The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show
Willpower vs. Systems: Why Your Diet Fails & How to Fix Your Relationship w/ Food | Sohee Carpenter
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What challenges do people face with diet compared to exercise?
People tend to struggle less with exercise than they do with diet. Exercise is something you do in a finite period of time and then you can move on with your day, whereas nutrition is you have opportunities all day long. Eating behavior is so complicated. For me, it was about the control of the food to then look a certain way, to then be accepted in a certain way and perceived a certain way.
Chapter 2: How did Sohee Carpenter overcome her personal struggles with eating disorders?
Another big reason why people struggle with binge eating, a lot of it is poor stress coping mechanisms.
Chapter 3: What role do cultural pressures play in eating behaviors?
When you have poor emotion regulation skills, every time you're stressed, you're bored, you're something, you turn to food. A big reason why a lot of people will take GLP-1s is that it eliminates food noise. I cannot tell you how freeing it is to be able to eat a meal, feel actually satisfied, and move on with your day, and going like four or five hours without having anything about food.
It's amazing.
It's so freeing. And a lot of people have never experienced what it's like to not have food noise.
What is the psychology of when we restrict something makes us course correct the opposite way?
The key to behavior change is not in relying on willpower. I think the smarter way to do it is I'm going to use willpower to form new habits. The key feature of habits is that they are cognitively not fatiguing. They're automatic.
That is fascinating.
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Chapter 4: Why does the binge-restrict cycle often backfire for individuals?
Sohee Carpenter, welcome to the show. Thank you. Fun fact, I've been following you for, you've been a coach, now a PhD, since?
Technically 2012.
Chapter 5: How can understanding Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) help with dieting?
Okay. You've had also a very interesting journey.
Yeah.
And I'd love to hear for the audience a little bit about you. You studied human biology? Biology?
Yeah, humbio. Yeah.
Chapter 6: What strategies can be used to reduce binge eating triggers?
Very popular major.
At Stanford? Mm-hmm. Okay. So no slouchy school.
No. No.
And then just finished your PhD, just got your PhD.
A couple months ago.
And one of the things that I thought was so interesting is I've actually been following you for a really long time. And you were working and also doing your PhD and all of these things in combination, which is unusual.
I was in a really fortunate position where I was in a distance program, a virtual program. I don't know if you felt this way, but I first got my bachelor's degree, obviously. I worked for four years and then a few years later, I was like, I need a bit more. So I went back and got my master's degree in psychology. That was a two-year program.
By the end of my master's degree, I was so not really enamored with academics from my personal experience. that I was like, I think I'm done. And then I found out that Eric Helms, who we know, icon in the industry, had gotten his PhD from AUT, Auckland University of Technology. And he was, at the time, taken on PhD students as an advisor.
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Chapter 7: How can habit stacking improve adherence to healthy behaviors?
And there was also at the time, which I believe they don't do anymore, they had a distance program, a virtual program. So I was like, wait, if Eric Helms has taken on students, he's willing to take me on. I've met him before. I get along great with him. We have overlapping areas of interest. And I can do this while staying in California, staying home, because I was working from home.
I was like, this is the only way I think I would ever do my PhD. So I was super fortunate that I was able to stay home, keep running my business, which was a personal decision of mine. I like staying busy. I like having more going on. So yeah, I was running a full-time business while also pursuing my PhD at the same time, which was a little bit tricky when it came time for data collection.
I won't lie, especially because the, I kind of, it was, Because of pandemic and other variables, I ended up moving quite far away from my satellite school while the ethics approval process was still happening. So by the time it was approved, I was living 80 miles away from campus.
So if you are doing a satellite program for PC, and you did it in sports science. Yes. If we lay out the framework for the audience with a bachelor's in biology, then you did a master's in psychology, which is kind of interesting.
Yeah, uh-huh.
And then did a PhD in sports science. OK, so take me through why psychology. And I do want to touch on, if you're open to it, a little bit of your struggles and how you've helped.
That's where it all stemmed from was my own personal struggles with especially eating behavior. So to rewind a bit, in my early teens, I struggled with anorexia and bulimia for a little bit. And then I was able to thankfully recover from that. anorexia within a year or so, but I struggled with binge eating for years and years, probably into my early 20s.
And, you know, we've heard this story, which is fascinating. A lot of entrepreneurial, successful women, we hear in their past that it's very common.
I think it has to do with a lot of high-achieving, perfectionist tendencies, as well as, at least for me, as a teen, I really... cared, as many people do, I cared a lot what other people thought. And as is still the case today, when you enter your teen years, that's when you start hearing more chatter about, oh, she's pretty because she's skinny. And she's, you know, she's popular.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of identity change in achieving health goals?
It's a long story. I moved around so much. So I was born in Korea and then I left when I was two. My dad, he was in international corporate world. Everyone thinks it's military. It's international corporate world. And he was very willing to move from country to country when I was growing up. So I've lived in probably 17 or 18 different places. So I left when I was two.
I lived in Indiana for a while. Then I can go through the whole list, but it's long. Bounced around, bounced around, moved to Chicago. Moved out back to Asia. So then I moved back to Korea when I was 12 to 15, I think. So I was only there for three years.
By then, because I'd grown up internationally and always went to international schools or American schools, I had a very heavy American background by then. So I went to international schools, even in Korea. And then when I was 15, I left for boarding school to California. And I've been in the U.S. ever since.
Okay. And are you an only child? No, I have a brother, older brother. You have an older brother. When you got to the U.S., that's when your first encounter, and again, we're talking about how you got really interested in the psychology of health and wellness.
Yeah, so I struggled with, I continued struggling with binge eating, as I said, through all my high school years, and then even into college. It was less of a struggle, but I was not understanding the importance of behavior change and psychology. And so basically by the time I was 18, I had discovered the world of lifting weights and clean eating, right?
That's usually people- Is that when you started?
I'm trying to really think back when I first saw you and it was, yeah.
I didn't start, I didn't have an online, any presence until late 2011 is when I started my first free WordPress blog. I was a senior in college and And I basically had gone through my four years of college trying to be a clean eater and sticking to rigid meal plans that my online coaches had provided for me, but struggling to adhere over and over, working out really hard,
foregoing my entire social life isolating myself which i think a lot of people can relate to but not understanding why why am i trying so hard why am i putting in so much effort when i i'm high achieving and basically every other area of my life you know i graduated top of my class in high school i went to a prestigious university i'm doing well in that regard but why is it my diet that i am continually struggling with so by the time i got to my senior year i was like
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