Bright Line Living™ - The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

A friend of mine recently went back to eating sugar and flour and found, to her surprise, that she had a pretty good week. She felt fine. Perhaps even happier. She told me about it, and it reminded me of a time in my life when addictive eating worked. What are my thoughts about this phenomenon? Watch this week’s vlog to find out. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/xmbGXBSometimes Addictive Eating Works | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I want to introduce you to a lovely mindfulness meditation practice. I learned it in a training session for leaders by the Xchange Group. This method is called the Unified Mindfulness approach to meditation. It’s very widespread, used by Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and other universities that do research on the benefits of meditation.  There are many approaches to meditation, but Unified Mindfulness revolutionized my experience. It’s the one and only approach that I find I can use as I move through the day—as I drive my kids around, make my bed, and just experience life. It was created by a man named Shinzen Young. Here’s what he says about himself: “I’m a Jewish-American Buddhist-informed mindfulness teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish-Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science” I love this guy! He is co-director of the Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness Lab at the University of Arizona. He’s a mathematician and scientist, and, basically, he endeavored to distill mindfulness into its mathematical elements. Young says there are three units of experience: what we see, what we hear, and what we feel. Each of those three can be outward-oriented or inward-oriented.  So for example, “see-out” is something you experience visually, like a sunset. “See-in” is when you have an image in your mind, perhaps something you are remembering. You might imagine a beach, for example.  “Hear-out” is what you hear around you. “Hear-in” is your internal monologue or a conversation you imagine. “Feel-out” is any of the sensations, from a taste on your tongue to the feel of your feet on the floor. “Feel-in” is emotional. Tightness in your belly, joy in your heart—any sort of emotion. To do the meditation, you notice what happens to you and around you, and label it, as see, hear, or feel. You can also note whether it is inward or outward. In the vlog, I do a brief session to demonstrate, labeling as I go, and then explain what I’m labeling. For example, as I was staring into the camera, I saw the color of my burgundy jacket in the lens—I labeled that “see-out.” Then I heard the sounds in my room and labeled them “hear-out.” My ankles and feet hurt, so I labeled that “feel-out.” Then I had thoughts of how watchers would respond to this meditation and labeled that as “feel-in.”  I enjoy this practice immensely. It’s fascinating to be pulled into the present moment, whatever you are doing. Meditation increases happiness, clarity of thought, sensory awareness, and the ability to be present. If you go to unifiedmindfulness.com, there’s a free online course you can take on this method.  Much of what we do in Bright Line Eating is finding new ways to engage with the present moment. When we stop eating sugar and flour and limit eating occasions, we create space between meals where life shows up. How do we engage with those moments? Mindfulness meditation gives you the agency to choose your response to that moment.  Unified Mindfulness is a lovely way to interact with the present moment. It’s a new tool you can use, if you wish. It’s working for me, and now I’m passing it on to you. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/KiaNsaSEE, HEAR, FEEL | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

PECS is Post-Event Collapse Syndrome, and it’s what happens if your Bright Lines get wobbly after an event or holiday. But what does this have to do with Maintenance? Turns out, quite a bit… learn how to protect yourself in this week’s vlog.  FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/6vkVHsPECS and Maintenance | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I am thrilled to announce the publication of an academic review article I wrote with Dr. Andrew Kurt Thaw: “The Badly Behaving Brain: How Ultra-Processed Food Addiction Thwarts Sustained Weight Loss.” It’s a chapter in the forthcoming academic book called Weight Loss: A Multidisciplinary Perspective and the chapter is available online now via Open Access Publishing.  The article speaks to the science of the relationship between food addiction and weight loss. It’s similar to the science I presented in the book Bright Line Eating—but that was published seven or eight years ago and the field has exploded since then.  About Open Access publishing: when you click the link, you can access and download a PDF of the article. Most scientific articles require you to have an academic affiliation to access them. I can see them because I’m a professor at the University of Rochester, but they are not available to the general public. However, Open Access allows anyone to read scientific articles. With this model, we, the authors, pay for access—in this case, since it was a British publication, it cost us 1,400 pounds to get this published. Because we paid that fee, we’ve financed your ability to read the article.  On the one hand, this new trend in academic publishing means that ANYONE in the world now who has an internet connection can now access cutting-edge scientific information at its source. The downside, though, is that it makes the playing field for publishing even more un-level, impacting early-career scientists and scientists from poorer countries disproportionately. Two things surprised me in writing this article.  The first is how much the field of weight loss science has progressed. We accessed a meta-analysis that looked at all the studies that have used the Yale Food Addiction Scale. There were an astounding 6,425 articles that used the Scale! What they found is that an estimated 20 percent of the population has food addiction.  The other thing that surprised me was a number in that meta-analysis. They looked at it by weight class, and for people living with obesity, they found 28 percent tested out as having food addiction.  That’s not what I’ve found with the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale. By my instrument, 33 percent of the people with class one obesity are high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale and 56 percent of those with higher classes of obesity test out high on the Scale.  What I learned from writing this article, however, is that you can have multiple symptoms of food addiction, but if you don't answer the right way to the questions asking you if you have clinically significant impairment or distress, then it won’t tag you as having food addiction, even if you have the symptoms. So, someone might say their eating habits aren’t causing them distress, but then you ask them how their work life is, for example, and they tell you they’ve been out on disability. Or they tell you they can’t exercise, or they’re in pain—but they don’t associate this with impairment. So I don’t buy the 28 percent number. There’s a graph at the end of the article that looks at weight-loss drugs compared to Noom, Weight Watchers, the Zone Diet, and others, and it’s stunning: Bright Line Eating does as good a job as weight-loss drugs at helping people lose weight. Weight loss drugs and Bright Line Eating are the only two that address addiction. Weight loss drugs do that by modulating the dopamine response in the mesolimbic pathway in the brain. BLE does it by healing that part of the brain with the foods you eat, stopping the relentless flow of dopamine that is causing those receptors to downregulate.  I encourage you to read this article, take it to your doctor, show it to your friends, and pass it around. This article can help advance the field. It’s very satisfying to put it out into the world. I hope you enjoy it. You can access it right here: https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/1178624You can read The Badly Behaving Brain article here. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/JaukLDThe Badly Behaving Brain is Published! | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

A few weeks ago, someone wrote to our customer support center. She wasn’t a member, and she’s not in the Boot Camp, but she found us and wrote in. Her email said: “How do I stop the amnesia that sets in when I’m off sugar and flour and go back to thinking I can eat it ‘just once,’ but then my life falls apart all over again?” Aaaaah. Such a great question! You’ve stumbled onto one of the defining features of addiction. Almost 100 years ago, some men discovered this phenomenon. In the 1930s, they developed The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and what you’ve written is something they focused on. There’s a paragraph in The Big Book that says: “The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called willpower becomes practically non-existent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink.” They follow this with numerous examples to illustrate how people pick up a drink with no effective thought about the consequences.  One example is when you have thoughts of resisting the urge to eat that are so underdeveloped in size and magnitude that they don’t offer anything close to sound reasoning. You have plenty of evidence that the consequences will be tremendous, but your brain doesn’t work in that moment. That’s addiction. But another, similar situation—like being allergic to strawberries—your brain works just fine. If you eat one strawberry and suffer the consequences, you know enough not to eat them again. But with food addiction, that connection doesn’t work.  Three things are going on in your brain that explain this. The first is ineffectiveness in the prefrontal cortex. Addictive impulses are generated deep in the part of the brain that gives a good dopamine rush when you eat highly rewarding food. But lots of things can hijack those reward structures, including modern-day concoctions of sugar and flour.  The prefrontal cortex is where executive functions are happening. Things like planning, evaluating options, and decision-making. What happens in addiction is that the prefrontal cortex stops having the ability to override impulses.  