Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and in this week's vlog, we are talking all about Maintenance and how Maintenance is the foundation of weight loss, that really nobody's interested in losing weight and gaining it back. It's so terrible to do that. I have done it so many times. Maybe you have too. Nobody wants that.
Short-term temporary fleeting weight loss is not on anybody's to- do list. What we want is to lose weight and keep it off. The reality is that the secret to long-term sustainable weight-loss Maintenance is to begin your weight-loss program in the right way, in a way that is actually sustainable. Now, you may not know upfront what is going to be sustainable for you, and that is what the book Maintain helps you to figure out. My fifth book, the Fifth Bright Line Eating® related book, is going to be published on April 21st, 2026. Right now, it is the beginning of March 2026. March and April and Bright Line Eating Land are going to be devoted to this book, not exclusively, but primarily. I'm going to start talking about it in this week's vlog.
For one thing, we've got the pre-order page up, which means you can now pre-order the book and that means you can download all the pre-order bonuses right now. Today. There's a link below this vlog. Go ahead and check it out. It's just super exciting. We've put together some really sweet bonuses for you, and you can start to experience the beginnings of the book even before it comes out on April 21st.
Now, even more than that, I'm doing a webinar this Saturday, and it's all about your weight-loss success, and it's about how to define your Bright Line Eating program. That's the title of this week's vlog: "Define Your Program. Design Your Program." because everybody is different. One of the secrets to making Bright Line Eating work for you, making weight loss work for you in a sustainable way, is to design and define, and I am sort of using those two words interchangeably because they need to be both part of the mix. You need to define and design a program that works for you. You need to make this work for you. Not everybody needs the same things. Not everybody's willing to do the same things. Lives are different. People are different. Biology is different. Brains are different. Realities are different. Psychology is different. You are a unique individual.
When I teach you about Bright Line Eating, when I teach you about the brain, all I can do by definition is talk in abstractions, talk in averages, talk in hypotheticals, talk from my experience, talk from what I've seen working with thousands of people. But again, that's on average, right? Sometimes I bring you individuals or instances or case studies. Again, may or may not apply to you. You are you. You are an individual person. Let me describe some of the things I mean when I say you've got to design your own program. Make it work for you. One of the things you've got to consider is your susceptibility score. If you're a 10 on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™, and there's always a quiz you can take at foodaddictionquiz.com. If you're a 10, and the scale goes from one to 10 with 10 being high, it means you're not going to have as much wiggle room when it comes to eating hyper palatable foods. Foods made out of sugar and flour, foods that activate the reward system, the mesolimbic addictive reward pathway in the brain. It's going to throw you off more than someone who's a four on the Susceptibility Scale. The higher you are on the scale, the more rigorous your program has to be.
Now, that's in general and on average. But one of the big things that interfaces with that is your level of willingness. This is really key because I think especially if you've been around Bright Line Eating for a long time, you might, if you don't have a super high level of willingness to sort of match your Susceptibility Score, you might just feel shame or defeated about that because what do you do if you're not willing, let's say, to let go of cream and a packet of Stevia in your coffee every morning? Well, you might be listening to this vlog month after month, year after year, or watching it or listening to it either way, because a part of you feels called to do Bright Line Eating. A part of you has a sense that this is probably what will work for you, but you haven't gotten started yet because you're not willing to give up your coffee, your cream and your coffee. Or let's say your glass of red wine with your spouse on Friday nights. Another way to go is to work the elements of the program that you are willing to do and take more of a harm reduction approach. Is it strictly according to the Bright Lines to have a glass of wine? No. Do I see it work very often for people who are nines and 10s or even sevens and eights, frankly, on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale? No. Would it probably be better for you to do the Bright Line Eating program and have that glass of wine than to just eat whatever, whenever, all week long and continue to live in the misery of that much unhealthy food, triggering your addictive brain? It would probably be way better for you to do Bright Line Eating to the fullness of your level of willingness and have that glass of wine than to not do it at all. It's a harm reduction approach.
