Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and in this week's vlog, we're going to talk about the barriers to effective, contented, sustained weight loss Maintenance. What keeps people from sticking the landing when they try to lose weight? Nobody goes to lose weight thinking, "Oh, you know what I want? I just want to take off a bunch of weight and then gain it right back." Says nobody ever, right? So, why is it so common that weight regain happens and what's keeping people from being able to keep it off?
I just published this book, Maintain. It just came out last week. I feel super proud of it. One of the things that I talk about in this book is the things that keep us stuck, the things that keep us from transitioning into this phase where we're liberated, where we are truly done with the weight loss struggle, with the food struggle, the weight struggle, all of it, it's behind us, and we are now someone who is living in a body that doesn't feel to us like it needs to lose or gain any weight. We're in our self-defined right size, whatever that is. We're now focused on our life, our relationships, our passions, our hobbies, our vocations, our friends, our family, all the things that make life so worth living. Nobody wants to live a life that's focused on losing weight at infinitum forever. Weight loss should be, if any part of your life, a short one and done, let's focus on this just enough to get the weight off so we can get healthy, so our knees can stop hurting and we can move on, right? But that's not what it is for a lot of people. For a lot of people, it's a lifetime obsession. It's a focus that requires or seems to involve, I guess, many new attempts each year.
Research shows the average dieter tries four or five attempts, new attempts each year, which is heartbreaking and staggering. I find that people who are drawn to Bright Line Eating® report that before they get here, they're spending 50, 60, 70, sometimes 90% of their life focus on their food, their weight, their exercise, what they're trying to do to fix this problem. Now, when they're living in contented Maintenance, that percentage goes down to 15%-ish, 15 to 20%. So, it's a huge amount of real estate to regain in your life if you can achieve Maintenance, not to mention so much healthier.
Our research shows so much happier, so many more feelings of being loved, supported, and connected in the world, so much better energy, so much better sleep, less depression, fewer days of poor mental health. We have published research on all of this. What keeps people from getting there? Well, I think often it's the failure to face squarely grief and fear related to the reality of what it actually takes to keep weight off. Grief and fear. Let me break that down. Grief. There's some things to give up, right? I mean, choose your hard. I have a vlog called, "Choose Your Hard." Staying overweight is hard. Living with the inflammation and the joint pain and the increased risk for all these diseases. And if you have low self-esteem related to it, if you have a binge eating disorder related to it, if you know that you're eating addictively and eating out of alignment with your values, if you're eating foods that you don't want to be eating, all of that is hard. Yes. But giving it up is hard too. There's foods to grieve. It's sad to think, wait, I'm not going to eat, fill in the blank. That's hard. If you have a diet mentality and you think you're just giving it up for a short period of time, then you don't have to feel that grief. But as soon as you adopt a Maintenance mindset where this is for the long haul, that can be horrifying. That can be really, really sad. What if it really disrupts your family dynamics for you to change how you're eating? What if your spouse, your kids, your groups that you're involved in are upset or dysregulated because you're not cooking the way you used to or bringing the foods that you used to. Maybe you were known for baking certain things or bringing certain things and now you're packing your way to lunch or dinner and not eating with them or not providing food for them. What if your family is not thrilled that you're not baking anymore or making big saucy casseroles and this protein, salad, vegetable dinner is not going over that well with them? Well, again, if you have a diet mentality where you allow yourself to just think, "Well, I'm just doing this for a short period of time," you can avoid feeling that grief or feeling the conflict, the loss, the sadness that really would come up if you said, "I'm really doing this. This is how I live now."
There are so many other forms of grief that come up. It's hard and sad for a lot of people if they had an identity or a profession related to food. Maybe they were a foodie, maybe they were a caterer, a baker, maybe they own a restaurant. What then? We have someone who's a Bright Lifer™ who's, I think, a third or fourth generation candy store owner. He's a salesman for a candy store that his parents and grandparents owned. How about that career? There might be big things to face and address and grieve if you really accept that you're doing this for the long term. At an identity level. What often happens is people stay in the diet mentality because it keeps them from having to face that grief.
Now, I do want to say that it is true that you don't have to feel all that grief at once because the brain is healing. In the early days of giving up certain foods, when your brain is reliant on those foods for hits of dopamine, the thought of living without those foods feels like Armageddon. It feels enormous, just so bleak and devastating that the brain can't even wrap its head around it. I see that in the eyes of people that I talk to about Bright Line Eating. When I say no sugar, no flour, I can see it looks like a nuclear bomb goes off in their brain and their eyes suddenly look like a devastated wasteland. They can't even fathom their life without eating sugar and flour. Their brain needs it so much. We have data showing that eight weeks later, as the Boot Camp is coming to a close, they will have experienced a tremendous amount of healing in their nucleus accumbens. Those dopamine receptors will have repopulated to a significant degree, bringing hunger and cravings way down. Suddenly, the thought of not eating sugar and flour long term feels much more possible. Fast forward a year or two, and it might seem pretty darn okay like, yeah, I could totally do this forever. I could imagine lying on my deathbed and looking back and saying, "Whoa, I haven't had sugar or flour in decades."
