Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and in this week's vlog, we're going to talk about Bright Line Eating® and lipedema. I want to start off with a quick story. I was 10 years old probably walking down Geary Boulevard in San Francisco with my dad, my dad who was always very philosophically inclined and he looked consumed by something and I said, "Daddy, what's wrong?" And he said, "I'm thinking about something that bothers me a lot." And I said, "What's that? " And he said, "It's going to sound silly when I say it, but it's not. It's really, really important. You don't know what you don't know. " And he said, "And you never will. You can never know what you don't know. " I don't know that I got that then, but I've thought about that over the years and he's right. It's a big issue. And I, as the figurehead of Bright Line Eating®, sometimes I'm stunned by the things I don't know. And suddenly, when I know them, I think, how could I not have known about this? And lipedema is one of those things. I am newly informed about lipedema, and my mind has been blown, and I have no doubt I'm telling you right now, zero doubt, that there are a lot of people's lives that are going to be completely changed by watching this vlog or by listening to the podcast or by tuning in to some degree. Get ready to have your mind blown.
I want to start off with someone named Nicole who wrote in. She wrote in over a year ago about this and I read it a long time ago and thought, "Yeah, I'll never shoot that vlog." Completely dismissed it. And now this morning I was reading the vlog submission forms and didn't have a topic so needed a topic and a physician that I've become good friends with in Bright Line Eating has been telling me about lipedema and suddenly this topic jumped off the page at me. Here's what she wrote. Nicole said, "I have asked this before." Nicole's been trying to get my attention about this for years and I couldn't hear her. "I have asked this before, but I would like you to dive into the reasons why Bright Line Eating would be a very good food plan for those with lipedema. Those with lipedema are looking for an anti-inflammatory food plan, which you have. And I have a whole lot of information on this. I love your program and I've come back to it as a lady with lipedema. I am happy to discuss my thoughts and experience with this and I really think you're missing out on an entire market at the moment because anyone diagnosed with lipedema has been told that the best programs are keto or carnivore. Your program is a better fit. I've been a fan of yours since 2017. I've asked many questions on this subject to your reps, but nobody wants to touch it. I'm happy to be a spokesperson and know of another lady that's big in the lipedema community that has also gone with your plan over others. I think this will be a great vlog as I know women with lipedema are always searching on the internet for the best diet solution that fits their lifestyle."
Well, Nicole, I finally heard you. Thank you for your patience with me. The reason that I didn't pick this up sooner is that, okay, let's be real. There's 150, 15,000, I don't know how many medical conditions, right? And I'm not a doctor. And so, I resist talking about specific medical conditions because I don't feel qualified. I'm not. I'm not a doctor. There's so many of them. And so, it's just a subject I like to leave for people to discuss with their physicians. In this case though, I didn't realize how much lipedema was related to fat and stubborn resistant fat loss, which is very much a Bright Line Eating topic. I'll get back to your dietary suggestion in this vlog, Nicole, but I just want to start off with what is lipedema?
Lipedema is characterized by a certain kind of fat. It's a fibrotic connective tissue inflamed sort of fat that's not metabolic fat. It's not standard adipose tissue and it doesn't behave like standard adipose tissue. It behaves completely differently. Lipedema is painful fat and it often feels textured. Like if you feel it, it feels like there's rice or walnuts or pearls or something under the skin and it bruises easily. If you have lipedema in your arms, the blood pressure cuff is excruciatingly painful. That pressure is really hard. If you have lipedema in your thighs, it hurts for a cat to walk across your lap. You don't want to put kids or grandkids into your lap. It hurts. That fat is inflamed as well, and it doesn't respond to regular dietary measures. It doesn't respond to caloric deprivation, even to bariatric surgery. In terms of fat loss, it doesn't respond well to GLP-1 medications, although GLP-1 medications might be helpful for the anti-inflammatory properties and it looks like the tirzepatide version as in particular can be helpful a little bit, but not really for fat loss.
So, people in Bright Line Eating who have lipedema might be experiencing frustratingly slow weight loss that doesn't make any sense. When we see someone come in to Bright Line Eating at 300 pounds and get on our weight loss food plan, they typically lose a lot of weight really fast. And I've wondered over the years what is going on with these folks every now and then that come along that are 300 pounds get on a Bright Line Eating food plan and hardly lose any weight or they lose weight very, very slowly. It just doesn't add up. It never has. And a long time ago I knew people in the 12-step world who would just dismiss people who weren't losing weight at the standard pace and say, "Oh, they're just lying. They're eating outside their food plan." They say they're sticking with their food plan, but they're not. And I would think, "I don't agree. I don't agree." But I didn't know what an alternate explanation could be.
Where does lipedema come from? Well, annoyingly, we don't know, but we do have some things to say about that. It seems to be genetic. It runs in families and it affects female bodies. It's related to estrogen somehow. Almost exclusively female bodies. And actually, current estimates are that 11% of women might have lipedema. It develops in stages, so mild, moderate, and then severe, and it tends to get worse or start around big hormonal changes. Puberty is the classic time when it would start, but also pregnancy, potentially perimenopause, menopause, birth control pills. These sorts of shifts can be instigators for the onset or worsening of lipedema symptoms.
