End Emotional Eating by Rewiring Your Brain with EBT with Dr Laurel

Overview

In this episode, Rachel sits down with Dr. Laurel Mellin, a health psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and founder of Emotional Brain Training, a program developed over nearly 40 years at the University of California San Francisco that rewires stress circuits in the emotional brain to produce lasting changes in health, weight, mood, and overall wellbeing. Dr. Mellin’s work began with her own struggle with overeating and evolved into a neuroscientifically grounded method that addresses the root cause of chronic stress, addictive drives, and emotional dysregulation at the level of the amygdala rather than the thinking brain.

You’ll Learn

• Why overeating, weight gain, depression, anxiety, and chronic health patterns are not character flaws but survival circuits encoded in the amygdala, and why blaming yourself for them is both inaccurate and counterproductive
• How emotional brain training differs from cognitive behavioral therapy, which only works at the level of the thinking brain without reaching the bottom-level circuits that generate the biochemical drives behind repeated patterns
• Why there are five distinct levels of stress in the brain, each with its own memory type and corresponding tool, and why staying at the top of the brain during therapy means never reaching the circuits that actually need to change
• How the cycle tool works, moving through a brief burst of anger, one moment of sadness, one moment of fear, and one sense of personal power to unlock a stress circuit in about 30 seconds and reliably produce a shift into elevated emotions
• Why eight specific stress-related hormones including cortisol, dopamine, insulin, ghrelin, leptin, and serotonin collectively drive overeating and weight gain, and why rewiring the circuits that activate them produces lasting biochemical change that injections targeting just one of these hormones cannot replicate
• Why EBT identifies four circuits that must all be addressed for lasting weight loss, including the food circuit, the mood circuit, the love circuit, and the body circuit, and why the body circuit is the most overlooked missing link
• Why the brain changes most rapidly through emotional experience rather than intellectual understanding, and why being genuinely heard by another person in a group setting activates the emotional brain in a way that solo journaling or thinking cannot
• Why gratitude and awe practices work neurobiologically, and why asking what was magical today rather than what went well shifts the brain into a state of elevated emotion more effectively
• Why joy is not a luxury but medicine, and why stress circuits stay active until the brain reaches a state of genuine connection and elevated emotion

Sponsors:

Fullscript (get 15% off professional-grade supplements): https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/rsm…

Resources:

Connect with Dr. Laurel Mellin:

EBT community: https://www.ebtconnect.net/

When you wake up in the morning, appreciate that on the day you were born you had all the inherent strength, goodness, and wisdom you would ever need to solve any problem. Set yourself on Joy. Listen to your body. Move through your emotions. The whole world opens up.