Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I want to talk this week about life and Maintenance year upon year, upon year, upon year, and just share with you a little bit more about my story, my trajectory over the decades that I've been working on some form of food recovery. Then I want to zero in on some things over the last few weeks and a little stretch of time in particular and talk about how I navigated it because I think it really illustrates what really Bright Living looks like. I have to say I'm really Bright right now and feeling amazing about it. I've been super Bright like this for about a year and three quarters, like 21 months, right around that mark, and it wasn't always the case, right?
I've been in some form of food recovery since I was 21 years old. It was about nine or 10 months, maybe a year after I got sober from drugs and alcohol. Clean and sober. I'd gained a ton of weight and I marched myself down to my very first 12-step food meeting, and unfortunately, I didn't get struck abstinent in that meeting, the way I got struck clean and sober when I went to my first meeting for drug and alcohol rehabilitation in a 12-step context a year prior when I was 20. That started about eight-and-a-half years, till I was 28 years old, so maybe a little less than eight-and-a-half years, so, maybe seven-and-a-half years of on again, off again, attempts at getting this thing that in that world they called abstinence, right? Abstinence meaning abstinence from addictive eating. I remember some stretches of success, but mostly I remember struggle, and I remember that my weight went overall up. It would go up and down and up and down, but mostly up.
When I was 28 years old, I started really doing it differently. No sugar, no flour, weighing and measuring my food, three meals a day, and I lost all my excess weight. I got down to the size I am now, and six months in, I had a major relapse in Australia. I gained back all my weight, and then some, got to my heaviest ever, although I don't know the number because I wasn't weighing myself at the time, and got up to a size 24 and then lost my weight again. Then I was good for about a not quite 10 years, but almost right around that, and I think I had six to eight years of perfect back-to-back abstinence. I think I had a slip maybe once on artificial sweeteners, which were allowed at that time in that program.
It was really kind of the glory days for my food addiction recovery. I was in my 30s, and then that started a period of time where I left that program on and off. I knew it wasn't right for me or I thought it wasn't at that time, and I left to try intuitive eating. 2012, that's when I tried the intuitive eating experiment. Oh my gosh. And that didn't work. Within a month and a half, I was just mindfully, consciously eating huge volumes of cookies. I just couldn't find the place where I felt satisfied. They said, if you just keep eating, you'll feel satisfied. If you're just paying attention, you're not eating over feelings, you're breathing, you're just mindful about it, you will notice that you feel satisfied. Sometimes I would, and sometimes I really wouldn't. I would just need to keep eating in order to reach a point of satiation, and I started to gain weight, and I wasn't willing to buy several new wardrobes of clothes up from a size four to a size six, and then size six to size eight, and size eight to size 10. I was like, how many wardrobes of clothes am I going to buy to run this experiment? I knew that the no sugar, no flour thing worked. I was like, why don't I just go back and do that? This mindful eating thing is not helping. So, I went back to no sugar, no flour, and then in 2015, after a couple more years of abstinence under my belt, I left that 12-step program for good. I had started Bright Line Eating(r) at that point, and that started about four years from 2015 to 2019, where I struggled a lot. I'd be Bright for days or weeks, and then I would binge and I would be Bright for days or weeks, and then I would binge. That was really, really hard. Those were hard years. They slowed down in 2018, so that I think over the next year, I maybe only had three binges or something like that.
Then in 2019, I think in September, I stopped binging and I put down sugar and flour, and I haven't picked it up since. That was September of 2019. What happened then was two-and-a-half or three years of immaculate, three Bright Lines, no sugar, no flour, eating only at meals, immaculate quantities at home when I have my own digital food scale and breaking the quantities Line or loosie-goosy quantities in restaurants. I did that for two-and-a-half years. Then in May of 2022, I got Bright again the way I am now and just surrendered utterly. I'm so, so grateful for the level Brightness that I have in my life right now, the level of recovery that I have, the peace that I have, the surrender that I'm praying to be able to maintain on a daily basis, just being in a place where I don't want any food more than I want to be really, really Bright.
