Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. A couple weeks ago, someone wrote into our customer support center. She wasn't a member, she wasn't going through the Boot Camp, so I guess I don't know how she found maybe my vlog or read a book or something. And then she was hurting. So, she found the contact us form on the Bright Line Eating® website and just sent in a message, and this is what it said, “How do I stop the amnesia that sets in when I'm off sugar and flour and go back to thinking I can eat it?” “Just once” in quotes, “just once.” “Then my life falls apart all over again?” My customer support rep was like, I don't know what to tell this person. They reached out to me, and they said, “What do I tell this person?” I said, “Oh, I know what to tell this person.” I got plenty to say to this person. As a matter of fact, I think I need to shoot a vlog for this person because, my dear, whoever you are in the world, you have stumbled on perhaps the defining feature of addiction. This is it. This is it.
A hundred years ago, just shy of a hundred years ago, there were some men in New York and Akron, Ohio who were starting to discover the same phenomenon. In the 1930s, they condensed their thoughts into the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This very phenomenon that you are identifying in your brain is one that they focused on in that book with such care and brilliance. Story after story, after story of illustration, the book kind of starts with chapter one is Bill's story. That's Bill W, one of the co-founders of AA, and they describe his alcoholism. Then the next chapter is called, There Is a Solution. In that chapter, there's a paragraph that goes something like this. It appears to be a fact that for reasons yet obscure, the alcoholic has lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called willpower becomes absolutely non-existent. We are unable to call to mind with sufficient force, the memory of the suffering and the humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink.
In the next chapter, which is more about alcoholism, they tell all these stories of people trying to illustrate the insanity of the thinking that precedes the first drink, the thinking or lack of thinking. It takes all kinds of forms. Everything from no thought at all, which they call the strange, mental blank spot. People who just walk into a bar and start drinking casually as if it were ginger ale. They know, some other part of them knows, at other times that they're going to go to prison or lose their wife and kids or all of the above. Another trip to the insane asylum, which is what they had in the 1930s, insane asylums for alcoholics. Yet, they just pick up a drink with no thought at all, or an insane thought, a crazy thought. A thought that's so far out of proportion that the word insanity is not too far a stretch, right? A thought like, “Oh, I'm at lunch and I've had a sandwich. Now maybe I can have a shot of whiskey. If I just mix it here in my milk, I'll just dump it in my milk. That'll be fine. I have a full stomach and the whiskey won't hurt me as much if I mix it with milk.” And that goes well. So, “Gee, maybe I'll have another shot of whiskey and yet another glass of milk. Maybe I'll do another and maybe now I'll just go buy myself a bottle of whiskey.” As the book says, thus started one more trip to the asylum for Jim. That's another example, an insane thought.
Another example is a thought, this is, I think what you're describing, a thought that is a related thought, but it's so underdeveloped in terms of its size and its magnitude that it just can't be described as sound reasoning for you to have experienced, that when you eat a addictively, when you “tie one on” with food, when you binge, your whole life falls apart. I mean, that's what you said here. My life falls apart all over again. I relate to that. I eat that way. Someone who doesn't eat that way probably can't relate, right? When they overeat at a meal, they don't suffer any consequences except a too full stomach and maybe not the world's best night's sleep, right? But they wake up the next day and they go back to their day. It doesn't ruin their life for us. Our life falls apart. Our lives become utterly unmanageable when we're eating that way, and we may not be able to just stop so easily, right? It might lead to afternoons and whole days of driving from convenience store to drive through, back to convenience store, sitting in parking lots, binging, going home and baking stuff, and eating all of that. Then ordering takeout and eating all of that, and then being so full that it feels like our stomachs are going to explode. Oh my gosh, the consequences of such a day lasts for days, just like a wicked hangover from alcohol. Yeah, our whole lives can fall apart.
Okay, so prior to picking up the first bite, you might have a thought, but it's weak and flimsy and flaccid like this…maybe it's even an excited thought of, suddenly it dawns on you, “Oh! I have a couple of hours this afternoon. I could go eat.” You think about a tasty this and a yummy that, and you have time to get it, and you've got a credit card so you could pay for it. It actually seems like a plan, like an exciting thing, almost as if it's dawning on you that a movie that you've been wanting to see is out in the theaters and you could go see it. What's missing is the effective thoughts about the consequences.
