a thing as too much constraint. So there are all these studies where, say, there's

• 15:17Speaker 01

  a set of 100 pieces that people can use to make some kind of invention. And if they're just left up to their own devices, they don't do very creative things. But if they're told, you have to, instead of choosing from these 100, you have to use these 20, and you have to use all of them. And you have to build a piece of furniture or something like that. They become much more creative. But if they're told, you have to use these pieces and you have to make a chair. So they're told the specific things they have to use and the exact thing they have to make, then they will often become less creative. So I think if you're prescribing what someone has to do and the way they have to do it. So if there's, if you have a constraint and you say, is there still room for me to surprise myself? And if the answer is no, then I think it's gone too far.

• 16:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. If your constraints are too constrained, then you're, you can't move.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has to be very constrained, though. You basically have to be prescribing pretty, you can get there. And maybe people have experience with bosses who not only tell them what to do, but also all the ways they have to do it. But people continue becoming more creative until they really, really don't have much wiggle room left. Like, much, they thrive with much more constraint than I think they would guess, basically.

• 16:33Mike Carruthers?

  I'm wondering what, besides creativity, this topic of constraint applies to. I'm going to ask you about that next.

• 16:43Speaker 04

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• 17:11Speaker 05

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• 17:40Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about constraints and how they make us better. And my guest is David Epstein, author of the book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. So David, mostly we've been talking about creativity as it relates to constraints, but what else does this apply to? Having constraints makes us better?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  There's a lot about productivity and personal well-being and ability to focus. So if we think about a few of those buckets, let's say there's one organization I write about where they did this exercise where they decided to make all of their current commitments visual. So they put all of their current projects on Post-it notes on a wall. And immediately by virtue of doing that, they realized that they had way too much stuff in progress. There was no way they could finish all the stuff they were doing, no matter what timeline they were on. And so it immediately caused them to prioritize really ruthlessly. And that happens, that's the same, it's a really good exercise for

• 18:45Speaker 01

  individuals to make all of your current commitments visible. And then maybe even ask, if I had to cut one of these out in the next 90 days, what would it be? Because people, we have a hardwired bias that psychologists call subtractive neglect bias, which means we are hardwired to overlook solutions that involve taking things away. So we always add more commitments, more meetings, more features, whatever it is. And so it's really useful to do these sort of subtraction audits where you make all of your personal or professional commitments visible and force yourself to take some things away. Maybe you just put those in a holding pattern and they come back later. But doing

• 19:26Speaker 01

  those subtraction audits regularly can help people battle the feeling of overwhelm that I think almost everybody has nowadays. So that's one way to do it. But there are also other aspects of constraint that interact with personal satisfaction, if you want to talk about those. Yeah, please, go ahead. Well, let me give you an acronym that I use for myself. Some of the things that I learned in research about constraints that I apply to myself. The acronym is BCS. It's easy for me to remember because I'm a sports fan and BCS means Bowl Championship Series in college football. But the B is for batching work. So we now know that multitasking, toggling between things, multitasking isn't really possible. You actually have to drop one thing

• 20:11Speaker 01

  and start another. That's how your brain works. And you just toggle between them quickly. And it makes you less productive because your brain's like a whiteboard where when you switch tasks, you erase, but there's still a residue, what's called attentional residue, is still left there that interferes with the next thing. And so if you're toggling all day, you'll be less productive and we now know it raises your stress. And this is measured by physiological measures like heart rate variability, that you can basically look at the number of toggles someone does in a day and predict what their end of day stress will be. And so the B is for batch your work. If you can, put your work into blocks. You may have to answer a lot of emails, but try to do it in one or two or three blocks over the day instead of toggling all day between one thing and another. So the average

• 20:55Speaker 01

  psychologist named Gloria Mark showed that the average office worker checks emails 77 different times a day. That's not what you want to be doing. You want to batch it and batch your other work if you can. So B. The C is what I just talked about, making all your commitments, commitments visible, making all your commitments visible and then periodically taking something away. And the S is satisficing, which is a word created by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. And it's a combination of suffice and satisfy. And what it means is setting good enough rules for things. So a lot of us want to optimize or maximize, as psychologists call it, which is get the best of any of our decisions.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  But it turns out that we usually can't really do that because we can't evaluate all the options and decisions very well anyway, but that people who have maximizing tendencies, and there's evidence this is on the rise around the world, are less happy with their decisions, they're less happy with their lives, they're more prone to regret, and there's not much evidence to actually make better decisions. So what Simon advised was having, setting satisficing rules, where before you start something, a work project, whatever it is, before you make a purchase, set good enough criteria, and when those are exceeded, go with it and move on. And people who have that, those kind of satisficing

• 22:23Speaker 01

  rules, end up just happier and having a lot less regret. So I think everyone should take some time to think about what those are before they start something.