Second, we have a phenomenon called state-dependent learning and state-dependent memory. These cognitive functions have to do with states such as where you are, how you feel, and what substance you’re on. When you’re in the state of not eating sugar and flour, your brain selectively recalls all the times you’ve been in that same state and you feel like life is good and you’re in control—that’s state-dependent learning. In that state, it’s harder to call to mind the state you would be in after you picked up those foods.  Third, we have procedural memory. A procedural memory is implicit—it’s also called muscle memory—and an example is knowing how to ride a bike. You get on a bike, and it comes back to you even if you haven’t ridden in years. Procedural memories are automatic and don’t require conscious decisions to execute them. The actions that happen in eating are also procedural memories, so you can find yourself eating in a familiar situation, like having a plate in your hand and going down a buffet line, and suddenly anything and everything is on your plate and you didn’t really make a “decision” to eat all that. So what do you do about it? What the men in AA concluded was this: “We’re absolutely hopeless, there’s no solution to this, therefore our defense must come from God because we are without human aid.” They encapsulated this orientation toward God in the 12 Steps.  That approach works and it’s shorthand for: you’re going to have to work a heck of a program.  So, to my writer: from what you’ve written, we’re really not supposed to diagnose people, but what you’ve written is truly the hallmark of food addiction. The impairment and distress you’re describing is the foundation of late-stage addiction.  What that means is that you have a fatal, incurable, progressive disease. The only solution is to work a very strong program. You’re not in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp. You need to get in it.  What will that do? It will give you an identity as someone who doesn’t eat sugar and flour. And you need to put it first, even before your family, because if you do that, you’ll get to show up for your family every day, with love to share—because your life won’t be falling apart. There’s no easy answer here. It’s a life-changer to realize the extent of the problem you have.  But your whole life will be different if you’re using a full-bodied, comprehensive treatment to deal with the condition that you’ve got. It’s the only way. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/5dtrA6Food Addiction Amnesia | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

 A Bright Liner named Katie recently sent me a message with a great question. She wanted to know if, when you make Bright Line-compliant foods that would normally have sugar and flour—but you’re making them without—the brain has the ability to “fill in the blanks.” In other words, will the brain trick the body into creating the illusion of flour and sugar, so that it produces higher levels of insulin? That’s exactly how it works. The brain does this all the time. It’s called top-down processing. For all sensory perceptions, there are two main forms of processing: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up processing is what you might imagine: the brain takes in information—for example, through the retina, if it’s visual stimuli—and processes this to build the image from the bottom up. But it turns out the brain has another way of working, where it gallops ahead and uses beliefs, expectations, and knowledge projected onto what it is perceiving. This is top-down processing. It’s where the brain makes assumptions and fills in the blanks, even if it doesn’t have a full picture in front of it. But the brain isn’t always going to be right when it does this. So, for example, if someone mashes butternut squash and adds pumpkin pie spice to it, as far as the brain is concerned, it’s pumpkin pie. And it will respond accordingly as if you were actually eating pumpkin pie. This is part of the reason why people don’t lose weight when they drink diet soda. The brain assumes you’re drinking sugar, and it releases insulin accordingly. Even with stevia or monk fruit, the total insulin released over a day is equivalent to what would be released if you’d consumed sucrose. What this means for your Bright Line journey is that it’s prudent to be careful around look-alike foods. It turns out that gaming the system, which people have been trying to do with diet soda for years, doesn’t work. You really do need to eat simple, nutritious whole foods, and not something that’s mocked up to resemble something else. In Bright Line Eating, we’re not judging people who are, say, making cauliflower pizza without flour. But there’s science behind why this might not be a great idea, depending on your experience and Susceptibility Score. If you’re a five or six on the Susceptibility Scale, and you’ve figured out a way to make cauliflower pizza part of your regular life, that’s fine. Even if you’re a ten, if it works for you, fine. But if you’re eating cauliflower pizza and you’re not in your Bright body or are having a hard time keeping your lines Bright—this may be why. Top-down processing is very powerful. It even results in heroin addicts overdosing with their typical dose, if they consume it in a different environment or without their knowledge. The conditioned tolerance response that the body launches when the usual sequence of events happens (two $20 bills in the hand … finding the dealer … getting the bindle of powder … cooking it up with a spoon…) literally results in the addict being able to absorb a larger dose of heroin without overdosing. In the absence of this sequence of events (e.g., shooting someone up while they are sleeping), the result can be death. On the same dose. Top-down processing is not to be taken lightly—it affects our physiology in powerful ways. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/w2RK1U Top-Down Processing | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

A few days ago, I was on an accountability call with our Bright Lifers community. One of the people participating shared that when she was a child she sucked her thumb. Later, she switched to eating addictively for comfort. She went directly from using her thumb as a source of comfort, relief, and soothing to using food for comfort, relief, and soothing. As she was sharing this with the community, all I could think was “Oh my gosh, me too! Why don’t I ever think about this or talk about this? Why isn’t it part of my story?” I sucked my thumb until I was 13 years old. The orthodontist even glued little spikes to the backs of my front teeth. That didn’t stop me—it just gave me vampire-like piercings on my thumb! For me, what did it was getting my period. That gave me an awareness that I wasn’t a child any longer. But I still bit my nails until they bled. I didn’t quit biting my nails until much later—and even today, I have a nail I will bite and chew sometimes. As a kid, I also chewed on wooden pencils until they were soggy splinters in my mouth and I devoured Bic pen caps until they were long skinny spikes of plastic covered in teeth marks. It’s all the same oral fixation. After talking to this Bright Lifer, I Googled “Dopamine release and thumb sucking.” Turns out there’s a whole scientific literature on it. And on dopamine release and chewing as well. We use what we can when we’re babies and children to self-soothe, release anxiety, and get what we need. They’re all tools for self-medicating. The link between thumb-sucking and food addiction is partly why I recommend not chewing gum. Chewing is important physiologically, but we get the mastication that we need when we eat whole, real foods. I recommend not chewing gum in order to break that oral fixation. As adults, we don’t want to rely on crutches. We don’t want to feel like we must have something in our mouths to be comforted. When we abstain from soothing or distracting ourselves in that way, we open up a space to ask ourselves what we truly need in that moment: connection? Comfort? Do we need to address something in our environment? Start a project we’ve been procrastinating on? Having something in your mouth at all times is counterproductive, even if you don’t identify as a food addict. Similar to that, research came out a while ago that clicking a mouse—like for a videogame—also causes a dopamine release in the brain. It’s interesting how we, as a species, gravitate toward whatever provides a little ease. Another lesson I’ve gleaned from this is about how we tell our story: how we sometimes miss a key piece of the puzzle. Maybe we’re in denial or haven’t looked hard enough, or maybe—and I think this is true for me—we’re just used to telling our story as we tell it. So, when someone brings something to our attention, it gives us another way to look at our past and the forces and experiences that have shaped us. We are writing and rewriting our story all the time. I invite you to look back at your own history and at the ways we’re similar. I suspect there are a fair number of people who will relate to this. And that may mean you need to ask yourself what kind of comfort you need. Where are you being called to grow and stretch, and how can you learn to tolerate discomfort, so that you can see where you truly need to go next. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/AeAYRn Thumb Sucking and Food Addiction | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I recently had the opportunity to take my 12-year-old, Maya, to the Super Bowl. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and we’re huge 49ers fans. I grew up in the golden era of Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and Steve Young and I remember the thrills of those years. I have three BLE-related lessons to share with you from this once-in-a-lifetime experience.   The first lesson has to do with planning and preparation. We flew into Vegas on Saturday morning. In my carry-on suitcase, I packed seven meals, my teddy bear, my 5-year journal, toiletries, a pair of underwear, and an extra 49ers hoodie. (Doesn’t everyone pack seven meals and a teddy bear in their carry-on? Lol.) While Maya ate NMF for lunch on Saturday, I asked her if I could make a phone call and she was fine with it, so I got away from that food, stepped into the sun, and called a Bright buddy. Yay! I went out to eat once while we were there, but other than that I packed all my meals. No food or beverage was allowed into the stadium, and we were three or four hours early—we arrived at 11:30 and didn’t get out til eight or nine p.m. I was hungry, but I used this mantra: hunger is not an emergency. And it was fine. The body is equipped to fast.  It is never a waste to plan and prepare. Plan for your trip, pack your food, get support, and surrender when necessary. The second lesson has to do with the one aspect of recovery that I never think of, don’t feel particularly good at, never prioritize, and am usually not feeling in the mood for, and that’s play. On the flight out, Maya and I began noticing people wearing football clothing. We challenged each other to find as many teams as possible.  It became a game to scout out fans. We approached people who were dressed in team clothing, and we met many lovely people who were happy to share their love for their team with us. By the end of the game we’d found a fan of each and every one of the 32 NFL teams, and we were thrilled! It was great fun. I know there are coaches on the Bright Line Eating team who advocate for play as something to incorporate into our Bright lives and I’m always surprisingly delighted when I invite it in. My third takeaway is about unstoppability. I didn’t think the 49ers were going to win, but the stats were in their favor for most of the game, and we were hopeful when they had a 10-to-nothing lead.  And then they lost in overtime. It was heartbreaking. And that’s when the recovery lesson started. I think that when someone is Bright for a long time and then has a break or a binge, there’s a mental effort to metabolize the experience. What does it mean? What just happened? Later, I told Maya that it was our job now to create, protect, and defend our memory of the experience. The reality is that we had the most incredible trip, ever. The 49ers losing did not take that away from us. She lit up when I told her that. We are the guardians of our minds. If the 49ers had won, it would have been easy. But would there have been a teaching opportunity there? Probably not.  Instead, I was able to teach my kid how to square your shoulders and deal with pain. I modeled embracing a nuanced understanding of hardship, where no one is necessarily at fault and there may be no easy answers. I showed her how to manage that kind of experience responsibly. It’s the essence of being unstoppable.  My hope for you is that if you have a break in your Bright Lines—or any setback in life—that you remember the BLE value of unstoppability, and cull that lesson for all it can give you. The reality is we don’t grow without hardship. Nothing good comes easily.  FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/lXwCsJ3 Lessons from the Super Bowl | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I want to share a bit about my own story and recent events that illustrate what Bright Living looks like. I’m really Bright right now but that hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been in food recovery for 28 years. That was about a year after I got clean and sober from drugs and alcohol, and I’d gained a ton of weight. I went to my first 12-step food meeting, and it didn’t turn everything around the way the drug and alcohol recovery did. That was the beginning of about 7 1/2 years of on-again, off-again attempts at abstinence. I had some success, but overall, I struggled. When I was 28, I started doing things differently: No sugar. No flour. Weighing and measuring my food. Three meals a day. I got down to the size I am now. And then I had a major relapse and gained back all that weight. Within 3 months, I was my heaviest ever. I lost the weight again and was good for almost 10 years. But then I tried intuitive eating, because intellectually it seemed a better fit. That didn’t work. Within a month, my freedom was gone and my weight was increasing. I knew that the no-sugar, no-flour thing worked, so I went back to it, and I was abstinent for about 3 years. But when my life exploded with the Bright Line Eating movement, my food went off track. For about 4 years I binged on and off—mostly Bright, but definitely lots of food struggles. But in September 2019, I stopped binging, put down sugar and flour, and haven’t picked it up since. That began 3 years of immaculate adherence to the first 3 Bright Lines: no sugar, no flour, and eating only at meals. But my quantities were off in restaurants. I surrendered more deeply and got squeaky clean with the 4th and hardest Bright Line: quantities. Since then, I’ve had immaculate quantities. And now I’m grateful for the peace that I have. I wanted to share what the sine wave of living Bright can look like. I go stretches where I don’t think about food at all; I feel free and grateful. My well-being is high, and I’m steady. Just recently, though, I got a little stressed and stopped writing down my food at night. I’ve done that on and off. Recently, though, I went a week without writing it down and I found myself before a meal addictively picking a fattier protein choice. Here’s what happened: beans don’t light me up, but Beyond Burgers do. They’re ultra-processed, fattier, and richer. And they’re allowed, but maybe they shouldn’t be, as an ultra-processed food. I made a Beyond Burger, even though I had beans prepared in the fridge. I made that choice, and it was an addictive choice, even though I weighed out exactly 4 oz. The next day, I took my kids out because I wanted a restaurant meal. And I did have a Bright meal, eating only what was on my food plan. But I know this restaurant has grilled eggplant that is pretty oily, and I had that on my salad. I went out to eat deliberately to get that hit from that food. That night, I went to the grocery store and contemplated buying some huge apples. The rationale in my mind was that I was about to travel 3 time zones west and knew there would be times I would need to go 8 hours between lunch and dinner, so the addictive voice in my mind told me a huge apple would be good to tide me over. I laughed at myself and didn’t buy the apples. But I could feel the soul-sickness in me. I made a gameplan. I called a couple of Bright friends for support. Then I came home and wrote down my food for the next day. When we talk about the sine wave, the downslope is the precursor (potentially) for a relapse. And maybe that means going off the Bright Lines—but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you just have a little wobble. But you can correct the wobble. For me, that meant making a couple of phone calls and writing down my food again. Someone on an accountability call recently asked me about eating out. She was using the one-plate rule. For me, a 10++ on the Susceptibility Scale, I don’t use the one-plate rule. I told her that I either use a digital food scale or I measure with my eyes. I stay vigilant about only eating the categories of food that are on my plan for that meal. And I’m eyeballing each category of food to make sure it’s my best estimate of the right amount. If a nagging feeling in my gut tells me maybe it’s actually too much, I cut some away. This is what a diamond vase looks like. If you’re not familiar with this metaphor, it goes like this: for people who come into Boot Camp, it starts to feel easy. And I say to them, it’s easy because the system works. It’s like you’ve been given a priceless gift: a crystal vase. So don’t juggle with it. Crystal vasers are those who have never broken their Bright Lines. But if you do break those lines, there is a way back. And you don’t get a crystal vase, you get a diamond vase—one that can’t be shattered. So that’s the little bobble I had and how I resolved it, just so you can hear the language and feel the bodily experiences of what super Bright Living can be like when you surf the sine wave of Maintenance. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/NlOqP7The Sine Wave of Super Bright Eating | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Register for International Food Addiction Consensus Conference: https://ble.life/4DURJTRegister for Ador@BLE: https://ble.life/PY9sf5Donate to the International Food Addiction Consensus project: https://ble.life/PVOw1B A miracle has happened, and I can’t wait to tell you about it!  First, some history: we used to put on an annual conference called the Bright Line Eating Family Reunion. They were great fun. And then COVID happened, and we haven’t done them since. Our team loved meeting all of you, and we loved seeing you meet each other, too.  It took a tremendous amount of work. I put together fresh science talks for them (many of which you can still access in the “Science Bundle” if you’re a BLE member). Preparing for them took a good three months of steady work. Currently, I don’t do much live public speaking because my kids are teens and I am not willing to take on extra trips that aren’t family-related. But now something has come up that feels necessary. It’s the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference (IFACC), in London on May 17. Here, clinicians, academicians, and researchers from around the world will gather to present to the media and the general public our consensus document on food addiction as a legitimate disease and diagnosis. We’ve been deliberating and creating this document for months. It’s powerful and needed, and it’s going to change the world. In due course, the ICD—the International Classification of Diseases—will accept food addiction as a legitimate diagnosis, and the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will accept it as well. Then, policy will change—you can’t advertise addictive substances to kids, for one thing, and bariatric centers will begin to screen for food addiction before recommending surgery, while food addiction treatments will become available and covered by insurance. I’ll be there in person and will be speaking, and so will Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People, which we talked about in last week’s vlog. So will Robert Lustig, one of the first people to sound the alarm on sugar (are you one of the millions of people who has seen his YouTube talk on sugar??), and Vera Tarman, author of Food Junkies. But there’s more! At the same time, I’ve been in touch with Bright Lifers including Sue Smith in London, who does so much for our community. Sue and the UK Bright Lifers organized a conference for Saturday and Sunday following the IFACC, May 18-19. I’ll be speaking at it, and I can’t wait. The theme is so cute: It’s Ador@BLE. Meaning how do we love and adore ourselves in Bright Line Eating? How do we love and adore our bodies? How do we love and adore every minute of our brilliant Bright Lives? Glynis Roberts, an international expert in self-compassion from Wales, who is also a Bright Lifer, will be lecturing on Saturday. There will be breakout rooms and time to meet