Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. A little while ago, someone named Theresa wrote in and she said something so powerful and so earnest, and I related to it so much. Theresa, I'm going to address what you said In this week's vlog. Here's what she wrote, “It seems I can't stop eating once I start eating. This is especially true for dinner. I'm okay as long as I don't start eating. Once I start, I seem to want to continue. Even if I eat compliant food, I can't make it through even one single day completely Bright. Help.”
Oh my gosh, Theresa, my heart so goes out to you. The first thing I want to say is you are not alone. This is actually one of the twin defining features of addiction. Once we start, we cannot stop. And once we stop, we cannot stay stopped. You're not alone, but clearly, it's a problem, right? Not being alone isn't comfort when you have the problem of not being able to stop eating. So, what do you do about this? Okay, the first thing is to recognize you are dealing with a fairly advanced case of food addiction, right? Food addiction is a real condition, it's a real disease, and yours has advanced to a state where you are frequently experiencing utter complete powerlessness over your quantities, over your volume of food once you begin to eat. And obviously, I mean, I hope this is obvious, right?
Never eating at all is not an option. So, what are you going to do about this? You've got to find a solution, and the solution lies in a comprehensive, multifaceted, and very rigorous approach to treating your food addiction. And you're going to have to keep trying things until you find something that works for you. First of all, I just want to say if you have been, now, I don't know you and I don't know anything about your background, but if you have been trying to, for example, do Bright Line Eating® from the book, you read the book, right? That's not going to be a potent enough solution for the condition that you have. If Bright Line Eating is going to work for you, you are going to have to be in the Boot Camp using every resource available to you. If you get into the Boot Camp and you start with the Boot Camp and you find you still can't stop eating at dinnertime, you're going to need to call in for coaching and get one of the coaches to help troubleshoot how you're approaching the Boot Camp. You might need to find a guide within Bright Line Eating, someone to take your food commitment and talk with you every day for a bit until you get a week or two of Bright Lines under your belt. I just want to say all of that. If you haven't tried that yet, start there.
What if you've already done the Boot Camp? What if you're like, “Oh no, Susan, I've done the Boot Camp seven times. I'm going to hold hat with this. I still can't stop eating.” Then I'm going to say, Theresa, you're going to have to take it to the next level. What might that look like? It might mean going inpatient. As far as I know, you haven't mentioned any eating disorder symptoms here, and as far as I know, there's one really good inpatient food addiction treatment program for people who don't have an eating disorder. They just have food addiction, and that's SHiFT Recovery by Acorn. You might need to look up their website, SHiFT, S-H-I-F-T, SHiFT Recovery by Acorn, look them up and see when they've got an inpatient treatment program happening. You can do that on site with them. You can also do it virtually with them. It'll be for a limited time, but then there'll be, I think 12 weeks of follow-up. That would be a more intensive thing. If you haven't already, you might try a 12-step program for food addiction. I think the most potent one would be FA, Food Addicts and Recovery Anonymous, and you can find them at foodaddicts.org. What that would do is it would give you a sponsor, someone to talk with you every single day on the phone who would be very directive and authoritative with you. If that kind of changing your behavior because of someone else's expectations of you and being held in a very tight container is something that works for you, you might find that that relationship helps to solve your problem where other things have not.
Back to the Bright Line Eating Program and just some things I want to point out to you, and actually this would apply no matter what approach you're using. I want to point out some things, some aspects of food addiction recovery that are going to be really apropos for you. One of them is the digital food scale. There is power in weighing your food precisely before you start to eat anything at all. You in particular might want to be someone who has the kitchen cleaned up and everything put away before you start to eat. As a matter of fact, Theresa, you might do well by having every single one of your meals, your breakfast, lunch, and dinner weighed and measured and in containers the day before so that when you wake up, your food is written down and your food is already weighed out and in containers. You're completely separating the experience of preparing food, cooking food, shopping and chopping vegetables, blah, blah, blah, from the experience of actually eating the food. And so, when you start to eat, you've got a weighed and measured portion of food, and when it's gone, there's literally no more food immediately around, which will create a little bit of a buffer between that last bite of your weight and measured committed meal and any other food that you might eat, right? There's nothing else around. Maybe even don't eat right near the kitchen. Eat somewhere where you'd have to really travel a bunch of steps to even get more food and then build in the habit of going to brush your teeth right after you finish the last bite of your committed food. Now you're going to go into the bathroom, you're going to get a minty strong toothpaste. You're going to scrape your tongue with it, brush your tongue with this toothpaste. You're going to use a really strong minty, like a Listerine type, green or blue colored mouthwash and get your mouth all clean and minty fresh. Again, another signal to your brain that you're done. You've had your last bite of food. Here's something else I want to point out. Dinner is relatively predictable. It shows up at the end of the day, consistently dinner never shows up at breakfast time. It never shows up at one in the afternoon. Dinner happens when you expect it to happen, and I know that sounds ridiculous and kind of tongue in cheek, but you can use that to your advantage. You can get a Bright Line Eating buddy to commit to talk with you on the phone at whatever hour it is or minute that you know will be finishing your dinner. Get something else to do right after dinner and start to make that habitual. Okay?