• 22:31Mike Carruthers?

  Wow. Well, I want to, you said a couple of things. First of all, the average office worker checks their email 77 times a day?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yep, 77 different times. So that doesn't mean opening and closing an email. That means going from some other task into email 77 different times a day.

• 22:51Mike Carruthers?

  Oh my God.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  So when Gloria Marx started studying this, when she started studying in the early 2000s, she was sitting behind people at work with a stopwatch. Later, her methods got more sophisticated and she, she was monitoring people's computers remotely and all these sorts of things. And when she started, the average worker was spending about three minutes on a task before they would change. And then around, about 10 years in, around 2012, she found it was down to, you know, more like a minute and a half. And by 2022, it was 45 seconds. And that's about where it's leveled out. It stayed at about 45 seconds between people switching windows or tasks or whatever they're doing.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  And again, that toggling predicts lower productivity and higher stress as measured by heart rate variability. There's even some evidence now it might affect your immune function if you're toggling a lot. It turns out to be a very stressful thing for the human brain to do. You may have to do a lot of different things over the day, but the extent to which you can monotask during any given block, you'll lower your stress and you'll improve your work quality. I know that's hard to do. It sounds impossible for the way a lot of people work, but maybe even if you just start with half an hour where you're monotasking and not checking phone, not checking email, and you know, just see if you can expand from there.

• 24:19Mike Carruthers?

  So talk about the problem of maximizing, because I do that. I do this. Well, explain what that is.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  So maximizing again is this tendency to try to always make the best decision, whether you're buying something on Amazon, whether you're dating, whatever it is, whether, you know, finishing a work product, or even maybe something that feels more personal. If people are flipping through Netflix or something like that and you find something good, but you're, is there, could there be something better still out there? They're like less satisfied with good enough, essentially. And it's insidious because since the introduction of infinite scrolling on our phones, international surveys show that people have been getting more bored. And researchers who've tried to figure out why that could be, did experiments

• 25:11Speaker 01

  with things where they would give someone, say, a set of 20 videos and they could pick and watch whichever one they want. Or they would give other people just one video from that set, and that's the one they had to watch. And the people with the option to flip through the 20 looking for the best one, were more bored than the people who were just given one to focus on. And so there's some evidence that it's just this endless ability to compare all of your decisions that's making people want to be kind of more perfectionist in their decisions, but also ruining the experience of the moment they're actually in.

• 25:43Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, what I do is I like I'll go on Netflix or Amazon Prime and I'll just keep looking for something better. I'll find something and think, well, I could watch that, but what could be better? Maybe there's something better. And you end up spending more time looking for something better than you actually spend watching a show or a movie.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Totally. And this is, there's stronger research in this area about dating apps, but I think it's a similar phenomenon.

• 26:11Mike Carruthers?

  Oh, yeah, I'll bet.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Where people like can't be satisfied with someone with whom they have a wonderful connection because you know what? If you just swipe a little more, there might be something else out there. And I had this problem where with my last book, I found it so all-consuming that I said, I'm never doing this again unless I find the perfect topic. And so I spent the next two years dipping my toes into different topics, saying, gosh, this is interesting, but maybe there's something better. And then I came across this quote by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who's most famous for coining the term "flow" to describe the feeling of total immersion in an activity. And the quote was about marriage, but you could apply it to basically anything, where he said, "One of the great

• 26:54Speaker 01

  things about being committed, and committed by your own choice, is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living. All this energy gets freed up for actually living instead of wondering how you should be living." As soon as I read that quote, I said, you know what? I'm taking the topic I'm interested in right now and I'm writing a book proposal on it. And of course, two weeks later, I was 10 times as interested in it. But I realized I was basically doing that app dating thing with different topics where instead of diving in and spending energy living with one and being fascinated, I was just always thinking about, is there something better around the corner? And I think we do that with so many things now because we can see so many different options.

