Food Junkies Podcast

Why do some people on GLP-1 medications lose their cravings for ultra-processed food almost overnight, while others still battle sugar? In Episode 297 of the Food Junkies Podcast, Dr. Vera Tarman talks with obesity medicine specialist Dr. Carolynn Francavilla about what GLP-1s can and can't do for people who struggle with food addiction.

Dr. Francavilla is a board-certified family physician, the 2025 Obesity Medicine Association Clinician of the Year, and founder of Green Mountain Partners for Health in Colorado. She trains fellow physicians through her program Help Your Patients Lose Weight, hosts The Dr. Francavilla Show, and created...

One in four kids now lives with a chronic health condition. Type 2 diabetes in children rose 60% between 2006 and 2019, and conditions like fatty liver disease are showing up earlier than ever. But kids can also heal remarkably fast, sometimes within weeks or months, when the whole family changes together.

In this episode, Clarissa sits down with Dr. Patel, pediatrician, lifestyle medicine physician, and founder and medical director of Reset Pediatric Lifestyle Medicine in Ontario. Dr. Patel shares three real family case studies showing kids reversing pre-diabetes, fatty liver, high cholesterol, and elevated blood pressure. The changes behind those...

Why do we keep reaching for food we don't even want? In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman talks with Dr. Thomas Sambrook, lecturer in psychology at the University of East Anglia, about his research on how the brain responds to food cues within milliseconds, and why that response can keep firing long after we're full.

Dr. Sambrook holds two PhDs, one in primatology from the University of St Andrews and one in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Plymouth. His work uses computational modeling and brain-tracking methods to study how we learn habits, make decisions, and respond...

What if your cravings aren't the problem, but a message?

In this episode of the Food Junkies Podcast, we sit down with Luis Mojica, somatic practitioner, nutritionist, and founder of Holistic Life Navigation, to explore how food, trauma, and the nervous system are deeply connected.

Luis shares his powerful personal story: growing up intersex, surviving bullying and sexual assault in silence, and turning to food as his only "witness" during 20+ years of binge eating. He describes how a $20 guitar became his first somatic experience, and how that moment sparked a lifelong path into psychology, nutrition...

Felicia joined CJ today for an incredibly open and honest conversation about recovery, resilience, and the complicated role food played throughout her life. Her story is heartbreaking at times, but it is also filled with strength, perseverance, and hope. For years, food remained intertwined with the recovery she was searching for, keeping her from experiencing the freedom she truly wanted. Felicia shares how she kept moving forward, continued learning, and discovered new ways to care for herself. The contrast between the life she once lived and the energetic, hopeful life she lives today makes her story deeply compelling and...

Molly and Clarissa sit down for another Clinician's Corner to dig into shadow work — what Carl Jung meant by it, why it's not just a "woo-woo" concept, and why it belongs in food addiction recovery. They talk about the parts of ourselves we learn to hide (anger, desire, ambition, even joy), how those exiled parts often drive the very behaviors we're trying to recover from, and how projection, envy, and even compliments can point us straight to what we've buried. This episode previews the Shadow Work module inside Liberation, Sweet Sobriety's brand-new 10-module program launching this fall.

WH...

Why do older women show the highest rates of food addiction, while older men are more likely to meet criteria for alcohol and tobacco use disorder — and why does that gap flip when it comes to weight? In Episode 292, we sit down with Lucy Loch, a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of Michigan, to unpack her research on food addiction in older adults and what it reveals about decades of diet culture, marketing, and an under-screened generation.

Lucy studies the life course development of addictive-like eating — how early-life experiences and exposure to ultra-processed foods shape appe...

In this episode, CJ sits down with April for a thoughtful, reflective conversation about recovery. April brings a quiet intentionality to the way she understands healing, growth, and the ongoing work of becoming. Her perspective is introspective, honest, and at times existential, inviting us to slow down and consider what recovery truly asks of us. This conversation has a different rhythm—less about quick answers and more about meaningful questions, self-awareness, and the space between where we have been and who we are becoming. April's calm presence reminds us that recovery can be both deeply personal and profoundly transformative.

