Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. It's early May, and my twins Zoe and Robin Thompson turned 17 on May 2nd. They turned 17. They were born weighing one pound, my precious little twins, and there was a 4% chance that they would both survive and be healthy. Zoe's about to graduate from high school a year early because she went to community college in the Pathways program and she's about to graduate from high school a year early. Robin is thriving in high school and doing plays and on the honor roll, and it's just amazing. They're both alive and healthy and vibrant. We went to celebrate their birthday at Plum Garden, which is our family restaurant celebration place. The grandparents were there. They each brought friends and just such a sweet evening in this restaurant because we always go to it to celebrate anything, and everyone's a birthday every year for everybody.
We're there a lot at this restaurant. I have to say that there's no particular restaurant that more epitomizes how I'm working my program differently now that I'm really, really peacefully Bright differently now than I did when I was Bright, but not steadily Bright. And so, I just wanted to talk about one aspect of it in particular. This vlog is really for the person for you if you've been around Bright Line Eating? for a while and you're just not getting the results that you would like, you're just not able to stay Bright consecutively. Maybe your weight loss isn't happening the way you like. Maybe you feel like you've given up on Bright Line Eating, it just doesn't seem to work with for you, or you feel like a broken record of just struggling in the same way over and over again.
I want it to bring up the topic of mixtures because there's a particular way that this restaurant cooks food that brings up the notion of mixtures. Okay, so this restaurant is Plum Garden. It's a Japanese hibachi house. Have you ever been to one of these restaurants where there's a big cook skillet and there's a chef who comes out in a hat and stuff, and then he does this fancy thing with the knives and they break eggs in fancy ways and fling them around, and it's like a show? What they're doing is they're cooking vegetables and rice and meats and tofu and stuff like that in a Japanese hibachi kind of style way right in front of you. Then they put it right on your plate from the skillet. It's easy food to be Bright in the sense that you watch them prepare it so they're not putting any sugar in it, unless they put some sort of, I have been to a hibachi place, not this one, but other ones where they squeeze a bunch of teriyaki sauce on it and that's got sugar. So, you have to ask for them not to do that. But this place doesn't do that. They just put soy sauce and butter and sesame seeds and things like that on it. So, basically, it's fine. But back in the old days before I was peacefully, steadily, consecutively Bright I had a hard time in this restaurant. I frequently overate and frequently felt out of control, and the quantities are very big, and I would frequently feel too stuffed when I left the restaurant. I would frequently feel more and more out of control toward the end of the meal and feel like I was eating the rice and the vegetables and stuff in a way that I just didn't feel good about. I often had meals there that I felt really weren't Bright.
What I do differently now is that I don't eat the mixtures. In particular, the fried rice that they make when they make the fried rice, they chop up egg and put it in there and there's quite a bit of butter that they put in there, and soy sauce, sesame seeds, little bits of vegetable like carrots and peas and things like that. Now, these are all things I eat, but you put 'em together and you have a mixture. Note that you have a mixture across food categories. You've got rice, which is grain, egg, which is protein, butter, which is fat, and vegetable, which is vegetable. Those are four different food categories in a mixture, in one concoction, and it's so interesting. The longer I stay Bright, the more peacefully Bright I am, the more I realize that how I work my program now is pretty much the way that the women in Boston in a 12-step program, that was very, very, I thought it was excessively rigid back in the day, but it was the way that I got the peace initially that helped me lose all my excess weight. Initially, back in 2003, ?04 or ?05 back in the day, they used to talk in pejorative, derogatory terms about mixtures and concoctions as sort of hallmarks of what they were drawn to in their food addiction. Big bowls of mixtures and concoctions. If I'm honest, that's kind of how I ate addictively too. I would bake stuff or I wouldn't actually bake it. I would eat it raw, but I would make a big raw baking concoction in a bowl when I was a kid, a little kid, and that was my binge food of choice. I frequently wouldn't use measuring spoons or cups. I would just dump all these baking ingredients in a bowl, and I would make my own big concoction and then I would eat it raw.