What do you do about this if you have lipedema? Well, the fat is stubborn, it's resistant. Some of the treatments that are more non-invasive include certain types of drainage, massage, compression, anti-inflammatory diets. This is where Nicole's comment comes in. Is Bright Line Eating a better diet than keto or carnivore or other options? Different diets work differently for different people. What I will say is that what you'll get from a Bright Line Eating food plan that is a bit unique is good education about carbohydrates, not just a mandate to stop eating carbohydrates, but a lot more clarity about the different types of carbohydrates that we don't want to be putting apples and carrots into the same bucket with pancakes and waffles, right? There are different types of carbohydrates. Sugar and flour, these refined carbohydrates are incredibly inflammatory and we want to be avoiding them whether we have lipedema or not, but absolutely if you have lipedema, you want to be avoiding those foods, but that doesn't mean don't eat apples. It doesn't mean don't eat carrots. So, you'll get that kind of education in Bright Line Eating.
You'll also get a food plan and education that supports you in adherence long term because really for most people, they know roughly what they should be eating. What they have a hard time doing is sticking to it long term and a lot of that has to do with something we call the Willpower Gap™ around here, and we overcome that through automaticity and our plan is automatizable. It's actually set up for maximal habit formation so that you end up sticking with your food plan like you brush your teeth, like just something that is routine. It's automatic. It just happens as a normal course of the day. Other food plans are actually anti-automatizable. They resist habit formation because you're having to track and count things throughout the day if you're trying to keep, for example, carbohydrates under a certain number of grams or because they eliminate carbohydrates to such an extent that the carbohydrate appetite kicks in. There are five distinct appetites appetite for carbohydrate, protein, fat, calcium and salt, and appetite being a system that drives consumption of food. And so, you don't actually want to eliminate carbohydrates. It's actually a setup for binging on carbohydrates later, which a lot of people discover. Anyway, I think Bright Line Eating is a great food plan to use for lipedema, but you're going to want to get more information than that.
I also want to mention that there are other treatments for lipedema in particular surgical treatment, like a particular form of liposuction that removes the lipidemic fat directly from the body and it's not standard lipostructure. You need to work with a surgeon who's experienced in the removal of lipedema tissue. That is a particular form of surgery. There's a whole range of treatments from less invasive to more invasive, obviously. It's a major, major topic.
For the people in Bright Line Eating who haven't as of yet had any explanation for their slow weight loss or their long plateau or their body's stubborn resistance to taking off weight, I hope learning about lipedema will at least help drain away some of the shame, some of the frustration, some of the confusion that might be layered on top of the underlying challenge. It doesn't take away the challenge itself, but at least knowing that you're not wrong, you're not flawed, you're not making it up, you're not deviating in ways that are extreme. You have a condition called lipedema and it's worth getting it checked out and partnering up with a medical expert in lipedema and discovering what your options are and having a lot of compassion for yourself, a lot of compassion for yourself because this is a whopper of a condition and that fat that is frustrating is it often looks pucked, and like cellulite. I also just want to say you don't have to have a very big body to have lipedema. Lipidemic fat tends to accumulate in the lower half of the body, but it can also accumulate in the arms or the abdomen and you don't have to be large to have it. You might be large but you might not. And there's degrees of severity and there's different locations on the body where it can be and you'll learn all this if you go to just a standard lipedema website for some basic information.
So, get yourself educated, give yourself a lot of compassion. What I want to do here is I want to open the topic for discussion. I'm guessing you're going to have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions. I think this is such a fascinating topic and 11% is not a small number. That is a massive number. And so, what I want to invite you to do is to click the link below if you have a question and for a future vlog, I'm going to invite a medical expert who specializes in lipedema onto the vlog to discuss with me and to answer your questions. If you have a question about lipedema, go ahead and click the link below, submit your question, we'll accumulate them and I will interview a lipedema expert, and we will get you more information so that you can be as informed as possible.
If you have Mastermind buddies, Gideon Games team members, etc., who are experiencing unusually slow weight loss, suggest that they get checked out for lipedema, ask if they have fat on their body that seems to be different in these ways, bruises easily, excessively painful, looks like cellulite or pockmarked, has the texture underneath the skin of rice or pearls or walnuts. That type of fat is not standard fat and it doesn't respond to dietary intervention in the same way. Yes, it's good to be on an anti-inflammatory diet for it, but you're not going to lose weight in that type of tissue the way you would lose adipose tissue just through dietary restraint. It's just good to know that that's a thing.
My mind is blown. How did I not know this? How did I not know that I didn't know? So, thank you to the physician who turned me onto this. Thank you to Nicole for suggesting that I should have vlog on this. I do think a Bright Line Eating food plan would be worth trying for all the reasons that I said if you have lipedema. Let's keep this conversation going in our community. If you have a question, click the button down below, submit your question and we'll talk about it a little bit more on a feature vlog. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