I want to share with you now what the sine wave of living really, really Bright these last 21 months can look like sometimes. I go stretches where I don't think about my food or my weight at all, and I'm living in the pocket of being so grateful and free and blessed, and my well-being is so high, and I feel so steady. Then just recently I got busy. I'm always busy, but I got busy and I got a little stressed, a couple work projects I felt a little stressed about, and I stopped writing down my food at night. Now, to be fair, this is something that I've done on and off a little bit over the 21 months. There are years where I didn't write down my food at all anymore, and it worked for me fine. But mostly over the last 21 months, I have been writing down my food, and then sometimes I won't for a little bit, and it's really okay, but I didn't write down my food for a stretch of time, maybe a week. Toward the end of that week, a little more stress was on board, and I found myself in the last-minute right before a meal, addictively picking a food choice, like a fattier protein.
Let me give you an example for me, and people are different about what lights them up for me. Beans don't light me up at all. For me, Beyond Burgers do a bit, right? They're an ultra-processed food. They're fattier, they're richer, they are manufactured to be ultra-delicious, and they're a Bright Line allowable food. Maybe they shouldn't be because they're an ultra-processed food. I'm thinking through about ultra-processed food since reading Chris Van Tulleken's book. So, I made myself a Beyond Burger when I had beans made in the fridge that should have been eaten up. I made that choice, and it was an addictive choice. I mean, I still weighed exactly four ounces of them. It was a Bright meal, but I noticed that. Then the next day at lunch, and then the next day at dinner, I did comparable addictive things. I believe the next night at dinner, I took my kids out to eat because I wanted a restaurant meal instead of a home meal. Again, I had a very Bright meal. I was very conscious about the quantities I had, exactly the foods and categories and quantities that were on my food plan. But I know that at this restaurant, their grilled eggplant, it's pretty oily. I talk about oily eggplant. That's one of the things that lights me up, right? In a Mediterranean restaurant on a salad, some strips of grilled eggplant. Well, that lights me up a little bit, right? I went there and got grilled eggplant on a salad for my vegetable and my salad and some protein. I went out to eat deliberately to get that hit from that food. That night I had to go to the grocery store to pick up some supplies, and I could feel the soul sickness inside me of having made three choices back-to-back dinner, lunch, dinner in an addictive way. I felt yucky about it. I felt almost allergic to it. The addiction doesn't want to live in me anymore. I don't want it anymore. I've been so free. I'm not on any caffeine. I'm not on decaf. I'm not doing anything addictive these days. Nothing. There's no little nook and cranny in my life where addiction has a toehold, and I just could feel the addiction being there, and I just didn't want it.
I went home from the grocery store, and I wrote down my food in my Bright Line Eating food journal that's right by the fridge. I got my pen. I wrote down my food for the next day. I wrote down beans for lunch, and I know those beans need to get eaten up. So, I put down beans. Oh, and while I was at the grocery store, I was shopping for supplies for a trip I was about to take. I knew on this trip there were going to be some stretches where I'd eat lunch and then not be able to eat dinner till way later, like eight hours later. So, I was thinking, I had the thought maybe I should buy one of these really big apples. I see I have moderately sized apples at home. I had apples at home, but there were like 12 ounce apples, like little baby's heads apples in the grocery store. I considered buying a couple of them for my trip to pack in my suitcase so that I would have enough sustenance to get me from lunch to dinner for those eight hours. I thought, you know what, Susan? You have apples in your fridge. You don't need to buy yourself little baby heads for apples. Nope, you don't need to do that. So, I went home, I wrote my food down in my journal, and I got free again. I got free again.
