How Weight-Loss Drugs Conquer Cravings
Video 3

Hey there, and welcome back to our 4-Part Video series on how to get weight-loss drug results without the drugs. If you've been tuning in all along and you put a comment below one of the previous videos, I just want to say thank you so much. My team and I have been reading them, and your excitement is building our excitement, and it's really fun. Welcome back, and if you're tuning in for the first time, this is video 3 in the 4-part series, and you can check out those first two videos by clicking on one of the links. There are thumbnails right here on this page where you can access those other videos, but you don't need to do that now. Stay with me right here because this video stands alone and it'll be way better if you just start here and then catch up afterwards. 

But let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. I'm a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and I'm an expert in the neuroscience of food addiction and sustained weight loss. I recently published a review article that shows that Bright Line Eating,® this novel approach to food and to weight management is producing the same results as semaglutide drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. In fact, at four to six years out, Bright Line Eating even surpasses the results of the drugs. I just want to pose the question, why is that? What is Bright Line Eating doing differently and what is it doing that's similar to these weight-loss drugs? We've been covering that in this video series and in video 1, we talked all about the weight-loss drugs, what they are, how much they cost, what the side effects are, what the pros and cons are, and we also talked about the three main pathways by which they work. The first one being that they suppress appetite and hunger, and we covered all of that in video 2. The second pathway we're going to talk about in this video right here, which is cravings, and in the final video we're going to talk about the Willpower Gap™ and how they solve the issue of just making sure that you stick to the plan that you intend to stick to long term. It's a willpower issue. It's an execution over the long-haul issue. 

Here we are right now in video 3 talking about cravings. What are they causes them? How do they work in the brain? How do we get them to go away so we're not hounded by food cravings, sugar cravings all the time. Cravings in the brain are basically an addictive response. We’ve got to talk about addiction, and here's where I have to say, I have a lot of qualifications. I've given you my academic credentials, but really what most qualifies me to talk to you here about this is my personal experience. I got hooked on drugs when I was 14. I started to dabble and then I got hooked, like serious drugs, crystal meth, cocaine. Then I started freebasing. Then it was crack-cocaine, prostitution. I dropped out of high school. It was bad. At the age of 20, I got clean and sober. I haven't had a drink or a drug for about 30 years. Thank you, God, biggest miracle of my life. In short order, I put on a ton of weight, and I started struggling with food the way I used to be struggling with crack. I could see exactly that. I wasn't just eating, I was using, but what's interesting is the food was way harder to address than the drugs were. I mean, not to say that quitting drugs was easy by a long shot, but it was very clear when I stopped using drugs, I knew I wasn't using them anymore and I knew what I was abstaining from, and I could make it my business to live a day clean and sober. With food, you have to eat.

The question comes up, what are the Bright Lines? What are the boundaries that you're going to put around your food to eliminate the cravings and the addiction, right? I ended up getting a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, partially because I wanted to investigate why my brain had gone so far off the rails, and it turns out without drugs in my system, I was really good at school. I went to UC Berkeley, I transferred to an amazing graduate school, the University of Rochester, and ended up getting my PhD. Then I taught college courses for 16 years. One of the courses I taught was in the psychology of eating and the neuroscience of food addiction. Here's what I started teaching my students, that addiction and cravings and food cravings in particular, they're all hitting the same part of the brain as drugs. It's the mesolimbic reward pathway. We're talking about the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area. These are parts of the brain that are, they're sort of deep in the brain. If the brain is a cue ball, like a circle, a sphere, we're talking about pretty much smack dab in the middle of it, old primitive centers in the brain that lead us to pursue and be motivated to achieve the rewards of things that are essential to our survival. We're talking about food, we're talking about sex. We're talking about things that the brain identifies as being essential. When there are stimuli in the environment that are excessive or exorbitant from the brain's perspective, we're not talking about blueberries, we're talking about donuts. We're not talking about kissing your spouse good morning or goodnight. We're talking about porn. These types of supernormal stimuli, we call them, they flood these areas of the brain with dopamine, too much dopamine, and those centers in the brain get blown out. They go, first of all, they go, “Okay, that was good.” And then they go, “Okay, that was excessive.” And they start to modify themselves. They start to downregulate, it's called, and the dopamine receptors become less numerous, less responsive, and now the brain is wiring in response to these floods that keep happening, which is okay, I guess. Notice now that you're rewiring the brain, and what happens now is that at baseline, you don't feel right anymore. You feel off, you feel itchy, you feel needy, you feel bleak, you feel desperate. You feel like you need something not to get high, but to get back to baseline, to get normal again. 

