Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. Have you ever wondered if it's a good idea for someone who has a history of an eating disorder to follow a Bright Line style food plan, an abstinence-based food plan? Is it ever helpful or even necessary or indicated for someone who has a history with binging, with bulimia, with restricting food intake to abstain from certain foods altogether? There is a huge controversy right now in the scientific literature and in the field of professionals who treat people with disordered eating, with weight struggles, with food struggles around this issue, like a huge, huge divide and debate. Just last week, my colleagues, Dr. Joy Jacobs and Dr. David Wiss and I published a peer-reviewed scientific journal article in the very prestigious journal, "Frontiers in Psychiatry," and yes, I know that last week I told you about a journal article that we published on Bright Line Eating® in the same journal, in the same special issue on ultra-processed food addiction. That paper was on a six-year follow-up of Bright Line Eating outcomes, weight-loss outcomes. This study is completely different. This was a perspectives piece on the abstinence-based treatment of comorbid eating disorders and ultra-processed food addiction.
Let me just highlight some of the topics that we covered by sharing a bit of my own story, not from a weight perspective, but from an eating disorder perspective. In my case, I believe that food addiction preceded my eating disorders, but I have suffered from two major eating disorders. As a child, I was already showing signs of food addiction. I was stealing food, I was sneaking food, I was binging on food. Then my drug addiction took over at the age of 14, and that swept me away for many years. I developed, as you have, I'm sure, heard, wicked, wicked drug addiction. I got clean when I was 20, and the food addiction just came right back full force this time. I think my dopamine receptors had downregulated to the point where my brain needed a fix, it needed a hit, it needed something to give it the flood of dopamine that it was getting from crystal meth, from crack cocaine. When I stopped using those drugs, I started binging really, really hard. I was clean and sober working the 12 steps for alcohol and drugs. After my midnight 12-step meeting, I was going to 7-Eleven, Safeway, and loading up on massive quantities of food and bingeing long into the night.
I didn't get officially diagnosed with binge eating disorder for three more years, but I was suffering from binge eating disorder all that time. I was having massive binges. A binge by clinical definition is eating a larger volume of food in a shorter period of time than someone normally would with a feeling of being out of control. I was absolutely binging my brains out, and it was happening at least once a week, often, way more often than that. That went on for three years. I got diagnosed with binge eating disorder formally after a major binge after I'd moved to Rochester, New York and had started my PhD program. I binged so hard one week consistently every day binging. I gained 16 pounds that week and I ruptured my stomach lining and I was on the toilet one morning just going pee in the morning and something, I felt something kind of rupture and suddenly there was fluid in my knees and I couldn't stand up from the toilet. I called my dad in a panic, and he bought a plane ticket, and he flew me out to California, and he booked me to see an eating disorder specialist. I saw an eating disorder specialist, and I got diagnosed with binge eating disorder and she put me on Celexa, which is an SSRI that had just been approved by the FDA. It was just out. She put me on a massive dose of it at very, very high doses. It was supposed to treat eating disorders. It may have helped a bit, I'm not sure, maybe a little bit. But I kept eating addictively for sure. I think maybe it did help the binge eating disorder, my addictive eating continued unabated.
I kept gaining weight until I was suffering with clinical obesity. At some point in that mix, I think actually before that, I started throwing up my food. I had always tried to throw up my food. I never could. Somehow my gag reflex wouldn't allow me to purge. I would stick my fingers down my throat. I'm like, I know people talk about this as being a solution to their overeating issues. I couldn't get myself to throw up. I couldn't do it. Then like a super high achiever that I am, I guess I just tried hard enough one day, and I finally got a tap, and it required sticking all four of my fingers down my throat to the point where my teeth scratched my knuckles raw and bloody. I had terrible aim. I couldn't really get it in the toilet consistently, so I had to throw up in the shower usually. My periods of bulimia were punctuated by lots of cleanliness. I was showering several times a day as I was throwing up in the shower and then getting out of the shower, toweling off, and then binging on more food and back and forth I would go. It was an exhausting regimen. It was the epitome of unmanageability. I did that for a few months. It did wreck my esophageal system. It resulted in, I don't know, whatever the flap is that keeps food from coming up into the back of your throat getting damaged or whatever. I just had acid reflux coming up into my throat all the time, and it was very painful. Anyway, bulimia and I didn't get along very well. I just wasn't very good at it. And so, my periods of bulimia were few. I think I have been bulimic for maybe three stretches of time. Each time it would escalate to the point where I was throwing up 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 times a day, just a lot. Then it would wreck my system.