But when we talk about the sine wave, we talk about the sine wave. We talk about relapse and the word "relapse." Relapse, lapse. Again, a lapse being a little period of time where things go off a little bit, right? Maybe that means going off the Bright Lines, or maybe it doesn't yet, right? This is the anatomy of it before it goes off the Bright Lines before you're off the rails. This is the little way that a wobble gets introduced into your program, and it's the red flag. If you've fallen in love with the peace enough, if you've fallen in love with the sanity, if you have had a taste of real freedom and it's more delicious than any food, it really is what your system wants in every way, then what can happen is you correct it. You come back up. You don't slide down into the danger and destruction zone. You do what I did, and you pull it back up, you get back on track. For me, that meant writing down my food, which corrected it that fast, it corrected it, and I had that trip to take.
I packed all my meals except for the one restaurant meal. I had a beautifully honest quantities restaurant meal, perfectly Bright, so grateful, so grateful. Someone on the Accountability Call recently asked me in a coaching session about eating out, and she's Bright at home, but she was concerned about eating out, and she was using the one plate rule. I just want to say for someone where I'm at on the Susceptibility Scale(tm), a 10 plus plus, I don't use the one plate rule. The one plate rule basically says, mound, whatever you can onto a plate and just don't go back for seconds. That's your Bright meal. I don't do that because for me, the mound, whatever you want on your plate is way, way, way too much leeway, right? What I told her is, when I go out to eat, I either have a digital food scale there and I'm weighing and measuring just like I would at home, or I'm weighing in measuring with my eyes, and I'm having only in exactly the categories of food that I would normally have at that meal. If I don't have grain at dinner, I'm not ordering grain at dinner, I'm having my vegetables, my protein, my tablespoon of oil that I can either eyeball or I can weigh out with a teaspoon. Three teaspoons equals a tablespoon. You can weigh that out with a coffee spoon. That's a teaspoon. I'm weighing and measuring with my eyes. It is a form of weighing and measuring. If you can really be honest with your eyeballs, you can get pretty darn close and weigh and measure with your eyes and to your body and your spirit. That's good enough if you've been honest about it. Now, if you can't trust yourself to be honest about it, then bring your scale. Bring your scale. I told her I don't use the one plate rule anymore. I'm weighing and measuring with my eyes and the whole aim of that meal, the whole aim is to enjoy the person I'm with, enjoy the moment, enjoy the event, enjoy the occasion, and to walk out of that restaurant utterly peaceful and free without second guessing what I did or what I ate, what I did with food at all. That's the aim, is freedom. If I've weighed and measured with my eyes and I've started to eat, and as I started to eat, I realized, you know what? I think this is bigger and heavier than I thought. I cut some more away. I take some off my plate because as soon as I have that thought, I know this is going to play on my mind later, and I don't want that. I want freedom. I want peace. I'll surrender another couple bites, take them off my plate until I feel certain like, no, that's the right amount. Or maybe even a little under. That's right. That's the right amount. Then I keep eating and I know that I'm free.
This is what a diamond vase looks like. This is what having had a crystal vase for six months back in the day, back in 2003, then shattered and then putting together a vase over and over again. If you don't know the crystal vase metaphor, the metaphor is when people come into Boot Camp and they've been doing it for a while, often it starts to feel so easy that they don't understand why it's feeling so easy. This problem that they've had, their whole life is now so easy. They can't even reconcile it in their mind. I say it is, it's easy, but it's easy because you're doing it and because of the system works and the ease of it is such a gift, don't squander it. It's like you've been given a priceless antique Waterford, crystal vase. Don't juggle with it because if it shatters, it will never go back the same way. Crystal vase recovery or crystal vasers as they become called people who've never broken their Bright Lines, but there is a way to get back to a level of freedom that's that good after shattering a crystal vase. Sometimes it's a long circuitous route. Sometimes it's a long hike through the research Rockies and hiking some more, as I can attest. But then maybe you don't get a crystal vase, you get a diamond vase one that can't even be shattered because you've just seen too much, been through too much, and you know that you want the peace and the freedom so much that whatever it takes to get there, you will do it. You will do it.
I just wanted to share with you that little bobble, that little wobble, which is practically the only bobble I've had in 21 months of the Brightest, Bright Lines I've ever had. I wanted to give you the inside look on what that was like for me, just so you can hear the language and feel the bodily experiences of what super Bright Living can be like. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.