Emotional Brain Training with Dr. Laurel Mellin: Rewiring the Brain to Heal Emotional Eating and Food Addiction | ANEW EP 77

In Episode 77 of the ANEW Insight Podcast, Dr. Supatra Tovar welcomes Health Psychologist, Nutritionist, and bestselling author Dr. Laurel Mellin, creator of Emotional Brain Training (EBT). In this powerful and thought-provoking discussion, Dr. Mellin shares how emotional eating is often rooted in stress and eating survival circuits, not willpower failure. Through Emotional Brain Training, listeners can begin rewiring the brain to heal lifelong struggles with food addiction, emotional overwhelm, and body shame.

With decades of experience at UCSF, Dr. Mellin developed EBT to provide a brain-based therapy approach that targets the emotional circuits stored in the limbic brain—areas associated with compulsive eating, chronic stress, and mood dysregulation. She explains how trauma and food become unconsciously linked early in life, forming patterns that fuel emotional eating and weight gain, and why conventional diets and cognitive techniques often fail to create lasting change.

Listeners will discover:

• What emotional brain training is and how it works
• How Dr. Laurel Mellin overcame her own food and body struggles through EBT
• The neuroscience of rewiring the brain and how to apply it to everyday stress
• Why GLP-1 natural support is crucial and how to activate it without medication
• The link between cortisol and weight gain, and how to calm stress hormones naturally
• How emotional eating recovery is possible using the Cycle Tool—a practical EBT method
• The eight key brain chemicals driving stress and eating behavior: cortisol, dopamine, insulin, ghrelin, leptin, serotonin, GLP-1, and PYY
• Real-world tools to break free from diet culture and rebuild body trust
• Why EBT can complement or enhance traditional therapy, and how it differs from approaches like CBT and mindfulness
  
  

Dr. Mellin’s journey is not just clinical—it's personal. She candidly shares how a moment of childhood shame formed the survival circuit that led to emotional eating, and how she permanently rewired it through emotional brain training. Her insights remind us that compulsive eating treatment must go beyond willpower and behavior—it must tap into the brain's natural ability to change.

For those struggling with binge eating recovery, body image healing, or the cycle of weight regain, this episode offers a radical new lens on healing: one that’s rooted in neuroplasticity, self-compassion, and the power of emotional connection.

To go deeper, explore the online course Deprogram Diet Culture at anew-insight.com—a comprehensive 7-step method created by Dr. Supatra Tovar to support long-term, diet-free health through neuroscience, nutrition, and psychology.

Here are Dr. Laurel Mellin social media channels link: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APE9YS,  https://www.ebtconnect.net/, 

Thank you for joining us on this journey to wellness. Remember, the insights and advice shared on the ANEW Body Insight Podcast are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine. To learn more about the podcast and stay updated on new episodes, visit ANEW Body Insight Podcast at anew-insight.com. To watch this episode on YouTube, visit @my.anew.insight. Follow us on social media at @my.anew.insight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads for more updates and insights. Thank you for tuning in! Stay connected with us for more empowering stories and expert guidance. Until next time, stay well and keep evolving with ANEW Body Insight!

Transcript

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the ANEW Insight podcast. I'm Dr. Supatra Tovar, and I am so honored to have health psychologist. She also has a master's in nutritional science like me and creator of Emotional Brain Training, Dr. Laurel Mellin with us today, Dr. Laurel, well, are you. Learned also that she has a master's in nutritional science like me, which is just so rare. So I cannot wait to pick your brain, Dr. Laurel. And then, before I do that though, I'm going to read a little bit so that people can know a little bit more about you, and then we'll get right into our questions. decades of experience in clinical and academic settings. She has developed a practical system that empowers individuals to shift from stress overload to wellbeing by targeting the emotional circuits that drive behavior. Her work bridges the gap between neuroscience and everyday mental health offering tools that address the root causes of emotional distress, overeating, addiction, and burnout.