It's not something I talk about very often because, well, because this isn't a harm reduction program, this is an abstinence-based program. However, there is a place for harm reduction methods under the umbrella of Bright Line Eating for individuals at certain times. I would absolutely and have absolutely coached people to take a harm reduction approach to their Bright Line Eating program if that's where they're at right now. Absolutely do what you can when you can and don't feel the least bit bad about it. Don't should all over yourself. You're as willing as you are right now, right? That's a really concrete example of what I mean by design your program. Your program today might be no sugar, no flour, weighing and measuring your food, eating three meals a day, and having a glass of wine with your spouse on Fridays.
Now, if you're doing Bright Line Eating successfully right now, don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you to go have a glass of wine. We have to be graceful and understanding about the nuance here. Everybody is different. You are a unique individual. Now, let's imagine you're working a full Bright Line Eating program. Let's imagine you're willing to do it all. Well, you still need to design and define your program. Maybe you're just following the fabulous plan. J-F-T-F-P. You still need to design and define your program. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean, what's your food prep strategy, right? Are you someone who keeps learning that it would be better for you to do food prep on the weekends and batch cook in a big food factory production on Saturday or Sunday and have all of your food ready to go all week long? Are you someone who actually runs better if every bite of your food is weighed and measured fully the night before, before the day even dawns? Or are you someone who likes to cook from scratch as the meal arrives? Those are big differences and they have huge implications about how you structure your time and how your program flows.
Let me give you some more examples around the nuance of a Bright Line Eating program. I, from the 12-step program that I was in for so long, developed some shame around big fruit. There was a judgment in that program that if you were eating big fruit, you weren't really surrendered, you really weren't working that strong of a program, that only people who were eating small and medium fruit were doing it right. God bless. There was a lot of judgment about that. So, when I would, years later, reach into a bag of apples in my fridge, I would feel a twinge if I reached for the biggest apple, like I was a bad person or something because I'd done that. God bless us. Programming runs deep. I noticed that and I decided to free myself from that twinge. Do what gives you peace. What I developed for myself was a rule that I always chose the closest apple, not the biggest apple, but the closest apple. I would work my way around obviously to the biggest apple in due time, as soon as it was the closest apple. And so, I would reach into my bag of apples, I would instinctively go for the biggest one, then I would catch myself and I would go, "No, no, just get the closest one." As soon as I would adjust my hand to reach for the closest apple, I would get this surge of dopamine because I was now hitting my target, I was in alignment, I would have an integrity burst of well-being, and I ended up turning around a twinge of shame into a twinge of gratitude and integrity just by developing that rule and learning to stick to it. Whatever. God bless me. Do what gives you peace. Sidebar, I was just in California staying with my dear friend, Sage Levine, and I was leaving her house and going to my own Airbnb up in the North Bay up in Marin and we were talking about food and she's like, "I'm certainly not going to eat all these bananas. Take some bananas." There were four bananas and the bunch of bananas had two front bananas and two back bananas. You may know that the front bananas are bigger than the back bananas. I said, "I'll split them in half this way, so you get a big one and a small one and I get a big one and a small one." I said out loud, "You probably never would have thought twice about it if I split them the other way and took the two biggest bananas and left you the two smallest bananas." She looked at me like I was a stark raving lunatic and she was like, "No, I never would have noticed." Then she thought about it and she said, "But you know, I'm that obsessive in my thinking about a man's compliments." She's dating on the dating scene and she's like, "I will scroll through his texts and obsessively analyze his messages to me and read into it kind of beyond what any regular person would read into it." I said, "Yeah, similar, similar."
