Bright Line Living™ - The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast Susan Peirce Thompson

A woman wrote in recently to talk about how she’s using just three of the Bright Lines, and it’s working for her. Listen to this week’s vlog to see where I stand on people using their own take on the Bright Lines to lose weight.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/6jfhvaBright Lines as Guidelines for Weight Loss | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Today I want to talk about my journey to be able to do one pull-up. This has been on my bucket list for a long time. It reminds me in some ways of the journey to lose and keep off excess weight. Here are five similarities I’ve noticed.

First, some context: When I was young, every year we had to do fitness tests—including one to hold yourself with your chin above a pull-up bar for as many seconds as you could. I was abysmal at this, at the bottom of my class. Now, I’m almost 50, and upper-body strength is still a challenge. 

The first Bright Line Eating principle that I’m reminded of is unstoppability. When we come into Bright Line Eating, we may struggle. When I started seriously trying to do a pull-up, shoulder impingements kicked in and I was in too much pain to keep training.

Then I got frozen shoulder, and that meant at least one more year without being able to train.

This year, however, my shoulder impingement was mostly gone AND my frozen shoulder was mostly gone. I was doing treatments for joint pain, too. I had to move unstoppably through challenges to get to a point where I could start to train toward a pull-up.

The second lesson is this: my book Rezoom talks about how to ride the waves in your journey. I mention something James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits: when trying to achieve something, most people focus on the goal. But what creates sustained behavior change is to think about your identity, not your goal, and then move on to focusing on the processes that will get you there.

My process was to get a good personal trainer and do what he told me to do. I realized that my identity as an exerciser needed to be: someone who strives for physical goals and who shows up for training consistently, with accountability and support. 

That brings me to the third similarity to a Bright Line journey: accountability and support. My friend Timo asked to join me in striving for pull-ups: his goal was to do 10, my goal was to do 1. Now we do a voice memo every Sunday night reviewing our week’s exercise progress. We decided we would strive to achieve our goals by my birthday, June 29.

I got to the point where I was close to doing a pull-up about three weeks ago. But I couldn’t quite do it—I got stuck at 90 degrees. That’s where the fourth BLE similarity comes in. Last Tuesday, before going on the pull-up bar, I paused and remembered WOOP. That’s an acronym from Gabriele Oettingen that stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. It’s a way of thinking that has you visualize your plan to overcome your obstacles. 

I visualized myself bursting through that 90 degree stuck-point, and this is what happened: I made it! I did a pull-up! I was so proud!

The final Bright Line lesson is something I teach in Bright Line Mind. Achieving goals doesn’t make us happy. Was I happy when I did my pull-up? Sure, for a few days. But raising your baseline happiness requires you to be striving for a goal: the pursuit of something matters, not achieving the goal itself.

At first, I thought I’d make a new goal to do three pull-ups, or five. But then I realized that neither of those goals felt self-concordant (aligned with my Highest Self), so right now, I’m trying to become a lap swimmer, someone who can (and does!) swim for 30 minutes, three times each week, and that’s my goal. I also have a new goal to be able to do 20 full pull-ups.

When you look at your BL journey, know that reaching your goal weight isn’t going to make you happier in a lasting way. What will, though, is being someone who is striving for what matters—whatever that is for you. Maybe it’s making it through the Bright Roadmap and then doing it again to help others, or maximizing your peace and serenity in your Bright Body, or maybe you want to publish a book, or take up painting.

A bonus tip: A good goal is one that you have about a 50 percent chance of achieving. That helps you to feel accomplished when you do reach it, but

I have exciting news! For a while now, we’ve needed an update on the science behind Bright Line Eating. The first and most comprehensive explanation was in the Food Freedom videos that I put out in early 2015. Those went viral and were watched by people in 195 countries.

Then in 2017 the first book came out: Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin and Free. That laid out the scientific case for a Bright Line style of eating.