Can changing what you eat treat depression, anxiety, and even psychosis more effectively than medication alone? In this episode of Food Junkies, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Matt Bernstein, MD, psychiatrist and CEO of Accord, to unpack the emerging field of metabolic psychiatry — and what it means for people recovering from food addiction.

Dr. Bernstein trained at Columbia, Penn, and the MGH-McLean Psychiatry Program before shifting from traditional hospital-based psychiatric care toward lifestyle-based interventions: nutrition, sleep, light, and movement. He now serves on the advisory board of Metabolic Mind and helped organize the first public co...

Fatigue. Brain fog. Cravings that never quit no matter how "good" you're eating. In this episode of Food Junkies, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Carolyn Dean — MD, naturopath, and author of more than 50 books including The Magnesium Miracle — to unpack a piece of the addiction and recovery puzzle that rarely gets airtime: magnesium deficiency and its tangled relationship with yeast overgrowth, sugar metabolism, and chronic cravings.

Dr. Dean has spent over five decades in integrative and functional medicine, and in this conversation she lays out her theory that a huge share of chronic symptoms — anxiety, insomn...

In this episode of Food Junkies, Dr. Vera Tarman and Clarissa Kennedy sit down with Brian Baumal, a registered psychotherapist based in Toronto and owner of Aliva Psychotherapy, where he specializes in weight management, eating disorders, food addiction, and psychological support for bariatric surgery patients. Brian trained at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto and has been a licensed member of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario since 2015. He's also a food addict in long-term recovery, having lost 100 pounds and kept it off for over 14 years.

Brian shares the moment that changed his understanding of food addiction...

CJ welcomes Lara, a former professional soccer player from Iceland, for a powerful and deeply honest conversation about food addiction and recovery. Lara began struggling with food at a very young age and recognized early that it was beginning to take over her life, even while competing as an elite athlete. She speaks with remarkable transparency about her experiences, their impact on her, and the path she has taken toward healing. Lara's willingness to share is so profound that she even wrote a book about her journey. CJ found her story fascinating and truly loved talking with her.

I...

📢 A quick announcement from the Food Junkies team: For the first time, we're moving to a new release schedule — new episodes every other week, still featuring one Recovery Story each month. We'll share more about this decision in our next Clinician's Corner. Whether you've been with us from the beginning or just found us, thank you. This is also the perfect time to dive into our archive of hundreds of conversations with experts, clinicians, researchers, and people with lived experience. Our next episode launches on July 17th.

About Today's Guest

Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson is a cog...

In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with world-renowned nephrologist, researcher, and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Jason Fung to explore one of the most pressing questions in the food addiction community: Is fasting safe for the food addict?

Dr. Fung's latest book, The Hunger Code: Resetting Your Body's Fat Thermostat in the Age of Ultra-Processed Food, challenges the calorie-centric model of obesity and offers a deeper, more honest look at why we eat the way we do — and what it actually takes to change.

In this episode, you'll hear:

CJ is joined today by Keren, a vibrant young woman whose passion for recovery and love of life shine through in everything she does. With an infectious enthusiasm and deep gratitude for her journey, Keren is dedicated to sharing her experience, strength, and hope with others who may be struggling. Her commitment to helping people has even inspired her to launch her own YouTube channel, where she openly documents her recovery journey and encourages others to keep going. Full of energy, honesty, and heart, Keren brings a refreshing perspective to the conversation and reminds us all that recovery can...

What if the voice urging you to binge isn't really you — and you could learn to talk back to it? This week, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Glenn Livingston, whose unconventional path from Fortune 500 food industry consultant to food compulsion researcher led him to develop one of the most distinctive frameworks in recovery: Never Binge Again.

Glenn shares how his own 80-pound weight loss journey — and nearly 2,000 clients later — shaped a method built on structured food rules, cognitive refutation, and understanding the neuroscience of cravings extinction.

