Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. About a month and a half ago, I think someone named Peggy Sue Parker wrote in and said, “I've been using three of the Bright Lines to guide my eating, no sugar, no flour, and only eating three meals daily. I have not weighed my food because I have never been one to overeat. I simply gain weight from eating sugary foods and eating at night. Now that I've given up sugary and floury foods, I am losing inches and weight. I just think some people could do well by managing without weighing their food.” Oh, Peggy, thank you so much for writing in. It reminds me of someone else who wrote in just in the last couple of weeks, and it was interesting because the head of our customer support team, Simone, wasn't actually sure what to say to her. So, she passed the message along to me and said, “Susan, what do you think about this? It would be great to know for when other people write in with a similar question.” This was from a woman who wanted to rejoin our Bright Line Eating® community, Bright Lifers™, but wrote in saying, “I'm not sure I belong because I'm whole food.” I mean, this person knows we have tons of people who are whole food, but what she said was, “I'm whole food plant-based whole food, and I don't eat sugar or flour, but I don't follow the other two Bright Lines. I eat my vegetables and my plant-based foods whenever I want to and in whatever quantities I want to. And it works for me. I miss the Bright Line Eating community. I would love to be a member again, but I don't know that I belong.” Then I read your message, Peggy Sue, that you wrote in, and I just thought, oh, okay, we've got to cover this as a topic.
It's so important. It's so important. I tell this story sometimes that when I was at the post office in Rochester, New York, registering the company Bright Line Eating as a legal entity for tax purposes, we needed a tax ID number, and it was time to get this entity on the books as a business. I was staring at this line that says, what is the name of your legal entity? We were forming an LLC and for some reason Bright Line Eating, LLC didn't feel right. It didn't feel complete, and I ended up writing down Bright Line Eating Solutions, LLC. Solutions, plural. I remember thinking about and looking at that “s” that I put at the end of solutions and thinking Bright Line Eating is not just one solution. It's a lot of solutions for a lot of different people because the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™ is real. Food addiction is not a binary. There's mild, medium, and very, very severe cases of food addiction that really do require different levels of treatment. There's the beginning nip of food addiction. There's food addiction as it progresses, and then there's very, very advanced late stage chronic food addiction. And these require different treatments and different approaches.
I'm reminded of Hamlet and the King's advisor, Polonius, who said, “This above all to thine own self be true.” I remember getting sobriety coins that said, “to thy known self, be true” on them, and then the amount of sobriety. I remember in the early days of being clean and sober, I never understood why they put that on coins. I mean, they put the serenity prayer on the back, but there were other slogans, “easy does it.” “Live and let live.” How about, “don't drink no matter what.” I didn't really hear people saying to thy known self be true in meetings. I didn't understand how that ended up on coins and now coming up on 30 years of sobriety, I do understand, I do understand. Peggy Sue, what I want to tell you is do what gives you peace and you are welcome here and yes, you are right.
There are lots of people who will benefit from no sugar, no flour, three meals a day. Oh my goodness, if everyone ate no sugar, no flour and three meals a day, do you know how healthy our population would be? Do you know how practically almost non-existent the disease of obesity would be? Do you know how much mobility and thriving there would be? Do you know much how much less joint pain there would be and how much less craving and how much less suffering and how much less insatiable hunger? I am not at all surprised that eating three meals a day and no sugar and no flour is working for you. Of course, you hear me telling other people, when you weigh and measure your food, your digital food scale will become your best friend. I have often said that I think of myself as the Lorax.
Do you remember the Lorax? He was the little fuzzy brown guy that popped out of tree trunks as they were. The trees were being cut down in the land where the Truffula Trees grew. This is a Dr. Seuss story, right? Well, the Lorax would pop up every now and then and say, I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees as they were cutting down the trees and doing all this deforestation and such a sweet story. Well, that's me. I pop out of the convenience store aisle and say, I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and I speak for the 10s. I speak for the people with food addiction that is so severe and so distressing that they can't even breathe for their desperation and their despondency and their feeling of being lost and alone in the world. They need a roadmap that works for them. I speak for them, and I often speak to them. I speak in very explicit and sometimes, I don't want to say harsh, but clear language about the four Bright Lines, no sugar, no flour, eat only meals, never snack or graze in between, and weigh and measure every single morsel. 4.0 is 4.0, not 4.1. I'm speaking to a certain person, Peggy Sue, when I say all of that and it's not you, it's not you. And that's okay.
Right now, I'm speaking to you, I'm speaking to you and saying, you are doing great. You are doing so just fine. I so support what you are doing. And you are doing Bright Line Eating. You are doing Bright Line Eating appropriately. You're doing it fully, you're doing it healthily. You're doing it in alignment with what works for you. I'm just going to read a sentence again that you wrote. You said, “I have not weighed my food because I have never been one to overeat.” I have not weighed my food because I have never been one to overeat. Can I just say that the people that fourth Bright Line of quantities was made for would never say that. They would never say that in a billion gajillion years because it's not their experience, it's not their experience. When they start eating, they sometimes, maybe often, maybe always, lose control over how much they eat. They frequently find themselves not being satisfied by a regular sort of plate of food and they find themselves eating more and more and more with less and less gratification and satiety from it with more desperation and not knowing how to get out of that conundrum. The digital food scale solves that problem for you, for them. It's a problem you don't have. It solves the problem for them. It's a problem you don't have.