people and connect. So you can go to both conferences or just one. There are links to register below. It’s surely not a coincidence that this vlog is coming out on Valentine’s Day. Love is our number one value at BLE, and this Valentine’s Day you can give yourself a truly significant gift: come join us live with other Bright Lifers, at a conference that affirms the reality of food addiction as a diagnosis. If you can’t make it, I understand, but then be sure to livestream the IFAAC conference. One final thought: for the consensus-building efforts, we haven’t raised the amount of money we need. Here’s what that means: before the conference, we’re going to be gathering, to plan out the research that will be needed to fill the gaps that exist in treatment research. Current research on food addiction treatment is very sparse. We need lynchpin evidence that shows that treatment with an abstinence-based approach to eating solves certain forms of disordered eating (those with food addiction as an underlying cause) in a way that current treatments don’t. If we take a large sample of the 30% of people with a diagnosed eating disorder who have not gotten well with the current treatments—probably because they have underlying food addiction issues—and randomly assign them to an abstinence-based eating approach as opposed to an all-foods-in-moderation-for-all-people eating approach, we could show the validity of food addiction treatments. A study like that is going to be expensive. We need to raise some funds to get this study off the ground. This is a moment in time where major things are happening. You can be a part of that. So: there are three buttons below. One to register for the IFACC, either live or via livestream. There’s also a link to register for the Ador@BLEs conference—and I truly hope you can join us for this. If you’ve missed the Family Reunions, now’s your chance. And the third button is to donate. I hope to see you in London in mid-May. These are exciting times, and I invite you to be a part of them. -------------------------------------- FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/MWBFR9You’re Invited to Experience a Miracle in London | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Once in a while a book comes along that I predict will revolutionize our community—and I’m excited to tell you about one such book. It’s called Ultra-Processed People by Dr. Chris van Tulleken. This book educated me so much. In fact, I reached out to the author after reading this book, and I have a nice surprise for you that I’ll tell you about in a bit. Here are some key takeaways: First, I never realized the full extent to which the explosion of ultra-processed food is driven by economics. One grim story that the book shares is that of the very first fully synthetic food. It happened in Germany in World War II. The Nazi regime wanted to become independent from all other nations. One problem was fuel—they didn’t have enough. But they did have a lot of low-quality coal, which could be rendered into liquid fuel for their planes, cars, and tanks. One byproduct of this process was a waxy, soap-like substance we would call paraffin.  A man named Arthur Imhousen, a soap manufacturer, took that substance and used it to meet another need that was acute for Germans: the need for more domestically-produced, consumable fat. He added salt, coloring, and chemicals and turned it into “coal butter.” It’s an example of how often byproducts from an industrial process are turned into something you can eat. Cottonseed oil is another example, using the cast-off seeds from the cotton industry, which were then pressed for their oil.  Another takeaway from the book is related to brand loyalty. It turns out that the way the stomach, taste buds, and brain are wired, when we eat an extra-large bolus of highly dense calories, the brain notices and wires up to prefer that specific flavor. That’s more than addiction: it’s loyalty to a particular brand. If you’re a manufacturer, you don’t just want people addicted to junk food in general, you want them addicted to your junk food.  Look at soda. Soda pop when it’s flat and warm isn’t tasty, because it’s just too sweet. Making it cold and carbonated tricks your taste buds and brain into not noticing the sugar, so they can pack more sugar into it without you having a negative reaction. But the extra sugar then delivers such a whopping bolus of calories that the brain remembers that specific flavor profile, and imprints on it. That’s why people are so dedicated to their brand of soda.  My biggest takeaway has to do with the reality of sugar and flour. Sugar and flour have been around for a long time. But the reason we’re seeing massive amounts of obesity today is because of ultra-processed food, not sugar and flour. This book showed me the difference between the two. I contacted Chris van Tulleken, and we talked for quite a while. I’ve recorded it, so you can watch it. One of the things I wanted to talk to him about was the difference between ultra-processed food and sugar and flour, because I know you can’t just abstain from ultra-processed food and still eat sugar and flour and recover. It seems to me that sugar and flour should be considered ultra-processed food. I wanted to parse this out with him.  Chris van Tulleken is an M.D., Ph.D., BBC star in the UK, and he’s got an identical twin brother, Xand, who was living with obesity, while Chris is not—it’s a fascinating story. That’s how Chris got the idea of doing this book.  You’ll also want to see what Chris says when I talked with him about coming to London to be a keynote speaker at the conference on ultra-processed food I’m working on. And you’ll discover that he has a very different idea about how one can quit eating ultra-processed food. It’s different from BLE. Very different. This book is mind-blowing if you’ve ever wanted a clear scientific explanation for all your questions about ultra-processed food: what about flavorings? What about emulsifiers? What oils are good for you? Why is ultra-processed food softer?  To see the interview, purchase your copy of the book: hardcover, Audible, ebook—whatever. Go to the website: https://BLE.life/UPP. All you need to do is put in where you bought the book and your order number, and you’ll get access to the video.  This is a big deal for us as a Bright Line community. The international community is coalescing around the idea of ultra-processed food addiction. Not just “food addiction” but ULTRA-PROCESSED food addiction. So we need to be up on this. And I have to say, I’m now thinking differently about some of the ultra-processed foods that we have considered Bright Line Eating-compliant.  Here’s something Chris said: If you’re ever wondering about whether something is ultra-processed food, just think about the motive behind the food. Is the motive to hook you and make money off you? Or is it to nourish and feed you?  I often think about the motive behind how I’ve eaten. Motives matter. Without a doubt, the motives behind our food supply have changed dramatically over the past hundred years, and I’ve never read a better explanation of this than Chris van Tulleken’s book. He’s amazing—a cool guy and a consummate scientist. Get your copy of the book today! Your mind will be blown. Enjoy! Access the exclusive interview with the author: https://ble.life/UPP FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/WBgONY

A Bright Lifer™ recently wrote in, and I want to address her question because it's on a very important subject—Maintenance. She says, “I've lost over 60 pounds with Bright Line Eating. Since I'm more sedentary during the cold winter months, I've gained about seven or eight pounds back, but the scale goes up and down within a 10-pound window. In the warm summer months, I love to walk and hike, so the weight drops back down. Is this what Maintenance looks like? I'm not quite sure as I'm afraid of gaining—so I'm back to the Weight-Loss Plan.” It's a great question! I’ve been on Maintenance now for two decades. It is very much a process of adding and subtracting food. There are, of course, factors that influence our weight—our activity level, the seasons, injuries, aging. When you age, for example, you need less food, though you still need ample protein. So you may cut back on your food, but not on protein. And then there’s someone I know who was doing great, maintaining a 100+ pound weight loss, but then he got injured and he suddenly couldn’t exercise. He neglected to compensate by removing some food from his food plan, and he also stopped weighing himself. Over the next few years, he slowly put on 40 pounds because he should have been removing food as his weight crept up. Here's what I do to accommodate fluctuating weight, whether it’s because of the seasons, exercise levels, the metabolism shifts that come with age, or whatever it is. I weigh myself once a week to see if I’m keeping within my weight range. My goal weight is a range, not a number. If you don’t want to use the bathroom scale, have some clothes that don’t have elastic waistbands. If you put them on and they fit, you know you’re doing okay. I have some “truth pants.” They’re just black slacks, with no stretch or give in them. And I know from seeing how they fit me if I’m within my range. However you want to track it, think about a roughly ten-pound range that you want to be within. When those pants get a little tight or your weight is at the high end of your range, start to shave out food from your plan. Typically that means taking out one thing—whatever was the last thing you added in, whether it was grain at lunch or dinner, or maybe you’d gone from four to six ounces of grain. Take out the grain or shave it back to four ounces. Then wait a week or two, or even a month or two, to see if that did the trick. You may have to shave out more. Some people might find that they don’t even need all the food that’s on the Weight-Loss Food Plan. For me, I remember being on a food plan twenty years ago that was twice as heavy as my plan right now. That was before I had kids and when I was exercising a lot. I just needed a lot of food. Now I don’t need nearly as much as I age. So you add food when your weight is low, and take food out when your weight is high. There’s nothing wrong with going back to the Weight-Loss Plan if you’re carrying enough extra weight to warrant that, say more than ten pounds. But generally, it’s best to shave back rather than make drastic changes. Your body will respond. Weigh yourself once a week and check back in a few weeks to see if your body is responding. If not, take another food out. This is the ebb and flow of Maintenance. We add and subtract food to keep ourselves within the Bright Body weight range we want to be in. We tend to settle into a size, a shape, a level of mobility that feels right for us, and we can feel when we trend too far in either direction. Then it’s time to adjust our food plan accordingly. That’s one of the beautiful things about Bright Line Eating—the ability to adjust as needed. One last thought: I recommend that everyone work with a Maintenance guide or Maintenance buddy. I never make a change myself without running it by someone. It’s good to externalize it—meaning to get it out of my own head. There’s a recovery saying: if you’re alone in your own head, you’re alone in a bad neighborhood. This is especially true with our food, our weight, and our bodies. Many of us have body dysmorphia and heightened levels of stress about these topics. So I talk to someone before I make a change and then I listen to their feedback. And when you’ve been stable in Maintenance for a while, you can do the service of being a Maintenance guide for someone else. It’s simple. It takes five minutes a week—just check in with them on their weigh day. It’s great for the long term to have someone to talk it through with, to make sure you’re being slow and steady around additions and subtractions to the plan. It’s just the way to go. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/skZ2Pu Adding and Subtracting Food in Maintenance | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Today’s vlog topic comes courtesy of Michael, who writes: I am shocked that you don’t mention dairy, especially cheese, when you talk about food addiction. Studies have shown that cheese is the most addictive food there is, as it releases the most dopamine. When I went to a whole-food, plant-based diet, it wasn’t sugar or refined grains I had a hard time giving up, it was cheese. And of the three—sugar, processed grains, and cheese—cheese is the worst. Not only is it mostly saturated fat, but it is high in calories, salt, and cholesterol and contains casein proteins, which have been linked to cancer. Why isn’t cheese at the top of the food addiction villain list? Is the dairy industry a sponsor of yours? I’m VERY serious! You make a very good point, Michael! Research does show that cheese can have addictive qualities. Cheese and other dairy products have casein in them. Caseins break down into casomorphins, which bind to opiate receptors in the brain, which then release dopamine. So it’s true: cheese can be addictive. No, the dairy industry is not a sponsor of Bright Line Eating. And if they were they’d be very grumpy with me because I talk all the time about how dairy isn’t healthy and there are way better options. But whether cheese should be allowed on the plan is another thing entirely. First of all, I am not a nutritionist. I’m a brain scientist. You’re welcome to go to other people to learn about nutrition. I’m going to teach you about psychology, food addiction, and weight loss. The Bright Line program is not a health-focused plan—it’s a starter food plan for people to be able to eat the widest variety of food while quelching their food addiction and losing their excess weight. Many people go down a path that allows them to optimize their food plan for health. But we don’t insist on that at BLE. It’s important to allow the widest possible variety of foods because we would be excluding a lot of people from the transformation we deliver if we partnered with a specific nutritional approach. We stay agnostic about that while allowing people to have their needs, preferences, and opinions honored. We allow people to eat hot dogs, sausage, prime rib—things that are not healthy—if you weigh or measure your serving and avoid eating it with sugar and flour. It’s a very different thing to eat melted cheese on pizza versus a two-ounce hunk of cheese, sitting separately on your plate, with your baby carrots and your apple. We want the entry door to Bright Line eating to be as broad as possible. So no matter where you’re coming from, you can wrap your head around weighing and measuring and are not constrained any more than is necessary. If you want to have a steak for dinner, have a steak for dinner. Or if you want a hunk of cheese for your protein, then have it. Why doesn’t cheese trigger addiction? I have a true but possibly unsatisfying answer: cheese works in the food plan because it works. When BLE was founded, there were already 54 years of experience with 12-step programs, beginning in 1960 when Overeaters Anonymous was founded. What the data showed from actual people living these programs was that those who tried to keep artificial sweeteners in their plan were chronic relapsers. Same with whole wheat flour, honey, and non-dairy creamer. But the people who weighed and measured cheese did fine. So there was no reason to exclude cheese from BLE because it wasn’t triggering people. There may have been a few people who went crazy over cheese, nuts, or other foods—but the percentage is minimal, and all these things fall into the category of “individual binge foods”—meaning that you are responsible for noting what lights you up and avoiding it. Let me give two examples: cheese and white rice. In the wrong context, both are profoundly triggering. I recall a woman whose #1 binge food was a pot of rice with a stick of butter melted in it. When her sponsor told her to add rice back to her maintenance diet, she didn’t think she could do it. But when she ate four ounces, with no butter, she did fine. Without the sexy sauces, she was fine. Same with cheese. Weighed and measured, no possibility of more—it’s fine. If it’s not for you, then don’t eat it. If you’re vegan, don’t eat it. And if it offends your sensibilities that it’s available to others, I can understand that, because it has those casomorphins and does seem like it should be problematic. And for some small percentage of people, it is. But we don’t see it being problematic overall. Michael, I want to thank you for your question. Let me reiterate: although I stand by having cheese in the food plan, I agree with you; it’s not particularly healthy. I’m always going to think very carefully, though, about narrowing the Bright Line program. I’m proud of the fact that, on the BLE plan, you can literally eat every single whole, real protein, dairy, grain, legume, fruit, and vegetable option. Your choices are yours to make. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/evhmToIs Cheese Addictive? | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

This week, I want to weave together three topics for you. First: I’m co-writing a book chapter on ultra-processed food addiction for an academic book on weight loss. I’m writing right now about the 11 DSM-5 criteria for substance use disorder. Research indicates that ultra-processed food addiction meets each of these criteria. A large meta-analysis of hundreds of studies showed that about 20 percent of people in the general population qualify for a diagnosis of food addiction. But the average person has 2.38 of these 11 symptoms, and to get a diagnosis, you only need to have 2 of them. A mild diagnosis is 2–3 symptoms, moderate 4–5, and a severe case has 6 or more symptoms. When you hear what the symptoms are, it’s pretty easy to imagine that a lot of people have them. One symptom, for example, is eating more food than you intended to. Another is repeated failed attempts to cut back or a persistent desire to cut back. The whole dieting industry is built on this. The point is this: it would seem that the average person, with 2.38 of these symptoms, would have a food addiction. But they don’t, because having these symptoms isn’t enough. There has to be a pattern of use that leads to significant clinical impairment or distress. The people with two or more symptoms often don’t meet that benchmark. They may have tried to cut back or perhaps they notice themselves overindulging, but they’re not stressed out about it. They just move on with their lives. Many people have what we could call an addictive relationship with food—but they don’t have a food addiction. Food addiction needs that clinically significant impairment or distress. The second thing I want to share has to do with a person I’ve been talking to lately who is struggling. She has a fair bit of weight to lose, but she’s young enough that it’s not impacting her health. She’d like to look better, from her perspective, and she’s distressed. And, when she eats addictively, she loses the ability to function in her life. So she is experiencing clinically significant impairment or distress. Part of her doesn’t believe in food addiction. She thinks it’s a choice, and she should just be able to control it. She thinks she could quit if she just had more moral fiber. She’s been trying for years. Last time we talked, I reminded her that the science shows it IS an addiction, and the belief that she’s choosing to eat these foods is erroneous. There was a professor at NYU, Rodolfo Llinas, who did an experiment: he would try to point his toe forward while electrodes placed in the motor cortex of his brain were telling his foot to flex back. He ran the experiment over and over. He was horrified, not because he could not override those electrodes and point his toe, but because his brain kept telling him that he was changing his mind and meant to flex his foot back. The same is true with my friend. Her brain is telling her she’s choosing, but she’s not. Another example: Let’s say I told you there was a bag with five billion dollars waiting for you up forty flights of stairs but the rule is that to get it, you have to hold your breath the whole time you climb the stairs. You couldn’t do it. You would eventually breathe, and it would seem like your choice—but it really wasn’t. You were capitulating to the demands of your brain which then manipulated you into thinking that you were choosing to breathe. Lastly: I was speaking to a group last week, and I said to them how grateful I was that I both like and want my Bright recovery. This way of life is something that I deeply appreciate for its structure, for the support system, for everything about it that allows me to be the person I most want to be. In addiction literature, there’s a lot about wanting and liking. Initially, when we’re not in an addictive state, we want flour, sugar, and other foods only a little. But then, we eat them and like them a lot. As the brain wires itself for addiction, the wanting gets bigger and bigger and the liking gets smaller and smaller. Studies have shown that people with obesity intensely want ultra-processed food, sugar, and flour. But when they’re eating it, the parts of the brain that are associated with liking are muted. They don’t even like it that much anymore. Lots of people want to lose weight and want to try Bright Line Eating. But when they realize it’s more involved than they thought, a full lifestyle and not a simple diet, they don’t like it and don’t want to do it. Some people grow to like it, Some grow to love it. What a gift that is! So people like my friend may think they have a weight problem and a willpower problem. She isn’t on board with the Bright Line way. She doesn’t believe in it. She thinks intuitive eating makes more sense. And I get that. I’ve tried intuitive eating, not weighing and measuring my food, and eating flour and sugar, and what happened? Within a month I was out of control. Most addicts experience periods where they feel like they’re regaining control. But it don’t last. That’s what powerlessness is—an inability to achieve the desired result, peace with food and weight, on one’s own. If your relationship with food and weight bothers you a lot, that’s clinically significant distress. What a gift it is to work a potent-enough program for whatever degree of addiction you have! To break free. To live joyously, contently, and free. Not everyone gets that gift—because addiction is just a beast. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/uwrsMY Significant Impairment or Distress | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I want to address something from an email I received this week. It said: “I hear you use the phrase ‘Is my food too sexy?’ Please explain this term! I have a feeling it will be very helpful as I am new to the eating plan, and am still feeling my way.” What a great question! “Sexy food” is a term I use all the time, and it’s worth explaining. It breaks down into three dimensions: the reward value, the level of processing, and complexity. First, the reward value. Generally, sugar, flour, fat, and salt are the elements that make foods more highly rewarding. Some foods on the Bright Line plan fall into that category. Cheese, for example, is highly rewarding. Nuts and nut butters are also sexy because of their reward value. They light up the brain. Sausage, too. Whole-fat yogurt can be highly rewarding, as well as coffee and caffeine. Most of the highly rewarding foods have been eliminated from Bright Line Eating—all the highly processed foods and foods with sugar and flour. Some foods have known addictive qualities, yet they’re allowed on the Bright Line Eating food plan. There are no Bright Line Eating Police, which means that you alone are responsible for noticing if a food is getting out of line; if you’re looking forward to that food too much, that’s important to notice. If so, consider taking it out of your plan for a while. A note about salt: you need salt. If it becomes problematic, you might consider weighing and measuring it, and keep in mind that salt increases the reward value of the meal. The answer isn’t to eliminate it, however, it’s to keep an eye on it. Next, processing. Some BLE foods are processed. Take rice cakes. I don’t recommend starting the day with rice cakes and peanut butter. That’s a highly rewarding food on top of a highly processed food. It’s a very sexy meal. Also lookalike foods like bean pasta and Ezekiel bread—they’re sexy foods. Consider your food on a spectrum from simple to sexy. We’ve already eliminated most of the sexiest foods from your plan. But for someone who’s a 10 on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale and who really wants food freedom, keeping food to the simple side of the spectrum is the way to do that. There’s nuance here, though. If you’re a 6 on the scale and are doing BLE to lose weight and it’s working for you, the foods I’m talking about may be fine in weighed and measured quantities. But for the person whose food addiction tendencies are more severe and who is struggling, they will need to make their food simpler. Third, we have complexity. Complexity refers to adding a lot of condiments and spices, plus a lot of different ingredients, and making your food more flavorful and more rewarding. Doing that slides a food up the spectrum in the direction of sexy. Note that there’s a big difference between steamed butternut squash vs. butternut squash that has been sprayed with spray oil and roasted. The procedure makes the food sexier. Roasted vegetables are way sexier than steamed vegetables. Roasted vegetables may be fine for you. But if I need to add oil to my vegetables and am attached to it and do it regularly, it’s going to affect my weight and peace of mind. There’s a big difference between steamed squash versus roasted butternut squash versus roasted butternut squash sprinkled with nutmeg and pumpkin pie spice. Then you’re getting into the domain of a lookalike food, and that’s not conducive to mental peace. This is what I mean about complexity: layering in different elements and aiming to create a whoosh in the brain. That’s problematic. Melted cheese can also be over the line. I never do that. It’s just addictive. If I eat cheese, I weigh two ounces and have it in chunks or string cheese. One green vegetable, steamed: that’s the essence of simplicity. When you start adding oil, garlic, spices, or multiple vegetables—say in a stir fry—all of those things add to the complexity level. That’s not necessarily bad. But if you’re looking to simplify food, try eating whole foods, one food per category at a time, with the simplest preparation—and see what happens to your brain. I find simple food delicious. And when I haven’t eaten between meals, my brain is so ready for that food it hits my taste buds just right. The simpler I keep my food, the more likely the next meal will feel like enough. Simple food begets a brain that appreciates simple food. Sexy food begets a brain that needs sexy food. With each choice, we’re creating a brain that is either satisfied or needy. Lightening up on sexy food is a favor to our future self. It will give us a brain that is delighted with simple food; that is peaceful and calm, and for whom simple food is truly enough. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/b2BGTqSexy Food | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

As we begin 2024, I want to share a letter from Val which is apropos for the start of a new year. Here’s what Val wrote: Please do a vlog on getting past the brain chatter that says “I will start next week” or “I will start next month” or “I can’t do it because I’ll never be able to eat cake again.” I keep wanting to start, but I can’t seem to. Val, many people grapple with this. So to start, I want to encourage you to use the January 1 “fresh start effect.” We’re past January 1st by a few days, but still: Boot Camp registration is open, and you can use the start of the new year to galvanize yourself into action. The fresh start effect may not be enough to keep you going, but it’s often enough to help you get started. Take advantage of the fact that the Boot Camp has a 14-day, 100 percent money-back guarantee. So if there’s a part of you that’s resistant, see if you can convince yourself that you’re just going to give this a try, just for a few days, and see how it goes. Commit to, say, three days. Do the initial part of the Boot Camp knowing that if it doesn’t work you can get your money back—no harm, no foul. That’s a legitimate way to get over the hump and get started. Of course, the reality is that you may want to stay with it once you start, but this gives you a potential out if you need it. Also remember that inside the Boot Camp, there’s a bonus module that’s specifically designed to break through resistance. It’s called “The Break Through Your Resistance Road Map.” I encourage you to use that to address the part of you that is resistant. My guess is that this part of you is trying to protect you from failure, by keeping you from starting. But that part of you doesn’t know about this new program called Bright Line Eating that is entirely tailored to the way your brain works. You may have tried plans before that have “cheat days” or build in snacks or try to sell you sugar and flour products—all kinds of things to hijack your brain. No wonder you didn’t succeed with them! They weren’t designed for the way your brain works. But now you have a plan designed for you, in your most authentic self, and you don’t need to be terrified of failure. Just follow the fabulous plan. JFTFP. Finally, let’s talk about that part about never being able to eat cake again. I have a story for you that you may have heard me share in the vlog before, but it seems fitting. Imagine, for example, that you’re worried about being able to eat cake at your son’s wedding, or some kind of potential future event like that. I had something similar happen to me when I was 20. I had a history of drug and alcohol abuse in my teens. I quit and got clean and sober when I was 20, about 10½ months before my 21st birthday. I was living in California where the legal drinking age was 21, and I thought, I can’t get clean and sober because I will surely drink on my 21st birthday. And people told me not to worry about that, and just to live in the day. That seemed dismissive to me because I was sure I wasn’t going to stay sober on my birthday—but that’s what people kept telling me. And that’s what I’d say to you, Val. Just worry about today. You don’t have to worry about the future. You just need to follow the plan for today. In the end, I DID stay sober, all the way up to my birthday. And I was invited by members of my group to attend an international convention in San Diego. So on my 21st birthday, I found myself in San Diego with 60,000 sober alcoholics dancing at a street party downtown, partying all night long with zero alcohol, and having the time of my life. What I found is that I was so different by that time from the person that I’d been the year before that I didn’t even think about needing a drink. So I envision you staying Bright today, knowing that you don’t have to worry about the future. You only need to plan for today. You don’t need to worry about your son’s wedding, because by that time you may have committed to a MasterMind group and a buddy, and you might go to the wedding thinking instead about your son’s well-being and your new daughter-in-law. And maybe the fifty pounds you’ve lost impresses your beloved cousin who needs to make some changes to their health—and as the night goes on you spend your time talking to them and don’t even care much when cake is served. You stay Bright and have a fabulous time. The main thing is to use the fresh start effect to register for Boot Camp now before it’s too late. Just tell yourself you only have to try it for three days. Get started and see how it feels. Get into action. You’ve got this. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/3YZ71GHow to Just Get Started Already | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

