Hey, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I've been thinking a lot about weight-loss drugs and about long-term weight-loss maintenance. If you're curious about how to pair the two together, maybe with Bright Line Eating® in the mix, but you really want to keep off your weight long term and not just have this attempt to be another flash in the pan, another short-term fix, another Yo-Yo Diet attempt, I really want you to tune into this video.
Last weekend, I submitted the completed first draft of the manuscript for my fifth and maybe final Bright Line Eating book. It's called, "Maintain," and it's all about the deep psychological shifts that are needed for sustaining lifelong weight loss. Like really, really keeping that weight off and never returning to the struggle of the diet, the food, the weight, the chatter in the brain, the chatter around the bathroom scale. Just really moving on from that, finally, and I had to write about weight-loss drugs because everybody's talking about them, but here's the thing. The data are in weight loss. Drugs are not going to solve the current obesity pandemic the way people are orienting to them right now. The reason is that they're not staying on them. 85% of people are off these weight-loss drugs within two years, within just one year, 71% of people are off them. The data are clear, people are relating to the drugs as a short-term diet. The data are also clear that people regain the weight on average when they stop these weight-loss drugs. So, I want to start this vlog by just sharing one key nugget that I realized that I really think is a paradigm shifting game changer, although it feels pretty obvious now that I've articulated it in my own mind. It is this, I do not see people succeed at keeping weight off with any strategy other than the one that they used to lose the weight in the first place.
The way to keep weight off is to lose it and then keep doing that for the long term. This relates to the first identity shift that I talk about in my new book. The book isn't coming out until April of 2026, so this is a very early preview. There's going to be a whole year of edits, and the publication process is long. But basically in the book I describe three key identity shifts that are needed to sustain weight loss. The first one is you've got to become someone who's not dieting, someone who is devoted to a program, to a path, to a way of eating, to a way of living your life to a lifestyle. People always say diets don't work, but it's got to be a lifestyle change. Well, the difference there is that with one, you're thinking of it as a temporary quick fix, and with the other, you're thinking of it as your new way of life that you are now devoted to. It's as different as someone giving up meat for Lent and someone becoming vegetarian. The vegetarian is devoted to a lifestyle of not eating meat. Someone who's giving up meat for Lent is just doing it temporarily, and it's a short-term thing. That's the first identity shift. You've got to become devoted.
The second identity shift is you've got to become resourced, meaning someone who's not using food as a crutch to get through life, someone who's not eating over every emotion, someone who's not getting back into the food when life gets life-y or when stressful things happen, you've got to become more resourced. You've got to do the inner work and develop other ways of coping with emotions.
Then finally, you've got to become liberated. Liberated, meaning someone who actually is willing to face the big vacuum of what your life would be like without the food and the weight struggle in it. Fill that hole with huge, beautiful, Bright pursuits of life on life's terms, just getting into life and moving on past the food and the weight struggle, meaning you're not tinkering. You're not in and out messing with your food plan, thinking that you're not yet in Maintenance, you still have five pounds to lose. You've got to just be liberated and allow yourself to move on to move on, finally, from the food and the weight struggle.
Those are the three identity shifts. You've got to become devoted, resourced, and liberated. Now, when it comes to weight-loss drugs, people are not typically thinking of them as a long-term thing. I assembled a couple hundred people on Zoom the other day. It was last month sometime. I think it was last month, whatever. Time is funny, month ago, two months ago. Out of all the people, these were people who were either interested in weight-loss drugs in a Bright Line Eating context or were already on them. I asked the people who were already on them, how many of them planned to stay on them. 76% planned to get off them, and most of them had been taking them for less than a year, already less than six months even. Of the people who were on weight-loss drugs, only 13% were really staying Bright. Most were using what the drugs afford, which is the ability to eat a little and stop. So, they're like, "Well, why do I need to abstain from sugar and flour when I can eat a little and stop?" They're not building in the habits that they need to sustain, and they're not planning on staying on the drugs. What that really means is it's a diet. It's a short-term thing.
Here's what I see working. I see that what's needed for long-term success is a three-pronged approach. Food, habits, support. You need a food plan. If you have a highly addictable brain, if you've taken the Food Addiction Susceptibility Quiz, which you can go take @foodaddictionquiz.com, you can go to foodaddictionquiz.com, take the quiz. It's super short note that it asks you to think about a time in your life when your eating was at its worst, not how it is now, but how it was when your eating was at its worst, not a day that it was at its worst, but like a stretch of time, like a month or two or three, a stretch of time where your eating was at its worst. Answer five simple questions, you'll get a number from one to 10. 10 is high. It means that you have a brain that's profoundly addicted to food, to specific foods, ultra-processed foods, sugar and flour foods. If you score high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™, you're going to need an approach to food that factors that in that will allow your brain to heal. Bright Line Eating is one such approach. You're going to need a food plan if you're not high on the Susceptibility Scale, you could get that food plan anywhere. You could get it from a magazine, a popular diet book, just, I don't know, Mediterranean Diet, vegan diet. It's got an ideally minimized-processed foods, maximize whole real foods, make sure you're getting enough protein, like some basics. Enough fiber.
You need an approach to food, but then you need habits. The habits that I'm talking about are habits around healthy living, like around sleep habits, around gratitude, habits around self-care, because again, you have to become resourced, so you have to become someone who's not turning to food. Habits around meditation, habits around human connection. You've got to build habits. I talk all about this in Bright Line Eating, and I guide people in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp to build these habits. I give them a food plan. I guide them in setting up the habits.