Ultimately, my allegiance was to the food. My addiction to eating was so powerful that that acid reflux problem ruined my eating. And I would give up on the bulimia, which was ultimately a weight control strategy because I just wanted to be able to eat my food. The food addiction was driving all that. The food addiction was there first. I'm super clear about that. I had that early. I had that as a kid. The bingeing was an extreme manifestation of the food addiction. I had binge eating disorder before I ever tried to control my weight. I was binging.
When I first adopted an abstinence-based style of eating after going to a 12-step food program, when I would fall off and break my abstinence, the binging did seem worse. That episode where I ruptured my stomach lining and all that that I just told you about, that was after a period of abstinence in a 12-step food program. It is clear to me that when I would get abstinent for a stretch of time, it felt like a rubber band stretching. The abstinence seemed to increase tension inside of me. When I would break my abstinence, it was like one side of the rubber band letting go, and the binge on the other side was more vicious. It was more intense. I think it would be fair to say that the abstinence during that time exacerbated the binging. But when I was abstinent, it cured the binging, it stopped it. And so, it was kind of hard to discern whether the abstinence was helping or hurting. I think it was doing both. I think at times it would help. And then at other times it would hurt. I found all that time, I wasn't really doing no sugar, no flour. I was still having artificial sweeteners. I was having yogurt with fruit on the bottom. I was having barbecue sauce on meat, that kind of thing.
So, I wasn't really doing no sugar, no flour. I might've thought I was. But in the 12-step food program I was in, there wasn't a lot of clarity around the crispness of Bright Lines like we have it in Bright Line Eating. The science wasn't known. Nobody was talking about the science of it. Anyway, then I found a different 12-step group that was clearer about no sugar, no flour, still not ultimately clear. People were still having artificial sweeteners in that program, for example. I did get abstinent or what we would call Bright and had six beautiful months of abstinence, and then I broke my abstinence, and the binging was worse. Again, that rubber band feeling of it stretched and stretched and stretched. When I broke my abstinence, the binging was the worst, and then it was the worst I'd ever had it. I did relapse back into bulimia at that time. Then I got abstinent again, and then I got really peaceful, and I had over a decade of real peace with my food. As a matter of fact, let me just think about the timing here. I think it was 11 years of real peace with my food. That was the best my food had ever been. I mean 11 years really. I didn't feel like the rubber band was stretching at that time. I was working my program strongly enough. I guess that I had real peace, real peace.
It was at the end of those 11 years that I founded Bright Line Eating, and then my life got so swirly, and I started traveling so much, and my life kind of overtook the level of recovery that I had at that time. I picked up the food again, and that started several years of intermittent binging. It wasn't as bad as it used to be at all. It was almost like the amount of recovery that I had was effective. I had healed a lot of things through working the 12 steps, and I was leading Bright Line Eating, and that did keep some guardrails on. I couldn't go off the rails as much as I used to in the past because I needed to come on camera and talk once a week on the weekly vlog. But I was binging intermittently again. Sometimes the binges were bad, but I didn't have as much shame about it. Something about, I don't know, I took a courageous path. I decided early on that I was going to be honest in my vlogs, and I shot a vlog called, "The Morning After a Binge." I just told you that I had binged and I told you how I was being gentle with myself and helping myself to recover from that binge. I think that level of honesty really helped to relieve shame. I didn't go into shame spirals when I binged. I just did my best to get myself the support I needed. After a few years of that, I stopped binging again, and I have not had any sugar or flour or binges or bulimia. I mean, I haven't had any bulimia in a long time. I haven't had any bulimia in, let me just think, 20 years, but I haven't had any sugar, flour or binges in almost six years now.
Then you've probably heard me talking about how when I first stopped the sugar flour and bingeing at that point, I was still being dishonest. Dishonest is a judgy word, let me say. I was still, I would say overeating beyond my food plans allowance in restaurants at times. I would say regularly, actually. Usually when I was in a restaurant, I would overeat. At home I was using a digital food scale and very peaceful and not overeating and not feeling tempted to overeat. I was very peaceful at home. In restaurants, I was pretty peaceful too. I didn't not have peace. I was just eating beyond my food plan allotment. I talked to my life coach about that, and he said, this sounds like the ideal, "You're able to just give yourself a little flex in a restaurant, a little leeway, but you're not beating yourself up about it." There was still something in me that felt like it was a little off, but I also recognized it wasn't escalating. It was messing with my weight a little bit. I was maybe five pounds heavier than I wanted to be, but I was still in my same size. The size clothes that I'd been wearing for 20 years were still fitting. So, it was hard to claim that it was messing with my weight hugely. I had peace-ish about it. I didn't feel totally peaceful. Obviously, I was talking with my life coach about it, so I didn't feel completely peaceful, but I had enough peace that it didn't seem like that big of a deal. I lingered in that space for two and a half years or something like that. Then I got squeaky clean, Bright with all four Bright Lines continuously by what feels like an utter miracle. I just surrendered at a deeper level. That was over three years ago.
I bring this up to say in my story, you can see a lot of the themes that we talked about in this perspectives piece on how to treat people that have eating disorder issues and food addiction issues. Sometimes with a clinical interview, if you really get to know a patient's life story, you can tell whether as in my case, the food addiction itself is primary, whether it preceded the eating disorder and whether the eating disorder was an attempt to handle the food addiction or whether trauma and an attempt to control eating resulted in an eating disorder. Then through the eating disorder like restriction, for example, binges and the subsequent development of food addiction became operative or whether food addiction's not even present and it's really an eating disorder without a food addiction, which happens. Now, the prevalence of food addiction and eating disorders is kind of hard to say, but generally speaking, it's a rough estimate to say that of people with food addiction, half of them will have eating disorder symptoms and of people with an eating disorder, half of them will have food addiction, and those Venn diagrams overlap by about half. That's a rough wag. That's an estimate. Prevalence estimates actually vary widely about how much these two constructs overlap. They are absolutely distinct.
For example, someone can have food addiction without ever having had any symptoms of an eating disorder. Here's what that would look like. Someone like me as a little kid develops an obsession with food, sneaking it, hiding it, stealing it, and overeating, but not of the binging variety, just of the always grazing more like mom's away from the kitchen. I'm going to go to the sugar dish and put a spoonful of sugar in my mouth. I'm going to go scrape my fingers across the butter dish and eat butter raw and then I'm going to hide from my mom and half an hour later, I'm going to do it again and again and again. That's addiction. It's not an eating disorder. There's no binging, there's no purging, there's no food restriction. It's addiction, it's addiction. The pull to get that hit is intense. Many people who have food addiction, meaning they're eating more than they intend to and feeling like they lose control of it, they're obsessing about their food and they're feeling bad about it. They have a clinical level of distress and or impairment. Their food related symptoms, maybe their weight related symptoms are causing problems in their life. Maybe they have diabetes, maybe they need a knee replacement surgery. Maybe their eating is leading to depression and they're having a hard time functioning and going to work, and all they want to do is sit home and order takeout. They're not binging. They're just eating all day and overeating and it's ruining their life. That's addiction. It's not an eating disorder. Now, all you have to do is throw a bunch of binging in there, and now you have an eating disorder and a food addiction. But for some people, they have an eating disorder and they don't have food addiction.
Maybe a young gal whose parents fighting and subsequent divorce, maybe some sexual assault or physical assault in the house leads to some control of food. If it feels like it's all she can control in life, she might stop eating for a while and notice that wanting to disappear really is where she's at. She just wants to fade into the wallpaper and with so much out of control in her life, she notices that it feels good to control her eating, and then she notices that it feels bad to eat and good to not eat that the not eating gives a rush. Now, clinically speaking, actually about half of people with anorexia nervosa have food addiction, and that surprised me when I learned it, but that's what the current prevalence estimates are, at least on one paper that I saw, and a little more than half for people with the binge-purge subtype of anorexia. Anyway, the tension in the field right now is that the standard treatment, the standard practice of care, the treatment of care for eating disorders is to work people toward normal eating, toward a model that's called all foods fit, that there are no bad foods, that it's really important to disabuse patients of their food rules, their restrictive food rules, and it makes a lot of sense. If someone's food rules are literally killing them and eating disorders do have the highest death rates of any psychiatric illnesses, it makes a lot of sense that you want to disabuse patients of their food rules and get them out of the food as shame game and help them to eat in moderation.