Dr. Laurel Mellin: 0:03

Wow, that's a long time. I'm 76 and I started when I was 28 as a faculty member or young faculty member at UCSF and was there for 40 years on the faculty developing EBT. I started with my own pain and I think that's a beautiful place to start because I don't think anyone would love treating obesity and eating issues if they hadn't suffered. I'm a big believer in that moment of suffering or whatever it takes so that you really can empathize and really have a passion. And I've had a tremendous passion for that. And so I went up, I started with nutrition. My father was diabetic. I had my own food circuit that I encoded at age 11 when I was being teased, and I reached for some cinnamon rolls and I encoded what we'll talk about, which is a survival circuit. Which biochemically drove me to be out of control of food and then to move into a body circuit, which is when you judge your body. And I suffered for that for 20 years. I actually used EBT. The method I'll talk about now to take the wires that were causing that and actually erase them, their emotional wires. And you have to use emotional tools. So you can't do it with mindfulness or thinking. So then I went in and I said, I got lucky. I was in this position where they didn't know really what to do with me because back then I was. A nutritionist and nutrition was a new field. So they said, well, we have to have a nutritionist. And so I started studying the root causes of obesity in children. And I went back in the literature to I knew that cognitive behavioral was not really doing it. It wasn't getting to the root cause. And I went back in the literature to 1940, this woman named Hilda Brook, who was about 90 pounds sopping wet. She was this little tiny psychiatrist at Baylor. She had written an article saying it's about the connection early on in life. And so I started developing the emotional connectivity tools and, as a scientist, we have to study everything, but things tend not to work, right? You get your hopes up that well, all of a sudden we're seeing the kids were losing weight and keeping it off. I actually used EBT. The method I'll talk about now to take the wires that were causing that and actually erase them, their emotional wires. And you have to use emotional tools. So you can't do it with mindfulness or thinking. So then I went in and I said, I got lucky. I was in this position where they didn't know really what to do with me because back then I was. A nutritionist and nutrition was a new field. So they said, well, we have to have a nutritionist. And so I started studying the root causes of obesity in children. And I went back in the literature to I knew that cognitive behavioral was not really doing it. It wasn't getting to the root cause. And I went back in the literature to 1940, this woman named Hilda Brook, who was about 90 pounds sopping wet. She was this little tiny psychiatrist at Baylor. She had written an article saying it's about the connection early on in life. And so I started developing the emotional connectivity tools and, as a scientist, we have to study everything, but things tend not to work, right? You get your hopes up that well, all of a sudden we're seeing the kids were losing weight and keeping it off.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:06

That was my inspiration. And then for me, it was really struggling in my thirties and early forties with dieting, weight loss, weight gain, that whole cycle. And that's really what helped drive my educational journey. So talk about those circuits that you mentioned. I think that's really fascinating and I think a lot of people are gonna resonate with this and maybe gain some new insight into it.