Why doesn't your brain generate a strong rationale for not hurting yourself that way? Again, you have plenty of evidence that it's just going to be incredibly damaging and painful. It's as if you have an allergy, an allergy to strawberries say. When you eat strawberries, your throat closes up, it becomes hard to breathe, and your lips swell up to four times their normal size, a big puffy, fluid filled sack, and you get red prickles all over your face. If you've experienced that once from eating strawberries, I promise you, you never eat strawberries again, right? It's not like you think, gee, maybe I'll eat some strawberries. They sure are good, and then sort of forget to call to mind with sufficient force, the memory of what happens when you eat strawberries, right? But with addiction, there's this incredible amnesia that you mention, right?
I want to mention three things that are going on here. A lot of things are going on in the brain to cause this amnesia. The primary thing, and this is a whole body of research, is the ineffectiveness of the prefrontal cortex when it comes to addiction. The addictive impulses are generated deep in the brain. I talk a lot about the nucleus accumbens, but there's all these related rewards structures in the mesolimbic reward pathway, places called the ventral tegmental area, and the substantia nigra and the insula and the nucleus accumbens, and so forth. Deep in the brain. If you go up from your spine, your neck, and you go deep into the brain right above that, right in sort of the center of the brain, very old structures, this is the part of the brain that evolved to make sure that we prioritize getting food and sex and noting when those sorts of things happen, and giving a good dopamine rush with it, and noting the cues that predict those sorts of rewards and making sure that you have the mojo to go get some more because it's essential. But lots of things can hijack those reward structures, including sugar and flour. They're drugs, they're not foods, they're drugs. We talk about that reward pathway a lot. But the prefrontal cortex is where what we call executive decision making is happening. Executive functions, things like planning and the evaluation of options and choosing. Decision making, memory activation, also sort of that, well, why don't you remember the consequences, right? Activating the right memories to help you evaluate a decision. What happens with addiction is the prefrontal cortex stops having the strength, the power, the dominance, the ability to override or rein in the impulses that are generated by that mesolimbic reward pathway. It is, in its own way, a form of brain damage, of brain dysfunction. The truth is that addiction causes cognitive deficits in learning, memory, attention, decision-making, impulse control. This is a clear example of that. And then other phenomena. That's the first phenomena, is prefrontal cortex dysregulation in addiction.
Another phenomenon is shared by everyone, addicts, and non addicts alike. It's called state dependent memory and state dependent learning. It has to do with states like where you are, how you feel, what substance you're on, your state of mind, your mood, that sort of thing. Any learning or memory, whether it's forming a memory or recalling a memory, is going to be profoundly affected by all of those factors. This has a huge impact in suicide because when someone is feeling at their worst, they're in a state where they can now only recall ever having felt that way. That's state dependent memory recall. Similarly, when you're on top of the world and flying high, it feels like life is grand and it's always been grand. You now can remember all of those memories. State dependent memory. When you're in the, I've not been eating sugar and flour for a while, state, you feel like life is good, life has always been good. I've got some measure of control here around my food. I always will. I remember having sane weight and measured meals. My food is great, and it's in that state that much harder to call to mind with sufficient force, the state that you would be in after you picked up those foods, it can feel like two different universes. Some of that has to do with a well-known phenomenon called state dependent memory. It does seem to me, and I don't know if this study has ever been run, that it's, gosh, in my personal experience, way, way, way stronger. I don’t know if I put a number to it five times, 10 times, stronger in addiction than it is in anything else that I've ever experienced. But it's a very strong phenomenon. That's the second phenomenon.
The third one is just the basics of procedural memory. Procedural memories are not explicit memories. They're not like an autobiographical memory that you could tell someone, oh, I remember when I was eight years old and I broke my arm. That's an autobiographical memory. It's an explicit memory. You can say it out loud. A procedural memory is implicit, and it's stored...really, we call it muscle memory, right? It's like the memory for how to ride a bike is a procedural memory. Procedural memories get activated by certain contexts, certain settings, certain things that you're about to do. You get onto a bicycle. If you've ever learned to ride a bike, it could have been 40 years ago the last time you got on a bike, but you get onto a bike now and there's no explicit telling your left foot to move forward and then it to go around the back and your right foot needs to move now, and your hands have to put a little pressure on the handlebars, but not too much pressure. None of that is happening in your mind. Your body just does it. It's a memory that, I don't want to say it lives in your muscles. Of course it lives in your brain, but maybe partially in your muscles, and it just rolls out of the body without any conscious thought happening. Well, the actions literally like the bending of the elbow that happen in eating are also procedural memories.
