Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. Is it possible that you could have an allergy to sugar flour and unmeasured quantities of food? Is that possible? What would that even mean? That's what we're going to talk about in this week's vlog. The notion of an allergy as the underlying problem with someone who has an addiction was first proposed in the book, “Alcoholics Anonymous,” in 1939, and the doctor who proposed it was Dr. William D. Silkworth. He'd been working with alcoholic patients for a long time, and he'd noticed that these people with alcoholism responded to even one sip of alcohol fundamentally different than other people did. They developed this crushing, obsessive craving to get more, even to the point of drinking themselves into a stupor so that they didn't show up for a business meeting that they'd been planning and preparing for months and were really excited about and was supposed to benefit their career hugely. Once they took one drink of alcohol, they would find themselves drinking for two days straight and missing that important meeting. Or I know of addicts who have used their drug of choice even while having facing legal problems that they knew were going to result in them losing their kids whom they love with every cell in their body, and yet they would keep using and not be able to keep themselves from destroying their family life. I know thousands of people who want with everything in them, to not eat certain foods, to not eat a certain way, to lose excess weight, to abstain from overeating, from binging. Once they get any bite of food into their system, sugar, flour, excess quantities of food, they lose control so utterly that they find themselves hating themselves and wondering what's wrong with them. I want to talk about this notion of an allergy this week as a model that can explain some of this behavior.
It was famously said by a statistician who I've never heard of in any other context. I forget his name, Box, I think was his last name. Anyway, he famously said all models are wrong, but some are useful. Whenever you look at a textbook and there's a little drawing of a cell or of the brain or whatever, it's a caricature. It's wrong in all kinds of ways, but it's useful. The schematic is useful, and I think this idea of an addiction as an allergy is useful as well. Now, we've got to break down the word allergy though, because we all think we know what an allergy is. It's if someone's allergic to strawberries and they eat strawberries, they might break out in hives or their throat might close up, or their lip might get really swollen. If someone's allergic to milk and they drink it, they might get a really bad case of the runs. Or if someone's allergic to pollen or cut grass or ragweed or something, they might get watery, itchy eyes, and be sneezing a lot. And so you might say, “Susan, I've been eating junk food. I eat tons of sugar and flour. I don't have any of those reactions. How can this be an allergy?”
If you go to the dictionary and you look up allergy, you get definitions that are like the hives and the watery itchy eyes variety. And then you get this alternate definition that says an abnormal reaction or response, an abnormal reaction or response. What I've noticed is that when I eat something off my plan, I have this abnormal reaction to it, and the abnormal reaction is both in my body and in my mind. This incredible craving takes over me, and I start to obsess. The physical ingestion of that food creates an obsession of the mind that is so intense that it feels like that one bite of food places me in an alternate universe. I've run this experiment so many times. It's almost like I eat a certain bite of food and suddenly I find myself in an underground dungeon of hell with no door, no window, no lock, no way to get out. I'm buried three stories underground in a cell, and the only thing I can do is keep eating and eating and eating and eating. When I'm above ground and following my food plan and weighing and measuring my food and abstaining from sugar and flour, I feel free, and I feel like I respond to life and to eating and just everything kind of like other people do. I feel normal, if you will. I feel typical. I feel like I can just live life, and as soon as I take a bite of food that represents sugar flour or unmeasured excess quantities of food, I'm in this hell box and then cursing myself that I could have forgotten how bad it is that I could have been so cavalier with that bite of food.
This is part of the issue is that the warping of the mind that goes along with addiction is exactly of that variety. It minimizes the potential impact of taking that bite of food like the addict who's using, even though they're going to lose their family when they pick up that drug, they're not thinking of those enormous consequences. Not in that way. The disease of addiction minimizes consequences to a grotesque, ridiculous degree so that in another state, when you're not currently in the grips of this allergy, this abnormal reaction, you can recognize, this is going to kill me. I'm going to die. I'm diabetic. My cholesterol is out of control. My grandfather, uncle, father, whoever died of a heart attack at an age that I'm now approaching or even past, this is potentially fatal for me. And then at the moment that you're pulling through the drive-through, none of that seems to matter or factor in at all. Ideas like I worked out this week, so I'll just have a little, or I'll just go through the drive-through “Once it won't hurt me,” or “I'll start again on Monday,” or “No one has to know,” or these types of rationalizations and excuses in that moment seem to justify or counteract what in a more reasonable frame of mind is truly a potentially lethal situation. It's like those cells. It's not like, it is exactly the case that the cells, the neurons in the nucleus accumbens and the ventral segmental area, that mesolimbic reward pathway, the addiction centers of the brain cannot see consequence. They do not care. They can't, it's not that they don't care, they can't see it. They don't have access to those circuits. That's part of what addiction does, is it impacts and reduces the connections from the addiction centers in the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which is where all of those consequences and their big impact lie up there in the prefrontal cortex.
