Hey there. Welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I am introducing in this vlog the partnership, the official collaboration between Bright Line Eating® and Milestones. You probably know what Bright Line Eating is. We're an online weight-loss program that specializes in helping people who have a more addictive relationship with food to lose that excess weight and keep it off for the long term. Milestones is an inpatient residential treatment facility down in Florida, kind of near Miami, that helps people for a month or two, usually something like that, four to eight weeks, sometimes longer. People who have eating disorder issues, food addiction, and/or mental health struggles. Their patients come to them with food issues and often some flavor of food issues. It might be eating disorder style or maybe mental health challenges, maybe food addiction type issues. They are basically a food addiction informed eating disorder inpatient clinic.
What's really exciting is that we have powerful synergy and a lot to offer each other. This partnership started when Marty Lerner approached me. Marty Lerner is the founder of Milestones. He has a PhD in clinical psychology and has been specializing in eating disorder treatment since 1980, so for a long, long time. He founded Milestones back in 1999. Oh my gosh, I wish I had known about it. I could have used it, frankly, during a lot of my life and I just didn't know it was there. I mean, actually let me just think. I lost my excess weight in 2003. Prior to that, I totally could have used Milestones, and I was mired in my own mental health eating disorder and food addiction struggles. It would have been great for me. Didn't know about it. But anyway, Marty started it down there in Florida. What they do is they help people and then there's a step down process where people are discharged, but after that, they don't have a really great way to keep people connected in with community support, with peer-to-peer ongoing support. And so, Marty approached me and said, "Hey, can we talk because I'm seeing what you've done here in Bright Line Eating and it seems like you all have an ongoing support network of people doing Bright Line Eating and it's global and it's available anytime, anywhere, because it's all online." And it's true.
Bright Line Eating is not stationed anywhere. We don't have a physical brick and mortar presence in the world. We're all virtual. Their Milestones patients, once they go home, wherever they go in the world, could absolutely tap into Bright Line Eating support structures ongoingly and long term. So, Marty connected me up with his team and I started meeting with Nikki Glantz, who's a nutritionist and also the COO of Milestones and Sakina Osborne, who is their clinical director there. So she's a counselor, a therapist, and works there treating eating disorders, mental health issues. Everyone on the team there is trauma informed. They have a bunch of nutritionists, a bunch of therapists, and we started talking and meeting, and the synergy was palpable. I mean, we are all so on the same page. They follow the four Bright Lines in their practice. They teach people no sugar, no flour, weighing, and measuring, food, having a really clear food plan, sugar, flour meals, and quantities. They're all about it. And we just got along so well. There was so much love and connection and synergy and agreement. I mean, really, it was just like fireworks were just exploding as we were talking the whole time. It was fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. We realized how much we have to offer each other.
What Milestones can offer Bright Line Eating is that there are really some people who struggle to get Bright and just can't get Bright and probably need more intensive treatment to go somewhere and get some trauma therapy and get some one-on-one guidance with a nutritionist to really work with them on their food plan one-on-one, therapists to really work with them on their issues one-on-one, trauma work, deep, deep work, and to be immersed in a supportive community where it's really just all the stressors of life are at bay for a bit and you're really diving deep. There is no substitute for immersive one-on-one support. I mean, if you think about the drug and alcohol world, going away to treatment is a staple of recovery. Not everybody needs it, but a lot of people do. When a substance use disorder hits a crescendo, going away to treatment is absolutely necessary for a lot of people. What's going to be exciting now is that Milestones is going to be introducing people to Bright Line Eating from the beginning. So, in the first week that patients come into Milestones, they'll be going through their intake process with Milestones, and part of that will be watching a video from me, introducing the collaboration, introducing myself. I shot this video recently and I was excited to do it because when I tell my story of food addiction, I don't often go into the nooks and crannies of my eating disorder history, which is extensive.
I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder when I was 23 years old, and I also had bouts of bulimia on and off. My crystal meth use was, in a sense, a form of anorexia. I couldn't achieve anorexia on my own, but I would snort speed so I wouldn't have to eat and later did crack cocaine so I wouldn't have to eat. And so, I have an extensive eating disorder background and also an extensive mental health background as well. I got to go into the depths of my story that I don't often share and talk about Bright Line Eating and the birth of it and what it is. And so, they'll get that video and then they'll also get access to the Boot Camp, but it's a condensed Boot Camp. It's basically just double time. Instead of being a 10-week program, it's a five-week program so that pretty much everybody who goes through Milestones will get access to the whole thing.
Then, at Milestones, there'll be Bright Line Eating focused meetings there once or twice a week where they'll be talking about Bright Line Eating principles and talking about Bright Line Eating food and stuff like that. I mean, the food is the same as Bright Line Eating and Milestones, we overlap in that area. So, they'll be getting Bright Line Eating exposure all the way through their time in Milestones. When they discharge from Milestones, they'll be signing up for Bright Lifers™, our ongoing annual membership program as they discharge from Milestones. They'll come out of Milestones as Bright Lifers and already understanding Bright Line Eating lingo, Bright Line Eating philosophy, Bright Line Eating science and they'll hit the ground running, and then they'll be in our Bright Lifers community with access to our Meetups, our Gideon Games challenges, our buddy and guide structures, all of it. They'll have access to our community, our ongoing courses and so forth. It's an amazing opportunity.
What I guess I want to say is if you know anyone, maybe it's you, who has struggled to get Bright or who hasn't even tried really Bright Line Eating because you are so overcome by your disease and just know that your food addiction is so strong that you're going to need extra support, I want to let you know that Milestones takes insurance. I don't know if they take every insurance, there's a lot of insurances in the United States, but they take insurance. You can reach out to Milestones, they're in Florida, they have an easy website to find, and you can talk to them about whether you could get your stay at Milestones covered by insurance and then get exposure to the Boot Camp while you're in there and get into Bright Lifers while you're in there and really get your journey started on a strong footing with individualized support tailored to you. Very intensive. Very handholding. Just very supported in an intensive format. Like I say, I needed it. I know I needed it during many stretches of my journey and I didn't have access to anything like it because I didn't know it existed. So, I really encourage you to consider Milestones for yourself or for someone in your Bright Line Eating community.
Be sure to mention it to people that they might want to check out Milestones, that it takes insurance, that it might be a good option. I just want to say thank you to Marty and to Nikki and to Sakina at Milestones for partnering with Bright Line Eating. It feels like the dawn of a new day in a way that our footprint in Bright Line Eating keeps spreading and our success speaks for itself and the infrastructure that we've built here is now robust enough that we can be a resource to other professionals who need to take advantage of what we offer because we do have an amazing virtual army of online support, a network, a community that's been built and nurtured over the last 11 years. And now, Milestones is going to be joining in our fold, and we'll be partnering together now from here on out.
So, here it is, announcing the Bright Line Eating-Milestones partnership, hear ye, hear, ye. We are joined, we are connected, we are supporting each other and that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
