Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and let's talk about the Maintenance break. What is that? It's not breaking your Bright Lines. It is a pause in weight loss. If you have a lot of weight to lose, and a lot is subjective, we could be talking about 60 pounds or we could be talking about 360 pounds, but if you are coming from bigger numbers and you've got a lot of weight to lose, you might want to consider on that weight-loss experience, path, trajectory, pausing maybe even more than once to add some food and stabilize your weight so that you're not losing weight anymore and just live there for a bit. It's called a Maintenance break and it's a thing and there are benefits to it.
What you do with a Maintenance break is you give your body a rest from the rigors and the strains of weight loss. Weight loss is incredibly stressful and demanding on the body. First of all, we evolved to have brains that are terrified of weight loss. I mean, if you think of it, there's just about nothing scarier to a human being than extended protracted weight loss. What it means is there hasn't been enough food around for months upon months upon months and you're probably about to starve to death. That's what the brain is thinking as you lose weight month after month. It's scary and the brain freaks out in all kinds of ways. It can shut down reproductive function. It can cause hair loss. It can cause hormonal disruption because hormones are produced and stored in fat. So, as your fat stores are changing, your endocrine system is changing. All these toxins are being released into your bloodstream as your fat cells shrink and the vacuoles, which are basically just like storage heaps, they're like landfills inside each fat cell, well, as the fat cell shrinks, there isn't room. So, what it does is the vacuole just moves over to the cell membrane and fuses with the cell membrane and just dumps, just dumps its toxins into the bloodstream free flow and all of a sudden, the kidneys and the liver have all of these toxins to process. It's hard on the body to lose weight for an extended period of time. The body can get fatigued. The brain can get scared and the brain can toggle the dials. Dials meaning thyroid hormone can get decreased to decrease metabolism and the sort of systems that govern how much fuel you burn at rest and how much fuel you burn when you're moving and how much you move at all. All those dials can get toggled so that even on your Weight-Loss Food plan, you're not losing weight anymore. Your weight loss can slow down or you can reach a plateau. These are all signs that you might need a Maintenance break.
If you're fatigued, if you start to get really, really hungry. If you start to, like not your brain, but like you kind of psychologically start to get scared, right? Because it is confronting to consider living in the world in a small body when you've been living in a big body for a long, long time. There's a huge identity shift that's needed there. There're so many reasons why you might just want to take a Maintenance break. I know people who've been very successful in Bright Line Eating® who, when losing say 145 pounds have had two Maintenance breaks in there, one for six months, one for a year. Literally they did not do their weight loss all at once. They paused twice during the journey to stay at a consistent weight for a while.
Now, how much food do you add to create a Maintenance break? Well, it really depends. This is one of the downsides of a Maintenance break. It takes some doing. There's no easy formula to it. In Bright Line Eating, you're going to want to be in Bright Lifers™, which is our annual membership program, and you're going to want to look at the course called Maintenance II, which is all about the nuts and bolts of adding food, and you're going to add food as if you're landing the plane at Maintenance for good. It's not for good, but it might as well be like you have to stop your weight loss. I don't know, for you that might mean adding one thing. It might mean adding a grain to launch and that's it. Or adding a second protein to breakfast and that's it. You'll know that's it because your body stops losing weight, right? Or it could take seven adds to get there. I don't know. Maybe you've got a fast metabolism and you're going to have to add food a whole bunch. Do you have to add food till you stop your weight loss? No, you could add food till you slow it way down and call that good enough. You could call that a Maintenance break. There's no hard and fast rules here. It will give your brain and your body significant relief just to slow it down for a while, but there's no telling how many adds it'll take. Each person's body is unique and different.
Now, as you are losing weight, if you hit a plateau and you think to yourself, maybe my body is fatigued with weight loss. I want to do a Maintenance break, but I'm already at a Maintenance break. I'm not losing weight anymore. You might want to add one component of food. I would recommend a protein at breakfast. That means doubling up protein at breakfast to see if you don't gain weight, but you stay steady. Your weight might pop up momentarily, but see if it kind of overall holds steady. And then you might try adding even a second add of food, a second component of food to see if you don't gain weight on that but you stay steady and then now, you're in a Maintenance break. You've added one or two things and now the plateau isn't forced. It's now deliberate. It's now, you've caused it and you're giving your brain a little bit more fuel, your body, a little bit more fuel and you're doing a Maintenance break. If you add food and your weight starts climbing week over week over week over week, take out the food. You don't want to reverse the trend.
Let's talk about some of the downsides of a Maintenance break because there are some. First of all, it messes with automaticity. In general, in Bright Line Eating, we put so much value on automaticity. It's so great to just wash, rinse, repeat, day after day, after day. And it can be mentally and emotionally destabilizing to transition to Maintenance. It's hard actually. This is one of the ways that Bright Line Eating has grown up over the last five years is we have really doubled down on educating people about Maintenance because Maintenance is a thing. We have three courses on it in Bright Lifers. Maintenance I on the psychology, Maintenance II on landing the plane and stopping the weight loss and Maintenance III on the psychology after you land the plane and you're in Maintenance, what then? There's so much to it. Tackling that in the interim is a lot to tackle because Maintenance is tough. And so, disrupting a weight-loss journey to interject a Maintenance experience in the middle of it is not a trivial thing to do. That's just one downside is it sort of increases your workload for a bit as you consider, what am I doing? What does this mean? It's going to kick up some food chatter and some fear and insecurity as you're wondering, am I doing it right, etc. Get coaching around it. If you're a Bright Lifer, we got you. The Bright Line Eating coaches. You can ask us for some support, ask the community for some support. We have people in our community who've had Maintenance breaks themselves and yeah, I would say don't do it alone.
The other thing I would say that can be challenging is once that food is added, the odds are pretty high that you're not going to want to give it up. I note that some of the folks who've had Maintenance breaks have taken not just a month or two of a pause, but like six months, a year. It's been a good length of a pause. I wonder if some of that is that it took that long for them to be willing to give up the food again and to feel ready to recommence weight loss. It's kind of like for me, I think back in the day when I was on the dieting yo-yo roller coaster, it wasn't every day that I was ready to start a new attempt. I kind of had to wait until I was ready. I was fed up enough. I was prepared enough. It felt like the landscape of my life was clear enough and I could like put my effort into it. And so, you might experience that, that when you take a Maintenance break, you might not have a whole lot of control over when you're ready to start losing weight again. You might intend, "I'm going to take a three month Maintenance break." It might turn into a nine month Maintenance break because you might find that you just rest there for longer than you thought you might and it took that long to be willing to let that food go and to commence losing weight. There's nothing wrong with that. This is now one of the benefits of a Maintenance break is it really gives you time to get the diet mentality out of your system and to really realize you are here for the long term. There is no rush. You're not going anywhere. You're just here and then still here and then still here and your body ever since you started putting your food on the scale and not eating sugar and flour has been a Bright body all along. You've been doing this, you're Bright, you're there, you've already arrived. There's nowhere to get to. I think a Maintenance break can really drive that home. Like, I am okay exactly at this size, at that size, at that size, it doesn't really matter, but it can be a little tricky and a little destabilizing to pause and then to let the food go and to recommence and then do it again. It's a little extra. It's a little extra to do, but it's healthy and it can be quite wise. I'm not saying you have to, I'm saying it's an option. It's an option. If you have a lot of weight to lose, you might consider doing it in stages and taking Maintenance breaks in between. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