As we head toward a new year, when people often work toward new beginnings, I want to share with you a message I received from a woman named Kim. Kim writes: I have read, and thought I have digested, Bright Line Eating. But how do I commit? I feel like I’ve had 100 “day ones,” literally. I know what to do. BLE teaches me what to do. But I can’t make it stick. What are some suggestions for getting it done? I’ve had hundreds of day ones. I started my food journey when I was 21 years old, a year clean and sober. I began a twelve-step program to address all the food I was eating, and that started eight and half years of repeated day ones. Later, there were more twelve-step programs and more day ones. And then I got Bright. I’ve been immaculately Bright for a year and a half now. (My longest consecutive stretch in the past was many more years than that.) What I have now is priceless: a healthy strong body and a peaceful mind. Extremely low levels of food chatter or scale chatter, and tons of happiness and well-being. My food recovery is a blessing in every area of my life. But all that came at a cost. It’s taken me a lot of research, and a lot of suffering, to get here. We each have our own journey. Everyone in Bright Line Eating has come to it knowing that they give up something to get Bright. I don’t have to tell you that—especially at this time of year, when it means giving up holiday food and alcohol. But the trade is SO worth it. Not everyone has gotten through all the pain by the time they get here. They may come to Bright Line Eating and still have a painful journey ahead of them, to get them to the place where they are convinced that it is worth it to put their food addiction in remission. So I have some suggestions for Kim. First, realize that nothing may be out of place. You may be on your path, doing your research and work while you’re in the program. Some people get here, and they’re ready to go. Others need to work at it before they’re convinced it’s the right path. Look at each of your Day Ones as getting you closer to your goal. There’s a study that was done that showed that the average smoker tried to quit thirty times before it stuck. You can think of the first 29 times as failures—or you can say those failures brought them closer to the place where they could quit. Each of your “day ones” may be getting you closer to where you need to be. Next, when I was in Australia, I did something different that “stuck.” My life was out of whack because I was bingeing my brains out and having day one after day one and I hired a life coach. At our first session, he gave me some homework and I said I couldn’t do it because I was doing pretty much nothing but binging and recovering from binging. He told me that my first assignment, then, was to get my food sorted out. Something about him holding me accountable, in addition to my sponsor, that extra layer of accountability, worked. So I would ask you: what extra support or accountability can you give yourself? Another thing that strikes me is that your behavior seems to indicate a diet mentality. Have you truly admitted that it’s a food addiction issue or are you denying that in some way? Addiction doesn’t like being treated. So my question is: have you just been doing a diet, rather than committing to the program? Maybe these are not really “day ones.” In other words, perhaps you need to redefine what it means to try Bright Line Eating. Have you truly committed? Did you back off of other commitments, so you could focus on the Boot Camp? Did you get a buddy? Did you call in for coaching? Perhaps you need to admit that you have a food addiction that is stronger than your attempts to handle it. And here’s another thing I’m curious about: are there parts of you that haven’t wanted this? That are pushing back on it? If so, that’s okay. In Boot Camp 2.0, we make available to you the Break Through Your Resistance Roadmap, which gives you tools to address the parts of you that are resistant to treatment. This is not a diet, Kim. It’s a program of recovery. It’s a new way of life. So have you really tried? How many true day ones have you really had? May every day one be put to good use. And every break turn into a breakthrough. I would love to offer to you what I have now, which is so precious. But before you accept it, know that it comes with a lot of pain, a lot of research, and a lot of day ones before you surrender to what works. You’re not alone. This is just what the path looks like. On January 1, Boot Camp starts. Carve out space for it. Come on in. I promise it will be worth it. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/TJEKfS Day One, Again and Again | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I was writing in my five-year journal recently and noticed that I started my entry with, “it was a super-sweet day.” I’ve been writing the same thing for a while. The thought came to me then that this has been the happiest year of my life. That’s a bold thought—but I checked and double checked, and it’s true. And in this vlog, I want to share what made it so, because so many of us are striving for happiness. I came into the year shiny Bright and doing well, and all I wanted through the year was to be steady with that. That was my word for the year: STEADY. Steadiness doesn’t come naturally to me, but I have been this year. My food has been super Bright. That was also the case in my thirties, but I had other challenges, including two premature twin babies. In my forties, Bright Line was born, and it was a huge success, but it was also a whirlwind and a challenge. So I’m pretty confident that this is the happiest year of my life. It's not just that my food is Bright. My habits have been dialed in, including a new layer I added recently: I’m taking a low dose of hormone replacement therapy (some bioidentical estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone). It helps. I’ve always struggled with depression and high/low moods. This routine of hormone supplementation helps me feel way more even keeled, punctuated with moments of great joy. Other than that, what made this the happiest year? I have three stories I want to tell you that have deep lessons. All three have to do with relationships. I am in service again in a way that’s making a difference—peer-to-peer, volunteer service—sponsoring in twelve-step programs. I’ve been so busy with Bright Line that I stopped doing this. An old friend urged me to get back to it, so I did. Volunteer service, heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul, is so good for me. In fact, I talk to one of my sponsees who lives overseas at 5:15 am and while I talk to her I use my light box. That structure has given me an uptick in my well-being, which I attribute to the human interaction, the biology of light, and the structure. That’s the first lesson: peer-to-peer support matters. So if you can do peer-to-peer support in Bright Line Eating, (being a guide, leading a Gideon Games team, etc.) no matter where you are on your own Bright journey, I recommend it. Here's what that could look like, even if you’re not Bright yourself right now. Step 1: GET BRIGHT. Get two weeks of Bright Days strung together, and then post in the online community: “I just got TWO WEEKS of Bright Days, after struggling for a long time, and now I want to help you! Do you need a guide to help you Rezoom and get your first two weeks under your belt? I can share my experience with you.” Boom. Service. The second lesson is this: you don’t have to take out the trash; you can compost just about anything with love. I found this out when one of my primary relationships was ruptured. We tried to get back to each other and couldn’t. And then—probably because we both were praying very deeply—we just tentatively reconnected. Since that day, every single interaction has been off-the-charts loving. No reflection on our past disagreement. Just love. It was like our rupture was a garbage-filled backyard, and I thought we needed to clear away the trash before we could plant flowers. But instead, we took bags of love-soil and poured it on top. And soon we were able to plant flowers in the love-soil, and I realized that all that trash would just compost underneath. I think I was arrogant in thinking that everything needs to be worked through. The final lesson is that it is never too late to reinvent yourself and dramatically revise a story you’ve been telling about yourself for a long time. My motherhood journey has been a hard one from the beginning. When Bright Line Eating was born and I was saddled with massive working-mom guilt, I worried that my kids weren’t getting the best of me. But that’s shifted this year. My kids are older now, and their needs are a better match for my skills. So I started showing up a lot more for my kids, and I crafted, sometime mid-year, what I called my Four Pillars of Joy: A thriving marriage Micro-moments of love with my kids Joy in manifesting Bright Line Eating’s vision A strong, healthy body One of my kiddos was not showing up for class, and I took away her cell phone. When she was protesting afterward, I wasn’t frustrated, nor did I think that I was a terrible mother (even though she was telling me I was)—and in that moment, I saw how much my inner narrative had changed. The next morning, I had a card under my door from one of my other kids. It was filled with love and affirmation. That card is a result of my changing the narrative of my motherhood journey. So if your lines haven’t been Bright; if you’ve struggled with your relationships, your appearance, or your food, it’s not too late to change. My narrative changed because I took action, and started investing in micro-moments of love with my kids. It’s been the happiest year of my life. My word for 2024 is JOY. I’m going to keep focusing on my four pillars of joy. And 2024 will have a lot of anniversaries. David and I will celebrate 25 years of marriage. I will turn 50. And Bright Line Eating will celebrate all its ten-year anniversaries: January 26 is the anniversary of the meditation where the universe told me to “Write a book called Bright Line Eating.” August 5 is the anniversary of the BLE email list and hence the entire BLE movement. September 9 is the anniversary of the Bright Line Eating Solutions, LLC entity. And October 24 is the anniversary of the Boot Camp. My New Year’s resolution is to keep on doing what I’m doing now. Writing in my journal. Focusing on my four pillars. Writing down my food, committing it, and eating only and exactly that. Being of service. Keeping my food simple, so I can be fulfilled, nourished, and happy. It’s the right formula for me. It’s what makes me happy. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/ggotPkThe Happiest Year of my Life | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