Well, that's what addiction does, is it limits the ability of the addictive centers of the brain to access those consequences from the prefrontal cortex. And so, literally all they're thinking, “There's a hit available and it's this big, and I'm going to go get it, and it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay because I'll start again on Monday. It's going to be okay because it's just once, it's just a little, I'll just have a few bites. I'll just order one thing,” and then of course, by the time you're there ordering, it's 2, 3, 4 things and then off to the races again. The allergy is the abnormal reaction. It's not normal to wake up in the morning and think back, “What did I eat last night? Am I okay to live this day?” Or “Did I indulge last night? Do I need to be feeling huge shame and remorse? Oh, I did. I ate last night. I ate a whole bunch of stuff,” and then shame floods through the body, the remorse, the regret. I've lived like this. I know what this is like. That is not a typical way to start the day. That is an abnormal reaction. That is the allergy.
If you have an allergy that results in an abnormal reaction to a certain food or a certain way of eating like quantities, then the solution is not just to have an abstinence-based food plan, a Bright Line approach to your eating. It's also going to be necessary to access enough power to stick with it. That power comes from surrender. It comes from surrender to power outside of you. A lot of that in Bright Line Eating® is accessed by the group. It's accessed by the tools, it's accessed by the program, and many of us in Bright Line Eating also access divine power, whether through the channel of our authentic self, through prayer, through meditation, like a plug plugging into an outlet, we need to access power greater than ourselves because the warping of the reasoning when addiction has really taken root will guarantee that you pick up again. That's just the way it is. In the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, they call it the strange mental blank spot where suddenly you're picking up and you didn't even think about the consequences at all, or some trivial excuse for picking up that first bite. The “I'll start on Monday. It won't count. It doesn't matter. It's just one when everything is on the line.” In that moment, it doesn't seem like that. It seems like any just of it's been a hard day. “It's Friday. I deserve it. I deserve a good, I deserve it.” What does that mean? “I deserve to go out and partake with my friends because it's been a heck of a week.” If you actually substitute in what's reality there, “I deserve to kill myself and abuse myself with food and to hate myself for the rest of the weekend for some nachos on Friday night.” Really? I deserve that. It doesn't make any sense, right? It's completely out of proportion thinking.
So, what is an allergy? If you're an alcoholic, an allergy to alcohol is an abnormal reaction to alcohol that results in overpowering cravings and an inability to stop once you start. What is an allergy to sugar, flour and quantities? It's an overpowering craving, an obsession of the mind that kicks in. Once you start and in that deep, dark hellhole, it can be very, very, very hard to get Bright again, and it takes a lot of support. It takes often, for me, it takes committing my food to another human being on a daily basis, like really feeling beholden and committing. It takes a community, loving me up, loving you up, belonging. This is what Bright Line Eating offers. This is what Bright Lifers™ offers. If you relate to this, I encourage you to watch our Masterclass. We have an amazing masterclass that explains more about the neuroscience of this. I have a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, and I'm a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and I teach you in this Masterclass how this is all working in the brain and what the solution is, what the solution is, because it's one thing to understand the problem, which maybe this video has helped a little bit with, but then what's the solution? The Masterclass goes into that in a lot of detail. It's free. I'll put a link to it below this video.
Oh my goodness, if you're relating to this with food, if you find yourself eating more than you intended eating when you should know better, you know that you're just hurting yourself with food and you want to stop, but some future you keeps eating, even though you know already that it's not what you want to be doing, that's addiction. That's addiction. And there is a path out. There is a solution. The Masterclass explains more, and just welcome to Bright Line Eating. I'm here to support you any way I can. I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I just love you, and I'm just here to support people who struggle with their food. I have, I've been in food recovery for 30 years now, and really squeaky clean, Bright for just over three years. So, on a long road of relapse and trying different things, I've had long stretches of peace and success, and then relapses, and I've done a lot of hiking through the research Rockies on this. Let me have done the pain for you. Let me have done the pain for you. There is a solution and it does work, and it requires surrendering to it, and then life gets so much better after that. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
