Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. In this week's vlog, I want to invite you to join the Maintenance Database. Join the Maintenance Movement. This is all spurred on by the fact that the book Maintain has just arrived at my doorstep, which is exciting. It will be coming to your doorstep in about two or three more weeks. The publication date is April 21st, 2026, and four boxes of author's copies showed up at my front door this past week. I'm very excited. The full title is Maintain: the Three Simple Shifts That Turn Temporary Weight Loss Into Lasting Freedom. It's all about weight-loss Maintenance, which is in the whole weight-loss landscape, probably the most understudied, underdiscussed topic. This book in particular is about the psychology of weight-loss Maintenance.
Who do you have to become to be someone who could actually lose their weight and keep it off? There are three deep identity shifts that need to happen for you to be able to do that. I've learned this over 23 years of maintaining my own weight loss and helping, I don't know how many people, countless people to keep their weight off. This exact point of I don't know how many people, is the reason for the Maintenance Database because Bright Line Eating's® been around for 11 years. In those 11 years, we have grown a community of Bright Lifers™ and they're relatively easy to study because they're in our community. We can reach them directly and we can say, "Hey, are you in Maintenance? How's it going? " We actually haven't started a database of Maintenance among Bright Lifers because I think more to the point, we need a database of Maintenance more broadly. And that's what we have just launched, is a Maintenance Database, and you can join it at jointheMaintenancemovement.com.
I want to back up and talk about the history of studying sustained weight loss. Back in 1994, Rena Wing and James Hill, Rena Wing was at Brown University, James Hill was at the University of Colorado, they were talking about this exact topic that a lot is talked about when it comes to weight loss and very little is talked about when it comes to Maintenance. They founded something called the National Weight Control Registry. It still exists. I've been in it for, I don't know, longer, more than a decade, certainly. They found it hard to find anybody who had kept weight off. So, they made the standards pretty easy. To get into the National Weight Control Registry, you have to have lost 30 pounds from your highest weight, and you have to have been keeping that weight off for a year or more. So, it's not actually a Maintenance Database. It never even discusses Maintenance. It's just about losing at least 30 pounds and then keeping it off. It's not about getting down to Maintenance. Anyway, in the annual survey that comes out to people who've joined this database, and I think they've got 10,000 people in the database now, it's very obvious that this all started coming out of the diet craze of the 1980s, the low-fat diet craze in particular. There's a lot of dietary questions. How are you eating? Some of them are like, in the last month did you put any kind of buttery spread on your bread or bagel or something? And if so, did you use margarine instead of butter? It's like a low fat. Did you use low fat salad dressing? Did you trim the fat off your meat? So, it was very low fat focused as if they're presuming that the way to lose weight is to cut the fat out of your diet. Okay. There's a lot of helpful things in the database though. They clearly were already hip to the notion of automaticity, really. They don't use that word. I don't know anybody uses that word but me, but there's questions in there of, are you exercising how often and do you do the same thing at the same time of day? Is there habit, routine, automaticity built in to your exercise structures, which I think is really interesting and helpful. Anyway, they've published a lot of studies on weight loss Maintenance. Again, not living in Maintenance, but just losing some weight and then maintaining it, right? A slightly different distinction.
In Bright Line Eating, we've published some research on weight-loss Maintenance as well. In particular, we published a six year follow-up study that showed tremendous sustained weight loss in the people that we studied. But what I really thought was interesting is that among the entire cohort who responded to the survey, these are people who did the Boot Camp six years prior. The whole cohort averaged like a seven-and-a-half percent weight loss, which is stunning because most of those people had long since left Bright Line Eating and weren't doing it anymore. But somehow, just at one time, six years ago, getting introduced to the notion of no sugar, no flour, weighing and measuring your meals, eat three meals a day, just getting introduced to that and doing it in the Boot Camp for a little bit seemed to inoculate them against further weight gain and most of them had not regained their weight. It's so interesting that these principles are so potent and Bright Line Eating has touched a lot of lives. I mean, in the 11 years that we've been around, Bright Line Eating has ... I mean, gosh, it's almost 12 years now. Bright Line Eating has educated something like 2.4 million people through our email list. Now, our current email list size isn't 2.4 million people. People unsubscribe, people go their way, but that's how many unique email addresses have been on our list at one point or another. Hundreds of thousands of people have bought one or more Bright Line Eating books in one or more formats, hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people have followed us on social media across all platforms. 115,000 people have taken one or more of our courses online. And there's friends, family, coworkers of those people who've lost weight that we don't even know about, who've never been on our email list or followed us on Facebook or bought a book. But because they have someone in their house or in their next door cubicle or something doing Bright Line Eating, they've heard the principles of no sugar, no flour. It's actually not as bad as you think. You get used to it. The cravings go away. And so, there's really no way to quantify how much the Bright Line Eating influence has spread.
