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“Calories in, calories out,” he says, “is a completely disproven hypothesis.”

Hyman advocates a cold-turkey approach to his patients. “You want people to experience their hunger, their behavior, their mood, their energy [and] their chronic symptoms if they stop [consuming] sugar and starch for a week or two weeks or three weeks,

Our biochemistry, he says, not will power, drives our cravings and hunger patterns. It’s not a “moral failing that we can’t control our diet.”

Hyman, who has written “The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet,” says his intent is to “completely obliterate the idea” that all calories are the same, that there’s no difference between 100 calories of Coca-Cola or cauliflower.

Fat actually helps you burn fat,” he explained, destroying many of the myths I’d grown up with

Fat, he says, “increases muscle mass and decreases inflammation — if it’s the right fat” — by that he includes coconut butter, MCT oil (or medium-chain triglycerides), extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil, and those found in wild fatty fish such as salmon and sardines, nuts and avocados. (See his complete list at thechalkboardmag.com/dr-hyman-good-fat-bad-fat .)

here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds.

Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks

I’m now in my fourth month of a modified detox — I don’t want to live without wine or some sweets (I eat three 1-inch squared pieces of very dark chocolate a day). I know I can’t avoid all added sugars, no matter how vigilant I may be.

Problems of success are harder, not easier, to deal with, of course – you wouldn’t want to reverse the conditions that got us here

The path of incentives is easy to trace: an addicted customer is a reliable customer – and why settle for mere consumption of your product when you could get overconsumption instead?

David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism”: named for the part of the brain responsible for emotional processing. Global industries, he says, are starting to aim right at it.

In this country, we are at last regulating away some of the older vices, such as nicotine and alcohol.

many new vices are popping up in their stead. Food companies mine and refine their products for addictive properties: ultra-processed food, thought to encourage compulsive eating, now makes up two-thirds of the calorie intake of adolescent Britons

Gaming addiction is soaring. We hear less about workaholics than we used to, but perhaps only because the condition is so common – instead, we hear about burnout, the end result.

Then of course there are smartphones, teaching us to crave for the next ping of a message, or the bright notification of a retweet

These in turn link us to the thousands of addictive products being pumped out by the largest tech companies on the planet. There are gambling apps, gaming apps and one-click shopping apps – even addiction to fitness-tracker apps is on the rise. Then of course there is social media, to which almost half of British teens now feel addicted.

For a few, it is possible to buy your way out, back into old-fashioned reality

a new kind of luxury is emerging: freedom from cravings.

The ultimate example might be the rapid growth of semaglutide drugs

they also seem to reduce cravings for alcohol, nicotine and opioids, and perhaps even compulsive gambling and online shopping.

semaglutides such as Wegovy and Ozempic reduce the release of dopamine in the brain’s striatum, the region that motivates you to take another bite of something delicious but also to take another puff of your cigarette. They appear to act not on the digestive system, but on craving itself.

It’s hard to imagine – having a smartphone without needing to check it, putting down a tube of Pringles halfway through. For this is the major struggle of modern life: self-control in the face of addictive products. It’s becoming harder and harder to do

most cannot afford to anyway

Ozempic is mostly known as a “Hollywood phenomenon”, available only to the rich.

The income divide is there, too, when it comes to resisting online addictions. As time away from screens becomes a scarce commodity, some companies are monetising it in the form of off-grid digital detox weekends or curiously expensive dumbphones.

This summer, Eton announced it would ban smartphones – giving new pupils Nokia “bricks” instead. Meanwhile, children from lower-income backgrounds spend on average two more hours a day on their phones than their peers.

money shelters you from many of the conditions that encourage addiction in the first place. Junk food appeals most when you do not have the time, money or the emotional energy to access healthy alternatives: chasing their likely customers, fast food joints spring up in deprived areas. As do betting shops.

We sometimes pretend that resisting gambling, social media, sweet treats and retail therapy is mostly a matter of willpower – as if the economy weren’t built on pushing us these things. Instead, it’s becoming a privilege few can afford.

The [white-supremacist] ideology is spreading more into the mainstream than it ever has before. There aren’t checks and balances to counter it. There aren’t programs being funded to help people disengage from extremism. Some of the rhetoric coming from the very top is emboldening extremists.

Picciolini: Unfortunately, I think that the underpinnings of the ideology have always been there. The extremists were on the fringe, and very visible, but other people weren’t willing to voice those beliefs.

I never thought we would have a social and political climate that really kind of brought it to the foreground. Because it’s starting to seem less like a fringe ideology and more like a mainstream ideology.

Kathy Gilsinan: What role does the internet play? There’s a lot of discussion about internet radicalization for members of ISIS—is this a parallel process for white-supremacist movements

Thirty years ago, marginalized, broken, angry young people had to be met face-to-face to get recruited into a movement. Nowadays, those millions and millions of young people are living most of their lives online if they don’t have real-world connections. And they’re finding a community online instead of in the real world, and having conversations about promoting violence.

White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, in recent months—aren’t just trying to outdo one another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh

If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit. From my perspective, it also makes people harder to reach.

Picciolini: It’s a whole lot of listening. I listen for what I call potholes: things that happen to us in our journey of life that detour us, things like trauma, abuse, mental illness, poverty, joblessness. Even privilege can be a pothole that detours us. As I listen to those—rather than debate or confront them about their ideology, but creating a rapport with them—I start to fill in those potholes. I will find resources in their community to help them deal with the trauma, with whatever it is that was the motivation for them to go in that direction. Nobody’s born racist; we all found it. Then I leverage the community around them to try to engage them and support them, and try to find ways for them to crawl out of that hole. Typically what I found is, people hate other people because they hate something very specifically about themselves, or are very angry about a situation within their own environment, and that is then projected onto other people

Bayoumy: What are some of the things that prompt these people to question their beliefs?  Picciolini: Certainly not facts. It’s very emotional. I try to take them through an emotional journey where they come to the conclusion that they’ve changed, and it’s not me telling them that they’ve changed. What I’ve found least effective is me telling them that they’re wrong, or me telling them that they need to think a certain way. Typically these people are pretty idealistic, although they’re lost, typically pretty bruised emotionally, and they have very low self-esteem.

Picciolini: I’ve always found it very difficult to sway opinion when it’s a group of people. When people are in a group, they tend to not be as vulnerable or as forthcoming. So I think it has to be a personal journey

it’s not an easy process; it’s a very, very long process. If you think about quitting smoking, or drinking, or anything like that. For me, from the time I was 14 years old till I was 23, those were kind of the adult developmental years, so there were a lot of things that I had to unlearn.

Picciolini: I think we can be equipped. There’s just no will to build something about domestic extremism. We don’t currently have any hate-crime laws that apply to online activity, but photoshopping someone’s face onto an Auschwitz prisoner on Twitter isn’t so different from spray-painting a swastika in a synagogue. I think we need to start asking ourselves what kind of policies need to be in place, not to limit speech, but to protect people from it. I don’t know what the answer is there.

I just think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They’re all trying to outdo each other, not just the last person, but Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists will always find another way to do it. I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots? There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.