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

I have exciting news! We’ve had the Food Freedom videos, the books, and now: our new Masterclass, which updates the information available on the science behind sustainable weight loss. Have you been wanting to know what those who KEEP THEIR WEIGHT OFF long-term are doing differently? This Masterclass is the deep-dive you’ve been waiting for. Watch this week’s vlog to learn all about this invaluable free resource.

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

I am thrilled to announce the publication of an academic review article I wrote with Dr. Andrew Kurt Thaw: “The Badly Behaving Brain: How Ultra-Processed Food Addiction Thwarts Sustained Weight Loss.” It’s a chapter in the forthcoming academic book called Weight Loss: A Multidisciplinary Perspective and the chapter is available online now via Open Access Publishing. 

The article speaks to the science of the relationship between food addiction and weight loss. It’s similar to the science I presented in the book Bright Line Eating—but that was published seven or eight years ago and the field has exploded since then. 

About Open Access publishing: when you click the link, you can access and download a PDF of the article. Most scientific articles require you to have an academic affiliation to access them. I can see them because I’m a professor at the University of Rochester, but they are not available to the general public.

However, Open Access allows anyone to read scientific articles. With this model, we, the authors, pay for access—in this case, since it was a British publication, it cost us 1,400 pounds to get this published. Because we paid that fee, we’ve financed your ability to read the article. 

On the one hand, this new trend in academic publishing means that ANYONE in the world now who has an internet connection can now access cutting-edge scientific information at its source. The downside, though, is that it makes the playing field for publishing even more un-level, impacting early-career scientists and scientists from poorer countries disproportionately.

Two things surprised me in writing this article. 

The first is how much the field of weight loss science has progressed. We accessed a meta-analysis that looked at all the studies that have used the Yale Food Addiction Scale. There were an astounding 6,425 articles that used the Scale! What they found is that an estimated 20 percent of the population has food addiction. 

The other thing that surprised me was a number in that meta-analysis. They looked at it by weight class, and for people living with obesity, they found 28 percent tested out as having food addiction. 

That’s not what I’ve found with the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale. By my instrument, 33 percent of the people with class one obesity are high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale and 56 percent of those with higher classes of obesity test out high on the Scale. 

What I learned from writing this article, however, is that you can have multiple symptoms of food addiction, but if you don't answer the right way to the questions asking you if you have clinically significant impairment or distress, then it won’t tag you as having food addiction, even if you have the symptoms.

So, someone might say their eating habits aren’t causing them distress, but then you ask them how their work life is, for example, and they tell you they’ve been out on disability. Or they tell you they can’t exercise, or they’re in pain—but they don’t associate this with impairment. So I don’t buy the 28 percent number.

There’s a graph at the end of the article that looks at weight-loss drugs compared to Noom, Weight Watchers, the Zone Diet, and others, and it’s stunning: Bright Line Eating does as good a job as weight-loss drugs at helping people lose weight. Weight loss drugs and Bright Line Eating are the only two that address addiction. Weight loss drugs do that by modulating the dopamine response in the mesolimbic pathway in the brain. BLE does it by healing that part of the brain with the foods you eat, stopping the relentless flow of dopamine that is causing those receptors to downregulate. 

I encourage you to read this article, take it to your doctor, show it to your friends, and pass it around. This article can help advance the field. It’s very satisfying to put it out into the world. I hope you enjoy it. You can access it right here: https://www.intecho

A few weeks ago, someone wrote to our customer support center. She wasn’t a member, and she’s not in the Boot Camp, but she found us and wrote in. Her email said: “How do I stop the amnesia that sets in when I’m off sugar and flour and go back to thinking I can eat it ‘just once,’ but then my life falls apart all over again?”

Aaaaah. Such a great question! You’ve stumbled onto one of the defining features of addiction. Almost 100 years ago, some men discovered this phenomenon. In the 1930s, they developed The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and what you’ve written is something they focused on.

There’s a paragraph in The Big Book that says: “The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called willpower becomes practically non-existent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink.”

They follow this with numerous examples to illustrate how people pick up a drink with no effective thought about the consequences. 

One example is when you have thoughts of resisting the urge to eat that are so underdeveloped in size and magnitude that they don’t offer anything close to sound reasoning. You have plenty of evidence that the consequences will be tremendous, but your brain doesn’t work in that moment. That’s addiction. But another, similar situation—like being allergic to strawberries—your brain works just fine. If you eat one strawberry and suffer the consequences, you know enough not to eat them again. But with food addiction, that connection doesn’t work. 

Three things are going on in your brain that explain this.

The first is ineffectiveness in the prefrontal cortex. Addictive impulses are generated deep in the part of the brain that gives a good dopamine rush when you eat highly rewarding food. But lots of things can hijack those reward structures, including modern-day concoctions of sugar and flour. 

The prefrontal cortex is where executive functions are happening. Things like planning, evaluating options, and decision-making. What happens in addiction is that the prefrontal cortex stops having the ability to override impulses. 

Second, we have a phenomenon called state-dependent learning and state-dependent memory. These cognitive functions have to do with states such as where you are, how you feel, and what substance you’re on. When you’re in the state of not eating sugar and flour, your brain selectively recalls all the times you’ve been in that same state and you feel like life is good and you’re in control—that’s state-dependent learning. In that state, it’s harder to call to mind the state you would be in after you picked up those foods. 

Third, we have procedural memory. A procedural memory is implicit—it’s also called muscle memory—and an example is knowing how to ride a bike. You get on a bike, and it comes back to you even if you haven’t ridden in years. Procedural memories are automatic and don’t require conscious decisions to execute them. The actions that happen in eating are also procedural memories, so you can find yourself eating in a familiar situation, like having a plate in your hand and going down a buffet line, and suddenly anything and everything is on your plate and you didn’t really make a “decision” to eat all that.

So what do you do about it?

What the men in AA concluded was this: “We’re absolutely hopeless, there’s no solution to this, therefore our defense must come from God because we are without human aid.” They encapsulated this orientation toward God in the 12 Steps. 

That approach works and it’s shorthand for: you’re going to have to work a heck of a program. 

So, to my writer: from what you’ve written, we’re really not supposed to diagnose people, but what you’ve writte