It would be not necessary, unwise, not helpful, and probably not possible to experience the full measure of that grief right up front in the first week. I'm not suggesting that you try to do that, but I do think that as you live with Bright Line Eating, as the weeks roll by, as the months roll by, at some point, really facing that grief of the foods that you're giving up, the relationships that have changed and will have to change of your identity that needs to shift, all of those things need to be felt. If you don't feel that, there are consequences. I'm going to talk about that in a second. But I want to shift now from talking about grief to talking about fear.
A lot of people have a lot of fear around Maintenance. They have a lot of excitement too. They like the thought of getting off their weight. They like the thought of wearing littler clothes, of having a consistent wardrobe of clothes so that they know what's going to fit their body at any given moment, of maybe wearing a size of clothes so they could shop in a catalog or go to a mall and buy stores, clothes in a regular store as opposed to needing to order from special catalogs or going to stores that specialize in clothes for people who have bigger bodies. They have some excitement about getting weight off, yes, but they have fear too. Some of the fears might include fear of wrinkles or loose skin. There might be some resistance to sucking all the weight or a lot of the excess weight out of the body of just like, "What would I be then? Just a wrinkly sack of skin? I don't know how attractive that would be." They might have fear around relationships, around attention, comments, people's focus on them, comments about their body, maybe fear about receiving sexual attention. Perhaps a bigger body has kept them safe. Maybe they have trauma, sexual trauma from their past, and the bigger body has been a buffer against unwanted sexual advances for a long, long time. So there could be really profound fear around letting go of that armor, right? Letting go of that girth, that size, that protection, that barrier, that shield against other people. It can feel very scary, very vulnerable to lose a lot of weight, if that's your background. They might have fear around sexuality, both sort of pro and con, you could say. For example, fear of sexual attention, maybe because of a background of trauma, or maybe just because, yeah, they don't know how they would handle it. It might feel awkward, but also potentially the other way, fear of their own libido waking up, fear of wanting sexual attention and maybe not getting it. What if you haven't found a life partner. Deep down, you feel like you might want one, and the weight has been the reason all this time. The weight has been something you could always say, "Well, of course I haven't been partnered. I'm heavy." And that's your own story in your own head, but you might have a fear. "What if I lose this weight and then I still don't get partnered?" What would that mean? What would that mean? That's a scary, scary thought. Lots of people of all kinds of sizes are trying to find a life partner and haven't for all kinds of reasons. Many of them related to the role of the dice. Those are some examples of fears that might come up related to losing weight and keeping it off.
If you don't make space for these things over time in your weight-loss journey and your Maintenance journey, what happens? Well, in my experience, two things potentially, kind of a fork in the road, two paths. I would say the more common one is you don't reach contented Maintenance at all. You keep yourself from achieving Maintenance and you stay stuck in diet mentality and in either hovering above goal weight, we call that finish line anxiety or maybe breaking your Bright Lines at some point so that you never really lose all your excess weight and transition to Maintenance, but maybe you do transition to Maintenance and what happens is a Food Controller Part of you, a Part of you that loves Bright Line Eating because the rules are clear and it's so structured, a Part of you that can weigh 6.0 ounces of vegetables, 4.0 ounces of chicken, a Part of you that can do a daily habit stack, fill out a nightly checklist sheet and feel contented, joyful, in control, on task, on point. That Part of you might white knuckle your way into Maintenance and make it happen through force and control and keep the Parts of you that are scared and sad, down, stuff them, don't let them out. And then what happens is your program of Bright Line Eating recovery and your life and your personality become rigid and afraid. Fear and rigidity might not be the dominant thing that you experience. There's probably also a lot of joy related to your Bright life, but it's there that you're holding on tight.
Using the book Maintain, using the exercises and the questions at the back of each chapter, at the end of each chapter, there's a series of questions. You can gradually, lovingly, little by little, start to journal on these topics and just ask yourself honestly what they might mean to you, where there might be grief to feel, where there might be fear to face. The book tells you how to do it. I can speak to it a little bit in this vlog as well. How do you feel fear? You breathe, you feel your body, you go into your body, like really try to feel it from the inside. You ask yourself, where is it in your body? You make a little space for it. You put pen to paper and you write about it. Maybe you talk about it with a coach, a friend, a spouse, a therapist, a Gideon Games group, a Mastermind group, a buddy. It's called doing the work, doing the inner work. You become someone who does their inner work. It's not fancy. It doesn't take much. It takes a little. It actually is something to do. Create a little bit of space, feel a feeling, take a breath. What about fear? Well, you remind yourself, how do you walk through fear? Afraid. You say that to yourself, literally. Then again, you make space. You feel the fear in your body. You journal about it, you share about it, and then you find the next right action to take. You move on. These are not things that you have to live in or wallow in.
Addressing grief and fear are endeavors that you do a little bit here and there as they crop up, as they crop up, because what you want is contented weight-loss Maintenance, not yo-yo dieting, not white knuckling. Contented Maintenance, and it does involve feeling a few feelings and addressing a few things, but it is worth it. So, this book Maintain will help you do it. Hurray for Maintain! Thank you to the Bright Line Eating community for everything you've done. Please leave a review for the book on Amazon. If you haven't, that would be super, super grateful or helpful, and I would be grateful. Oh my dears, and that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
