Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. A Bright Lifer™ named Catherine sent something into customer support recently that was so on point. She said that her Mastermind Group and she had a huge epiphany in their session when she was describing to the group how her Bright Lines have gotten wobbly. Now that she's in Maintenance, she feels really destabilized like standing on Jell-O now that she's in Maintenance. Someone else in the group said, you're describing exactly what I felt and experienced during PECS, and they had this huge epiphany that maybe the wobbliness that many people experience in the Maintenance transition is a big fat form of PECS.
You might be saying, Susan, what's PECS? Okay, PEC is an acronym. It's PECS, and it stands for Post-Event Collapse Syndrome. We identified it in Bright Line Eating® early on when we observed that people were just as likely to break their Bright Lines on the day after Thanksgiving as they were on Thanksgiving, which is interesting, right? People break their Bright Lines on Thanksgiving. That makes sense. Why would people break their lines on the day after Thanksgiving after successfully staying Bright all day on Thanksgiving? Well, it's PECS. It's Post-Event Collapse Syndrome. What happens is they white knuckle it all through Thanksgiving and they endure the extra food, the pumpkin pie being passed around all the desserts, all the NMF, all the stuff, and they get depleted. They navigate all the social situations, the family dynamics, they get more depleted. Then on the day after Thanksgiving, they're in this profoundly only exhausted, mentally, psychologically exhausted state, and a part of them is like, now I deserve some food, I made it through. They've got all of the fresh notions of what they might eat in their mind because they just experienced it all at Thanksgiving and then they go eat maybe that same stuff or maybe some different stuff, but they eat.
What we do in Bright Line Eating is we train people to expect PECS after a holiday, after a trip, after a big emotional event, maybe a surgery or a move or something like that. We expect people, we train people, to expect it because when you expect it, you can plan for it and you know that you've got to spend as much time preparing for and guarding yourself psychologically for the days after you get home from a trip, say as you do on the trip itself. You need to build in some re-entry days, you need to make sure that you've got food in the fridge. It's all about planning and preparation.
I would say, Catherine, first of all, you and your Mastermind group are entirely right. As a matter of fact, I know you're in Bright Lifers, so go check out Maintenance II. This is a whole course. The Maintenance II course is all about landing the plane at Maintenance. How do you actually figure out what your goal-weight range is? How do you successfully start adding food gradually so that you stop losing weight so that you transition to and discover your Maintenance Food Plan? Because everyone's different when it comes to Maintenance, the Weight-Loss Food Plan is the same for everyone, and bodies are different, so people are going to lose weight at slightly different rates, but it pretty much works for everyone. But at Maintenance, people are going to need different amounts of food to stabilize. The way to add food is all explained in that course, Maintenance II.
Then, the fourth module of that course is all about settling into Maintenance. There's a video in there called, “PECS,” that uses the analogy of Maintenance as a form of Post-Event Collapse Syndrome. In this way of looking at it, the event is weight loss, right? You go through this, it's kind of like you said in what you wrote in, Catherine, right? It's like a two-year dinner party. It doesn't take everyone two years to lose their weight, but it's like this prolonged experience with care and dedication and fastidiousness keeping to your Bright Lines as you lose your weight. If there's a part of you that's thinking, we're just doing this temporarily and then we can relax when we get into Maintenance, that's kind of a form of diet mentality, and that's where you're going to get really tripped up. I got to say diet mentality for anyone who did diet back in the day, every diet I ever experienced, and I did a lot of 'em basically said some form of after you take off your weight, you get to go back to eating kind of like normal. You get to go back to eating foods that maybe you haven't been eating. You get to relax at that point, and that orientation to Maintenance is embedded. Now deep in our psychology, there's parts of us that really expect, well, now I get to celebrate a little bit, right? I'm at Maintenance, finally. Don't I now get to eat some sugar and flour? Don't I now get to have a cheap meal, whatever. It's diet mentality. We don't do that around here, and I'm not accusing anyone of diet mentality. I'm just saying kind of like certain biases that are baked into our psyche just by living in this society. This form of conceiving of Maintenance, I think, is really an inheritance of experiencing diet culture in our society. Instead of thinking, this is my way of life, we're thinking, okay, the weight-loss period is over now. Now I get to relax. Now I get to indulge a little. Now I get to loosen up a little bit. That's what creates the wobbliness.
