Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. When you're living in Maintenance for a long time, there is a way to figure out whether something you're doing with your food, whether it's a recipe, a specific food, a method of preparation, or anything else like a mode of traveling, anything like that, whether it's working for you. This is really important because as we're flying along on our journey, we have an instrument panel in front of us, and the lights are coming up on the control panel. And it's important to know how to read the instrument panel right, to fly straight and true, and to stay on the journey. So, I want to share with you in this vlog what we call in Bright Line Eating?, the 4 Questions. These are the questions to ask yourself to find out whether something you're doing with your food is working.
I think we used to have these 4 Questions in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, and I'm pretty sure we took them out and we now talk about them in Bright Lifers?. We want people to be on their journey for longer before we introduce this notion of experimentation, because the first thing I want to share about the 4 Questions is actually that you can't ask them and get reliable answers if you haven't been very, very steadily Bright and successful for quite a long time. Because if you're not consecutively Bright and very, very peaceful for a long time, and then you ask yourself the question, ?Do I have peace around it?? You can't tell because you don't have peace in general. You haven't yet settled into a steady, consecutive continuous understanding of what it feels like to live week after week, month after month, possibly year after year, at peace with your food and your weight. Truly, truly no ripples in the pond. If you don't have that kind of baseline framework to compare it to, you're asking, ?Do I have the peace of someone who's never had peace in their whole life or for decades around their food and their weight?? And they don't know. It is hard to tell. Is it more chaotic or less chaotic than it used to be? It's like, it's not a valid question. So, we don't introduce the 4 Questions early on anymore in someone's journey. We wait for quite a while.
If have been on your path steadily for a long time, and then you want to experiment with something, or you're wondering whether a food that you're eating is working for you, even if it's a Bright food, I don't know, sausage or something, if you're wondering if something you're eating or something you're doing with your food is working for you and you've been Bright and peaceful for a long time, you can ask yourself these questions.
The first question, I already gave it away is, do I have peace around it? Do I have peace around it? I have to say that the Brighter I live, the more clear it is to me that peace is the goal, peace is the goal, peace with my food, peace with my weight, peace with just peace in my head as I meditate. Peace. Then what happens is I am available for the universe to use, to be of service, to show up and help people, to connect with my family, to have those beautiful micro moments of love and to joy with my kids, to have moments of tenderness with my husband. To think I'm going to call my mom. I'm going to call my dad and have a lovely phone conversation. Ro stay in touch with my friends. To go to the gym and enjoy a good workout. These are the things that spring from a taproot of peace where I'm really available for my life, where I go days and weeks and months without really having to think about my food or my weight really at all. It's amazing. Peace. Do I have peace about it? If I?m doing something with my food, let's say in a restaurant, and I walk out of the restaurant and my head hits the pillow that night and I haven't thought about that restaurant meal, once I have peace about it, maybe it wouldn't be what someone else would've done, but if then the next day happens and I'm still not thinking about it and the next day happens, I have peace about it. If I do it in a restaurant again the next time, but then afterwards I'm not thinking about it and I wasn't looking forward to it in between, I have peace around it. If on the other hand, I do something in a restaurant with my food and then it crosses my mind five times before I go to bed that night, and it's on my mind as my head has hit the pillow, I do not have peace around it. That is a sign that it's not working for me, that it kicks up the addictive obsession. Should I have? Shouldn't I have? How was that? Was it not? But no, that's not peace. So, that's the first question. Do I have peace around it?
Another is, is it messing with my weight? Some things I can have peace with, but they're not sustainable. If it puts me on a path of regaining my weight, that's not going to work long term. I'm going to have to rein it in and make adjustments, and that's not sustainable. So, even if I have peace around it, if it's not sustainable, fundamentally it's not working.
The third question is, is it healthy? And that's more just information. Not everybody in Bright Line Eating is aiming for optimal health, and we don't have to aim for optimal health around here. That's not our job around here is to get you healthy. Our job is to get you free and to give you agency back over what you eat or don't eat. Then you can use that agency and that freedom to strive for optimal health or to just settle in and enjoy the pretty close to optimal health that you get from living Bright. But it is interesting information. If you've added something in and it's really, it's not that healthy, then that's information you might, if it passes the test of the other three questions, you might say, it's not that healthy and I don't care. And that's fine. So, it's just a question, is it healthy? And then what do you think about that?
The last question comes back to the topic of sustainability, and it asks, is it escalating? Is it escalating? Did you just introduce this thing into your breakfast once and then that was fine, and then a couple weeks later you had it again, and now all of a sudden breakfast doesn't feel like breakfast without it, and you have to have it every day. It's escalating, right? What that signals is addictive attachment and building a tolerance for something and needing more and more of it to get the same payoff. That's addiction. When something is escalating, it's maybe not clinically diagnosable addiction, unless there's some other factors in the mix as well. But it is one of the features of addiction is that building tolerance and the escalating of the behavior. So, is it escalating? If it's escalating, that's not sustainable and it's a sign. It's a sign.
Those are the 4 Questions. And so, whenever anyone asks me anything, can I have organic corn tortillas as a grain? I'm like, initially, no. I would let that go. That's not on the Bright Line Eating plan for starters. Then when you've been Bright five years and you're steady in Maintenance and your goal range and you're enjoying your Bright body and you have total peace and you're an 8 on the scale at that point, what I would say is potentially try it and use the 4 Questions and see how it goes. But, you have to start from that baseline of a really, really strong program, a really smooth sailing trajectory for quite a while. Otherwise, you won't even be able to get an honest answer to the first question, do I have peace about it?
Anyway, those are the 4 Questions. And once you're well established in Maintenance, you can use them to answer your own questions, or you can build your own FAQs of How does this work for me? Do I have peace about it? Is it healthy? Is it escalating? Is it messing with my weight? You can find out for yourself how something works. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
