Hey there. I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I have a question for you. Is there just one Food Addiction Susceptibility Score™ or could there be two? Someone just wrote in this question and her name's Robin and she says, "Hi, is there a way to know your Food Addiction Susceptibility Score separately for Bright Lines one and two and another score for Bright Lines three and four? I find that I'm a 10 for lines three and four, but not for lines one and two, as I've made exceptions with those lines on occasion with planning and have been okay. I find this more peaceful than me impulsively eating unplanned Bright foods. Just wondering if more people are higher with the process addiction versus the substance addiction. I love this program. It's given me peace. Thank you, Robin."
Robin, you're onto something here, and I'm going to start off with just a quick little story. Sometime in the last month or two, I don't remember where I was. I was online. I was maybe giving a webinar or something and I found myself coaching this woman and she'd never taken the Food Addiction Susceptibility Quiz™. But to coach her, I needed her score. I asked her if she'd be willing to take it right there on the spot because it's so short, right? If you haven't taken it, it's at foodaddictionquiz.com. So, she agreed to take it right there in front of everybody. I shared my screen. We went over the questions. She put in her email address. What became instantly obvious is that she scored high on the questions related to cravings and obsession, but very low on the questions related to hunger and appetite and satiety. Now, that's the opposite profile of the profile that Robin who wrote in that question is describing.
If you need to be sort of caught up here, Bright Lines one and two are about no sugar and no flour. That's the substance addiction part. Those are substances. Sugar and flour are substances like heroin and cocaine. You ingest them, they affect the brain. What do they do? They flood the reward center of the brain with dopamine too much. Then, the receptors, the dopamine receptors thin out. It's called dopamine downregulation. That creates cravings because now the brain wants another big hit of sugar and flour in order to feel normal, just in order to feel okay again. Because at baseline, there isn't enough dopamine matching with receptors anymore. You're kind of in a low dopamine state unless you're actively eating sugar and flour to get your hit. So, that system, the substance addiction system, the sugar and flour system, the Bright Lines one and two system is separate from the hunger appetite satiety system, which is around bright lines three and four.
Bright Lines three and four are to eat only meals and to bound your quantities of food usually by weighing and measuring on a digital food scale. That's all about how much you eat and when and having boundaries around the quantities because sometimes a brain just wants more food. Even if it's just Brussels sprouts, it just wants more. It wants more apples, it wants more carrots, it wants more salad. It just wants more food. It wants to eat more often. It wants to eat more volume. That's a separate system. Now we're talking about appetite regulation. This is hormones like leptin, GLP-1, GIP. These are all appetite regulation hormones. There's also stretch receptors in the stomach that can actually trigger the release of dopamine in the reward pathways. So, there is a little bit of overlap in the systems because eating huge volumes of food can release dopamine as well. But mostly they're separate systems.
A lot of us, like me, are super high in both. I have a big problem with sugar and flour and a big problem with quantities both. I mean, that's part of what makes me a 10 plus plus, not just a regular old food addict, but like a certifiable, very, very intense late stage would be the more technical term. So, I'm a late stage food addict. But it is not only possible, but quite reasonable, and I'm not sure how common it is, but I imagine it's not that uncommon to have some asymmetry in how much you're affected by the substance addiction and the cravings, the dopamine system versus the quantities issue and just how much food you're eating. If you have a system that naturally gets full, a system that stops eating when you've had a moderate amount of food and feels satisfied, then weighing and measuring food and being so precise about eating meals, but not snacking in between might not matter as much for you. You might be well served by just adhering to Bright Lines one and two, no sugar, no flour.
If cravings and food obsession are more your issue, if you're like, I don't know, I just have a sweet tooth or I just crave starchy things, breads, pastas, it doesn't matter which way it goes, whether it's the sugar or the flour side of it. But if it's really about the specific foods you're eating, a Bright Line for those foods may be all you need. Whereas Robin, what you're describing is actually the flip of that, which is you seem to have a quantity issue and it's the weighing and measuring and the eating only at meal time, not snacking that seems to be the most important thing for you. Now, I did note that you're not talking about eating sugar and flour willy-nilly, you're talking about rare, planned exceptions, which is different. But to answer your question directly, yes, I do think it's very possible to have separate profiles for the substance addiction versus the process addiction, process meaning the process of eating. That would be the meals and quantities lines.
Do we have a way of giving you a separate score? We do not. The Food Addiction Susceptibility Quiz is scored non-linearly. So, the answers that you put in are squared and then added up and then sort of compared to a matrix of... Yeah, it's just not a linear thing. So, we can't really take the questions for Bright Lines one and two and the questions for Bright Lines three and four and separate them.
There's also an issue that a couple of the questions like the one around how much you're thinking about your weight and your food and also the question around binging, both of those questions could relate to either. So, some of the questions are more specific to quantities, others are more specific to cravings, and then others kind of could go for both. So, it's not really a quiz that's easily tease apart a bull, if that makes sense.
However, you can go through the quiz yourself and the questions that are about cravings and the questions that are about volume eating are pretty obvious and you can just see how am I scoring on these ones? And if you're someone who really seems to have more of an issue with Bright Lines one or two or Bright Lines three or four, you can know that information for yourself like you're doing, Robin. I think this is a theme that we've been talking about in Bright Line Eating for some years now, which is being aligned with how you work your program and understanding that you are self-responsible and that no one's "shoulding" all over anyone else's program. You absolutely get to, and we encourage you to, not only do you get to sort of adjust things the way it makes sense to you, but it's incumbent upon you to do that. To make this program your own, to make it something that gives you peace because you're the one that's got to live with it. This is all in service of you and your peace, your healthy weight, your self-concept, your ease in your skin, your ease with your food, your ability to focus on your life instead of your food and your weight.
This is all what we're doing here is helping each other to get free. It's not a formulaic thing. I mean, it starts off kind of formulaic, but pretty quickly we realize that we're all responsible for making this program our own. So, I encourage you to do that, Robin. It sounds like you already are. Congratulations! Well done! And thank you for the interesting topic because those two systems are very separable. I'll just end with this. Note that in pretty much every webinar I've given, since 12 years ago when I gave the first Bright Line Eating webinar to talk about the first Boot Camp that we were starting, I've been talking about hunger and cravings separately. Hunger, meaning leptin, leptin resistance, appetite. And cravings, meaning dopamine, dopamine downregulation. They're separate systems. And so, of course it makes sense that they would get jacked up separately in various people to various degrees. Then there's just double winners like me who have them both jacked up. God bless us. All right, that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
