Hey there. It's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh my gosh, yeah. So I'm in a new location. This is my living room. And I'm here because I'm shooting the all new, brand new from scratch, Food Freedom videos.
And do you know, I haven't shot the Food Freedom videos from scratch, redone them completely from the ground up, since 2015? Is that ridiculous? It's been over eight years. Yeah, that's crazy. But I just finished video three. I'm super excited. You'll get to see them end of May, early June they'll get released. Excited about that.
I'll be telling you more about that soon. But anyway, I have a topic to discuss with you today, that came up yesterday. I had a group of Bright Lifers over to my house to capture some video footage of their Bright Transformations. And Dr. Betty Rabinowitz came.
Now, I first met her in the berry section of Pittsford Wegmans, my local grocery store, maybe last year. She came up to me, she said, "Susan Peirce Thompson." She said, "I knew I would run into you one day here at this grocery store." And she just said thank you with so much passion, and gratitude, and love pouring out of her eyes and beaming at me. She had a mask on, so I couldn't fully see her.
And it was so moving. I mean, really, it carried me for days, the feeling of her gratitude pouring into me. And so when she showed up at my house, she said, "This is me from the berry section." And I said, "I remember you!"
So Dr. Betty Rabinowitz was a physician at the University of Rochester for her career. And she mentioned a concept yesterday over lunch as we were sharing a meal together that kind of blew my mind, and I think you're going to love it. And I think it's going to become really embedded in the fabric of how we talk about this certain element of Bright Line Eating. I cannot wait to introduce you to this. So thank you, Betty, for this concept. So here we go.
In Bright Line Eating, we talk about chatter. Mental chatter. And I have this kind of riff that I always do to describe the chatter. And it goes like this. It's like when you're thinking about what you've eaten or not eaten, whether you're on your plan or off your plan, how many miles, how many calories, how many pounds, right? That's the chatter.
And Betty said, "The chatter isn't just food chatter." She said, "There's food chatter, and there's scale chatter." So there's the chatter about the food. Have I eaten enough? Have I eaten too much? Am I on my plan? Am I off my plan? Can I eat now, can I eat later? Maybe it's time to eat now. Can I eat now? How about now? How about now? How about more?
Ugh, the food chatter, right? Or sometimes the food chatter will kick up after a restaurant meal. Does this ever happen to you, where you're not sure if you ate brightly in that restaurant, and then suddenly your head is all filled with the food. With the restaurant meal, and the choices you made. And you did this, and you should have done that, and oh my gosh.
But then there's scale chatter. Now at lunch yesterday I told Betty, "I think it's weight chatter." And I was thinking about it more, and I was like, no, she's right. It's scale chatter. It's not just weight chatter. Because if I measure my waist, as opposed to stepping on the scale, I don't have the same chatter. It's the number on the scale that does a number in our head, and creates this chatter.
And the elements of scale chatter are really corrosive. I mean, any kind of chatter is insidious. And really, the whole purpose, frankly, of Bright Line Eating is to eliminate the chatter. This is the freedom that we talk about, right? Freedom is freedom from chatter.
But scale chatter is different, in that it robs us of the ultimate feeling of success in Bright Line Eating. Because to really succeed around here, you need to land. You need to arrive. You need to solve the food and weight problem.
And yes, it's true that when we're monkeying with our food, we're robbed of that success as well. Because we still have the food chatter. But when we have the scale chatter, what happens is, it causes us to overly-fixate on the last little bit of weight that we think we have left to lose. And it causes us to forget about, temporarily, all of the weight that we've lost so far. And magnify this little bit of weight that's bothering us.
I had a person I was coaching on the accountability call the other day. She had lost some enormous amount of weight, I think it was like 140 pounds. Forgive me, Bright Lifers community, if I'm getting that number wrong.
But I got so much feedback after that coaching session, of how powerful it was. Because basically, I schooled her pretty good that I wanted her to feel successful. And I said, no fair taking this massive weight loss and not framing your Bright Journey as a success because of these last 10 pounds! Really, no fair. No fair to you, no fair to the Bright Line Eating community, to the Bright Line Eating movement. No fair.
And yeah, people felt like it was so powerful to be reminded of how we need to feel successful about what we do around here. And the scale chatter keeps us from feeling successful. But it's so interesting that it's the number on the scale, I'm going to say something weird, in the units that we think of.
If you think in kilos and you convert it to stones or to pounds, it doesn't have the same effect. I literally can't even remember now what my goal weight is in kilos. I lived in Australia for two years, and I learned how to translate it into kilos in my mind. But now I don't even remember. There's something about that number that doesn't have the pull on me.
The measurement around the waist, it doesn't have the pull on me. What is wired into my brain are the numbers 115, 125. I mean, I'm short, so those are the numbers that have this huge pull on me.
So scale chatter. If we don't let go of the scale chatter, find a way to get out of the scale chatter, to get out of the comparison mode that it puts us in.
This is why I hate to even say my numbers like that. Because then if there's someone else who's 5'3" and they're in the 130s, which is perfectly reasonable and a healthy BMI. And depending on your frame, I mean, I'm small-boned and pretty slight. I mean, you should see my mom. She's like a hundred pounds soaking wet, right?
I'm slight. So someone else could be in their Bright Body at this height and 130 pounds. Then I say my numbers, and I kick up scale chatter just through my vlog in this person's mind. Because now they're comparing, and they're thinking about my number, and their number, and maybe they should be lower. Oh, God bless us. God bless us.
So food chatter and scale chatter. And part of the identity that we need to adopt in Bright Line Eating is the identity of someone who has arrived. The identity of someone who has solved the food and the weight problem, and let go of the food and the scale chatter.
So I'm going to just kick this concept out to you in the Vlog. I want you to run with it. And I think you're going to come back to me with all these ways that scale chatter is different than food chatter, ways that it impacts you. I'm so curious how this concept is going to benefit you.
And yeah, thank you Betty Rabinowitz for the amazing, amazing insight. Oof, I love our community. Yes!
That's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