When you wrote in Catherine, your whole point was, once we have this awareness, doesn't that arm us a bit to be able to handle it? What are the tools now that we see this so clearly for keeping ourselves from succumbing to this wobbliness in Maintenance, this destabilizing force of Maintenance? Because Maintenance does not have to be a destabilization. It really does not. Just like with PECS, the solution is planning and preparation, planning and preparation, planning and preparation. That's why as a Bright Lifer, you're so blessed to have the courses, Maintenance I, Maintenance II, and Maintenance III are that planning and preparation Maintenance. One is an eight-week course entirely designed to inoculate you against that way of seeing the weight-loss journey and the Maintenance journey. It prepares you psychologically for Maintenance. This is why I want people to take that Maintenance I course as early as possible, right after the Boot Camp, we've got a short Foundations of the Bright Life orientation to Bright Lifers, and right after that, take Maintenance I, get really steeped in this as your way of life. Get really steeped in the awareness that Maintenance is a thing.
Maintenance is, I would say, as big or a bigger thing even than figuring out how to lose weight and set up the Bright Line Eating structures in the first place, right? Maintenance is something to be focused on, something to be studied, something to be prepared for, something to be planning around. If you think of it as something you're going to need to master as a Maintenance maestro, you're going to need to roll up your sleeves and really dive into the way to succeed at Maintenance. You're going to need to learn it. If you think about it that way, you will be successful. You will. And the Maintenance I courses, watch them, watch it again, that Maintenance I, those modules. Maintenance II is all about landing the plane. So, study up on those. Then Maintenance III helps you, right? As you've sort of landed the plane at Maintenance, Maintenance III covers this issue of the liminal space. Liminal space is the empty in-between period. It's like the hallway between the rooms, right? You're not in the living room, you're not in the dining room, you're in the hallway, you're in the liminal space, you're in the between period, and there can be some vacuum air emptiness feeling of Maintenance because now you're not losing weight. All that excitement has gone. Now you don't have a weight issue to focus on. That problem's been solved. You don't really have food chatter much anymore. That problem is solved, and now the 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90% of your psychic energy that used to go to your weight, your food, your food, your weight, all that is now lifted, and there's this spaciousness, right? It's eerie, and it can be unsettling, it can be uncomfortable. Maintenance III really dives into that. What do we do with that liminal space? What do we fill it with? How do we make our life about life instead of about food and weight? There’re so many different ways to orient to that, and Maintenance III covers them all.
Oh my gosh, I think you're so wise to identify this. I think people don't take Maintenance seriously enough. I do think the Maintenance courses are the antidote to what you're describing. Doing them with support is even better. Getting study buddy groups together to go through those courses. Even better in Bright Lifers, we've got a mechanism for that. You can click on the study buddy link and get yourself into a study buddy group. Maintenance is a thing, and if you out there, not Catherine, but everyone else listening to this, if you want to succeed with Bright Line Eating and have this not be just another diet, you can do Bright Line Eating as a diet, it'll work that way, and you will gain the weight back because you always do on diets. But if this doesn't present itself in your life right now as yet another diet to be tried and failed at, if this presents itself as your way of life, please, God, finally, thank you. Your final successful attempt at solving this problem for good, then addressing the Maintenance transition as if it's PECS, as if it's going to be potentially a Post-Event Collapse Syndrome. If you're not prepared, is the way to go see it that way and get prepared, right? Make it your rallying cry to do your homework, get fortified and face it with all the planning and preparation that's going to enable you to sail through it, because you can stick the landing when it comes to Maintenance and the courses teach you how. Great topic, Catherine, well done. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
