We are going to talk about toxic hunger.

For most people, hunger means a grumbling stomach, headaches, lightheadedness, irritability,

fatigue, and inability to focus.

For many people, these uncomfortable symptoms are the undoing

of all their attempts to reach their ideal weight. Conventional wisdom, and even medical textbooks,

would suggest that these are normal symptoms of hunger. Since eating removes the symptoms,

they are mistakenly believed to be hunger, but they are not. I'm Jenna Furman, and we are going to join my dad, Dr. Furman, as we learn about toxic hunger and strategies to eat to live. Daddy-o, good to see you. How you doing? I'm doing great, thanks. It's hard to believe we're 2,000 miles away. You live in Hawaii. I can't believe that. It's true. It's true. I'm very lucky because the hiking has been really, really great lately.

What have you been up to at the retreat?

Well, I've been trying to get all the trees in the ground by the end of May, so my fruit orchard is finished.

I have 20 fig trees planted, surrounded by some citrus trees on the edge, and I've planted some ground cover that's going to now take off some of the dirt areas and be ground covered with flowers that grows into each other. So just trying to make things look better and finish planting my fruit trees. I feel like this fruit tree project that you've had has been like two years in the making. So are you actually happy with it at this point? That's right. It's been for years I've been holding them in pots because they didn't have the grading done and ready for the land, ready to put it in. So now I finally got all my trees out of pots into the grounds. That's really a good feeling. These trees are really happy now. They're all singing and dancing. They're in real dirt now. Imagine what it's going to feel like when you could actually eat the fruit from these young trees, these adolescent trees.

I know. Can you imagine a few years from now when we're getting like so much from eating our own naturally grown or all fruit that we serve and all the food we eat is right from our backyard? Will you give me a discount? You can have all the figs you want. Really? Man, you're generous. So today we are going to be talking about toxic hunger and emotional eating. Now, I decided to pick the topic of toxic hunger

because I found it just always interests me. And you created a research paper on it and you have

published works on toxic hunger. And I know

that you developed this concept through your practice. So can you tell us what is toxic hunger?

You're right. And that this concept is something people have not been talking about before.

And even since I published that paper, the changing perceptions of hunger in 2010 in the

Medical Journal and Nutrition Journal, even since then there were researchers all over the

world that have referenced that, have been utilizing that.

But there's still overwhelmingly ignorance and, of course, lack of discussion of the

fact that hunger, as people feel it and sense sense it is not hunger. It's false.

It's fake. They're responding and they're eating in response to withdrawal or a detox

vacation and they're calling something hunger that isn't hunger. Like if you smoked cigarettes,

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