We're late to the party here getting this database set up, but better late than ever, 12 years have gone by, another 12 years will go by, and another 12 years will go by. And so, we've established now the Maintenance Database to invite people who are living in Maintenance to stand up and be counted. But this raises the question, what do we mean by being in Maintenance? What's the definition? How do you know if you're there? Well, because the book is coming out and it's a psychological thing, part of the definition that we have on the website for jointhemaintenancemovement.com. When you click on joining the database, it defines it for you. Part of the definition comes straight from the book. It's about being devoted, resourced, and liberated. This is a subjective thing, but you need to ask yourself, am I devoted to a program, a plan, a way of eating, a way of living? It doesn't have to be Bright Line Eating. It could be Slight Line Eating. It could be something else entirely. But am I devoted to the way I am handling my food and my weight issues of the past, right? Am I devoted? Am I resourced? Am I someone who does their inner work? Am I someone who has other coping strategies other than turning to food when life gets lifey? When I feel stressed? When I want to celebrate? When I feel bored, et cetera, right? Am I resourced? And am I liberated? Am I done with the food and the weight struggle? Have I moved past it? Am I living in a world where I'm free from the food and the weight struggle that I used to have?
It could be a food and a weight struggle. It could be a food addiction struggle from the past, and it could be an eating disorder struggle from the past. You don't actually have to have lost any weight to be living in Maintenance. You could have potentially had an eating disorder issue that you've now broken free from, and you're devoted and resourced and liberated and want to be counted as living in Maintenance in that way as well.
But I think to be in the Maintenance Database, you have to have had a past struggle of some kind. So, I don't think this is the place for someone who's always been slender, never had a food issue, a one on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™ to say, "Oh, that's me. I've been at a stable weight." Right? No, no, no. This is for people who have at one point struggled and now have broken free. So, that's the first set of criteria. They're psychological and it's subjective. You get to decide whether that fits you. I just want to say also, just about everybody who lives in Maintenance and my experience struggles with it to some extent at some point. So, none of us are 100% free, 100% of the time, right? But you could definitely look at today in contrast to the past and say, "Oh yeah, I'm significantly liberated compared to that." It is way easier than it used to be, this whole food and weight thing. Okay.
What are the physical criteria? We're actually not that prescriptive about what weight you have to be at to be in the Maintenance Database. There is one criteria in there, which is you have to have a BRI under 6.91. Now, BRI is not BMI. BRI is body roundness index as compared with the BMI. The difference is that you know how people say the BMI is outdated and it's ridiculous because you could be super muscular like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he won the bodybuilding competitions he would have been classified by the BMI as morbidly obese, right? Okay. Well, he would not have been classified as anything other than healthy according to the BRI because BRI takes into account your height and your weight, but also your waist circumference and your hip circumference. By looking at the roundness of the body, you can actually get a much better sense of whether someone is at a healthy weight for them, but a BRI under 6.1 just means not at the highest risk category, not at the highest risk category. My guess is that anyone in Bright Line Eating who would be counting themselves in Maintenance would have a BRI more like in the two or three range, like well under 6.91. So, it's just a minimal criterion in there. And then you have to have been living at your stable Maintenance weight range-ish for a year or more and not trying to gain or lose weight currently. Now, there has to be a little asterisk there because most of us who live in Maintenance are sometimes trying to gain and lose weight to keep ourselves in our range, right? Like we get our weight trends, there's Maintenance weight creep and then you bring it down. I mean, my weight, I'm five-three-and-a-half and my weight has ranged hugely in Maintenance from like 106 pounds up to like 132 pounds in that whole range. I usually am one-teens-ish somewhere in there, sometimes it creeps into the 120s. And then yes, if it creeps into the 120s, I'm typically trying to lose some weight, trying to bring it back down. I count all that as Maintenance. So, there's the fluctuations of Maintenance and the adjustments that you make, but it's very different than like, "Okay, I'm going on a diet. I need to lose weight. I'm finally going to get it together this time." No, no, no. Those are just the adjustments within Maintenance. Yeah, those are pretty much the criteria.
