Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and if you've been watching The Weekly Vlog for years and years and years, I'm about to change it up a little bit. I know I've always started with welcome to the Weekly vlog, and then in years long ago, I did a little eye roll-y thing. ?Welcome to the Weeklyyyyyy Vlog.? Anyway, I was in California recently with my dear friends, Ocean Robbins and Sage Levine, and they both said to me separately, I think you should change up how you start your weekly vlog. It just feels tired. It feels like you've got so much great information in there, but if it's just one weekly vlog after another, it's just going to get lost in YouTube and online.
I'm going to start differently by just telling you what I'm going to cover in that vlog. In this vlog, actually stay to the end because it's scholarship time. If you've been waiting for the scholarship announcement for the next Boot Camp, that's coming in this vlog. Wait till the end for that.
Okay, so, let me practice my new beginning. Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and in this week's vlog, I'm going to explain to you why whole wheat flour is a problem for us today. Those of us who are more addicted to food, even though when we look back centuries ago, it didn't really seem to be a problem. This is a great question that was actually sent in by Beth, and she said, ?Though I am convinced that white flour is horrible, horrible for your body and for your mind, I am not totally convinced about whole wheat flour. Many, many centuries ago, people ground wheat and other grains to make their own flour. Why was flour not a problem for them?? Alright, great question, Beth.
I've got three things to say about this. First of all, centuries ago, the entire food environment was very different. Whole wheat flour was probably then among the most triggering foods that they had, especially when you pair it with bread with butter and things like that, which they certainly did. But in addition to that, they were drinking wine, okay, diluted probably, but okay. And then they had a whole bunch of unrefined meats, vegetables, fruits, minimally processed things. They had no industrial ingredients with chemical formulations poured into bags. They weren't eating 50 to 60 to 70 to 80% of their calories as ultra-processed foods. They didn't have drive-thrus to drive through. They still had quite a strong semblance of meal structure where there were times of the day that people ate breakfast, lunch, dinner, and times of the day where people were not eating, they were working in the fields, they were doing the work of staying alive, but they were not eating all day every day. In the context of that very different food environment, people weren't getting obese and weren't developing food addiction at the rates that we see today, certainly.
But that doesn't actually mean that whole wheat flour wasn't a problem at all. It's interesting that even thousands of years ago, gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins. I kind of look back and I'm thinking, what were they all getting gluttonous about? I don't think it was broccoli, right? What were people overeating so much in the years before, during, and right after the death of Christ, right? That gluttony would've been one of the top things that people were worried about that people could get carried away with. And I'm thinking, well, that bread and butter might've been in the mix there. I don't know. So, I guess what I want to say is we don't actually know that it wasn't a problem for anyone. I know there's sketches of the very, very plump chef in the kitchen making food in the basement of the castle or whatever. And I don't know how real these things are, but I am curious about the extent to which the presence of whole wheat flour in the diet back then was a little bit of a challenge for some people. But because it was in the context of a very sane, very wholesome, very farm to table food environment overall, the population didn't develop obesity or food addiction the way our current population has it. It really is a matter of the sort of the dose makes the poison. We've got a dosing issue here of ultra-processed foods, of ultra-refined carbohydrates of chemicals and dyes and poisons in our food supply. That dose is overwhelming us today, and the level of accessibility is off the charts. Whereas back then, the whole wheat flour may have still been a poison to a certain degree, but just the dose was so much smaller in the context of everything that they were ingesting on a daily basis. That, I mean, you can have a couple molecules of rat poison in the context of drinking a gallon of water. And those couple molecules probably won't hurt you. You start drinking thimbleful now it's more of a problem. You start drinking pints of it, now you're going to die. So, the dose really does matter. I'm not saying whole wheat flour was poison, I'm just saying we don't know the extent to which it was problematic, but certainly the food system was not toxic the way it is now.
There's another issue here, which is that I will give you that that amount of whole wheat flour was not a driver enough in their food supply to be making massive segments of the population obese and food addicted. But that's a different question. Then fast forward to today. If you now already are living with a weight struggle, either overweight or obesity, and you're living with that condition, and you're also living with an addictive relationship with food that is already formed, how must you eat today to be healthy, to be free of food obsession, and to recover and let your brain heal? Those are different questions. Does a little bit of whole wheat flour in a broad food supply drive masses, numbers, massive numbers of people to obesity and to food addiction? Probably not. Once you have food addiction and obesity, can whole wheat flour be in the mix as you try to recover? That's a different question. I would put honey in that category too. People often ask me about honey, ?Hey, that's not refined. That's not a fake food. That's not born in a factory and poured into a plastic bag.? Which is true. And hunter gatherer peoples will stumble upon some honey and binge their brains out on it. They'll be eating their tubers and their kale and there will be, or whatever, and then they'll find a big honeycomb and they will eat that baby until it's gone. And that's all right. Then they go back to their?there's only so much of it. And so, it's really an availability question and access question and really a question of what's the rest of the context of the food environment that someone's living in?
Today, once you've developed an issue with an addictive relationship with food and a weight struggle, can whole wheat flour be in the mix and not throw you off track? Well, I've run that experiment, and for many years before I lost my excess weight, I was in a 12-step program called Overeaters Anonymous, which did not give a specific food plan. It said, figure out the foods and eating behaviors that cause you difficulty and abstain from them. It was basically, these meetings were, it felt like a big experimental laboratory of people trying all manner of different food plans. The brown flour, but not white flour experiment was often run. I got to say, I have watched many, many, many, many, many, many people, including myself, run this experiment. I'll tell you how it went for me. How it went for me is I discovered the utter absolute deliciousness of whole wheat tortillas and whole wheat pasta. They became very, very big, central, needed, craved, foundational parts of my food plan. I was eating them all the time and whole wheat bread and butter, those foods, absolutely. Once you've licensed brown flour, it's very easy to license corn flour. Now you're eating corn chips. It's a slippery slope, and suddenly Mexican restaurants are hard suddenly, anyway, it just gets challenging. What I found as I looked around the rooms at Overeaters Anonymous, and as I looked at my own experience running that experiment was I did not see people recovering, losing their excess weight and getting mentally free from food obsession, including whole wheat flour in their plan and abstaining from white flour only. I didn't see it. I didn't see it. I didn't see the recovery there. I didn't feel the recovery there myself. It was absolutely problematic.
Now, the last thing I want to say about this though is as always around here, it depends on how badly your brain has already wired up for food addiction. So, take that Food Addiction Susceptibility Quiz?, go to foodaddictionquiz.com and see what your number is. Because if when you're eating is at its worst, the worst stretch of time that you've ever experienced in your whole life, you project yourself back to that time and you answer those questions and your number comes out as a five, then I would say?the scale goes up to 10, so, five is right smack in the middle?I would say if you're a five, you do not have food addiction and whole wheat flour might be able to be a part of your program if you're weighing and measuring and doing Bright Line Eating? otherwise. What you really need to do is lose weight, but you do not have a full-blown food addiction if your number is 7, 8, 9, 10. In those higher numbers, I would predict that the whole weight flour experiment won't work for you. That's just my prediction. I don't know. I don't know you. I don't know your specific circumstances. I never deny anyone their research. I myself have hiked through the research Rockies for more years than I care to admit. The reality is that when we run experiments, we figure it out for ourselves. I do my best to save people that pain and that process when they come in. And I skew my materials toward the brains of people who are seven and above on that Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale. And I say, do not mess with whole wheat flour because it will be problematic. But as I say that, there's an asterisk there. It will be problematic unless you're low on the Susceptibility Scale, it'll be problematic unless it isn't. In which case I'm wrong. I don't know. Run the experiment. You're responsible for you. I don't know.
But I have developed a program in Bright Line Eating that is strong, that is able to take someone who has a pernicious weight struggle driven by an addictive relationship with food, where there's cravings, there's insatiable hunger, there's losing control over how much you eat once you start to eat. There's food chatter and scale chatter of what do I weigh? What have I eaten? Will I, won't I? How many miles? How many calories, how many pounds? That is relentless and exhausting. For people who want out of that misery, who want a pathway to freedom that works, that is tried and true, that has worked for thousands, that pathway is laid out. Brown flour is not on the plan. Rhat's because we want to protect the brains of people here who really, really want to prioritize freedom above all else.
Let me transition now to just saying we have a Boot Camp cohort coming up in June of 2025. Right now, as I record this vlog, it's May of 2025, and we are opening applications for scholarships right now. The application window is short. We will be accepting applications from Wednesday, May 21st, 2025 until Sunday, May 25th, 2025, and then the Boot Camp will be starting next month. Now, we will be giving out 20 full complete scholarships to this Bright Line Eating Bootcamp 2.0. If you have been waiting for this announcement, click below, fill out the application. If you've applied before, be sure to let us know that. Ee cannot wait to notify you if you've gotten a scholarship for the next boot Camp. Now, this next Boot Camp launch is going to be all about Beyond Weight-Loss Drugs, the True Secrets to Lifelong Success. We're going to be reviewing the latest year of research on these new weight-loss drugs. We're going to be talking about how they work in the brain and in the body. We're going to be talking about Bright Line Eating and how the results from Bright Line Eating continue to be very, very parallel to weight-loss drugs. But the latest research goes out four and six years, and the long-term data show that Bright Line Eating even beats out these weight-loss drugs when you go years and years out, which is incredible and very gratifying to see. But we're going to be talking about the weight-loss drugs. We're going to be talking about Bright Line Eating. All that is going to be starting June 10th. And then the Boot Camp itself will be starting right toward the end of June. If you want to apply for a scholarship, click below. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