Then lastly, you need support, which is a community of people walking this journey with you, people that you're really sharing with and being open with people that you're thinking, "Oh, I wonder how their son's graduation went?" "Oh, how did that visit go with your in-laws?" That you're wondering, "How did that doctor's appointment go? Was that lump? Was it something? Did you get it all clear? How did it go?" People that you're traveling this life journey with, but also in relation to your food so that you have someone to call when it's that day when you're stepping on the bathroom scale and you're scared about what the number says, and it always triggers you. You have someone to call. You need support. I don't see people typically being successful on the food journey and the weight journey when they're traveling alone because we're really fundamentally social beings and food is such a social thing. So, if you're eating in a way that's bucking how your friends, family, coworkers all eat, and then you're expecting that that's not going to go well for you psychologically, you're going to feel too much on the outside, but if you're traveling with us, you feel on the inside here, you feel like you belong here. That makes the journey so much smoother, and it really allows for the longevity to really stick with it long term.
Food, habit support, that's what goes into the program. That's what you become devoted to. Now, where do weight-loss drugs fit in? Well, they can, if you find that you have not been able to stick to a program because the cravings and the hunger are just too much. The weight-loss drugs can be a tool to help you work your program to help give you the longevity that you need to help you stay in the game. Weight-loss drugs can be a tool, and you'll want to work them into your program and expect to have them in there for the long term. Expect to keep going with them. Now, are there any exceptions to this? I guess we'll see in the years to come. Are there any people who successfully wean off weight-loss drugs and maintain their weight loss? We'll see. I do know of one case, literally just one case. She was not high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, and she had never had a weight problem before. She was fit and trim until she had two babies in rapid succession, one in her late 30s and one in her early 40s, and then she had 30 pounds of baby weight that she wasn't losing, and she spent a little while and used weight-loss drugs to help get that weight off. Meanwhile, she went back to the gym and started her old routines that she used all through her 20s and 30s and got that healthy lifestyle reestablished and then weaned off the weight-loss drugs. She did not have an addictive relationship with food, and she did not have a chronic lifelong weight issue. She had a temporary weight issue from baby weight and perimenopause hitting at the same time. That is the only case I am personally aware of someone who's gone off weight-loss drugs and maintained their weight loss. I suspect in the years to come, I'll encounter more cases. Please reach out to me if you're such a case. If you've used weight-loss drugs to lose weight and now have succeeded in getting off the drugs and maintaining that weight loss, I'm guessing that those cases are likely to be unicorns rare, and that the adage of what works for maintenance is what you use to lose the weight in the first place. Just keep doing it, that that is going to be the average typical trajectory for someone who is successful.
They always say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I like that. I think that's true. I say insanity is finding what really works and deciding to stop doing it. I have done that so many times. I cannot tell you I have bucked the no sugar, no flour, weighing, and measuring thing, and/or tried to leave support systems that worked for me, tried to leave habit stacks that worked for me. What I always find is what works is what I need to go back to and lifelong maintenance. Contented maintenance for me is a product of doing what works and doing what helped to keep the weight off to get the weight off in the first place. I am devoted now to my path. It's a three-pronged program of food, habits, and support. I live Bright. I am devoted to being Bright, and that is what works for me. I don't need a weight-loss drug right now because I'm free. My brain has gotten free.
If you're someone who can't seem to get free, can't seem to work the Bright Line Eating program long term, or has fallen into a pit of relapse, you might want to consider a GLP-1 for re stabilization, and maybe those will be people that will be able to wean off the drugs eventually. People who were once Bright consecutively who fell into relapse couldn't get out long term and need to use the drugs to restabilize for some months or years. If that's your story, I would really encourage you, and this is for real, for real, to reach Maintenance and then stay on the drugs for two years. Two years, and then slowly wean off and keep the door open that you might need to take an injection periodically just to keep, maybe not every week, but maybe every three or four weeks just to keep the hunger and the cravings to a manageable level.
We're in this journey together, folks. Nobody has answers on this. Nobody is studying the relationship between these weight-loss drugs and food addiction. They should be, but they aren't. I'm watching. We just don't have long-term data yet. But I am now willing to put a stake in the ground of what I advise as a professional. I advise that whatever method you use to lose your weight, keep doing it, to keep it off, that that's the way Maintenance works. We need not vilify weight-loss drugs that are a tool that are going to be helpful and needed for some people.
Bright Line Eating creates those same effects in the brain. It's just that addiction is a beast and not everybody recovers from addiction. Addiction is awful, and food addiction is the worst addiction. Take it from someone who's been addicted to a lot of things, including crack cocaine and crystal meth. Food addiction is the hardest. It is the hardest, not because the drug is stronger, but because the recovery environment is so not conducive. "
I've created a new video series, it's called, "Weight-Loss Drugs and Beyond: What really Works for Lifelong Success." In Video 1, I talk all about the new weight-loss drugs and some of the latest research on them, some of the latest side effects that have come out, just all about them. Then as the video series progresses, I describe how you can get those same effects without using a drug. I invite you to join the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp. We're doing a big cohort that's coming up soon, this Weight-Loss Drug Video Series as a precursor to a Boot Camp cohort that's going to go through the Boot Camp together. Whether you want to do that with a weight-loss drug for support or just do the Boot Camp and get weight-loss drug effects without the drugs, both are possible, but I really feel like it's worth it to tune in to check out this video series, regardless of your perspective on weight-loss drugs.
I want to ask you actually to click the link below this video and just answer one quick question for me. It relates to how you feel, not what you think, but how you feel about weight-loss drugs. Would you answer that one question for me? It's literally multiple choice. It'll take you 10 seconds. Just click the link below, answer that question. That'll get you free access to the video series, including Video 1 that'll share some pretty eye-popping new science on the weight-loss drugs. I've been paying attention. I don't know if you've lost track of the research, but a lot has been published in the last year. Click the link below and I can't wait to see you. I love you and I'm very open-minded about this journey. I'm glad we're all on it together. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