*Applications for a Boot Camp 2.0 scholarship are now closed. We don’t talk about exercise a lot on the vlog, because Bright Line Eating is mostly about what and how you eat. But many people think they need to be more active when they’re trying to lose weight. The science indicates otherwise. Consider the phrase “calories in, calories out.” There are flaws to this idea: your body is not just a step counter that totals up your activities to determine weight loss. It’s a very responsive, intelligent machine, and it accommodates and morphs based on what you do. There’s a whole body of research funded by large food corporations that says that it’s not the sugar or ultra-processed foods we’re eating that are making us gain weight, it’s the lack of movement. But exercise won’t make you thin. There was a study where they took hundreds of sedentary, overweight women and separated them into groups: one stayed sedentary (that was the control group), and the other groups did varying levels of exercise, supervised by a trainer. At the end of this long study, everyone weighed the same, regardless of how much they exercised. And let’s look at the research of a man named Herman Pontzer. He’s an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University. He wondered about activity levels and caloric output in hunter-gatherer tribes vs. sedentary individuals in the Western world. When Pontzer went to the Hadza people in northern Tanzania, one of the last true hunter-gatherer societies, he measured their metabolisms very accurately, at a molecular level, using so-called “heavy water.” What he found was that they weren’t expending any more calories than those sitting at desk jobs in the U.S. What the body does when we’re extra active is that it compensates by burning less for the rest of the time. It shifts you into low gear so that you don’t burn more calories than you would if you were at a desk job. People around the world burn 2,000-3,000 calories a day, no matter what they do. This makes sense. If you think about the times when food is most scarce, the body is trying to keep us alive, so it makes sense that it would downshift and steal calories from other systems to survive. So you might think you could exercise and add the number of calories burned to your baseline, but it doesn’t work that way. This is built into Bright Line Eating. Our take on exercise is nuanced. The diet bashers think we’re against exercise. Tell that to my personal trainer! We’re not against exercise. Here’s where we stand: The science is clear that exercise is one of the best ways to improve your longevity, your health, your cardiovascular fitness, your bone density, your sex drive, your self-esteem. It’s good for just about everything but losing weight. We’ve learned from hard data that people who insist on exercising at the beginning of their Bright Line experience are the least successful. Exercise makes you hungrier, and causes a compensation effect where you justify eating more. And weight loss causes a dip in energy, making exercise at the beginning extra willpower depleting. If you don’t have a standard exercise regimen, it’s not in your best interests to start one in the first few months of your Bright Transformation. Go easy on the exercise, and make sure you’ve got enough in your tank to get the food right. Getting the food right is what will ensure the success of your whole Bright transformation. Food is the driver, not exercise. The beauty of divorcing exercise from food consumption is that when you get to maintenance, if your weight creeps up, your first thought isn’t to hit the gym, it’s to look at your food intake and see if you’re continuing to make Bright choices there. Exercise is in a separate category altogether. You do it for your health, for joy, for flexibility, and for strength, and it’s not part of your weight management plan. So if you have an exercise regimen, and it’s not addictive, keep it up. But easy does it for about the first four months or so of your Bright Line transformation. Once your food is truly automatic, if you still have weight to lose, or if you’ve already transitioned to maintenance, then start exercising. You’ve got to handle your food first, then find out what brings you joy in terms of movement. Before I sign off, I want to let you know that we have a scholarship opportunity for Boot Camp coming. As of today, December 13, 2023, scholarship applications are open, and they close on December 17. Then Boot Camp registration begins on December 31, and the Boot Camp begins on January 6, 2024. So if you’d like a scholarship, we have ten full ones available. Now’s the time to apply. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/lQxpog Why You Can’t “Burn Off” Calories | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Click here to donate. I’d like to share an opportunity for our community to do so much good in this world. Right now, we can change the course of history. On my next birthday, I’ll be 50, and perhaps because this big milestone birthday is coming up, I’ve been thinking about my legacy. I have two things I want to do before I die. First, I want Bright Line Eating to outlive me, so that it will continue to help generations of people after I pass. Second, I want to help get food addiction listed as an official disease in the DSM and ICD, the two reference manuals that are used to classify diseases and conditions. And you can help me with this effort. Food addiction is not yet recognized anywhere as an official diagnosis. There are two places where that needs to happen. First is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), primarily used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and healthcare professionals in the U.S. and Australia. It’s research-based and very specific, listing the symptoms you need to be diagnosed with a disorder. Second is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), used globally and created by the World Health Organization (WHO). It’s much older than the DSM and more comprehensive. It includes both mental and physical disorders. Its categories are broader and not as specific. It’s frequently used for diagnosis, whereas the DSM is often used by those doing research. Food addiction needs to be added to both. In 2021, a group submitted a proposal to list food addiction in the ICD. The proposal was rejected with a thoughtful and comprehensive written response. The committee from the WHO felt that food addiction fit into the existing categories and that there wasn’t enough evidence to make the change. Since then, a coalition has developed to build consensus among the experts who understand food addiction. We want to answer questions like: is this really a disorder? Do we have the evidence, or is evidence in some areas lacking? What should it be called—food addiction, eating addiction, processed food addiction, ultra-processed food addiction? Could it potentially fit into one of the ICD’s current categories on eating issues, obesity, and/or eating disorders, or is a new category warranted? These experts are starting to gather in small groups to hash this out and form a consensus. On May 17, 2024, there will be a conference in London to make the international consensus public. Prior to the conference, the experts will gather in two groups to tackle two major projects: design studies to fill any research gaps and resubmit to the ICD with our consensus. The work has already started. I’m in one of the working groups and have met people from all over the world so that we can answer the questions. I'll be in London for the conference, and I’ve been asked to speak at it. All of this takes money. We have some, but not enough. Raising money for important causes isn’t new for the Bright Line community. In 2017 and 2018, I put out a call to raise money for Charity: Water. You responded. Many of you still give monthly—myself included. So far, our Bright Line Eating community has raised more than $1 million, which means thousands of people around the world now have clean drinking water because of our generosity. In 2019, we raised money to write test bank questions about nutrition that would be used by medical schools. We raised $200,000 in two days. That means nutrition is now being taught in medical schools where it wasn’t taught before. So this isn’t a new thing for us. And it’s an amazing opportunity. We only need $36,000. Click below to see the giving page. It’s in pounds because this is a global initiative, hosted in the U.K. Just this morning, I pondered my own giving. I don’t have much money on my own, separate from my family’s finances, but I gave £2,000—about $2,500. My reasoning? I don’t get to make history very often. And if I’m going to ask people to give sacrificially, I need to step up to the plate myself. History is right here for the making. Here’s what’s at stake—if we can get food addiction listed in these manuals, we’ll have treatments for people with this disorder. We’ll have health insurance coverage. We’ll get programs like Bright Line Eating covered by insurance. We’ll have inpatient treatment centers. We’ll get funding for research. All this will help us move the needle on the obesity pandemic. If we can show that processed foods are addictive, you’ll start to see policy changes—changes in what can be advertised, for example, to young children. In our lifetime, we could change how people think about food. It would do so much good in the world. That’s why I’m giving. That’s why I’ll be in London—and yes, it will be live-streamed, so you can watch it from home. We can do this. Be one of our supporters. I know many of you, and can’t wait to see who joins us. No matter how large or small your gift, it matters. We can make a meaningful difference in the world’s trajectory. Click below and join me. Click here to donate. FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/xLP0Xx Let's Get Food Addiction RECOGNIZED | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast