Register for International Food Addiction Consensus Conference: https://ble.life/2y1CSM
Register for Ador@BLE: https://ble.life/X3atIE
Donate to the International Food Addiction Consensus project: https://ble.life/75Ucqf

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.