There's another issue here though, which is that in Bright Line Eating, when someone declares Maintenance, it typically means they've just finished losing their weight and they've just hit Maintenance that's not yet sustained. So, to be in the Maintenance Database, you have to have been living in Maintenance for a year. So, you hit Maintenance, a year later you get to be in the Maintenance Database. So, jointhemaintenancemovement.com, go to the page on joining the database if you've been living in Maintenance for a year or more.
Why would you want to do it? Why would you want to join the Maintenance Database? Well, first of all, we're kind of at the crossroads of a cultural clash, right? In the 1970s and 80s, dieting was all the rage, and nobody thought twice about it. There was the fat-free diet culture and the aerobics culture, and there was a lot of implicit assumption that your worth was defined by your size and thinner was better. Then there was a backlash against that, right? Where, "Hey, no, we're not going to allow ourselves to be defined by our size. And we are worthy no matter our size." The body positivity movement and the health at every size movements cropped up. But amongst the fat activists and the health at every size proponents, there was a lot of denial that it actually is a health issue as well. A lot of denial of that scientific reality, that scientific evidence, that large amounts of excess adipose tissue are not benign and inert on the body. They hurt the joints and they hurt the brain and they hurt the heart and they hurt the lungs and they're releasing inflammatory cytokines that are damaging organs and systems all throughout the body and it's a problem. Carrying excess weight is a problem and supporting just the endless expansion of obesity around the world isn't a good thing for anybody, right?
Then Ozempic came out and Zepbound and Wegovy, all the drugs, and suddenly it was okay to talk about losing weight again, and that dialogue came back to the center of societal discourse, but nowhere has there been a nuanced understanding that this is an individual journey and that eating in a way that feels addictive is painful and that in our current food environment that's gone off its rocker, we as people need to take control of our own health and our own eating patterns and buck society a bit, right? For those of us who figured out how to do that in a culture that is eating whatever, whenever, and then warring over weight to be heavy, to not be heavy, all those things, to take the drugs, to not take the drugs, the reality is that individuals have agency and if you have found your path in that madness and you have achieved Maintenance, it is worth it to stand up and be counted to say, "I am not trying to gain weight or lose weight anymore. I used to have a food or a weight struggle, and I do not anymore and here is how I'm doing it. " So, the Maintenance Database gives voice and attention and accolades to those who have found their personal solution amidst the weight and food madness that is our world today and have put a stake in the ground for an individualized solution tailored to each person that feels empowering for the individual. It also allows scientists today and, in the future, to reach out with a simple email to say, "We're conducting a study. Would you like to be in it? " Which you can ignore, you can reply yes, you can reply no, totally your call, but that is all you will receive in the Maintenance Database in terms of invitations or marketing promotions. You might get an occasional informational email if we've completed a study or if there's Maintenance-based news that we want you to hear about, but this is not going to be a marketing thing.
This is not joining the Bright Line Eating email list. This is completely separate from Bright Line Eating. So, if you're a Bright Lifer, you're not in the Maintenance Database already. If you're on our email list, in our database, you're not in the Maintenance Database already. This is a separate thing. This is a separate email and you're not going to be getting a lot of emails from the Maintenance Database staff. It's going to be a minimal thing, but you might want to help inform future scientists and future people who struggle with their food and their weight because the more we can learn about what individualized empowered Maintenance looks like and where it comes from and how it's configured and how people are managing it over time, the better. Because the struggle is real. People by and large are not reaching Maintenance and some people are.
Well, what are they doing? That's the point of the Maintenance Database. We set up the Maintenance Database to be super simple. You're not going to be asked a bunch of questions. As a matter of fact, hardly any. You will be asked when you first started Maintenance, so that's not the one year later date. That's like the date that you first lost your weight or the date that you first declared Maintenance. You'll be asked for that date and hardly anything else. If there's any research that happens, you'll be invited in the future to participate in that, but this is just your opportunity to stand up and be counted. Our initial goal is to reach a thousand people. Let's see if we can get a thousand people to say, "Yes, I am in Maintenance." It doesn't have to be with Bright Line Eating. It can be through any method at all, just living in Maintenance. Have your success counted and ask the people you know who are living in Maintenance to join the Maintenance Database. Who's out there? Who's achieving this right now? Living in Maintenance. Devoted. Resourced. Liberated. No longer trying to gain or lose weight. Used to have a struggle, don't anymore. Jointhemaintenancemovement.com. Stand up and be counted. Your achievement matters. It really does. Jointhemaintenancemovement.com. That's where you reach us in the Maintenance Database. You'll have to scroll down a bit. I'll see you there. Congratulations. I love you. This is Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson signing off. I'll see you next week.