I think I hear you almost in this at the end you say, “I just think some people could do well by managing without weighing their food.” Right? I hear you asking me to speak to all the people who don't need to use Bright Lines strictly and severely exactly the way they're laid out. They need to use them more as guidelines. Guidelines, like the lane markers on the highway. Not that you have to stay a train on a track and not deviate by an inch, but like guidelines or guideposts that say, “Hey, if you stay roughly in this lane, it will be a good safe way to go and it will get you where you want to go, right?” If you veer too far out of the lane, there'll be maybe some bumps that will say, “Hey, get back in your lane.” Right? And for you, three out of four of these Bright Lines are working and fine.
Now, there's a couple reasons why it's hard for people to hear me when I say this or believe me. One of the reasons is conformity. Conformity is a very powerful psychological principle. It was demonstrated in all kinds of ways in psychology. Starting in the 1950s, 1960s, Solomon Ash did these powerful experiments where he had people sit in a semicircle and look up at a screen and say, “Here's a line. Now, which of these three other lines are the same length?” He had it rigged so that the first few people would give an answer that was flagrantly wrong. They would say it was the second line when the second line was clearly way longer than the target line. When they would get to this poor schmo who was sitting there maybe fifth in the semicircle, a lot of the time, this guy would say that same wrong answer that everybody had just said, because the thought of saying something that nobody else was saying, the thought of disagreeing with everybody was so difficult. It was like the pressure, the pressure to do what other people were doing in that circumstance was so intense that they often just gave what was clearly a lie in order to just go along and get along. In Bright Line Eating, when I've tailored this program to protect the experience, the success, the brains of people who are really, really, really, really high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, when you know that level of rigor to the four Bright Lines, it's just not necessary for you. It can feel like other people are exerting pressure on you to do what you know is not right for you. It's called conformity, and it actually doesn't require anybody else to be paying attention to you to be directing their efforts or their energies at you to be making comments to you. All that's required is for you to be in the presence of a bunch of other people who are doing something differently than you and all the same. They're all doing it different and all the same as each other. Suddenly the pressure is there for you to fall into line. In those conformity experiments, it was shown that if just one person stepped out of line and said some other answer, whether it was the right answer or not, it could be one of the other wrong answers, suddenly the person felt freed up to say what was true, truly the right answer as far as their eyeballs could tell, right?
What I want to say Peggy Sue, is that you are needed right around here in Bright Line Eating. In this community, doing what you do, not pushing it on other people, just being there doing it and saying things like, “Hey, I am succeeding and happily losing my weight and feeling peaceful by following three out of the four Bright Lines and it's working for me”. And hear ye, hear ye, everyone else in the Bright Line Eating community, don't you dare say peep about that. If it's working for them, it's working for them, period. What we support here in Bright Line Eating is doing what gives you peace, doing what's in alignment with your best. Thriving and flourishing. To thine own self, be true. To thine own self, be true.
The reality is that I'm going to keep most of the time speaking in service of people who are highest on the Susceptibility Scale because oh, they need the most support. Their brains are the most tangled up with this addiction. Their addict brain is always looking for a way to weasel out and latch on to any given easier, softer path that's not going to produce success for them. So, I'm mostly gearing these vlogs to people who are 10s on the Susceptibility Scale. It's true. Sometimes I step out of line with that, and I talk to someone who is not experiencing a super severe case of food addiction, someone who could say something like, “I have not weighed my food because I've never been one to overeat.” Right? I've never been one to overeat. God bless. And the Bright Lines are serving you as guidelines to weight loss.
It is true that our addictive minds will dupe us a lot. I think this is why so many people are scared of deviating from the strict Bright Line Eating path at all. But I have to say, I have found that overall, for me at least, the call to truth, the call to self-actualization, the call to peace and freedom and wholeness and wellness is stronger than my addiction. I have one of the strongest addictions I can imagine. Addiction is a horrific, progressive, relapse prone disease, and it's very, very strong. Recovery is progressive and very, very strong, even stronger. In Bright Line eating, I like to give people the keys to the kingdom, the full roadmap of what will likely work for them and utter absolute freedom and autonomy to follow it or not deviate or not find what works for them. Start and restart, keep on going, be unstoppaBLE™, figure it out. Resume and return. Stick to the straight and narrow if that's what they want to do, always and forever to just choose their path. There are no Bright Line Eating police and we support everyone in doing what makes them free in choosing what gives them peace. Peggy Sue, it sounds like you have found that at least for now, people's brains change and people's experiences change.
I'm reminded by someone who in the early days of Bright Line Eating was the staunch one plate rule person, which is an alternative to using the fourth Line of quantities as weight and measured food. The alternative is to just use a one plate rule, which maybe you're doing at your three meals, I'm not sure, but that is a bona fide alternative to using a digital food scale. Just putting one serving a food on your plate and not going back for seconds. That is a way of bounding your quantities as well. She did that. She lost her weight, she felt great about it. She was vocal, “Hey, I'm doing the one plate rule.” I'm sure she got some blow back. She kept doing it. It was working for her. She lost her weight and years later she started weighing and measuring her food. I remember being so surprised by that and then that was working for her. I have no idea what she's doing now, if she's still in Bright Line Eating, if she's not, what's working for her today? All I'm saying is on this path, it evolves. It evolves.
So, Peggy Sue, if you wanted a rubber stamp from Susan Pierce Thompson saying that you are doing just fine. You got it girl. You got it, you got it. Please stay here in Bright Line Eating and whoever wrote in saying, I wonder if there's a place for me in Bright Line Eating, because I only follow the first two Bright Lines, what I told Simone to tell her and everybody like her is, of course there's a place for you in Bright Line Eating. We want you here. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome back. We want you here. Everyone is here. Everyone is free to be here. Using the Bright Lines as guidelines in whatever way serves their highest and best good. Truly to thy known self be true. That's the weak leave vlog. I'll see you next week.