When you put a bunch of foods across different food categories together, you have a mixture. You have a concoction, and I didn't use to see it that way. I thought it's fried rice. There's nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing wrong with it. It's not a moral thing at all. However, the research is pretty clear that the number one factor that allows the brain to release excess weight and to heal from food addiction is the simplicity of the food that we eat and the lack of triggering reward value of that food. Reward value is a difficult thing to measure. Sugar has high reward value. Flour has high reward value. Fat and salt in combination have high reward value. Refined carbohydrates of all forms have high reward value, but mixtures and concoctions also have high reward value. You don't find high carbohydrate, high fat foods in the wild. You don't. That's not how nature makes food. And so, when you start to put white rice and butter and soy sauce and egg in a concoction like that, it has really, and salt, the salt from the soy sauce, the layering in of those ingredients has very high reward value, and so I don't eat it anymore, that fried rice, I just say, ?No, thank you.? If I have grain for my lunch or dinner meal, if we're there for lunch or dinner and I do have grain in my food plan, I will order a bowl of white rice on the side and eat it plain and let the fried rice just sit there. We'll take it home. Someone else in my family will eat it. The stuff's delicious. Someone will eat that stuff for leftovers. Not my food. It's not my food today.
Similarly, their salad dressing. I always knew it had a little bit of sugar in it, but I rationalized that it had certainly oil, certainly vinegar definitely, they had blended up carrots and onions in there. I could sense that it was kind of a big carroty blendy mix, probably several other ingredients. So, I always rationalize that the sugar was probably way low on the ingredients list. I don't know because I'm not making that salad dressing. It's homemade, but I know that it has some sugar in it because asked, and I don't need it anymore. I have my little garden salad there that's like iceberg lettuce and a tomato and a cucumber, and I just have that little bowl and I just pour a little bit of soy sauce on it. Maybe I'll ask for a slice of lemon, and that's my salad I don't do there. And then, I just trust that with their vegetables, they put some butter on the vegetables. That's my fat, and that's what I do for that meal. No salad dressing, no fried rice, simpler, avoiding the mixture.
I have not had anywhere near a whiff of an out of control feeling, not Bright experience in that restaurant in the three years that I've been super Bright, not a whiff, it's just gone. It's gone. That attachment, that obsession, that bad history in that restaurant, and for me, that's a really big win. It means I've reclaimed a beloved cherished family space, a celebratory experience, and now I'm able to show up fully for the experience with my family, and I'm no longer in a position of feeling furtive and triggered and obsessed and trying to just get through the meal somehow, and in my own private hell of wondering, have I had too much? Can I have some more? Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not in that food obsessed state like I used to be, which is such a blessing.
I just offer this story to you and this anecdote about this restaurant as an invitation for you. Again, this is specifically if you're not getting the results you want in Bright Line Eating. If you're not losing your weight, getting free, feeling peaceful, feeling Bright. If your heart's not singing on this journey, have you kept your food complicated? Have you been doing recipes? Have you been mixing things together? Could you try a week or two of food that's so simple with each category? Absolutely separate. Not even mixing your vegetables like literally a six ounce pile of steamed green beans and four ounces of grilled tofu or chicken, and a beautiful eight ounce salad with a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Could you literally keep it that simple so that any stranger looking at your plate would never ask? What is that? They would know, oh, I know what that is. That's clearly pork chops and broccoli and a salad like I can see from here. That's exactly what that is, right? Simple, simple, simple. Could you try that? Could you just put six ounces of blueberries in eight ounces of plain yogurt and have a one ounce dry thing of oats that you add a little bit of water and it turns into a bowl of oatmeal, and that's your breakfast. Simple, simple, simple. Could you try that and see what happens to your brain over time? As you let go of the mixtures, let go of the recipes. Let go of concoctions and fancy food and just bring the reward value of your food down low enough to maybe hit the precious point where the level of addiction you've got is matched by the strength of your program, and you keep your food simple enough to let your brain heal so that you could be free. I so want that for you. Give it a try. What have you got to lose? That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
