A Bright Lifer named Katharine sent us an observation: She was telling her Mastermind group how her Bright Lines have gotten wobbly now that she’s in Maintenance. Someone else said that she experienced the same thing during PECS. Maybe, they thought, the wobbly feelings actually were PECS.

So what is PECS? It’s an acronym for Post-Event Collapse Syndrome. We identified this when we observed that people were as likely to break their Bright Lines on the day after Thanksgiving as they were on the holiday itself. 

What happens is that they endure Thanksgiving and work very hard to maintain their Bright Lines—and their brain gets depleted. The day after, their brains are suddenly telling them, I made it through, I deserve some food. 

We train people to expect PECS. After a holiday. After a trip. After a big emotional event. When you expect it, you can plan for it and guard yourself against it. 

Katharine, I suggest that your group check out the course Maintenance II. Maintenance II is a whole course about “landing the plane” and transitioning from the weight loss phase to the Maintenance phase of your Bright Journey. And, in the fourth module, there’s a video on PECS.

Every diet I know of has some version of the idea that after you lose weight, you can go back to eating as you did formerly. But we don’t do that in Bright Line Eating, because it doesn’t work and Bright Line Eating isn’t a diet.

So how do we avoid having our Maintenance transition be one big experience of PECS? The solution is planning and preparation.

For Bright Lifers, our three courses on Maintenance—Maintenance I, Maintenance II, and Maintenance III—are that planning and preparation. Maintenance I is designed to inoculate you against that way of seeing the journey. That’s why I want people to take that course as soon as possible after the Boot Camp. 

Maintenance II is all about landing the plane. Maintenance III helps you right as you’ve landed the plane in Maintenance. You don’t need to focus on weight loss because that problem is solved. Maintenance III dives into that: how do we handle Maintenance, how do we make our life about life? 

I think people don’t take Maintenance seriously enough, but I believe the Maintenance courses are the antidote to this. Doing them in a group is even better. 

If you want to succeed and not just have Bright Line Eating turn into another diet, then address the Maintenance challenge as if it was potentially PECS. If you’re not prepared, then get prepared. Do your homework, get fortified, and face it with all the planning and preparation we offer. You can stick the landing!