The challenge is that moderate quantities of addictive substances aren't always helpful for addicts. Moderate drinking regimens for alcoholics, moderate cigarette smoking regimens for nicotine addicts, those aren't typically the standard of care. So, you've got people on the food addiction treatment side saying, forcing people to eat cupcakes and cookies and eating disorder treatment is frequently leading to binges that are biological in nature. These are addicts who are being triggered by a drug. Then you've got a big fight going on between these treatment professionals where the eating disorder experts are saying, you're pathologizing food. You have to eat to live, and you're just reinforcing the eating disorder by telling these people that these foods are bad and harmful. Food is food, and food is necessary for life, and it's not helpful to be pathologizing it. On the ultra-processed food addiction side, you've got people saying, sugar's not a food group. Sugar's not even a real food, and we're not eliminating real foods. We're saying eat all whole real foods. Just don't eat ultra-processed foods like sugar and flour and avoid the foods that lead to binges, avoid the foods that are making you obsessed and addicted.
So, mainly in this paper, what we argue for is a nuanced perspective, and most importantly, that there is no one size fits all approach here. There is a lot of entrenchment and dogma on both sides of this debate, and since this is a Bright Line Eating vlog, I just want to say to all my beloved Bright Line Eating followers out there, I want you to please know that a Bright Line approach to eating an abstinence-based approach to eating is not going to be right for everybody. There are going to be people who either for all times or at sometimes are going to be triggered by an abstinence-based way of eating, and it's going to kick up an eating disorder type symptomology for them, and the solution for them might be to avoid abstinence or Bright Lines, to go back to an intuitive eating or moderate eating harm reduction, all foods fit approach to eating. In our Perspectives paper, we highlight this with one clinical vignette. We have three clinical vignettes in the paper. One is the love story that we like to tell in Bright Line Eating, and we see it in Bright Line Eating, and it's someone who comes from an eating disorder background like I have and a food addiction background like I have. So, basically me, you come in to an abstinence-based approach to eating and it works, and it solves the problem. The binging goes away, the purging goes away, and the person gets Bright. Now, unlike me, our first clinical vignette stays Bright at that point, and basically, it's happily ever after. Awesome.
Then there's vignette number two who had an eating disorder in her early 20s, late teens, maybe early twenties, and then got eating disorder treatment and stabilized with an all foods fit approach with a harm reduction, moderation-based approach to eating. She then allowed herself to eat sweets and desserts, but not often because she knew that they could be problematic for her, but if she wanted some, she could have some. She mostly had three meals a day, but not always, and she had no rules around her food at all, but just a general sense of what tended to work for her. Through self-love and recovery, she did right by herself, led by her authentic self, developed a beautiful psychological practice, spiritual practice, became a therapist, and then she got connected with Bright Line Eating, and she tried a Bright Line approach to her eating and it sent her right back into bulimia, and she struggled for a couple of years and then left the Bright Line Eating approach and went back to her eating disorder treatment perspectives and had to really reject Bright Line Eating, get it out of her system, stop thinking in those terms, and go back to all foods are fine, all foods in moderation, and she stabilized and is peaceful with her food.
Again, that was story number two. Then clinical vignette number three is someone who had an eating disorder and food addiction background and came in touch with a Bright Line abstinence-based approach to eating, and it worked for a little while, and then the binging got terrible and then they left and really tried intuitive eating again. That started years of going back and forth between a Bright Line approach and an intuitive eating approach. After many years of hiking through the Research Rockies, they got very, very clear that sugar and flour spell trouble for them, and they ultimately surrendered to the abstinence-based approach, the Bright Line approach. Then after many, many, many years of research, they got Bright and abstinent and stayed Bright and abstinent and free, and now they're free. I guess that would be my story. I'm vignette number three.
