Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to The Weekly Vlog. Oh, I have a fun story to tell today. A miracle has happened. I can't wait to tell you about it. Okay. First, some history. We used to put on live events at Bright Line Eating(r) once a year. We called it the Family Reunion. It was a big coming together of beloved people. People would meet their Mastermind Group members there, their Gideon Games team members there. They would meet buddies there for the first time. I would do a long line and just hug everybody and take pictures with them and sign their books, and it was so fun. We did it in San Diego each year at Paradise Point. We did the first one in 2016. We did it again in 2017, again in 2018. Again, in 2019. We had a contract to host the event in 2020, and I think you know what happened that year, and we even had a contract for 2021 and once again, and we've never hosted a conference since. And the reality is that even by 2019, we were starting to rethink it a little bit, although it was such a labor of love. We just loved putting on those conferences. The Bright Line Eating Team, especially, loved meeting you, loved meeting you. There was something about getting to hug and see the sparkle in the eyes of someone that we've been helping to live Bright all this time. It just was so nourishing for everyone, and we loved seeing you meet each other. It was so brilliant. But we'd already come to realize that it just didn't make sense to hold these conferences. For one thing, we hosted all the food, and by the time you bought your plane tickets and your hotel room and paid the fee for the conference, you were spending a lot of money and we were breaking even, or maybe even not quite breaking even on the event.
But when you factored in the fact that it took us three months to plan the event, to put it all on, and really it was most of what I was working on for about three months because I would be on stage every day for a lot of the day, and each year I would come up with a theme and I would put together brand new fresh science talks for those conferences. I mean, you can access, if you're a Bright Line Eating member, the Science Bundle, which you have access to in your courses in the Hub has a lot of the recordings of the lectures that I gave and putting on a lecture. When you're a professor and there's a textbook and there's a curriculum and the content that you're going to be delivering, you just need to convey it in a way that's interesting and compelling or whatever. That's one thing. I would create these themes and then a bunch of sub lectures from scratch, and I would have to go learn a whole new branch of science or some sort of area or develop some new area of expertise and then teach it. It was so much work, and it was really all I did for about three months was prepare for the family reunion each year, and when we learned year after year that we would lose a little bit of money or break even on it, and then we were like, oh, and that's kind of what we all work on for three months. It was like the worst business...well, it wasn't the worst business decision we ever made, but it was up there. It didn't make any sense financially. We kept doing it because we just loved it. That's our main motivation around here in Bright Line Eating. That's our main value. But when Covid came and kiboshed the family reunion, we knew pretty well we're not going to go back to hosting those events. It just doesn't make sense. And we miss it. We really, really miss it, and you miss it. We hear from a lot of you that you miss it and the staff misses it. Everybody misses it.
The miracle that's happened is that there's an opportunity that's come up and there have been opportunities for me to speak at Utah's Brightest, Minnesota's Brightest. I get invited to come do live things, and I turn them down. The reason I turn them down is there's a little bit of not wanting to play favorites. If I do it for one, I feel like I need to do it for others. But really, that's not the reason. The reason I turn them down is that my kids are about to fly the coop. My kids are teenagers now, and I am not willing to put any extra trips on my calendar that aren't family related or absolutely necessary, and I'm just not willing to, in five years ask me again. I may be willing to, but right now I got to be with my kids. Tick tock. Tick tock. As a mom, it's really poignant and alive in my mind is that my kids are about to be grown and they're only going to be kids for so much longer.
I'm just not willing to do any ancillary travel right now, but something has just come up that does not feel ancillary. It feels central, absolutely central to my purpose as a human being and a professional here on Planet Earth. It's the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference in London, May 17th. This is a conference where food addiction professionals, both clinicians, academicians, researchers from around the world are going to gather to present to the media, to the public, and to the people present in the room and on livestream, our consensus statement on food addiction as a legitimate, bona fide, absolutely real, and true condition, a disease, a diagnosis. We have thought it through for months. We've been deliberating and working together and working, shopping this consensus statement. It's powerful. It's needed. It's going to change the world. What's going to happen is either this time or next time or next time, but in due course, the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organization, will accept food addiction as a legitimate diagnosis. Then the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, will accept it as well. What will happen is that policy will need to change because you can't advertise addictive substances. If ultra-processed foods are addictive substances, you can't advertise them to kids. Bariatric centers will start to screen for food addiction before just recommending surgery. Food addiction treatment will become commonplace like drug and alcohol treatment. The whole world will change. The whole world will change based on this. And this consensus statement is the beginning of that.
