Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I want to talk about GLP-1 medications and the Bright Line Eating® community. You may or may not know this, but several months ago we started official GLP-1 Coaching Calls in the Bright Line Eating Bright Lifers™ membership and the Boot Camp. That means that if you sign up for the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, or when you finish the Boot Camp, you join Bright Lifers, which is our ongoing annual membership to continue to do Bright Line Eating long term, either way, you have access to GLP-1 Coaching Calls that happen twice a month, so on average, every two weeks. We have a call and I host them, so I'm the coach. And we have two guest coaches as well, Dr. Mark Goetting, who is a physician who is board certified in obesity medicine and lifestyle medicine and sleep medicine and several other things. As a matter of fact, he's remarkable, Dr. Mark Goetting. And also Dr. Marty Lerner, who is a PhD psychologist, who is one of the world's experts, maybe the world's expert actually, in the intersection of clinical psychology and eating disorders and food addiction. He founded, and runs, the Milestones treatment inpatient program down in Florida that Bright Line Eating is associated with. At Milestones, they also help people if they're on GLP-1s and help guide them in incorporating GLP-1s into their treatment plan. So, he's super experienced with that. So, the three of us together are coaches.
We're not providing medical advice. We're not prescribing GLP-1s. What we are doing is working with people who do Bright Line Eating, who might be curious whether a GLP-1 makes sense for them at this stage of their journey. We work with people who are on a GLP-1 to work their Bright Line Eating program with the medication. Sometimes they need their food plan modified. Sometimes they're curious about side effects, dosing. We always refer them back to their physician for medical questions. But in terms of the interface with Bright Line Eating, we give them Bright Line Eating coaching. We also work with people who want to phase off a GLP-1 medication and don't want to regain their weight or people who want to optimize their weight loss with a GLP-1 and Bright Line Eating. So, all kinds of topics come up.
We've been doing this now for months and months and months. We also are aware that these folks who are doing Bright Line Eating on a GLP-1 have started several meetups. Meetups are community led, usually weekly meetings, but sometimes they're daily actually in our Bright Line Eating community, and they're hosting meetups that are so that people who are doing GLP-1s and Bright Line Eating together can get together to support each other. They have come together and informed me that they're concerned about some language that they're hearing pop up over and over again in our community. Not everyone of course, but they're hearing it and it hurts. It's hurtful language. And it's things like, "I don't want to do a GLP-1. I don't want to take the easy way out." "I want to really work my program. I don't want to get on a medication." "I don't want to cheat. I don't want to take a shortcut, so I'm not going to do a GLP-1." And so, people who are reading stuff like that in the online community and they're on a GLP-1 are absorbing those comments and just feeling like, "Geez, I actually don't feel like I'm taking an easy way out. I feel like I'm using a tool that feels helpful for me and necessary for me."
Anyway, it sort of reminds me of if we were a community supporting people with a lifestyle intervention around depression, and so we focus on helping people with their sleep and with their diet and with their exercise and with their social support and with cognitive behavioral strategies to improve their thinking and get them out of rumination. We would also likely have people in our community getting off an antidepressant, maybe deciding to go on an antidepressant, curious whether they should be getting on an antidepressant. And that would all be happening too. And so, I don't know that we would have people in our community saying, "I don't want to get on Prozac. I don't want to take the easy way out." They'd be saying, "Well, I don't know that I want to get on Prozac because I'm not so excited about those sexual side effects or the weight gain side effects", or "I'm not really one for pharmaceuticals, so I'd rather avoid Prozac if I can." That's a different type of comment than I'm not going to take the easy way out or I want to really work my program. There's a pejorative sort of derogatory tone to that.
I'm thinking if we were a community that was about incontinence and we had developed a set of Kegel exercises to do to avoid squirts of urine when you jump and cough and all that stuff, we would also be talking to people who might be looking at a surgery to get a mesh thing to help the incontinence, or maybe there are medications I'm not sure that help with incontinence, but sometimes medical treatments are helpful. Sometimes they're warranted, sometimes they're not. It kind of depends on the costs, on the side effects, on the path that you prefer to take with it.
One thing I can tell you, having coached now lots of people on GLP-1s who are doing Bright Line Eating is I don't think it's actually accurate to call it an easier path. It's a different path. It comes with its own set of challenges. GLP-1s dramatically rein in appetite. They can blunt food noise, so they can be really helpful for someone whose physiology does not seem to be balancing out even while working the Bright Line Eating program to allow the food noise to come down to a manageable place where they can stay Bright and function. So, that's helpful. It does seem to provide assistance for most people in those ways, appetite and cravings. But it comes with a set of other challenges, where for example, appetite can be reined in so dramatically that it can be hard to eat your Bright Line Eating meals. Even when you're really trying to eat your full food plan, you find that you can't. Or it can be difficult sometimes to eat produce or it can be challenging to deal with some of the other side effects, some of the nausea, some of the constipation or diarrhea. It can be challenging to figure out dosing and to grapple with how you marry a GLP-1 with Bright Line Eating. It comes with another set of challenges and complications. And for people who are in love with Bright Line Eating, committed to Bright Line Eating, it can be really hard for them to find themselves not able to finish a meal, for example, and feeling quite nauseous. There's a Food Controller voice in their head that says, "You're not doing it right. You're not Bright. You got to eat this food." And they can't. And it just creates other complications potentially. So, I just want to say it's not necessarily an easier path. It's a different path.
People come to me asking me, "Do you think I should get on a GLP-1?" Sometimes I say, "In your case, if I were you, I would consider it." In other cases, I say, "If I were you, I would not consider it. It doesn't seem like a fit at this time." It varies, but regardless of all that, I think we as a community could grow in our acceptance, love, and tolerance, which are really strong values that we hold in Bright Line Eating. I mean, let's just call to mind our tremendous strength in overcoming a lot of the challenges we faced around protein choices, around religion, around politics. If you look at protein choices, Bright Line Eating started and really exploded. We started in 2014, but we exploded in 2015 through a partnership with the Food Revolution Network, which is all about plant-based eating. And people who weren't coming from the Food Revolution Network typically were not plant-based eaters. They were omnivores eating meat, eating dairy. A lot of vegans and plant-based eaters came into our community through the Food Revolution Network, and suddenly we had communities of eaters trying to be on the same page who normally wouldn't mix that well together, thousands of each. We have learned to live together. We call ourselves protein neutral, which some people might laugh like, oh, that's not a big deal. Actually, it's a pretty big deal. It's a pretty big deal. You don't often get staunch vegans and strong meat eaters socializing, especially on the common ground of food and dietary lifestyle choices. And we've done a remarkable job at that, a remarkable job.
I just want to say, I think we can do that here as well. There are going to be people who choose to be on a GLP-1. There are going to be people who will never go on a GLP-1 and feel very strongly, potentially, that those medications aren't great for whatever reason. We can all learn to live together and not just live together, but to be loving and kind and respectful and to watch our language. We are a group of people on average really suffering with food addiction and with hunger and cravings and weight struggles and a desire to live peacefully with our food and a desire to shed the excess weight and to be in alignment with our food choices and to be focused on our family and our hobbies and our lives as opposed to our weight and what we've eaten or not eaten and whether we're going up or down on the scale, just to be free of all that. We want that for ourselves and for each other.
There are many, many tools that we use toward that endeavor, toward that goal of really being free and peaceful and happy. Now we have a new set of tools. They're pharmacological in nature and it rocks the boat a little bit because people have different feelings about it. I think initially some people were like, "Whoa, that's cray cray. I'm never going to even consider that." And the more research that comes out, the more it looks like, "Okay, these are here to stay. These are here to stay." And we are officially and clearly pro-choice about these medications. People can choose to be on them or not as their circumstances warrant, as their conscience warrants, as feels aligned for them. Everyone is self-responsible to make their own choices. We are collectively co-responsible to foster and create a climate and a community where everybody feels safe and welcomed and respected for their choices and understood and seen and valued. And to hold, we hold the shared awareness that every path has different challenges. Every path has different upsides and downsides.
We each get to choose and then maybe decide that path isn't right for us after all and switch over and then switch back and we're all self-responsible. But the love and acceptance that we hold for each other in the Bright Line Eating community is not negotiable. That is where we stand firm. And so, this vlog is just a plea, an entreaty, a rallying cry for an increase in our mutual respect and acceptance and consideration and compassion for everyone who's on Bright Line Eating and doing a GLP-1 medication and everyone who does Bright Line Eating and has chosen not to be on a GLP-1 medication and for everyone to sort of just look at the other way of doing it and just say, "That makes sense. I could see why some people are doing that. It may not be my choice, but I can live in solidarity and understanding and compassion and alignment for people to have their own choices. And I make my choice freely." We all get to make our own choices freely. It's the beauty of being alive and adult and responsible and love. It's our number one value, always has been. All right, you with me? Here we go. That's the weekly vlog. I love you and I will see you next week.