Essentially, all of these stories are amalgams of different people that Dr. Joy Jacobs and Dr. David Wiss and I have worked with over the years. I mean, really, we could all cite dozens if not hundreds of case studies that fit into each of those perspectives. I have seen less actually of the second perspective, the one who comes in and the Bright Line approach, the abstinence-based approach kicks up an eating disorder and they find peace outside of this approach. Typically, I find that it's hard to find peace if you keep eating sugar and flour. But here's the thing, and this is an important point that I want to highlight now, everyone on each side of this controversy in each camp, if you will, is suffering from exposure to a tremendously biased sample. Basically, we're each seeing the cases that are the fallout from the bad results of the other approach. So, in Bright Line Eating, I see people coming in droves who have tried eating disorder treatment and failed like the treatment failed them. They needed to abstain from sugar and flour and being forced to eat NMF and sugar and flour foods in treatment centers kept them from getting well, and they come here because they know they actually need to abstain from those foods. I see that all the time, and I see those people recover hand over fist, but the people who don't, likely get refunds, disappear, and I don't see them. They're not in my community. They have an eating disorder kicked up and they leave, and they go to eating disorder treatment, and they're now the fallout that those people are seeing, and they're seeing people come into their program in droves from Bright Line Eating from 12-step food addiction programs where sponsors are not trained. There's no professional class of anybody there. There's just people that are sponsoring who may not have any background with eating disorders at all, and they could be very harmful. They don't mean to be, but they can be and very gaslighting and punitive, and anyway, they can do more damage. Then those people run to eating disorder clinics and feel like they've been really harmed by an abstinence-based approach. Those people are seeing the fallout from our approach.
What's interesting is, at any given point of time, think about my story, right? At any given timestamp during my trajectory, there's this timeline that's happening. If you just freeze frame on a moment when I've got my head in the toilet and I was abstinence six months ago, but now I'm binging and purging my brains out, it can look like the abstinence kicked up binging and purging. If you don't get a full case history of me and hear, oh, the food addiction came first for this woman, what this woman has is food addiction and the eating disorders were an attempt to mitigate the issues caused by an addictive relationship with food. If you are not skilled, open-minded and listening for the whole trajectory, all you might see, if I presented to an eating disorder clinic at that moment, all you might see is, oh, here's another casualty from that darn abstinence approach, and we need to get her eating muffins as quickly as we can and eating all foods in moderation. That's what they might see. We need clinicians who understand that at any given moment, someone might need to start an abstinence-based approach or stop doing an abstinence-based approach or try a middle ground where they abstain from one or two things that are causing them the most difficulty while they just create enough space to do some trauma healing work or any number of other possibilities. It's nuanced. What we need are people who are not so attached to one dogmatic perspective that they can hear the patient and what they're willing to do, what they want to do, what the whole history of their life story is saying to us, including some tests and measurements like the Yale Food Addiction Scale or different binge eating scales or these things. You've got to understand that if someone just lost a bunch of weight, it can look like they have food addiction, or it can look like they have binge eating disorder. Really that might just be the biological backlash to losing 75 pounds because significant weight loss triggers hormonal adaptations that then can cause voracious eating and an absolutely addictive like relationship with food. And so, that's in the mix too. We've got the reality that weight struggles and weight gain and weight loss, these are not factors that are just, well, how much weight did you gain and lose? Okay, we'll just mark that down in your chart. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Weight loss and weight gain absolutely have causal impact on someone's psychological state and how readily they might be voraciously hungry, binging their brains out, obsessed with food, eating hand over fist. Those are sometimes a response to significant weight loss, but on tests and measurements, they look like food addiction. They look like binge eating disorder. It can be hard to say. So, at that point in time, if someone just lost a bunch of weight and now they look like they have food addiction or a binge eating disorder, you can't actually conclude that. You say, well, you might have this, but let's wait and see till your weight level's out and your brain isn't reeling from the weight loss that you just had. So basically, these things are hard once someone gains significant weight and wants it off once food addiction wiring is there and the fiber tracks of the mesolimbic reward pathway of the brain once eating disorder patterns and parts of us, now I'm invoking internal family systems. Parts of us have developed that. Really think binging is a good strategy for getting rid of unwanted food that really think stopping eating altogether is a good strategy. Once we have parts of us that have developed those eating disorder strategies, we now have a big, what do you call it? Just a big ball of wax, a big ball of twine that is hard to untangle. It is. People are different. We need clinicians who are treating the whole person. We need clinicians who are not wedded to any dogmatic approach, not once you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
Now, if you're a member of a really intense group like Food Addicts In Recovery Anonymous, you're a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Everybody looks like they have food addiction, and the only solution is abstinence. If you're treating people in a standard eating disorder clinic, you're a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Everything is eating disorder based, and the only solution is all foods fit. No food rules allowed. You have to eat all foods in moderation, and those camps are not helpful. They're just not. They work for some people, but I mean, from my perspective, it's likely that only a third of the people that present with what looks like a comorbid eating disorder and ultra-processed food addiction will be served by going into an eating disorder clinic or into a program like FA or Bright Line Eating as it is right now. I mean, Bright Line Eating's a little different because we have Dr. Joy Jacobs, and she's nuanced. She understands that sometimes weight loss is not helpful at a certain stage of a journey. You've got to get someone in a state where they're not in an active eating disorder and their food addiction is treated, and then weight loss can happen after that. She treats the whole person. She does. Now, Dr. Joy Jacobs doesn't do clinical work one-on-one with people in Bright Line Eating, but she does do group work, and she does help us to identify people who have an active eating disorder so that they can get referred out to good care.