In This Episode:

Your eyes might be revealing metabolic disease long before your doctor catches it in bloodwork — and most people have no idea. In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Radka Toms, ophthalmologist, functional medicine practitioner, and founder of My Sugar Stop, to explore the fascinating and largely unknown connection between sugar, gut health, and your vision.

Dr. Toms shares her own story — from a "hardcore conventional doctor" eating chocolate bars for lunch to developing rosacea and insulin resistance and eventually pioneering the field of nutritional ophthalmology.

What You'll Learn:

👁️ The Eye-Metabolic Health Co...

In this episode of Clinician's Corner, Molly and Clarissa get real about one of the most pervasive and painful barriers in recovery from ultra-processed food use disorder: shame and stigma.

Fresh off facilitating two back-to-back retreats (with Vera joining both!), they bring the depth of those in-person conversations directly to you. This is the kind of episode that meets you where you are — no toxic positivity, no oversimplified "just love yourself" advice, and absolutely no shaming you into change.

In this episode, you'll hear:

What do you do when your child will only eat three foods — and none of them are vegetables? For Natalie Peltro, certified nutritional therapist and lifestyle medicine expert, that was her reality. Her son was diagnosed with severe nonverbal autism at 18 months, and the journey to help him heal through food became the foundation of her entire career.

In this episode, Natalie shares the framework she's used with hundreds of families to overcome picky eating — not through force, pressure, or sneaky tricks that backfire — but through biology, nervous system awareness, and what she calls the Four E's.

What if the most powerful tool for mental health recovery isn't a medication — it's your metabolism?

Dr. Erin Louise Bellamy joins Dr. Vera Tarman for a deep dive into ketogenic metabolic therapy: what it is, how it works, and why it may be one of the most underutilized interventions in both psychiatric care and food addiction recovery.

Dr. Bellamy is a chartered psychologist, CEO of IKRT (International Ketogenic Research & Therapy), and a research fellow at the University of East London. She has been researching and applying ketogenic metabolic therapy in clinical settings since 2014, with a ba...

CJ is joined today by Peggy, whose story is as raw as it is relatable. From the age of six, Peggy began navigating a complicated relationship with food that would follow her into adulthood. She shares candidly about tying her worth to always having a boyfriend, and the deep need for validation that drove those choices. While she was able to walk away from cigarettes with ease, food proved to be a far more difficult battle. Through years of weight fluctuations and self-discovery, Peggy's authenticity shines. Her honesty, vulnerability, and insight will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to fe...

What if the missing piece in your recovery isn't more willpower — it's resilience? In this deeply inspiring episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Stephen Sideroff, UCLA psychologist, researcher, and one of the world's leading experts on stress, addiction, and optimal performance. With over 40 years at the intersection of neuroscience and recovery, Dr. Sideroff breaks down his comprehensive Nine Pillars of Resilience model and shows exactly how it applies to recovery from food addiction.

🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE:

Why stress is the #1 driver of both addiction and relapse — and what to do about it

The re...

What if your body could warn you before a relapse happens? In this fascinating episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Bob Messerschmidt — biomedical engineer, inventor, and one of the architects behind the original Apple Watch's health-sensing technology — to explore a surprisingly simple but powerful biomarker: the erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR).

Bob is the founder of Core Health and has developed an FDA-registered at-home device that tracks chronic low-grade inflammation over time. For those of us in the food addiction and recovery world, this conversation opens a compelling new door: could inflammation tracking be the missing feedback loop...

Are you exhausted from chasing motivation that never lasts? In this Clinician's Corner episode, Molly Painschab and Clarissa Kennedy break down why motivation is actually an outcome, not a starting point — and what truly drives sustainable recovery from ultra-processed food use disorder.

Using the lens of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), they unpack the three psychological needs every person in recovery must have met: autonomy, relatedness, and competence — the often-overlooked key that separates short-term compliance from lasting change.

🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE:

Why "just get motivated" is the wrong advice — and what to focus on instead

...

CJ welcomes Heather to the podcast, a guest whose bright, charismatic energy lights up the conversation from the start. Heather is exceptionally open and instantly warming, sharing her journey with honesty and heart. She speaks candidly about living with diabetes, her long battle with sugar and ultra-processed food addiction, and the moment everything changed,  when she realized she wanted to become a healthy, active grandmother for her grandchild. That love became her fuel for transformation. Heather's story is one of resilience, clarity, and choosing herself and her family again and again. I cannot wait for you to meet her.

If...

What does recovery look like — and how do we measure it? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. John Kelly, one of the world's leading addiction researchers and founder of the Recovery Research Institute at Harvard Medical School, for a deep dive into the science behind what makes recovery possible, sustainable, and real.

Dr. Kelly breaks down the difference between remission and recovery, shares what decades of research tells us about who gets better (spoiler: most people do) and unpacks the active ingredients that help people build lives they love. We also get into the language we us...

What if the key to understanding your relationship with food isn't willpower — it's neuroscience? In this fascinating episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Rachel Herz, neuroscientist, leading expert on the psychology of smell, and author of Why You Eat What You Eat and That's Disgusting. From the evolutionary roots of disgust to why ultra-processed foods bypass our natural aversion responses, this conversation will genuinely change how you think about what ends up on your plate — and in your mouth.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Are you highly sensitive — and secretly using food to manage a world that feels like too much?

In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Esther Kane, MSW, a British Columbia-based psychotherapist with nearly 30 years of experience helping highly sensitive people (HSPs) break free from emotional eating and food addiction. Esther isn't just a clinician — she's an HSP herself who nearly died from an eating disorder and has spent decades figuring out what works.

If you've ever been told you're "too sensitive," struggled to explain why food feels like your only relief, or burned out...

Life doesn't pause for recovery — and right now, life is a lot. In this Clinician's Corner episode, co-hosts Molly Painschab and Clarissa Kennedy sit down for an honest, grounded conversation about what it looks like to stay connected to your recovery when the world feels like it's on fire and your personal life is a lot at the same time.

This isn't a pep talk. These are two clinicians talking real about the neuroscience of stress and cravings, the shame spiral that follows a slip, and what "minimum viable recovery" can look like when you're just trying to...

What does it take to turn personal pain into policy change? In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Chérie St. Arnauld, Executive Director of Metabolic Revolution and a passionate advocate for metabolic health, to explore the power of grassroots mobilization in the fight against ultra-processed foods.

Chérie grew up in a household shaped by economic constraints and ultra-processed food. It was her sister's cancer diagnosis, and the radical dietary intervention that gave her 10 more years of life, that forever changed how Chérie understood the relationship between food and healing. Today, she's channeling tha...

CJ has the privilege of sitting down with Kristy today. Today, I'm honored to introduce Kristy, a devoted homeschooling mom whose life is a powerful testimony of resilience, strength, and hope. Kristy once believed her struggles were simply about weight and exercise, never realizing she was battling food addiction. Through faith, courage, and deep self-discovery, she came to understand the root of her struggle and found freedom on the other side. She is unwavering in her belief that God carried her through every step of the journey. Now, she shares her story to encourage others, offering hope and lifting up...

What's really happening inside your child's body when they eat ultra-processed food? In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Jacob May — mitochondrial researcher, registered dietitian, and Associate Professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center — to explore the cellular and metabolic consequences of a diet dominated by ultra-processed foods, particularly in children.

Dr. May leads the Mitochondrial Energetics and Nutrient Utilization Laboratory, where his team investigates how dietary patterns shape metabolism at the cellular level. He's a keynote speaker, precision nutrition researcher, and practicing clinician — and his insights here are both science-forward and refreshingly practical.

In...

Are you working hard, caring deeply, and still feeling like it's not enough? You're not alone, and this episode is for you.

This week, Molly and Clarissa sit down with Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, clinical psychologist, core faculty at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, and author of How to Be Enough and How to Be Yourself. Ellen brings warmth, science, and radical compassion to one of the most common, and most quietly painful, struggles in recovery: perfectionism.

In this conversation, we explore:

🔹 Where perfectionism actually comes from — genetics, family of or...

Have you ever left a session feeling smaller than when you walked in? In this episode of Food Junkies: Clinician's Corner, Clarissa and Molly explore one of the most important — and least talked about — dynamics in eating disorder, food addiction, and substance use treatment: what happens when the clinician's model gets in the way of the client's healing.

🔑 What We Cover in This Episode:

⬡ The Rosenhan Experiment — how psychiatric patients were misdiagnosed and then had their normal behavior interpreted as worsening symptoms, and what it reveals about clinical bias today

⬡ Epistemic dismissal — the active or passi...

Can you eat plant-based and still avoid sugar, carbs, and ultra-processed foods? In this episode of Food Junkies, Dr. Vera Tarman is joined by Adina Mullen, plant-based chef, author of Vegan Flavors of the World, and founder of Adina's Delicacies, to explore whether vegetarian or vegan eating can truly support food addiction recovery, low-sugar living, and even plant-based keto—without deprivation or rebound eating.

Adina brings a deeply grounded, real-world approach to plant-based cooking rooted in whole foods, cultural traditions, flavor, and satisfaction. This conversation goes beyond diet rules to focus on nourishment, satiety, and sustainability, especially fo...

In this powerful episode of Food Junkies, we're joined by Amber Romaniuk, emotional eating and digestive health expert, to unpack the real drivers behind binge eating, food addiction, and the relentless restrict–overeat cycle.

Amber shares her personal recovery journey from binge eating, bulimia, and food addiction—and explains why lasting healing requires more than another diet or food plan. Together, we explore how hormones, thyroid function, nervous system stress, and shame shape our relationship with food in ways most people are never taught.

This conversation is especially important for women who feel like they "know...

Is there a built-in "fat switch" in our genes—something nature designed to help us store fat for survival? And if so, what does that mean for food addicts living in a world saturated with ultra-processed food?

In this episode, Dr. Vera Tarman sits down with Dr. Richard Johnson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, former Chief of the Division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension, author of The Sugar Fix, The Fat Switch, and Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, and a researcher with 700+ scientific papers to his name.

Dr. Johnson explains how fructose (fr...

In this month's Clinician's Corner, Molly and Clarissa take a deep dive into the fix response—a lesser-named but incredibly common nervous-system survival strategy that shows up as over-functioning, urgency, problem-solving, and "doing something" to make discomfort go away.

This episode explores why fixing isn't a personality flaw, control issue, or codependency—but a biologically wired, trauma-informed self-preservation response that once helped keep us safe.

Together, we unpack how the fix response shows up in food addiction recovery, relationships, work, parenting, and even helping professions—and why it so often leads to burnout, resentment, and cycles...

In this episode, Molly and Clarissa welcome back Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti for a rich, grounded conversation on body forgiveness and why it can be a turning point in embodied healing. Drawing on her clinical work, research, and lived experience, Ann shares that "forgiving your body" isn't a mental exercise or forced positivity—it's a felt shift that helps move people from control and correction toward listening, trust, and reconciliation with the body as an ally.

Ann also introduces themes from her upcoming book, Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm: A Somatic Guide to Forgiving and He...

Why is it so hard to lose weight—and even harder to keep it off?

In this episode, we explore groundbreaking research showing that fat cells can retain an epigenetic "memory" of obesity, even after significant weight loss. This emerging science helps explain why weight regain is so common and why willpower alone is not the issue.

We're joined by Ferdinand von Meyenn, Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, where he leads research on nutrition and metabolic epigenetics. Prof. von Meyenn has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, with work featured in top scientific journals including Nature and Ce...