I think is one of the cognitive foundations of the strange mental blank spot where in a certain circumstance, let's say a potluck at your place of worship, and you walk in the door and suddenly you grab a plate and you're just putting some of everything on your plate, including from the dessert area and you're eating it. Then afterwards you go, what did I just do? What did I just do? Well, that was in many ways a procedural memory taking over. You've done that motor sequence probably many times. Let's say you've been going to that place of worship for decades and you know how to take a plate and go down a buffet line. You've done it before. Unless you have a tremendous amount of consciousness on board to thwart that behavioral sequence, it's entirely possible that that procedural memory could roll off your muscles and you could not have a single thought about it. So, what do you do about it?
I'll tell you what those men concluded in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that was published in 1939. What they concluded was, we're screwed. There is no solution to this. We are absolutely doomed, and therefore our defense must come from God because we are without human aid. They tried over and over and over again to stop picking up the first drink, and they concluded they simply could not, and they did develop a certain way of orienting toward God that they encapsulated in the 12 steps. Now, they didn't come up with that from nowhere. They got that from the Oxford groups who had six steps, and the 12 steps are just a slight elaboration on the six steps. So, they said, if we work these 12 steps and we turn to God and give this problem to God, we trust God to handle it for us. Now, that started the whole 12-step movement.
My answer is that that approach works, and I think it's also sort of shorthand for you're going to have to work a heck of a program, my dear. Like this strange mental blank spot, this amnesia that you've identified is absolutely without a doubt the hallmark of addiction. We're not supposed to diagnose people, but I would say, given what you wrote in, just even this, I think it's one sentence: how do I stop the amnesia that sets in when I'm off sugar and flour and go back to thinking I can eat it just once, then my life falls apart all over again? As a professional, I would feel comfortable diagnosing you with full-blown food addiction from just that sentence. Nobody would write that sentence if they didn't have a fairly advanced case of food addiction. I mean, for one thing, the kind of clinically significant impairment and distress that you're describing in that is the foundation of food addiction, right? That's what it…or addiction, substance use disorder. That's what it is. You're expressing despair over your life, falling apart when you have just a little of your drug of choice, right? That's substance use disorder. What that means is you have a fatal, incurable progressive disease, and the only solution is to work a heck of a program. So, when I note that you're not in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, I would say, sweetheart, get in there. You're not a Bright Line Eating member. After the Boot Camp, become a Bright Lifer™.
What are you doing in the meantime? What does that give you? Well, it gives you, first of all, a community of support that's going to help to build an identity as someone who doesn't eat sugar and flour, not just a diet mentality of, I'm not eating sugar and flour because I'm trying to lose some weight because I'm doing this Bright Line Eating thing, but I am a food addict and Bright Line Eating is my salvation. It's my life, it's my way out of hell. That's what it takes, and my feet are planted here and grounded here above all else. This now becomes number one in my life, number one in my life, above family, above work, above everything else. You might say, “Susan, I'm not putting my food program above my family.” And I'd say, “Well, put your family above your food program and your life falls apart. Then how much do you get to show up for your family this week?” If for this week, you put your food program first? Now your family gets to be first because you get to show up for them every day consistently without fail, with a clear mind and a smile and helpfulness to give and love to shower on them because you don't experience your life falling apart over food again, that pulls you away from them. You are not just hurting you, you are hurting them and everyone who loves you by not putting your recovery first.
There is no easy answer to this. It is a bummer. It's a bummer. It's a big pill to swallow. It's a life changer to realize the extent of the problem that you have. I've got it too. I've got it too. The solution is: get up early and meditate, have a morning habit stack, have your food written down the night before. Get on text or the phone or the Bright Line Eating Online Support Community and commit your food. Say, “Hey, this is what I'm eating today, and I commit to eat only in exactly this.” Eat your weighed and measured breakfast. Connect on the phone with someone in Bright Line Eating during the day. Hop on the morning Accountability Call, eat your weighed and measured lunch. Enjoy your life. Eat your weighed and measured dinner. Have an evening habit stack that involves some gratitude, some journaling, some inspirational reading. Maybe hop on the evening Accountability Call. That's the kind of program that will keep you from…and it will. Watch. It will keep you from thinking, “Oh, I could eat that just once.” It will fortify your prefrontal cortex with enough real-world evidence and support in terms of the kind of planning of suddenly your proper meals will be eaten automatically, and the thought, “Oh, I could eat just one of that.” You will find that suddenly the mantra that someone was sharing that's been working so well for them will come to your mind instead of picking up that food. Or suddenly your phone will ring from someone in Bright Line Eating and you'll say, “Oh my gosh, I was just thinking about eating. I'm so glad you called.” Right? Or you will call them. Your whole life will be different because you're working a full-bodied, across the board, comprehensive program that treats the condition that you've got. I don't know of any other solution other than a comprehensive program that you work on a daily basis one day at a time. It's the only way that I'm aware of.
That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