This day of releasing this statement, I will be there in person. So will Chris Van Tulleken, who is the author of the book that last week's vlog was about ultra-processed people. He's one of the keynote speakers. So will Robert Lustig. Did you ever see his YouTube video? Millions of people did on sugar, one of the very, very first people to sound the alarm that sugar is this deadly killer amongst us. Vera Tarman will be there speaking. She is the author of Food Junkies and the Food Junkies podcast, an academic, a recovering food addict herself and someone who is right at the forefront of advocating for food addiction policy change. There will be a lot, and I'll be speaking there as well. This is the I-F-A-C-C, the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference. It's one day. It's a Friday, May 17th, right in the heart of London. There are still somewhere between 150 and 200 tickets available for people to be live in the room. They're live streaming it. You can watch this on live stream, you can participate in that, and there's a link below if you want to buy tickets for live or the live stream.
What happened when this conference happened, and I knew I was going to be coming to London, is right around that time, I was in extra touch with Bright Lifers in London as well, Sue Smith among them, just a big shout out to Sue Smith. All she does for our community, she's a brilliant Bright Lifer(tm). She's maintaining something like a 90-pound weight loss or something like that with Bright Line Eating. She's been in her Bright body, now, I'm going to mess up her numbers, I haven't memorized them lately, but something like for six or seven years. She's been around for a long time in our community, and she organizes a morning daily accountability call for people in Europe because the call times for the ones we host in the United States are not ideal for people living in Europe, obviously. She's got a whole group of people in Europe who hop on these Zoom calls with her. I was in touch with her because we did a little vlog about ON THIS BRIGHT DAY, and a group of people from Europe were featured in that vlog. I was saying that I was coming to London in May. You know what they did? Sue and the rest of the Bright Lifers in London and in the UK, they organized a conference and it's happening just like it used to in San Diego with meals included beautiful bright meals, absolutely every attention to detail poured into those meals with love so that you can just pay your one fee. It covers your hotel and your meals. You can attend a conference. This is for Saturday and Sunday. There'll be a little registration period for Friday night as well if you want. Then Saturday and Sunday, the 18th and 19th, I'll be speaking Saturday afternoon, and then most or maybe all of Sunday morning at the conference. I can't wait. It's going to be so fun to be back on stage again. Live with a bunch of Bright Lifers. So good.
The topic of the conference is so cute, it's Adore@BLE, spelled this way. Adore@BLE at the sign, right? Like you have an email address, Adore@BLE, meaning how do we love and adore ourselves in Bright Line Eating? How do we love and adore our bodies in Bright Line Eating? How do we love and adore our lives in Bright Line Eating? How do we adore and love every minute of this brilliant, Bright Life we were gifted with?
Glennys Roberts, who is an international expert in self-compassion, a lecturer in self-compassion from Wales, and oh, by the way, is a Bright Lifer who, oh, by the way is maintaining, I'm looking at her pictures, and it must be almost a 200-pound weight loss. I mean, seriously, seriously, an incredible weight loss. Maybe it's 150 pounds, 180 pounds, maybe 200 pounds. Check out her pictures when you meet her in Wales or in London. Unbelievable weight loss. She is an expert in self-compassion. She'll be lecturing on Saturday morning. There'll be breakout rooms, there'll be time to meet people, there'll be time to connect. This is going to be in London as well. It's the one-two punch of you can go to both Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday, there's links to register down below for both.
I just want to speak a word about the fact that this vlog today, I don't think this is a coincidence, is coming out on Valentine's Day. We often think of Valentine's Day as a couple's day that love is about romantic love, and that if you don't have a partner in your life, you're sad on Valentine's Day because the day isn't for you and it's passing you by. I just want to say in Bright Line Eating, we flip that around. Love is our number one value. On Valentine's Day, you can give yourself a really, really big gift to get yourself live in a room with people doing Bright Line Eating with people, experiencing historic declaration together, the international consensus revealing that food addiction is real, that some of us are really, really susceptible to it, and that our lives change when we adopt Bright Lines. By getting yourself in the room there to experience that historic moment and then coming across to the hotel where the Adore@BLE conference is going to happen, you can learn to adore yourself to shower on yourself, the compassion that parts of you are really, really yearning for. You can, by being present in person, start to undo some of the wounds that are created, live and in person with other people. The reality is that wounds happen in relationship, eye-to-eye, belly-to-belly, nose-to-nose. As we interact with people and hurtful things happen. Hurtful things are said, rejections are experienced, bullying is absorbed or teasing or abandonment or avoidance or isolation. All of these things happen with other human beings alive as we grow up. And there's only so much healing you can do on Zoom. There really does come a moment when being in the room with other people is the most healing thing you can do for yourself.