Recently, I wrote a book chapter called “The Badly Behaving Brain: How Ultra Processed Food Addiction Thwarts Sustained Weight Loss.” That also includes information on the science. It’s 100% up to date, but not as accessible for someone who wants the data in layperson’s language.

Now, we have something up-to-date that you can send people to or check out yourself. It’s an all-new Bright Line Eating Masterclass. It’s a deep-dive two-hour course that educates you on the science of sustainable weight loss.

Here’s some of what it includes:


Info about the two foods that block weight loss.
Updated science about the Willpower Gap, cravings, and hunger (in fact, the title of the Masterclass is “Conquer Cravings, Harness Hunger and Thrive in your Bright Body… for Life! ”).
How to handle food cravings.
The one huge mistake people make when they try to lose weight.
Why people can’t stick with a new plan of eating.
Data, plus a whole lot of pros and cons, on the new weight loss drugs.
Data on how people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s can lose weight as easily as those in their 20s and 30s (it’s true! I show data from over 4,000 people demonstrating it!)
What people who keep weight off for the long term are doing differently from those who fail again and again—and people are keeping weight off long-term with Bright Line Eating.

It’s all in an easy-to-absorb format—and we’ll be doing more. We like this format, and I’ve spent months working on this. We worked with an animator from Italy, and members of my team were super involved. Thank you to all of them.

You can access this on BrightLineEating.com. It’s so easy.

Go check it out. The link is below the video. Now, when you want to tell someone about Bright Line Eating, all you have to do is refer them to the Masterclass at BrightLineEating.com. In lieu of a 2-hour movie on Netflix one night, they can watch the Masterclass and become one of the most educated people in the world on our current food and weight dilemma. Enjoy it, refer people to it, and help spread the word about sustainable weight loss.

Click here to reserve your seat in the Masterclass!

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/Ynv3tpIntroducing the Masterclass | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Today’s topic was suggested by a conversation I had with a Bright Lifer. She said she had recently gone back to sugar and flour … and it kind of worked. She didn’t intend to keep it up but was surprised that she seemed okay.

It reminded me of a time in Australia when I was deep in the throes of late-stage food addiction. I’d stop eating sugar and flour and could only last a few days. I remember that when I went back to the food, it was such a relief. 

A good way to think of this is with the hourglass analogy. Before we start BLE, the hourglass is wide, symbolizing all the freedom we have because we can do 100% what we want with food. Then we learn to become Bright and our options narrow. We may reach a point where we’re feeling very restricted—eating out feels hard, traveling is scary, dinner parties aren’t fun. Then, as we practice eating in new situations and learn to be Bright no matter what, we develop automaticity with restaurants, travel, and dinner parties, and the hourglass gets wider again. Now we have the ULTIMATE freedom—we’re in our Bright Bodies AND we can live freely in the world. we can  successfully navigate life.

If you’re in the earlier phases of recovery, it can feel great to give up the constraints and go back to the food. But this “freedom” can be deceptive.

Some people may go back to the food when they’re at the bottom of the hourglass. They feel great—and so they get overconfident. It’s a pernicious feature of addiction: when we’re in recovery, we forget the horror of what addiction was like. 

When the brain wires up to do anything, neurons fire together, synapses develop and connect, and fiber tracts develop in the brain. I think of these as riverbeds. The riverbed grows deep over time, as water wears down the soil. This is how addiction forms.

When you want to quit, you have to dam all the water upstream. That dam is the Bright Line program. Over time, as the water is diverted, you develop a new riverbed with the habits you learn from BLE. At first, it feels awkward and unfamiliar, and you’re in the narrow part of the hourglass. Over time, however, it becomes comfortable, because the riverbed is deep thanks to all the practice and automaticity you’ve built up.

But what if someone who is comfortable with their Bright habits decides to let some water back into the old riverbed? At first, it feels like it’s no big deal. The grasses and shrubs that have grown up in that dry riverbed keep the water from flowing freely. But eventually, the grasses and shrubs wash away and you’re going to get all the negative consequences of that old river. 

If you go back to eating sugar and flour, it may work at first. But eventually, it won’t. How long it takes to get back to misery is based on multiple factors, most notably where you are on the Susceptibility Scale. 

If you have any amount of addiction—if you’re a six or above on the Susceptibility Scale, say—remember that addiction is progressive. Over significant periods, it gets worse. The periods where it works will get shorter. The consequences will become more severe as you age.

Addiction is like flushing a toilet—the water swirls around and goes down, down, down the drain. Sometimes the water might head up a bit at the beginning of a flush…before it swirls ever further down.

Finally, what if you’re stuck in a cycle where some parts of you really focus on how the food works, and other parts of you want to live Bright? That can be a terrible inner conflict to experience. You go back to the food in cycles and can never stay Bright for long. Getting out of that cycle requires a deeper surrender and a fuller application of the Bright Line Eating tools.

But don’t be surprised if, sometimes, being in the food seems to work. Hopefully, this helps you to see the big picture, so that when you think that addictive eating might be working, you can zoom out and see what’s coming, eventually.

FOR THIS

I want to introduce you to a lovely mindfulness meditation practice. I learned it in a training session for leaders by the Xchange Group. This method is called the Unified Mindfulness approach to meditation. It’s very widespread, used by Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and other universities that do research on the benefits of meditation. 

There are many approaches to meditation, but Unified Mindfulness revolutionized my experience. It’s the one and only approach that I find I can use as I move through the day—as I drive my kids around, make my bed, and just experience life.

It was created by a man named Shinzen Young. Here’s what he says about himself: “I’m a Jewish-American Buddhist-informed mindfulness teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish-Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science” I love this guy! He is co-director of the Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness Lab at the University of Arizona. He’s a mathematician and scientist, and, basically, he endeavored to distill mindfulness into its mathematical elements.

Young says there are three units of experience: what we see, what we hear, and what we feel. Each of those three can be outward-oriented or inward-oriented. 

So for example, “see-out” is something you experience visually, like a sunset. “See-in” is when you have an image in your mind, perhaps something you are remembering. You might imagine a beach, for example. 

“Hear-out” is what you hear around you. “Hear-in” is your internal monologue or a conversation you imagine. “Feel-out” is any of the sensations, from a taste on your tongue to the feel of your feet on the floor. “Feel-in” is emotional. Tightness in your belly, joy in your heart—any sort of emotion.

To do the meditation, you notice what happens to you and around you, and label it, as see, hear, or feel. You can also note whether it is inward or outward. In the vlog, I do a brief session to demonstrate, labeling as I go, and then explain what I’m labeling.

For example, as I was staring into the camera, I saw the color of my burgundy jacket in the lens—I labeled that “see-out.” Then I heard the sounds in my room and labeled them “hear-out.” My ankles and feet hurt, so I labeled that “feel-out.” Then I had thoughts of how watchers would respond to this meditation and labeled that as “feel-in.” 

I enjoy this practice immensely. It’s fascinating to be pulled into the present moment, whatever you are doing.

Meditation increases happiness, clarity of thought, sensory awareness, and the ability to be present. If you go to unifiedmindfulness.com, there’s a free online course you can take on this method. 

Much of what we do in Bright Line Eating is finding new ways to engage with the present moment. When we stop eating sugar and flour and limit eating occasions, we create space between meals where life shows up. How do we engage with those moments? Mindfulness meditation gives you the agency to choose your response to that moment. 

Unified Mindfulness is a lovely way to interact with the present moment. It’s a new tool you can use, if you wish. It’s working for me, and now I’m passing it on to you.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/KiaNsaSEE, HEAR, FEEL | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

PECS is Post-Event Collapse Syndrome, and it’s what happens if your Bright Lines get wobbly after an event or holiday. But what does this have to do with Maintenance? Turns out, quite a bit… learn how to protect yourself in this week’s vlog. 

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/6vkVHsPECS and Maintenance | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast