Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the "Best of the Weekly Vlog Series" where we introduce you to the biggest fan favorite vlogs of Bright Line Eating® of all time. And in this week's vlog, we're going to introduce you to one of the most unique features of food addiction, something that makes it distinguishable from all other addictions. Check it out.
My third book Rezoom™ is going to be published December 28th, 2021, this year, December 28th, and that's a Tuesday. This is the only book I've ever written with a co-author. Everett Considine is the co-author of this book. It's called, Rezoom: The Powerful Reframe to End the Crash and Burn Cycle of Food Addiction. In it I talk about food addiction, I talk about the Rezoom reframe. Chapter two is called, "Food Addiction is Real." Chapter three is called, "Food Addiction is Hardest." In that chapter three, I talk about a whole bunch of unique and different ways that food addiction is, in my professional opinion, the hardest addiction to kick. In this vlog, I want to talk about one of those reasons, and I want to do it with an analogy.
Imagine a world in which drinking alcohol caused acne, not just with one drink, but with a bunch of drinks, and then a bunch of drinks another night, and then a bunch of drinks another night. And then again and again over time, steady drinking of alcohol caused acne, not just a little bit of acne, but really disfiguring acne, the kind of acne that leaves scars on your face and on your body, like really disfiguring acne. Imagine in this world, I mean, well, first of all, one might think, "Well, in this world, who would ever drink?" Let's imagine people still do. People still drink. Let's imagine a lot of people still drink and they develop this acne. They keep drinking, they develop the acne, they keep drinking, and they don't like the acne. They try to get rid of the acne, but there's no getting rid of the acne while they're still drinking. It's the drinking that's causing the acne. Eventually, they quit drinking, but quitting drinking doesn't get rid of the acne. The acne sticks around. Now imagine it's not just disfiguring acne, acne that they don't want because they feel like it doesn't look good. Now imagine it's also deadly acne that something in it sort of necrotizing deep inside their skin and creates conditions that lead to early death, painful death, lots of different conditions. There's lots of motivation to get rid of this acne. Lots of motivations. But the only treatment for getting rid of the acne has as a side effect, a powerful craving to drink alcohol. As soon as you try to start getting rid of the acne, suddenly the compulsion to drink alcohol returns and you return to drinking. That would be a messed up world to live in, wouldn't it?
Welcome to Planet Earth. That is exactly the world we live in with food addiction and weight gain, eating excess food, eating the highly palatable foods, the highly ultra-processed foods that are available in our food environment causes weight gain, super clear. And as weight accumulates and accumulates and accumulates, you don't like the way it looks maybe, but oh by the way, it's also causing all kinds of other conditions, leading to all kinds of other conditions that will kill you early and in pain. When you stop eating addictively, the weight doesn't just go away. You have to do something else to make the weight go away, which is you have to eat fewer calories than your body needs to stay alive. The brain is set up in such a way that when you sustain weight loss over a period of time, it decides there's a famine happening. Pretty reasonable, right? Suddenly, hormonal changes happen in the body triggered by the brain. Thyroid goes down to slow down your metabolism. Leptin suddenly goes down so the fullness signal doesn't come. Ghrelin goes up. So, your hungrier. All sorts of other neuropeptides get adjusted to drive you powerfully to eat more food, to push your weight back up the scale to where you were. The brain doesn't care that maybe once upon a time you weighed X, Y, Z. All it knows is that once you have weighed a higher amount, it's going to drive you back up the scale.
Once you have developed food addiction and a weight problem, you are trapped in a cycle that is very hard to get out of. That is why a program as clear and potent as Bright Line Eating is necessary. This is not a little problem that a little this or a little that solves. It is an extremely maddening cycle. If you are stuck in that cycle, if you've done the loop a few times, even within Bright Line Eating, I have some advice for you. My prediction is you're not going to like it, not one bit, and you probably won't even follow it. But I'll tell you anyway, if you want to know what my advice is now, this is just if you have in Bright Line Eating, doing your best, lost a bunch of weight, gone back to the food, regained it, lost a bunch of weight, gone back to the food, regained it, and while you were losing that weight in Bright Line Eating, you were working a very strong program, you were really doing it. If that's not the case, then this advice isn't for you. My advice for you is just go work a strong Bright Line Eating program and it'll handle it. Because when you work a strong Bright Line Eating program, we have a very good track record of success, but not a hundred percent. So, this advice now is targeted at the small percentage of people who really, really doing all of Bright Line Eating still struggle and regain their weight and then lose it and regain it. That still happens. If that's you, listen up.
Consider trying to change your eating according to Bright Line Eating while not trying to lose weight and do that for a long time. I mean like six months, not six days, not six weeks. You heard me. Six months. Stay on a Maintenance Bright Line Eating food plan for six months of consecutive Bright Lines. That means your food addiction problem is in remission. Solve the food addiction first with all the healthy habits of a morning habit stack, lots of relationships and connection with people who do Bright Line Eating, and evening habit stack, writing down your food the night before the next day, eating only in exactly that with no weight loss. Just tackle the food addiction first and then six months in, with all that automaticity under your belt, try taking away a little bit of food. Not all of it, not all the way down, not all the way, but just take out a little bit, shave a little bit off, and see if you can get to a place where you lose about one pound a week. With that kind of approach, I predict you can have your Bright Body Transformation. Food addiction plus a really pernicious weight problem is a vicious circle, unlike any other I know of. The only analogous torture that I can imagine is that acne/alcohol thing that I thought of. It is so bad, and if you're stuck in that hell, just know I wake up every day for you. You've got this though. There is a way out. There is a way out. I love you. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