Dr. Laurel Mellin: 0:07

I hope so. But the message that of all of this, 'cause we'll be talking about neurophysiology and neuroplasticity right now, is that currently the system is not treating the root cause. And if you have a problem, and I just will say as a woman who grew up at a certain age with the woman's movement, that if you have a problem that more women are concerned about than men, and are suffering from in terms of the suffering aspect of this than men. So we believe from the literature, can you imagine having a problem where there was a known root cause, which there has been since 2008. It's been really clear since 2008 that it's the stress circuitry in the emotional brain that gets encoded through no fault of our own that cannot be rewired by thinking or doing, then this is happening to women. Women are getting really, they're getting to self blame. They're getting into doing things that aren't healthy to themselves. They, it is hard to accept their body because these circuits are not being rewired. But here's the idea. Even though some people are more genetically inclined to obesity than others, as a human race, we are all inclined to go into extreme with foodin stress, mainly overeating. That's because our hunter gatherer ancestors when they had stress, it wasn't psychological stress. They didn't live long enough to get psychologically stressed out like the rest of us do, and they didn't have as much stress coming in. It was actually that they were starving. And so there's eight major chemicals that all of us who study obesity. There's these eight chemicals. Mainly they are cortisol dopamine insulin, ghrelin leptin, serotonin, GLP-1, and PYY. These major chemicals, that we know are associated with overeating and weight gain, and hungry all the time. All go haywire when we're in stress I hope so. But the message that of all of this, 'cause we'll be talking about neurophysiology and neuroplasticity right now, is that currently the system is not treating the root cause. And if you have a problem, and I just will say as a woman who grew up at a certain age with the woman's movement, that if you have a problem that more women are concerned about than men, and are suffering from in terms of the suffering aspect of this than men. So we believe from the literature, can you imagine having a problem where there was a known root cause, which there has been since 2008. It's been really clear since 2008 that it's the stress circuitry in the emotional brain that gets encoded through no fault of our own that cannot be rewired by thinking or doing, then this is happening to women. Women are getting really, they're getting to self blame. They're getting into doing things that aren't healthy to themselves. They, it is hard to accept their body because these circuits are not being rewired. But here's the idea. Even though some people are more genetically inclined to obesity than others, as a human race, we are all inclined to go into extreme with foodin stress, mainly overeating. That's because our hunter gatherer ancestors when they had stress, it wasn't psychological stress. They didn't live long enough to get psychologically stressed out like the rest of us do, and they didn't have as much stress coming in. It was actually that they were starving. And so there's eight major chemicals that all of us who study obesity. There's these eight chemicals. Mainly they are cortisol dopamine insulin, ghrelin leptin, serotonin, GLP-1, and PYY. These major chemicals, that we know are associated with overeating and weight gain, and hungry all the time. All go haywire when we're in stress And in this environment, most people are stressed and don't even know it. Sometimes we just go numb or we go into a false high. I go low, so I know it 'cause I get anxious, but we're in stress. And so these eight, because the stress circuits in our brain that activate all these chemicals to go in the wrong direction are making us overeat. And what we need to do to have a new paradigm, where actually we stand up and say, Hey, let's treat the root cause is we actually teach very simple, very powerful, very universal tools, specifically a tool I'll called out by name, which is called the cycle tool. With that tool you can identify the precise circuit that is causing you to overeat and you can basically melt it. Well, emotional brain training is a program. You can't just get an app and do it, although there's an app because it is about your relationship with yourself. In other words, you get you, you get tools that you use with your thinking brain because you have to follow a certain pattern of a technique that you learn and it's in the app, the circuits that are causing the biochemical drive to judge your body, to disconnect from yourself to over and undereat, to punish, rather than relax into connecting with yourself are in the unconscious mind, the emotional brain. Okay, so what happens is you can't get into the emotional brain. Up until now, unless you went to a therapist, and we want people to go to a therapist and use EBT, But we also want them between sessions to be empowered to use the skills themselves. So in the emotional brain, there are circuits are encoded by your experience everyone who's listening or watching right now you know there was a moment you can remember where all of a sudden food was important to you. It wasn't just to eat 'cause you were hungry, but you had this drive. You had either shut down your mind and just went into the eating, or you maybe had a strong drive that you had to do it because you were anxious or depressed or whatever. That is not a psychological problem. Fundamentally is that somehow a circuit, some old circuit got encoded in your brain when you were stressed, so you had this big fight or flight circuit going here like it was for me when I came home from school at age 11 and I was being bullied and I didn't know what to do and what to do about it.'Cause I didn't have any food drives or I just, they, it was just food, but it looked kind of good, comes together and boom, if you don't process it emotionally before you go to bed that night, you will be stuck with a circuit in your emotional brain, specifically in the amygdala that is extremely sensitive to stress. So I could get in a tiny bit of stress and I would have this fight or flight drive as if I was gonna die if I didn't get that food. So these circuits need to be pulled apart. So the program is this. You need to be in a group. You cannot do this as a lone island because this is the emotional brain. The best of all worlds, And it's also really fun to do it because in about five minutes someone can find their circuit in their brain and begin to rewire it, and then both people get very excited. So you start by learning how to get out of stress and go all the way to feeling great now. Feeling great is called joy. And there are five levels of stress in the brain.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:14

And what are the skills? How do they, how are they doing this?