Anyway, those of us, I'm a 10 plus, plus, plus, on the Susceptibility Scale and quantities are my drug of choice, really. I just want more food, more food, more food. Anyway, I've learned ways to fine tune the nuances of my program to support myself. Another example, a few years ago, I changed my approach to eating in restaurants. Typically in Bright Line Eating, we say produce is produce, right? When you go out to eat, don't worry if it's cooked vegetables or raw vegetables. Well, I was noticing that my 12 or 14 ounces of vegetables, how much it actually depends on my food plan at that moment, but there are certain restaurants where I can actually get more vegetables than that, like certain Mediterranean restaurants, for example. I was noticing that my eyeballing would be off because 12 or 14 ounces of vegetables is just too much to assess in one eyeball. I just couldn't tell. I would frequently keep eating vegetables. In a Mediterranean restaurant, they might be oily, really heavy vegetables, which was yummy. I would sometimes leave that restaurant feeling way too full. Like, okay, I've eaten too much food here. What I learned to do was to actually split my vegetables in my mind of I get six ounces of raw and six ounces of cooked, and I would make myself keep that distinction because I found it much easier to eyeball six ounces. I weigh six ounces of vegetables all the time, and I kind of know what six ounces of vegetables looks like. I don't really know what 12 or 14 ounces of vegetables look like, but six ounces, I know. I would make myself look at six ounces of raw and six ounces of cooked, and then my eyeballing got much more accurate, and I would walk out of the restaurant not feeling overly stuffed, and it was a win for me.
These are just examples of how even if you're Bright, even if your approach to Bright Line Eating is to just follow the fabulous plan, you still have work to do to define and design your program. What I've found is over the years also, I need to inventory my program regularly. I need to really take stock of what am I doing in the realm of food choices. Am I eating foods that light me up in the realm of food prep? Are my food prep rhythms optimal? Am I serving myself well with my food prep habits? In terms of weight, is my weight where I want it to be or has it crept up a little bit in Maintenance or am I losing weight at a rate that I'm good with if I'm still in weight loss? These are all things that require some examination frequently from time to time. Health, right? Do I feel good about the healthiness of my program? Do I feel like I'm getting enough calcium, enough iron? How do I feel about the balance of animal protein versus plant-based foods that I'm eating? Do I feel like I'm getting enough protein? These are all things that need to be examined and really looked at and considered and maybe tweaked and fine-tuned from the most fundamental, like am I willing to let go of sugar, flour, alcohol, to the most nuanced and fine-grained.
I have a workshop that I am offering. It's a webinar that's coming up on Saturday. If you're watching this vlog in real time, I'm talking about Saturday, March 7th, 2026. There will be a replay available, but only for three days. So, if you can't make it on Saturday, go ahead and register for the webinar anyway. There's a link down below. Go ahead and register, but make sure right now to put on your calendar when you will watch it. I'm not sure ... I think the replay will become available on Sunday morning. You'll just have Sunday, Monday, and then Tuesday morning to watch the replay. Make sure you schedule out time to watch the replay or join me live on Saturday, March 7th at 3:00 PM Eastern Time. The webinar is called, "Your Bright Blueprint: Define, Design, and Live Your Weight Loss Success."
If you want my support with going through some of the details of this, of really what does it look like to define, design, and live your weight-loss success with Bright Line Eating or something close to Bright Line Eating. If the full Bright Line Eating program isn't right for you, that's okay. This is where to come to learn more about how you do that. Then a select number of people, because we're going to cap registration on this, will be able to go deeper with me in a full three-part workshop that will actually give you a workbook and hold your hand in really defining, designing, and living your weight-loss success. You can finally dial in a program that's right for you that will enable you to transition all the way to Maintenance and live there, long term. A workshop that's completely informed by the book that I just wrote on this topic of Maintenance.
We're kicking off March and the book month, well, the penultimate month before the book gets published next month. We're kicking off March with a wonderful webinar and a wonderful workshop, and the pre-order bonuses are up. If you pre-order the book in advance, if it's this week right now, in real time you're watching this vlog, just know that the page for the pre-order bonuses will come up for you after you register for the webinar. If you've missed out on the webinar and it's already passed, then you're just going to see the pre-order pages for the book down below. So, we will swap those out depending on the date. If you're here in time, super exciting for you, go ahead and check out that webinar. I can't wait to see you there.
If none of that is right for you and you just wanted to listen to this vlog or watch this vlog, I just want to leave you with this, that weight loss is a very personal journey. It is very personal and individual to each of us. Just remember that here at Bright Line Eating, I talk in generalities, I talk in abstractions, I talk in averages, but you are a human being. You are a person and you are always going to be responsible to figure out what works for you to commit to it and to live it, and that's how you're going to have your long-term weight-loss success. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