But there's the kicker is where's the good care that we're referring people to? There aren't very many people out there right now who understand the incredible importance of treating the whole person and not from any one dogmatic perspective. Dr. David Wiss, Dr. Joy Jacobs, they're two of the only ones I know, and I think there's a few others. But if you have eating disorder symptoms and a food addiction, I think that first of all, I just want you to know I love you. I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I am you. I relate. Perhaps maybe you'll get a sense as you try different approaches of what feels like it might work for you, and it can be hard to tell. I got a sense relatively early on that abstinence would ultimately work for me. I really wanted it to work for me. I really liked abstinence when I felt the freedom of it. It was not white knuckling, it was not restrictive. It really felt free. I just needed to find a way to stick with it. Ultimately, I did through a super strong, Bright approach. I mean, that's what I needed, and thank you, God, thank you, God. I found freedom. It's hard to do, but it might be the case that that kind of freedom is elusive and a harm reduction approach is going to work better, especially at certain times. You might bristle at that idea, but it's not that bad. I mean, I would say that's what I was doing for those years that I wasn't binging. I wasn't eating sugar or flour. I was overeating in restaurants. I was not watching my quantities in restaurants, and I was 95% free. Food was not a big dominating issue in my life during those years at all. It was a harm reduction approach. It was the best I could do in terms of abstinence at that time. If I had to really make a judgment call like an umpire at the plate, did it work or not work? I would say it worked. It was just fine. It was when I needed at the time. Everybody's different and everybody's different at different times.
And so, if you're listening to this flog and you're staunch and stalwart in the Bright Line perspective, what I want to implore you is to keep an open mind, because people who have an eating disorder background as well as a food addiction background, may or may not be served by a Bright Line approach at any given moment. Support people in their journey of figuring out what works for them. If you have any interest in developing a clinical background where you could work with people in the way that I'm describing in a mature, nuanced, holistic, multifaceted, open-minded way, where you're really getting full case histories and listening to people and hearing what they need for the next phase of their journey and supporting them in doing all the research they need to do, understanding the perspectives that are the end points of the abstinence-based approach or the eating disorder all foods fit for all people approach, understanding where you can send people to really try out those different approaches and understanding that there's lots of gray area in between, and people might need to try out abstinence from certain things or harm reduction models, and that might be where they find their best optimization of getting the most relief that they can and minimizing the harm. If you have any interest in developing that specialization, it is needed, needed, needed in this world right now, it would be a huge service.
Those are my two requests. Keep an open mind yourself and encourage people, whether it's yourself or someone else, to develop expertise at the intersection of these two approaches, because we need people standing in the middle right now, kind of like in lots of ways. We need people who are in the middle not polarizing at the extremes. Really listening and understanding that this is a hard topic and it's complicated. The perspectives piece that we wrote has a lot of amazing citations.
Thank you. Thank you to Nadia Briones, and to Asha Grace Valor for help with those citations, and David Wiss found a lot of citations. Joy Jacobs and I found a lot of citations, and our reviewers suggested some citations. So, if you want an incredible list of references, this paper is a gold mine, and I haven't really gone into all of the factors that we bring up in the paper. I encourage you to read it. Comorbid Abstinence-based Treatment, Abstinence-Based Treatment of Comorbid Eating Disorders and Ultra-processed Food Addiction. It's arguing for a balanced middle ground perspective that very humanely treats the whole person and understands that one size does not fit all. Thank you for listening. I know this was a long one. I love you. That's the weekly vlog. I'm going to post the paper right down below. There's a link down below. It's published in "Frontiers in Psychiatry." Second top journal in the world, in the field of psychiatry. Go us. Thank you to David Wiss and Dr. Joy Jacobs. It was a pleasure writing that paper with you. It took a long time. It was a lot of work and I'm so, so glad we did it. I think it's a real true contribution to the field. Alright, that's it. I'm signing off. Love you. Talk to you next week. Bye.