Here's an image of a brain that's been blown out in this way with dopamine downregulation, and you can see that excess food actually hits the nucleus accumbens and this mesolimbic reward pathway of the brain, just like drugs, you can see that there's less orange, less red, less of a robust response than the brain that's not addicted. We're literally talking about addiction. So, what do weight-loss drugs have to do with all this. I thought they were just about appetite suppression. Well, it turns out that over a hundred studies have been published now about how these weight-loss drugs actually affect the reward centers of the brain. It turns out that they modulate dopamine response there in much the same way that they modulate blood sugar control. This is why they're prescribed for diabetes. They help the pancreas to release more insulin. They help the liver to release less glucagon, and so they moderate the blood sugar response. Well, in kind of an analogous way, they moderate dopamine release so that when the floods normally happen, they're a little bit more moderate, and they sort of dampen things there. Now, this can cause issues that some people don't like a feeling of anhedonia, which is just a general malaise or lack of pleasure. But what they are doing pretty effectively is squelching cravings. It's not just that people are eating less on these drugs, they're also smoking fewer cigarettes, they're watching less porn, they're gambling less, they're drinking less, and they just have less drive for the rewarding things that this part of the brain tends to drive us towards. 

But you can suppress food cravings without being on a weight-loss drug. I've done it. I used to have food cravings that were so horrific, I was tortured by them. I remember being on my college campus, UC Berkeley, and having to leave class and leave campus and go home and make my favorite binge food, which was a big bowl of raw cookie dough, and I had to eat it. I was on campus and just going out of my skin with intense food cravings, and now I live utterly and completely free from food cravings. I don't have cravings like that. I have occasional food thoughts, but that's a different thing. They're easily brushed away and replaced by a more productive thought. I don't have cravings anymore, and I've helped other people to get rid of their food cravings too. 

As a matter of fact, in 2020, I published a study in “Current Developments in Nutrition” showing that with 1,208 people using the techniques that I'm going to explain to you here in a little bit, I have helped people to go from pretty high food cravings, moderate to high down to little or no food cravings anymore, ever, like low levels of food cravings in just eight weeks. But why does it work? Well, pretty simple actually. When you stop eating the foods that are causing the issue, when you stop eating the donuts but eat the blueberries, what happens is the flood of dopamine stops going into those areas, and those receptors start to replenish. They start to repopulate. They become more numerous and more responsive, and suddenly your brain is healing and the cravings go away. This is where there's a huge myth that people always say that you can't stop eating dessert. That's a terrible idea because you'll just crave dessert. You'll go crazy craving these foods. Now, you are craving them anyway, and scratching the itch didn't work. It just made it itchier. Then you got into an untenable situation with your weight and your health. It turns out that if you stop eating dessert really quickly, you start to experience not only relief from the cravings, but with the system that I teach people an overall level of peace and serenity with food that you may never have experienced before in your whole life. 

Look at this right here. At the end of two months, we ask people, has your level of peace and serenity with food gone up or gone down or stayed the same? This is after two months on a very rigorous plan of eating that includes no sugar and no flour, a Bright Line Eating plan of eating. Almost everybody is saying their peace and serenity with food has gone up and their cravings have gone down, their hunger has gone down, and their weight has gone down. But now you might be thinking, “Not eat sugar, not eat flour. Oh, no, I don't think I could do that. I don't know if I would want to do that.” Oh my gosh, whatever you're thinking about that, I just want you to know. I hear you. I feel you. It's scary. A lot of foods in our society contain those ingredients and they're very normalized in our society. 

People will even say, “Hey, Dr. Thompson, it's not healthy to tell people to eliminate all food groups, whole food groups. People need to be eating out of every food group.” I'm thinking to myself, when did sugar become a food group? Sugar is not a food group. It's very normalized in our society. But I encourage you not to look at these foods as foods. I want to propose to you that you might want to look at them as drugs. This may sound extreme, but just bear with me here. 

What are drugs? Where do they come from? How are they made? Let's take not sugar and flour for a second. Let's take drugs that we all agree are drugs. Let's take heroin and cocaine. Where does cocaine come from? It actually comes from the coca leaf from these little bushes that grow in the Andes mountains and hikers in the Andes Mountains sometimes will pluck the leaves off these bushes and put them in their cheek and chew them while they're hiking. There's actually a published scientific paper showing that chewing coca leaves in this way is not addictive. But when you take the inner essence of those coca leaves and you extract it, and then you purify it and refine it down into a fine white powder, you've now taken a harmless plant, and you've turned it into a drug. What's heroin? Well, heroin comes from, do you know? The poppy plant. You can actually fail a drug test, just so you know, by eating too many poppy seed bagels, you can, but you won't become addicted. Poppy seeds on their own are not addictive. But if you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and then you refine and purify it down into a fine brown powder or a syrupy liquidy sludge, you've now taken this harmless plant and you've turned it into a drug. 

Sugar and flour are made the same way. Sugar comes from any number of plants, it turns out. Yeah, sugar cane, but also beets or corn or rice, so many foods, but they're fine on their own. I eat all of those foods actually in their whole real form. But if you extract the inner essence of those foods and then you refine and purify it down into a fine white powder, or in the case of corn, corn syrup, syrupy thick sludgy liquid, you've now taken a harmless plant and you've turned it into a drug. Flour the same way. All of the foods that are made into flour are fine to eat in Bright Line Eating. We eat wheat, we eat rice, we eat almonds, we eat coconut, but we don't eat the flour made from those foods because when you take the inner essence of the food and you refine and purify it down into a fine powder, you've taken a harmless healthy plant and turned it into a drug. 