Gosh, let me see if I have any more suggestions for you. Oh yeah, I do have one. People tend to have problems with dinner when they don't have problems with breakfast and lunch. I see this all the time or more problems with dinner, and that's something that you indicated, Theresa, right? You've got more problems with dinner. Here's why that is. It's twofold. One is that your brain is more depleted by the end of the day. There's nothing really you can do about that. But the other is that people tend to pair dinner with more variety, more highly rewarding foods and less automaticity. They often start the day with a very routinized breakfast that they're super familiar with, and then they get to dinner and it's like it could be any number of things, a big variety. Maybe they're going to eat at home, maybe they're going to eat out. It's like dinner becomes this huge kind of mess compared to breakfast. And then they wonder, gee, breakfast, I'm always Bright at breakfast. Why am I not Bright at dinner? I want you to notice the difference, and you are someone who's going to need to make your dinner more like breakfast. In other words, I want you to develop a dinner that is not comprised of rewarding foods. What do I mean by that? Well, avoid butternut squash and have steamed green beans, steamed broccoli, that kind of thing. Don't put a lot of spices on your chicken if you're grilling it. I'm not saying don't eat salt and pepper, but grilled chicken with salt and pepper. Leave it at that. A very, very simple meal. I'm not saying you have to eat chicken and green beans, but just find something that you like. It's okay to like your food. It's okay to enjoy your food just like you enjoy and your hot shower, but you've got to make it simple enough that it's not something that you would think about and look forward to at other times of the day. You're not sitting around fantasizing about the hot shower you're going to get to take whenever you next shower. It's lovely and enjoyable, but it's not lighting you up and making you obsess about it all the time. Find a dinner meal that you like, but that feels very neutral and not particularly scintillating or titillating or exciting to you. And eat that every night. Every night, every night. Not forever, Theresa. But until you get some Bright days under your belt, right? You're in rehab, you're in rehab, you've got to really understand that you have a powerful, powerful addiction akin to someone who's been shooting heroin on the streets for a long time. I hate to say this, but it's how your brain is, how hijacked right now, right? You are in a state of critical care. You're absolutely in a state, honestly, of beyond human aid, right? This is addiction. When it gets this far advanced is incredibly difficult to arrest. When I say eat the same dinner every night, I'm talking about it as a, this is like a tourniquet that we're putting around your leg because you're bleeding out. This is an extreme measure. It's not going to be forever, but you've got to do some things to get some healing under your belt. Eat the same dinner every night for a good stretch of time.
I think if you use some or all of those strategies, you'll be on the right track, Theresa, you'll notice having some Bright days, you're going to need more support, more accountability. You're going to need to find a program that you can check into as rehab. You're going to need to really, really take this seriously. Make dinner hour absolutely protected, heightened sanctified so that you are on point. You know what you're doing for your recovery program. Your meal is already weighed out the night before, and when you take it out, there's no other food around. You eat your meal. You go brush your teeth, you go make your phone call to your committed buddy, it will work, Theresa. There's a way out of the hell that you've been living in, but you have not been working a program that's anywhere near as potent for the food addiction that your brain is experiencing right now.
And again, I just want to end where I started, which is to say you're not alone. This is unfortunately advanced and extreme, but also kind of garden variety food addiction. This is what addiction is. Once we start, we cannot stop. And so, the game is how not to start at all. And with food, we have to start. That's why we use a digital food scale to bound the quantities and bring a lot more intentionality to that meal. Because as food addicts, we've got to kick the tiger and take him for a walk three times a day. The game is how do we not get eaten alive in that process? You got this, Theresa, I love you. I'm here with you. Let me and my team know how we can help you, and you will get through this. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next time.