Dr. Laurel Mellin: 0:15

And then I blame myself afterwards and it just feels terrible. That's enough activate the circuit. Because once you activate that circuit, you hit the emotional wall, you're gonna go into a, some kind of a mood, anxiety, depression, numbness or something, and that stops the change. But what EBT does is it's a certain formula of emotions. Angry, sad, afraid guilty. And what it is, it breaks that barrier down and literally your unconscious mind is at your service. And all those times you've thought, I, how do I really, you know what's wrong with me anyway? Why am I overeating? If you answer that from your thinking brain, you'll be off. Because the message in the unconscious mind is usually different, so you just complain. You do this emotional dance, we teach you how to do. It takes a few minutes, like two or three minutes, and then the brain actually wants you to heal. you've gotta stop thinking so much. Well, physiologically, that means you have brought the unconscious message from that circuit that's been making you miserable up to the conscious mind, and then you just hit it in a certain way until it is erased. It's erased when you look at the food like a hot fudge sundae or even like a sandwich at lunch you're really not hungry and you say I don't think I need it. So the chemicals have been driving you all along. And when that happens to you, when you rewire the, your food circuit, 'cause everyone has at least four circuits and then they have to do a little bit more work to raise the set point or the habit of their brain. So they don't regain the weight. But when you rewire your first circuit and you have that feeling in your body, that's why all therapists who are trained in EBT all go through the program. They go through at least 12 weeks of the program where they learn how to rewire their own circuits. 'cause we all have them. I mean, if it's not one thing, it's another. And there's some trauma, there's some whatever. But when you rewire that circuit and you look at that food you're not taking a weight loss drug, if you want to, you can, but you're not taking a weight loss drug and you say it is so unappealing. You have validation all along that there was never a psychological problem. It causes distress and psychological, but fundamentally it was just that circuit and somehow you actually got into a program where you could learn the tools to erase it, and it's very empowering. Wonderful question. I started with knowing that it wasn't cognitive or behavioral, it was emotional. I don't, and I mean emotions as physiology, emotions as psychology. And so I just started working with children, talking about magic words, how do I feel? And what do I need? to my patients who were adults and how they modified that 'cause adults had more stress. And I worked on that and I found I, I found a way of this cycle tool. I discovered the cycle tool at the University of California San Francisco in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, What happened was I wrote some bestselling books from, and please don't buy those books because they're not as up to date as the new ones on EBT. He's our scientific director. And it took until 2007 when he had rewired his circuits and all of a sudden he had this aha moment where he said, this is why it's working. It's working because we're rewiring the stress response. We're rewiring the emotional brain, which is the seed of, the soul. And and then we went from there taking another 15 years to bring it to the point that it can be in an app. It can be, people can use it. The therapist can learn it and the participants can go online and get into groups and learn it. So it's been, it is been challenging. I would say the last four years were very challenging because I found that we needed to go all the way to joy. You can't just go to a mediocre mood. And also the trauma circuits are that are typically, like I had trauma when I reached for my food. I wouldn't say that I was abused by or the different kinds of extreme abuse that we think about that are very common, particularly in people who have a more extreme body size. One problem or another, a mood problem a food problem or whatever. So essentially what we're doing is using this procedure that the psychologists learn to give this service, but also you learn it in an app. So you can use it not exactly in the same way that you would with your therapist but similar. And so essentially we got to the point that I had to admit that we had to get this method out more widely. Now, 500,000 people have used it so far, but really in our society should have these tools. so we finally got it to the point that the circuits that are, I just want you to put your fingers right down here, where it's the reptilian brain. To do that, you've gotta have a thinking brain that's working. Right when the reptilian brain is like pouring chemicals all over you. And so we modified the procedures until you could use an app to get pretty much down there, you'll get better results with your psychologist or your psychotherapist, but you get right down there to deep in the brain and, you've hit the circuit when it goes poof. And then you notice again that whatever that pattern was, whether there's anxiety or perfectionism or people pleasing or distancing or overspending or whatever it is, where the drive stops.

Dr. Supatra Tovar: 0:25

We are understanding so much more about the brain than ever before. But this is a direct application and I don't think, I mean maybe EMDR gets a little bit into that, but not in this direct way like you have developed. This is so fascinating. I cannot believe we're out of time for this half of this podcast. I have 80,000 more questions for you, so hang on.