• 27:33Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think everybody relates to this. There are things in life where, you know, this endless ability to do something paralyzes us, and then we don't do anything and we spend all our time trying to think of what we're going to do instead of doing it. I've been talking with David Epstein. He is a bestselling author, former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and the name of his book is Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. And David, great to have you here. Thanks. Thanks for coming back.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 28:39Speaker 05

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• 29:11Mike Carruthers?

  A lot of people struggle with their weight. In fact, more than ever before. And now, with the rise of these new weight loss drugs that help people eat less, it would seem we finally have a solution. But if it were just about eating less and having more willpower, wouldn't this problem have been solved by now? Because people have been dieting for decades. And yet, the pattern is familiar. You lose weight, you regain it, and then you start over. So what's really going on? Why does the body seem to fight back against weight loss? And why has the problem gotten so much worse? My guest says we may be asking the wrong question. It's not just what you eat, or even when you eat,

• 29:56Mike Carruthers?

  but why you eat. Dr. Jason Fung is a medical doctor and bestselling author who studies the biology of weight and metabolism. His latest book is "The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food." Hey, Dr. Fung, welcome to Something You Should Know. So it seems, you know, people talk about weight loss a lot. Like, it's very top of mind, and yet, the problem seems to be worse than ever before. So what are we getting wrong?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think that people have focused on the wrong issue. So for years and years, decades really, people focused on calories. You know, this idea that like a calorie is a calorie, so therefore all calories are equally fattening. But it's actually not true in any way. When you eat different foods, they may have the same number of calories, but they produce different hormones in your body. Your body responds to cookies, for example, with certain hormones, and is responds to, say, eggs with different hormones. And therefore, the effect is totally different. Because for every calorie that you eat, you can, your body could store it, or it could burn it. And which one it does is very important.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Because of course, one of them, you're gonna have lots of energy, you're gonna feel great. The other one, you're just gonna get fat. So, you know, those hormonal responses are very important. So, you know, beyond the number of calories, it's also the types of food that you eat, the processing and so on. But the other thing that people haven't focused on a lot is sort of the underlying reasons why people eat. And if you think about it, it's really about the hunger. Because we eat when we're hungry, and we stop eating when we're full. Therefore, the sort of driving force behind most eating behavior is hunger. So we need to understand the different types of hunger, what drives it, what you can do about it. Because really, if we didn't have hunger, none of us would have trouble losing weight, right?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  And that's the lesson that a lot of these new weight loss drugs have. When you squelch the hunger, weight loss isn't all that difficult.

• 32:05Mike Carruthers?

  Right, sure. But when you say there's different kinds of hunger, what do you mean? Because when I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I don't feel different, it just feels hungry.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's different reasons we eat. So most of us think about the physical hunger, which is, in scientific terms, is called homeostatic hunger. And this is driven by hormones. So if you think about it, people think about that they're hungry, you know, they think it's because they haven't eaten in a while. But that actually isn't the case. Because if you think about body fat, it's just store of calories. So if you have- Have body fat, say you have fifty pounds to lose, you have three hundred and seventy five thousand calories sitting on your body. So why can't your body simply release some of those to take care of the hunger? If hunger is simply you needing calories, right? So therefore, it's clearly not the case. Certain hormones produce more hunger, certain hormones reduce hunger.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  So there's two other types of hunger. There's something called, which is something called hedonic hunger, which is sort of an emotional hunger. Because we eat because it feels good, we like it. And there's, you know, a lot of people, you know, if you think about it, eat for emotional reasons. They're bored, they're feeling a little low, so therefore you eat to feel better. And we know that eating is pleasurable, it's one of life's great pleasures. It releases dopamine, it stimulates our brain reward systems, you know, all these sort of things. And this is the, you know, this is the whole idea of dessert. You're not eating it because of the physical hunger, you're eating it because of the sort of pleasure of eating, the emotional side of things.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  And that's important because a lot of the reasons we eat can be tied back to this sort of hedonic hunger, particularly for ultra-processed foods, which have been sort of engineered to maximize the pleasure of food while minimizing the sort of satiety. And that's actually not even the whole of it, because there's a third type of hunger, which is called conditioned hunger. That is, your certain things can stimulate hunger just because you associate them with food all the time. So, for example, like it's breakfast time, you eat, it's lunchtime, you eat, it's snack time, you eat, you go get a coffee, you eat, you go to a sporting event, you eat, but it's not the physical hunger, it's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise, which is what a lot of people feel.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  They walk around and they don't understand why they have to eat all the time. Well, it's because you've been trained to eat all the time.

