Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. So I have frozen shoulder. It's such a bummer. My right shoulder, and right-handed, is so jacked up, and I've had issues actually with my right shoulder for about three and a half years now. But it was shoulder impingement, which just means that my rotator cuff muscles are kind of weak and my shoulder was sloshing around there, and sometimes it would get impinged, caught in the structures of the shoulder and wasn't great. And I was doing physical therapy for a long time.
And then in December, this past December, it just got a lot worse. And now my doctor is saying, "You have frozen shoulder." Frozen shoulder comes on gradually, it tends to affect women more than men. It tends to affect people in their 40s to 60s. It tends to affect people with an autoimmune condition like Hashimoto Hypothyroiditis, which I have.
It tends to affect people who have had vaccines in their right shoulder, in that shoulder, which I've had a bunch of, not just COVID vaccines, but also I was going to go to Ethiopia in 2019, and I had a bunch of vaccinations for that trip. A lot of them in my right shoulder. Anyway, apparently I'm like a sitting duck for this condition, and I have frozen shoulder, which means I can't move it very well. It's painful when I sleep. It's painful when I do stuff. It's terrible.
So I wanted to shoot this vlog about something that's come up for me as I look at ways to address this, and my doctor's given me a range of suggestions. I'm going to go get a second opinion and learn more. Of course, I'm going online to learn about this, but one of the things that I'm aware of is fasting is really good to reduce inflammation. It's good for autoimmune conditions. It's just good in general.
And this reminds me of a situation that a lot of us, maybe all of us are in, when we think about healthy options food-wise, right? And we get these suggestions from other people too, or from online articles that we read. Oh, cacao is a superfood. It's super healthy. Kombucha is super healthy. Sourdough bread is super healthy, it's low glycemic, and the enzymes and stuff are good for gut bacteria, blah, blah, blah. Fasting is super healthy. So as you probably know, I'm a 10, we call it a 10+++ on the food addiction Susceptibility Scale.
I've been gloriously Bright for a nice long stretch now. My weight is where I like it to be, right in that sweet spot of what's healthiest for me. I'm not overeating. I'm not eating addictive or unhealthy foods. My food is really dialed in. And when I look at changing the way I eat to make it more healthy for whatever condition I've got, or just to optimize my wellness, I've got to consider my food addiction. I've got to consider how it's going to affect my brain. I've got to consider how it's going to affect my automaticity.
So I've done some water fasts in the past, and what I found was the water fasting itself was relatively easy. It's hard for the first day and a half or so because of hunger, but then when you stop eating after about a day and a half, it's amazing this state of just not caring about food that the body gets into.
I've done a three-day water fast and a 10-day water fast. I found them both to be relatively easy, but here's what wasn't that easy. The refeeding part, what I found is that this hungry food monster kicks in and wants to gobble up more and more and more in large part to recapture a lot of those lost calories. And that can be very hard, especially for a quantities addicts like myself. That driving physiological force to gobble up a lot more food can be very hard to manage.
Kombucha, it's—well, we don't tend to drink our calories in Bright Line Eating— and it's made with a ton of sugar. And of course, the theory is that those bacteria eat up the sugar, but why not just eat tempeh, fermented soybeans or fermented vegetables, pickled sauerkraut, or something like that? Why the kombucha? Right?
Cacao, it's like, well, yeah, cacao definitely has some compounds in it that are healthy, but chocolate is also, depending on which study you look at, the number one or the number two most addictive food known to humanity. And why eat something that's going to have a flavor reminder of that powerfully addictive food? And don't even get me started on sourdough bread.
So here's what I try to remind myself of. When I stay grounded solidly in the perspective that what I need to do for my health, for my wellbeing, is to stay completely and utterly solid in my Bright Lines, and from that place of a solid foundation, do whatever I can that won't throw me off track with my food addiction recovery journey, however, I can optimize my wellness. So for example, eating sauerkraut or tempeh, right? Eating more steamed greens, just optimizing my health, absolutely.
From that place of that solid foundation, anything I'm going to do that's going to throw me off of my solid foundation is dangerous and tricky and needs to be evaluated very carefully because there's no sense on a journey of trying to optimize wellness, doing anything that's going to result in me starting to overeat. Because let's all be super clear, overeating is super unhealthy. Chronically overeating is outrageously unhealthy and going back to sugar and flour are a health nightmare, right?
I mean, obviously anything that might lead to me eating a pint of ice cream every night is not going to be good for my long-term health and wellness. So I've got to prioritize my food addiction recovery, my Bright Lines. And so what does that mean in terms of fasting to help my shoulder? The answer right now for me is, I don't know.
I'm still thinking about it. I had the idea quite a while ago, and I'm just still thinking about it. And I will not make a decision or proceed until I am certain that I could proceed without disrupting my Bright Lines because my Bright Lines come first. Because that's the kind of brain I have. And I have to remember that my friends, my healthcare practitioners, my doctors, none of them will protect my Bright Lines for me. None of them understand what it is to have a brain like mine when it comes to food.
None of them understand the consequences of being thrown off track even a little bit in terms of my Bright Lines. And so it's my job and my job alone to take all of the suggestions and information out there and filter it through the perspective of, yeah but what will this do for my automaticity with my Bright Lines? And if it's going to throw that off, I've got to be very careful.
So yeah, I just wanted to offer that because we're not living in a world where people understand the pull of addictive foods and what those of us who are very susceptible to that pull have to deal with to stay healthy.
And that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