Whole foods don't even hit the bloodstream the same way as sugar and flour do in their refined form. Once sugar and flour have been extracted and refined in that way, what it's like is going to a hot Arizona blacktop driveway and sprinkling snow cone shavings onto the driveway. They're going to melt on contact, and that's digesting sugar and flour. Whereas if you're digesting a whole real food, let's say a bowl of brown rice or some corn on the cob, that's like taking a big brick of ice and putting it out on the black top driveway to digest. I mean, it'll melt, but it'll take time. It'll be slow. That's how we want these foods to hit. The brain is gradually and slow, so we don't flood the dopamine centers. 

Now you might be thinking, “So, Dr. Thompson, if sugar and flour are drugs and they're addictive, why isn't everyone hooked? Why isn't everyone experiencing these powerful food cravings? And why isn't everyone living with obesity?” Well, it turns out that not every brain is equally susceptible to the pull of addictive foods or even addiction in general. If we take addiction across the board, it turns out that one-third of people are not susceptible to addiction. They're literally not addicted to anything, and they cannot be. One-third of people are moderately susceptible, and one-third of people are highly susceptible. Let's take these people who aren't addicted. You might say that's impossible. If you inject anyone with heroin every day, they'll become addicted. I'll say no. They'll maybe develop some tolerance, and they'll maybe go through withdrawal when they stop. But let's take that non-addictable person and give them a back surgery and give them a prescription and put them on opiates every four to six hours around the clock for weeks. What happens is they can't wait to get off them when their pain is gone, and they never become addicted. These are also people who can go to a concert and have a cigarette and not think about another cigarette for a year. They're people who might drink coffee in the mornings, but if they happen to be at an Airbnb where there's no regular coffee, there's just decaf, they'll drink decaf for a few mornings, and it won't even bother them. 

The people who are moderately susceptible to addiction, they might develop addictions to this or that, probably not the kind that would make them get sent off to rehab and ruin their life. The people who are highly susceptible to addiction Now, these are people who are sevens, eights, nines, tens on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™, or maybe not. Maybe food's not their thing, but maybe gambling is, or shopping is, or alcohol is because addictions actually have to wire up specifically in a domain with a specific substance or behavior separately from the others. 

When it comes to food, a recent meta-analysis that looked at 6,425 published scientific journal articles that assessed food addiction using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, found that the pooled prevalence of food addiction in clinical samples, meaning people who had any of the following conditions, overweight, obesity, an eating disorder or prior bariatric surgery, was 40%. 40% of those people tested positive for food addiction. But in nonclinical samples, meaning people who never had any of those conditions, the prevalence of food addiction was 14%, which is about as common as alcoholism, smoking, and other substance use disorders. So, Bright Line Eating recommends a Bright Line, which is a clear, unambiguous boundary that you just never cross for sugar and flour, the addictive foods. What that does is it creates the magic. I'm sure probably no one's ever told you to abstain completely from sugar or flour before, but when you do, the dopamine receptors start to replenish. Food cravings subside, and also the blood starts to heal. Insulin, inflammation and triglycerides come down really, really fast, which gets leptin on board, which creates that powerful appetite suppression effect that we were talking about previously. 

Now we're at the point where you might be saying, “Okay, Dr. Thompson, don't eat sugar, don't eat flour, don't eat junk food, all the ultra-processed garbage. I need to not be eating that. I need to be eating my blueberries and salad and kale and broccoli. I kind of already knew that. And if I could have been doing that already, I would've been doing that, and I wouldn't be watching a video on weight-loss drugs. So how do I stick with it, Dr. Thompson? I know I should be eating healthy food.” Now we've come to the reality, which is that the big kicker here is no matter what anyone tells you to eat, sticking with it over the long term is going to prove to be really problematic. Maybe it's not problematic for you if you're a one or a two or a three on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, but if you're any higher than that, it might indeed lead you to be watching a video on how to get weight-loss drug results without the drugs. 

In the next video, the final video of our series, we're going to cover execution over the long term. It's a willpower issue, and we're going to talk about the Willpower Gap, what it is, how it works in the brain, how the weight-loss drugs solve it, and how you can actually solve it naturally so that you can get the weight-loss drug results without the drugs. 

We've come to the end of video 3. Video 4 is going to be exciting. It's going to be the linchpin to why every diet has always failed you before, and what it really takes to stick with something. Before I sign off, I just want to say, please scroll down and leave me a comment. I love reading the comments. Loved it, hated it. Learned something interesting. Whatever your thoughts are. I want to hear them. My team wants to hear them. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in video 4.