Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and in today's vlog, we're going to talk about how to get aligned in your Bright Line Eating® program. This topic actually comes out of the book Maintain. The book launch for Maintain is over. I just wanted to give you a recap. We hit two out of three of the United States bestsellers list. As a matter of fact, the book was the number one selling nonfiction book in the country according to USA Today, which uses book sales as their measurement. So, congratulations to us! We also raised enough money to get the book Maintain into 80% of the libraries, that's 80, in the United States so that people on any budget can get access to the deep psychology that leads people to keep weight off long term as opposed to yo-yo diet.
One of the things that happened during the book launch was a couple months ago I ran a workshop series that was one of the things about it was that it was raising money to get books into libraries and it ended up being the fastest selling out thing we ever have offered in Bright Line Eating. I mean the spots in this workshop went like hotcakes and the workshop was called Aligned and it was all about how to get aligned with your Bright Line Eating program. I didn't expect that to happen. I didn't expect it to sell out so quickly. There were hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand people who had heard about the workshop and just weren't fast enough to grab a seat. After we offered the workshop, people were writing in droves saying, "This was so helpful to me. " The nature of those comments took a few different directions, and I just wanted to talk about them in this vlog because I think they really illustrate something very deep about what it takes to succeed with Bright Line Eating as a weight loss and weight loss maintenance and lifestyle overhaul strategy long term.
First of all, we had people who said, "I have been Bright and Bright Line Eating has been working for me, but thanks to Aligned, I now understand at a much deeper level why I do what I do, why it works for me, and I feel synced up with the program that I'm working. It's not just an off the shelf solution that I am benefiting from. It's actually my own program and I'm realizing the ways I've customized it, how that's benefiting me and what my own track record and data show that proves to me that this is right for me, that this is what I want and need to be doing." In other words, I'm going to put a word on it. They're saying that they came to realize that their Bright Line Eating program is egosyntonic. Do you know this word? I didn't know it just a few months ago. It's a fabulous word that I just learned. Egosyntonic, meaning doing something, something that is aligned with your identity, your sense of self, what matters to you, the person you think of yourself as being. The notion of something that's egosyntonic is interesting because it's not always helpful. Actually, it's hypothesized that the eating disorder anorexia is harder to treat and put into remission because it's so often egosyntonic as opposed to say bulimia, which is less often egosyntonic. In other words, someone who's eating big volumes of food and then throwing it up into a toilet often doesn't see that as congress or in line with the type of person that they want to be, but often someone who is eating very little and getting very, very skinny does actually see that as in line with who they want to be. They want to be eating very, very little. They want to be very, very skinny and so because anorexia is often egosyntonic, in other words, aligned with someone's identity, it makes it very difficult to treat. But it can be a very positive thing too. Someone, I don't know, training for the Olympics, might find the training regimen although challenging to be egosyntonic aligned with their identity as an athlete and someone who does hard things and is willing to sacrifice for long-term goals and things like that.
In Bright Line Eating, there can be a long process of one's deep identity changing and getting to the point where doing something as rigorous as Bright Line Eating can be egosyntonic and the tweaks that someone makes to their program can also be to make their program more egosyntonic. This brings me to the next category of feedback that we got, which was maybe the dominant flavor of feedback that we got, which was people writing in droves saying, "I loved this, the Aligned workshop, because it made me feel welcome at the table and it validated a lot of the things that I've tweaked or changed in my Bright Line Eating program that work for me, but that I've been feeling vaguely guilty about because I'm not just following the plan, I'm doing it my own way." But one of the things we pointed out in the workshop is that everybody's doing it their own way. There is no such thing as an off-the-shelf Bright Line Eating program because just even to get your first meal on the table, you have to make countless decisions about what you're doing with your plan. You have to decide whether you're eating animal protein or plant-based proteins only. You have to decide whether you're using salt and pepper, condiments, using recipes or not. You have to decide whether you're keeping the vegetables split six ounces at lunch and 14 ounces at dinner as it is in the standard Weight-Loss Plan, or whether you're going to shift some of those vegetables down to lunch like a lot of people do, and do 10 and 10. You have to decide whether you're doing the enhanced protein version or the standard protein version and on and on and on. There're so many things that you have to decide even if you're just following the frickin' plan. You can't actually just follow the frickin' plan. You have to make some decisions along the way, lots of them, how and when to do your food prep so many things.
Everybody's modifying their plan and making it true to themselves and by normalizing that and pointing that out and then inviting people to look back in their history and really look at what works for them, what doesn't, how they know, what's working today, what are they willing to do today? I would say that getting aligned is the process of getting synced up with the program that you're working, the program you're willing to work, the program that's needed to keep your brain in check, depending on how strongly your brain gets pulled towards addictive foods, the identity that you have for yourself deep down. This is a long process because people often come in here really broken, really not. Broken is a loaded term. Let me use a different term. People come in here really scarred from often decades of trying to eat one way and not being able to because they were trying plans and programs that didn't account for the addictiveness of the foods in our current food environment. And so, they were set up to fail from the beginning. But watching yourself fail at implementing a certain plan over and over and over again definitely takes a toll. That can impact the underlying identity of somebody and then when they get here, it perhaps is not egosyntonic necessarily to be immediately successful with a plan. Some people get stunned by being successful with Bright Line Eating right off the shelf or right off the bat and as they make their modifications and their tweaks, they find it actually works and there's an alignment process that has to happen where their brain develops peace with the notion of success.
It takes time. It really does. It takes time. There's a lot to this notion of getting aligned and I thought I would offer a free webinar on it because obviously this topic resonates with our community so, so strongly. So, coming up, I'm offering a free webinar and it's called, "Your Bright Blueprint, Define, Design, and Live Your Bright Line Eating Success." It's for anybody who wants to explore this notion of getting aligned. There's a registration page down below you can click, get yourself registered. I just really encourage you to think about this notion of being aligned in what you do with Bright Line Eating, because it's not a should thing. It's really a question of what serves me, what gives me peace, what am I willing to do and what works for me, for my brain, for my lifestyle. If you want to learn more about it, check out the webinar and I will see you next week.
