Hey there. It's Susan Pierce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I'm going to say a bold thing. If I were getting the opportunity to talk with someone that I knew was about to start Bright Line Eating and I could offer them just one piece of advice to guide their whole Bright Journey, today's vlog topic is what I would say.
I would tell them to decide right up front to pledge, to commit, to orient themselves toward becoming a Maintenance Maestro, which is the term we use in Bright Line Eating for someone who commits to learning all about Maintenance and doing Maintenance right, mastering Maintenance. And the reason is that I think that when people start Bright Line Eating, they are already oriented toward figuring out the basics. They want to learn how to do the food plan. They want to get the weight off. That's usually their motivation. And so I don't need to convince people to focus right up front.
But what happens is people get into a groove with doing Bright Line Eating the weight-loss way, and their weight's melting off, and I feel like the time that they most need to refocus is often when they have the overconfidence bias, and they think they've got this now, and they lose some of their focus. And that's as they're transitioning from weight loss into Maintenance. And I think that resolving to do Maintenance well, understanding that Maintenance is a thing, it is a thing...
There is a body now of information in Bright Line Eating about how to do Maintenance well. We have spent the last year or two absolutely pimping out our offerings on Maintenance. They're incredible. They cover it from beginning to end, from the psychology leading up to Maintenance, like how do you need to orient yourself to become someone who's going to transition to Maintenance well, all the way to exactly what are the nuts and bolts of figuring out your goal weight range, adding food, which is quite an art and a science to land the plane at Maintenance. And then what it takes to settle in. How some people, their weight keeps drifting down for a while and all that.
And then everything about what it is to live at Maintenance long term, all the different psychological changes that go into that, all the new life that opens up for you. Maintenance is a thing. There's a whole body of work around it of how to do it well. And if you start your journey knowing you want to do that, you want to be one of those people who becomes a Maintenance Maestro who takes Maintenance seriously, then it's kind of like, "Well, yeah, the weight-loss phase is great, and sure, it's exciting to have the scale going down. That's all fabulous. But if you know I'm really going to be someone who takes Maintenance seriously."
Here's what that involves: it involves studying up on it and taking it seriously. It involves resolving to be someone who's going to just follow the Maintenance plan, just follow the plan around how to do Maintenance, which means you're not going to be one of these people that refuses to add food. That just gets so attached to the weight-loss way that you don't make any adds, and then you end up in this place that we call "Maintenance by exception," where you're breaking your Bright Lines because your body needs more food. It's burned off all its fat already, and it needs more food, but you won't give it any more food. So your brain forces you to eat more food. That's Maintenance by exception. You're making exceptions to your plan and you're transitioning to Maintenance defacto by breaking your Bright Lines and getting more food that way. That's terrible.
You're going to become someone who follows the Maintenance regimen, which means adding food to the plan in a structured way. So you're still writing down your food and eating only in exactly that, and you're now adding more food to the plan. So you're studying up on it and reading all about it. You're doing it by the book. You're really following the way we transition to Maintenance in Bright Line Eating.
And you're talking to all kinds of people who've been successful in Maintenance, in Bright Line Eating because things will crop up. You'll have questions. You'll be going through something and you'll wonder, "Do other people go through this too?" And you'll float it out to the community and you'll get tons of reassuring, wise, seasoned responses from people who've been on the path before you. You'll get their help and support. It will make such a difference.
So those are basically the elements of becoming a Maintenance Maestro. We have so much support for you. But yeah, I think that if someone were starting Bright Line Eating for the first time or returning to Bright Line Eating and they wanted to hear my one piece of advice, it would be resolve right up front to become a Maintenance Maestro. And I'm so grateful that we have the support for you now to do that in a really structured way in our membership.
So that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
