Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to The Weekly Vlog in this week's episode. I want to share with you a bunch of science that relates to the last two vlogs I shot. This is actually third in a series of three, and it's related to science that I'm learning for my new book that I'm writing or sort of learning new angles, learning the history, writing it up in new ways. It's all about the science of dopamine and addiction and reward. In this week's vlog, I want to apply this to something we talk about a lot in Bright Line Eating®. It's why the first time you try Bright Line Eating there's something magical about it. It's pretty easy, easier than you expect, and it works better than you expect, and subsequent attempts tend not to be as easy or work as well. It can be pretty defeating as you try again and again and again if you didn't sort of protect that first attempt and sort of bobbled the Bright Lines and lost it along the way. It can be much harder to get it back. Why is that?
I've been really diving into the science of that, and I want to start off by explaining six scientific reasons why the first time you try Bright Line Eating, it can work magically well. The first reason is that it's novel. You don't know anything about it. Bright Line Eating is a pretty comprehensive system. There's a lot to learn, a lot to discover, a lot to uncover, and as you're reading through the food plan and figuring out the course and doing all the things, novelty, the newness of it all is hitting the same centers of the brain that feel starved of sugar and flour, but novelty is giving them a hit. Novelty is a reward that hits dopamine in the addictive centers of the brain and gives it a charge. There's so much that's new about Bright Line Eating when you first start that that part of the brain is getting activated and stimulated again and again and again, and it provides a big offsetting chemical neutralization that helps to balance out your brain chemistry so that the withdrawals aren't as bad and you don't want the sugar and flour as bad because your wanting system gets redirected to wanting to figure out the Bright Line Eating program and get another hit of novelty. So, that's there.
And then, people come in to Bright Line Eating not expecting it to work. I just know this because I've asked them. I mean, I've asked lots of people who are really successful with Bright Line Eating years later and I say, "What were you thinking and feeling when you clicked register on your first Boot Camp registration screen there and you signed up?" They were thinking, "I can't believe I'm spending money on this. There's no way this is going to work." People generally speaking really do not think they're going to be able to do it. It sounds farfetched. It sounds actually pretty preposterous to abstain from sugar and flour and they don't expect it to work. So, what happens is as it starts to work pretty dramatically and pretty quickly, their brain gets a massive reward prediction error.
Now, we talked about this a couple of vlogs ago. The reward prediction error is the difference between what your brain expects and what your brain gets and dopamine is tracking that difference. So, dopamine gives you a big spike. Those dopamine neurons, they start to fire hard and fast when anything that's better than expected happens. And so, when you step on the scale for your first weigh in and suddenly the number of pounds lost is more than you expect, you get a big spike of dopamine for that. When you sit down and eat a Bright meal that's exactly what you wrote down the night before, you didn't expect yourself to be able to do that. You get a big spike of dopamine for that. As the early wins accumulate, you start to get big spikes of dopamine for it working and it's better than you expect.
Number three is we invite you in Bright Line Eating to track a bunch of things, to track your Bright days. Count them. Write down day one, day two, at the top of the food journal page. We give you calendars to shade in your Bright days and watch them accumulate. We give you a Nightly Checklist sheet to track habits and tick them off every night. Now, what this is doing is it's strengthening something called control dopamine. In a classic book, The Molecule of More, the authors distinguish between desire dopamine, which is what we usually talk about here, that's the addiction dopamine, and control dopamine, which are dopamine neurons in the prefrontal cortex that help you plan, weigh consequences, make decisions, fill out checklists, write a to-do list for the day, that kind of stuff. There's a large body of research that shows that in addiction, control dopamine gets weaker and desire dopamine gets stronger. That's actually the crux of the issue, is that desired dopamine gets massively strong and the prefrontal cortex, that control dopamine that should be weighing those consequences can't do its job anymore, kind of goes offline. The connections up to the control dopamine get weak, weak, weak, weak, weak and suddenly you want to hit, and you can't even remember why you shouldn't do it even though you've already had one leg amputated from your type 2 diabetes and you're about to go get more junk food. There just isn't enough access to the part of the brain that would accurately assess that consequence for you. Anyway, as you do these checklists that we give you, you start to strengthen your control dopamine and that starts to give you a little hit as you tick off the box, which is also a little bit of desired dopamine. Now you're strengthening the connection between your desire dopamine and your control dopamine, and you start to really heal that part of the brain.
Number four is Bright Lines. The thing about Bright Lines is that research shows that the wanting system of dopamine, which we talked about last week, we talked about how dopamine's all about wanting, it's not about liking. That there's a difference between wanting and liking. The wanting system is very sensitive to whether a reward is available, a hit is available. For example, smokers tend not to crave a cigarette when they're in a movie theater watching a movie because you can't light up in a movie theater, not in the United States anyway, probably nowhere anymore, and the brain knows that. The brain only generates the craving for the cigarette when you step outside the movie theater. Now it wants a cigarette. Similarly, when you're new to Bright Line Eating and you learn these Bright Lines and you're like, okay, I'm doing this. And you're literally reading the list of what can I and can't I have? No artificial sweeteners. Okay, that's out. If you start with the intention to stick to those Bright Lines, your brain is listening and suddenly the cravings go mute. If you started Bright Line Eating and experienced almost no cravings right from day one, this is why. Because your brain took you seriously and research shows that wanting isn't generated if a hit's not available. And so, just starting this plan meant a hit is not available.
Number five is a massive fresh start effect. If you plunk down money and do your first Boot Camp, it's a big deal to start your first Boot Camp, it feels super scary and you get this massive like I'm starting something new effect and the fresh start effect is big. It's why January 1st, people change their behavior. It doesn't always last, but you see big behavior changes, boom, on January 1st because that date provides a big fresh start effect. Starting a Boot Camp for the first time produces a big fresh start effect and the brain takes notice of that.
The sixth and final one here is just, not just, is belonging. When you get into our community and you experience for the first time the love, the support, the lack of judgment, the feeling of being a part of something that actually matters. And then, if you post and people reply back and you start to feel like you're part of a group, we're now talking about oxytocin, we're talking about serotonin. Serotonin is very sensitive to belonging and also to having status in a community. And you might think, well, if you just start Boot Camp, you don't have any status at all. But actually, the way people will treat you in our community, if you say, "Hi, I'm just starting the Boot Camp and I'm new," is they'll be so excited. They're like, "Hey, welcome. Oh my gosh. I remember starting my first Boot Camp." You'll get probably, my guess is, more love than you expect. And the feeling of being seen in a community is something your serotonin receptors will really take note of. The tone and tenor of love around here that's so palpable compared to most other places will be something your oxytocin receptors will really take note of. Why this matters is because your brain overall is looking to be happy and dopamine's not the only chemical it wants. It also wants serotonin and oxytocin and endorphins.
When you can get a little something-something from somewhere other than dopamine, it takes some of the load off of dopamine. Suddenly your brain doesn't need dopamine as much because it's getting some of its needs met elsewhere and that has an effect as well. So altogether, this package is so incredibly reinforcing and healing and impactful for the brain. Altogether it can create something that, like in 12-step recovery, they call pink cloud recovery where a newcomer comes in and they're on a bit of a high from how well it's working and how good they feel early on. People warn them, don't get too excited here because it doesn't last. But pink cloud recovery is very real and it's a phenomenon that we see in Bright Line Eating a lot. I do want to emphasize we don't see it with everybody. There's lots of things that can result in it not happening this way, but it's a common enough occurrence that I wanted to explain the undergirding of the science that goes underneath and supports this experience that is something we talk about a lot in Bright Line Eating.
Let's pivot now and talk about why is it harder when you come back to Bright Line Eating or when you try to get Bright again, when you Rezoom?? Why can it be harder? Well, first of all, that novelty benefit isn't there. You don't get for free, your brain doesn't get the weeks of the experience of learning a new system, like discovering how does this work? What am I supposed to do? What can I eat and not eat? How do I log into the hub? All of these little presents that your brain was unwrapping that were giving novelty hit after novelty hit after novelty hit are gone because you already know all that stuff. And so, the novelty boosts of dopamine that were doing a huge job offsetting the dopamine down regulation and the cravings that your brain had, that those novelty hits just aren't there.
To make matters worse, reward prediction error is likely not working in your favor anymore. The first time you started Bright Line Eating, probably your expectations were really low and any sign of it working was a bonus, a benefit, and you got a dopamine spike with anything that was better than expected. If Bright Line Eating worked really well for you in the past, your brain now remembers that and the bar is set high. You go to your first weigh in, you go to your first meal, and you expect these things, your brain, unbeknownst to you, your brain expects these things to deliver massive dopamine payoffs. If they don't, if the scale doesn't tell you a loss that's as good as it expects, if eating your first few Bright Meals doesn't feel as euphoric as it did whenever you first started Bright Line Eating, your brain is now registering that as a negative reward prediction error and all of a sudden your dopamine is flagging and dipping down to say, "Oh, that's not nearly as good as I expected. Boo, I don't like that." A dopamine dip is terrible for the brain and what it generates is craving. It generates a desire to get more dopamine, to do something to lift that dopamine and that can actually turn into craving, which can be, that's hard to rock and roll through in the first week or two. There's lots of things that aren't... The dopamine system isn't working in your favor as much anymore. Now, there is a way to ideally offset that, which is to keep your expectations really low, expect it to be terrible, expect it to be really hard, expect not to lose much weight, keep your expectations really low and you'll be better off.
The third thing here is that it's quite possible that Bright Lines aren't working as easily in your favor like they did the first time. Not to say you should abandon them, they're still the only game in town really, but the challenge is that when you first started Bright Line Eating, your brain took you seriously like, "Oh, okay, we can't eat sugar. I guess we're not eating sugar." There was no wanting generated at all because it's like the smoker in the movie theater. I'm not wanting a cigarette when I'm in a movie theater. But if your brain doesn't take you seriously this time because you've broken those Bright Lines before, it's called the abstinence violation effect and it's very real. Your brain doesn't believe you this time, not the same way. So, unfortunately, your brain is still likely to generate urges to go eat things that are off your plan and intermittent reinforcement, which I've done a whole other vlog about, and we talk about a lot in our community, intermittent reinforcement's going to make that worse. What it's going to do is it's going to prolong the time that it takes for your brain to get quiet. It's just going to take a long, long time this time, which is going to make it harder.
There's also something called kindling, which is where repeated relapse cycles lead to stronger cravings. It's like the brain knows that the dopamine system is going up and it's going down. As you do that over and over again, the wanting system gets more and more honed and as you relapse again and again and again, the wanting actually gets stronger. This is relapse research that was done on alcohol, but one can presume it's probably the same with food as well, that relapse cycles, the wanting, the craving gets higher and higher and higher the more you go. Another thing is that people coming back often haven't regained all their weight. Sometimes they have, but often not. What that means is that if you're at a lower body weight than you first started Bright Line Eating at, your brain is by definition just fighting you a bit more. The brain is always trying to get you back up to the peak weight you were ever at. Anything that you're at below that is your brain going, "Oh, we're too thin. We're too thin." Even if that's ridiculous, you still, by the health metrics, have weight to lose, the brain doesn't calibrate that way. It calibrates to your right weight being the highest you've ever been. That's what it wants. So, some of your hormones like leptin and ghrelin and the GLP-1 and the appetite suppression hormones and hunger hormones and thyroid hormone, all of that is calibrated to your brain to get you back up to where you were. So, if you're starting from a lower number, then your brain is just fighting you more. There's more. There's the reality that if you've struggled to succeed over and over again, it could be that the cues that relate to Bright Line Eating, a food journal, texting your food to a buddy, whatever those cues are that signal I'm doing Bright Line Eating, those cues might now be linked in your brain to feelings of shame and failure as opposed to success and self-efficacy. It can take time, sometimes quite a bit of time, months for that to shift.
Finally, there's something called reactance, which I talked about in a recent vlog. Psychological reactance is when the brain says, "Oh no, you can't tell me what to do." As soon as you say no, as soon as you say, no sugar, no flour, reactance would say, "Oh yeah, I'm going to go eat some sugar and flour." And psychological reactance is something that the brain does. If past experiences have led to feelings of deprivation or constraint, what might happen now that maybe didn't happen the first time that you did Bright Line Eating is more reactance might be getting kicked up. Now, some people have reactance the first time they do Bright Line Eating. Some people never have reactance when they do Bright Line Eating. Psychological reactance varies person to person, but it is a known phenomenon and it does sort of make sense that it would be potentially stronger if prior experiences of doing Bright Line Eating felt like white knuckling than parts of you, rebel parts of you can kick up.
This all sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? I just want to say it is. It is. It's not unsolvable and it's not permanent and it's not definitive, but it is bleak. This is why I talk so much about not taking that first attempt at Bright Line Eating for granted because it is magical and it is way easier the first time than it will be in the future. There is a reason to sort of not take that for granted. There's no way from my position here that I can adequately explain this to people. I beg people to take me seriously that even if it feels easy, trust me, you're living a miracle, you're living a gift and don't give it back because it won't ever be the same afterwards.
Now that said, I myself have not been Bright since my first attempt at giving up sugar and flour. Nowhere close. I've probably broken my Bright Lines up, I don't know, a hundred times since the first day that I first started this, which was May 21st of 2003. I have been absolutely able to get my Bright Lines back and to achieve peace and a body that weighs right in the range that I'm hoping it'll be at and feeling free and feeling blissful and having no food cravings or thoughts hardly ever. It is possible, it's just harder.
What do you do if you've tried Bright Line Eating over and over and over again and you still know this is my solution. I've got to make this work. How do you make it work? Okay. First and foremost, find ways to create novelty. Find ways to do it different. Start with a new course. Get a new Mastermind Group. Engage with the Online Support Community in ways you never did before. Get a different color food journal or use a different way of tracking your food. Get a calendar and color it in. Try different foods. Try it different. Just do as much different as you can. That's the first thing.
Second is really engage that fresh start effect. The fresh start effect is stronger on certain dates. The first of the month. Monday. January 1st. A date that matters to you, your birthday, the death date of your beloved grandmother, whatever. Make a date matter to you. Start on that date. Numerology. The 27th of the month because it's a beautiful cube, three times three times three, whatever. Find ways to really signal to your brain that this time matters and it's different and it's a real fresh start this time.
Number three, make your expectations as low as possible. I'm not going to lose any weight. This is going to be the hardest thing I've ever done. It's going to be terrible. It's going to be abysmal. Seriously, meditate deeply on how hard it's going to be. It's going to be awful. As you set your expectations that low, there will be some wins in the mix and your brain will notice and you'll start to feel like, "You know what? Maybe this is actually working after all!" And you'll start to get some traction with it.
Also, really, really dive into the community more than you ever have. Get new buddies. Join a Gideon Games team. Really, really dive into the community. We have Meetups now. You can be going to meetups almost all day, every day. And not to say that you have time for that, but get to some of those meetups. Just try them. They're amazing. You get access to meetups when you're in Boot Camp or Bright Lifers. Really, really dive into the community. It's going to make a big difference and that serotonin and that oxytocin is going to offset your dopamine depletion in magical, magical ways. Dive, dive, dive into the community.
Finally, rebuild your Bright Lines. Really look at what you did or didn't do before in terms of keeping your Bright Lines. Maybe get a bunch of those trigger foods that are technically Bright out of your kitchen. Get rid of the nuts for now. Get rid of the nut butters for now. Get rid of the cheese for now. Get rid of the sausage for now. Get rid of the, certainly anything with artificial sweeteners. Really look at your Bright Lines and do things that signal to your brain that a new boss is in town and the Bright Lines are actually Bright this time because that will reactivate that abstinence effect and that experience where the brain doesn't give you any cravings because it knows that a hit's not actually available. We're following Bright Lines. There's no hit available. We can stop wanting now.
There are things you can do by redoubling and retripling your efforts and getting the cues that predict those rewards out of your kitchen, out of your environment. Stop doing the things for a bit that trigger you. Stop going to the places where there's potlucks and blah, blah, blah. Just stop doing the things that are going to expose you to foods you don't need to be exposed to right now. Not forever, just for a short bit. You just need to get some Brightness under your belt. It is absolutely possible to create conditions that are almost as good as that first time with intentionality.
Then the key is the second time around, the fifth time around, the 50th time around, the 50,000th time around, I don't know how many times you've maybe broken your Bright Lines, but when you get Bright again after that much research, you are now in a better position to really know why not to take it for granted. Now you're better off because, we talk about a crystal vase, now you have a diamond vase. Now you have not only Bright Lines, but a lifetime of lived experience that tells you why this is no joke. This is a magical state. You're living a gift and you're now committed to keeping it Bright one day at a time, preciously because it matters that much. So, don't give up. Don't give up. You got this. I am living proof you can get it back. It just takes a little know-how, a little understanding of the science, a lot of willingness, some action, and a fresh start again. I love you. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