I frankly cannot wait. Mid-May is going to be incredible for Bright Line Eating. I really encourage you if at all possible to extend yourself and commit to being there live. Now, I know that this opportunity is only going to be available for about 150 of you. I think the Adore@BLE conference has slightly more availability, more than 150. But I know the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference only has something like 150 to 200 spots. The Adore@BLE not much more it. It's capped out at a certain point, but give it a try. Click below, grab your seat, grab your seat, be there with us live. Be there with us live. I'm not going to tell you what my portions live on stage are going to be about at the Adore@BLE conference. I think I'm going to save that, but I have some fun things planned. There will definitely be plenty of time for Q&A and I want to give you a hug. Come be there in person. If you can't make the Adore@BLE conference, I get it. But be sure to live stream the day on Friday, May 17th from London. Be sure to live stream that so you can click down below to get your tickets to both.
The last thing I just want to say is for the consensus building efforts, we never did raise the full amount of money that we needed to raise. Costs have gone up for the conference, costs have gone up, the tickets are going to help offset some of that. But not all of it. Not all of it. We need to step up. Here's the main reason why. The day before the Friday conference, so on Thursday, May 16th, the international group of experts, including researchers, academicians, and clinicians and physicians are going to be gathering and breaking into two groups. One group is going to be focusing on the application to the ICD to get food addiction recognized. The other group that I'm going to be a part of is going to be focusing on planning out the most needed research study to fill the gaps that exist in the treatment research.
Because the literature on treatment of food addiction is extremely sparse, like embarrassingly sparse. There's almost nothing on it. We don't have any linchpin evidence that conclusively shows that treatment of food addiction with an abstinence-based approach solves problems for people in a way that current standard eating disorder treatment. If we had that, if we took the say 30% of people who have an eating disorder who have been completely resistant to eating disorder treatment thus far, they've received treatment. It hasn't worked probably because they have underlying food addiction and they're being instructed that all foods fit for all people, that there are no bad foods, that they need to eat all foods in moderation. Because they have underlying food addiction, they're still hooked on their substance of ultra-processed foods, sugar flour, ultra-processed foods, and they keep relapsing back into their eating disorder symptoms that are really at that point, pretty much indistinguishable from food addiction, but underlying an eating disorder. Some people have food addiction and some people don't. Some people just have an eating disorder. If we could take those 30% of people who are not being served by current eating disorder treatment and randomly assign them to an abstinence-based food addiction treatment for their eating disorder, that covers food addiction as well versus standard eating disorder treatment, we could then show that if someone has food addiction underlying their eating disorder, the food addiction treatment is the only thing that will work. The abstinence based approach is needed. The Bright Line for sugar and flour is needed. In order to execute that study, that is going to be expensive. I mean, just think about it. We're talking treatment centers. We're talking a large enough sample size. We're talking about recruiting professionals who are experts in eating disorder treatment. It's going to require many experts. It's going to require a lot of money to run that study. We need to fill up the coffers a little bit to get this off the ground. That's what any overflow money that we raise will go toward that study. So, please, please, please click below and donate to these efforts.
This is a moment in time where so much is happening. You can be there live and experience it. You can contribute if you have spare cash flow that a dinner out, a short trip, an airplane flight, like these things. I understand that money is tight for a lot of people. I also understand that the Dow Jones just hit a record high. What are we doing here with our time on planet earth? What are we doing with our resources? Results require means. That's the way it is on planet Earth. Results require means. There are three buttons below. There's a button to register for the May 17th conference, either live or live stream. There's a link to register for the Adore@BLE conference. Please come join. Please come join. We have no plans to hold a Bright Line Eating conference anytime in the foreseeable future. This is your chance if you missed the family reunion. If you've always wanted to go to one, it's time to register now for this conference. Then the third button down below is to donate. All right, you've got three things down there. Please partake of all three. I want to see you in London in mid-May. Exciting times. It's all come together. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