• 34:34Mike Carruthers?

  And so why is this such a problem now when you look back at pictures of people in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s? They weren't real big like they are today, so something has changed.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that's the thing. This is the story that we've been sold is that weight loss, weight gain is all about willpower and discipline. So therefore, if we are fatter now in 2026 than we are in, you know, 1966, it's because we have less willpower. But that's not true. If you think about the types of hunger, you have the homeostatic hunger, which hasn't changed too much, but think about the hedonic hunger. The level of ultra-processed foods in our diet has skyrocketed in the last 50 years. And that makes a huge difference because you have foods that have, you know, there's all these chemicals, you know, you think about how food companies can maximize pleasure. They talk about, you know, it's not by accident, right?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  They have focus groups, they tweak the recipes, they make sure they have the right amount of salt, sugar, and fat. But more than that, they have artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors, they have texturizers, they have emulsifiers, millions of ways to make that pleasure of eating increase. And by increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods, they've sort of maximized this hedonic hunger. Then you think about the conditioned hunger. And you think about the 1970s, for example. It was not acceptable to eat snacks, for example. So if you wanted an after-school snack, your mom said, "No, you're gonna ruin dinner." If you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom said, "No, you should've ate more at dinner," right? But now it's all changed.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Like, we have food everywhere, right? You play soccer, some parents are like running around chasing their kids with sweet drinks, right? And none of this was acceptable in the 1970s. So the social conditions made it easy to not eat because you didn't have all this conditioned hunger, you didn't have all this hedonic hunger. So the problem is really an over-hunger problem, not an over-eating problem.

• 36:39Mike Carruthers?

  And so what's the advice? Because I've heard statistics about how many people try to do better, try to eat better, and they fail far more than they succeed. Their weight comes back, even if they take it off in the first place. So what has to change? What is the... You wake up tomorrow morning and what do you do different?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  If your problem is that you have all this conditioned hunger, well, you have to find a way around it, right? You have to redesign your social and physical environment to make it easy to not eat. So, for example, if you go to get a coffee and every time you go to get a coffee, you see the donuts, so you get a donut, right? Now you figure it out, oh, what's happening is that I have conditioned hunger. I have, every time I go to get a coffee, I want a donut. So how am I going to change that? Well, maybe you could use an ordering app. So you order the coffee, you don't even see the donut. So you go get your coffee, you pick it up, but you don't get the donut, right? Maybe you have to make rules like, oh, I'm gonna, you know, not eat after dinner

• 37:42Speaker 02

  so that you don't wind up tempted to eat, you know, in front of the TV or, you know, late at night. You have to redesign your physical environment. So maybe if, for example, you always get hungry at four o'clock, five o'clock, or something like that, well, hey, maybe you need to schedule something. Maybe you have to say, okay, well, at five o'clock, I'm gonna go for a walk every day, right? That's gonna take your mind off and take you away from the eating environment, right? Because if you're just walking around, you might go get something to eat. And you know that, right? And it's not your fault.

• 38:16Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but it does seem daunting. I mean, the statistics say so. I mean, it's, people can start doing this with the best of intentions, but the failure rate is really, really high, which is why those drugs are so popular now, because they take the effort out of it.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Well, absolutely. Because what's happening, of course, is you're using the drugs, and I'm not against the drugs. The drugs, what they do is they use one system, which is the GLP-1 system, which is part of the homeostatic hunger. And it's not like it's a normal level of GLP-1. It's a very big pharmacologic dose of GLP-1. And that squelches your hunger. So if you have emotional hunger, hedonic hunger, if you have conditioned hunger, it will squelch it because you're using the GLP-1 to squelch it. The problem is if you ever come off of the GLP-1, and a lot of people do for various reasons, but if you come off of it and you haven't learned anything, then you don't understand. So if you're an emotional eater, well, yeah, you can use this drug. It will make you nauseated, you won't want to eat, and therefore you're not gaining any pleasure from eating, right?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Just like when you're really, really full and somebody says, "Here, have another pork chop." It's not that pleasurable. So, yes, you can use that to squelch it, but the problem is that the focus so far has been so much on diet, right? Weight loss is diet, diet, diet. It's not. A lot of it is environmental, a lot of it is emotional.

• 39:38Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is interesting to me how this is very much seemingly a Western problem. You don't see this in a lot of other countries.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Look at Italy. An Italian has very low risk of obesity in Italy, right? The difference, a lot of the difference, is that they don't eat everywhere they go. You don't see Italians sort of walking on the street eating. You don't see them, you know, at their desk, doing work and eating, right? It's different. They have a different food culture. Where you eat real food, right? The level of ultra-processed food is much lower. So therefore, they don't have the same problems with hedonic hunger. So that condition makes them have a much lower rate of obesity, one of the lowest in the developed world. Now you take that Italian, plop them into New York City, or, you know, move them to somewhere else, and their rate of obesity just skyrockets. What's the difference?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  It's not the diet necessarily, it's not the person. It's those other conditions, the food environment and everything else.

• 40:36Mike Carruthers?

  Doesn't it seem to you, I mean, it seems to me as if people, to some extent, are just giving up, that bigger is the new normal and that that's okay? And I really worry about that.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do too, because there is this whole idea... I mean, first, you have to understand about fat shaming, right? So the reason people were fat shaming was this whole calories. It's really the calorie bullies that sort of led to fat shaming. Because the story that they sold us was, of course, that it's all calories, calories, calories. Since you decide what you eat and you decide what, how much you exercise, calories is about discipline and willpower. So if you get fat and can't lose weight, you don't have discipline, you don't have willpower. So in other words, it's your fault. So we can make fun of you and shame you. That's actually not true at all. Because again, this is a very simplistic way of looking at it. Yes, you can decide what you eat, but you can't decide to be not hungry.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  You can't decide to burn fewer calories, right? You can't decide how you metabolize your basal metabolic rate, right? So it's not their fault at all, because if you're hungry, that's why they're eating, right? They don't, they didn't decide to be hungry. Nobody asked to be hungry so that they could eat more and gain weight, right? So that's what led to fat shaming. And then the backlash against fat shaming, which is that, hey, some people are big and it's okay. The problem is that the medical evidence suggests that weight loss has a huge number of benefits. You know, heart health is better, kidney health is better, metabolic health is better. So this, this sort of giving up. So what's happened, of course, is that we, we, we came through this, you know, five decades of calories, calories, calories, right? Didn't work, so people couldn't lose weight.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Then there was all this fat shaming around it. And now the backlash, which is like, well, maybe people are just meant to be this big. It's like, well, it's not actually true, right? Because there's, there's health consequences to being overweight. You know, knee problems, back problems and so on. So this sort of giving up was because it was so unsuccessful, this sort of calories, calories, calories thing.

• 42:41Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it also seems to me, just my observation, that a part, one of the factors, and as you say, it's multi-factor. But one of the factors is just how much food people think it takes to make a meal. That portions are huge and that the quality of the food has, you know, people eat out more. They eat out, they eat bigger portions, they eat fattier foods, and they think that's normal. And, and back in the 50s and the 60s, people didn't eat that way. They ate at home, they ate smaller meals. And in fact, I was, remember talking to someone about how

• 43:21Mike Carruthers?

  When they updated the joy of cooking, they changed a lot of the recipes where it used to be serves six, now it serves four. It's the same recipe.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that actually happens in a lot of recipe books. But you're absolutely right. So how, and this gets back to the conditioned hunger. That is, you know, when you think about how people eat, there's this whole process. So in terms of social, there's, there's something called social modeling, which is that you base how much you eat, amongst other things, you base everything actually, on what other people around you are doing. So if, for example, you eat pork lung or something, pork rectum, you might think it's gross, but in the Filipino culture, it's, it's very acceptable. Why? Because other people around you have eaten it, and therefore you eat it. How much you eat is the same, right? How much you eat depends on how much other people eat. That's called social modeling.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  And it's, it's a very powerful influence. So if you eat at certain places, if you eat in Japan, or if you eat in Europe, for example, the portions are way smaller. You go to the United States, or Florida, and the portions are actually huge. They're massive, right? So I come from Canada, and the portions are sort of, I think, reasonable. And then I go to Florida, and they're like, double what I think is reasonable. So the problem is that if you live in these places, you think that that huge portion is normal. And that's a process called social modeling. So again, once you understand that, then you can actually decide to try to do something about it.

• 44:52Mike Carruthers?

  There's a phenomenon that I've noticed, maybe I heard someone talking about this, but we eat what's put in front of us. In other words, I will sometimes, if I'm in a hurry, or don't want to cook, and there, I'll have a frozen entree. There's always some in the freezer. I'll have it. They're not very big. They're fairly small. They're not a lot of calories. But when I'm done eating it, I feel satisfied because I have eaten the whole meal. But if I had cooked a whole meal, the servings would likely be much bigger. And I would eat more calories. I would eat more food because that's what I would put on the plate. So I can feel satisfied with a smaller meal.

• 45:35Mike Carruthers?

  If that's the meal, I will feel satisfied with a bigger meal and eat the whole thing if that's put in front of me.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's absolutely, that that happens to everybody. So that's this idea that, you know, if you give people bigger portions, they're going to eat more. Right. And a lot of, there's been a lot of studies to show that even though they're not more full, right? That's, that's the whole point is how do you decide when to stop eating? Right. Because a lot of these satiety signals, they take time. So when you're eating, you can keep eating. But if you're to eat a certain amount, stop for half an hour, then you actually won't go back, right? Because, you know, that's what happens.

• 46:14Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is, this is a big topic. Lots of people are concerned about it. And I would imagine that in your work, you've developed some hacks, some, some ideas that people could use to put to work to, to make it easier. So what are some of those?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it all depends on the types of hunger. But for example, eating later in the day generally is worse for you. And this all gets back to the sort of hormonal balance, sort of rather than just calories. The, the, how late you eat in the day makes a difference. The order of your meal. So if you're eating the carbohydrates first versus carbohydrates last, like if you're eating bread at the, you know, at the beginning of the meal versus at the end of the meal, that makes a difference. There's a huge difference in the amount, like the how quickly your insulin and glucose goes up. So if you eat carbs first, like so there's an experiment, for example, where you eat bread and orange juice. And then 10 minutes later, you eat chicken and vegetables. And then they switch it. So you eat chicken and vegetables first,

• 47:14Speaker 02

  and then you eat bread and orange juice. The amount of insulin that is released is much lower when you eat the carbs last. So if you're releasing less insulin, you get, you're giving your body less instructions to store the fat. Because remember, insulin is a hormone that Tells your body to store more fat. So the lower you can get your insulin, the better. So but it's not simply the food, but the food order makes a difference. The food time, the meal timing makes a difference. Uh, certain foods that you eat with other foods, so vinegar and, and fermented foods. They will actually impact how quickly your, your blood glucose and your insulin go up. So therefore, you know, if you take bread versus bread with olive oil and vinegar, there's a big difference. It's actually much better for you. You can use things like resistant starch.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  So if you, uh, take rice, you cook it and then you cool it and then you reheat it. You get less of an insulin effect. So that's another hack you can use because that's going to make it better. If you have the rice, well, it's better to have this resistant starch working for you instead of against you.

• 48:16Mike Carruthers?

  Well, those are some great suggestions and, and I appreciate the insight into the different types of hunger because I think it helps explain a lot. Jason Fung has been my guest. He is a medical doctor and bestselling author. The name of his book is The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you very much, doctor.

• 48:45Mike Carruthers?

  So here's an interesting question that a lot of us have had to answer at one time or another. Should you go on a second date if there were no sparks on the first date? A lot of people say no, but modern dating research suggests you might want to rethink that. It turns out attraction doesn't always show up right away. Some connections are what researchers call slow burn, where interest grows over time as you get more comfortable and actually get to know the person. And here's the twist, that instant spark that people chase, well, that can be misleading. It's often driven by things like familiarity, excitement, or even anxiety, but not necessarily long-term compatibility.

• 49:31Mike Carruthers?

  That doesn't mean first impressions don't matter. They do. Your brain makes quick judgments in seconds. But they're not always final. So if the first date was not amazing, but it wasn't bad either, a second date might be a good idea. It might be where the real connection starts. And that is something you should know. That's the end of this episode. If you liked it, please share it. Use the share function on your player and send it to someone you know. They'll appreciate it, and so will I. It sure helps us. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 50:10Speaker 04

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