Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. All right, I have an interesting topic to talk about today that was spurred by something that happened, a conversation that I had this week. I have a lot of good friends who do Bright Line Eating®, and one of them was on the phone with me in the last few days and she was describing how she's been lately. She said that recently she went back into the food, she started eating sugar and flour again, and that it kind of worked. It was interesting. She said, I didn't get too depressed or down on myself. I kind of felt good in fact. She said, “I've been doing a lot of Parts Work. I've been doing a lot of therapy. Maybe that has something to do with it.” She wasn't coming from a perspective of thinking that she would keep doing that forever. She definitely felt like she wanted to get back onto her Bright Lines, but she just said that basically she was surprised that it had worked.
It reminded me of a time when going back to addictive eating definitely felt like it worked for me. I remember I was in Australia. Now, interestingly, I was deep in the throes of late stage food addiction at this time. I was a mess. I was gaining weight very rapidly. I was desperately trying to stop eating, and I would stop eating sugar and flour, and I could only last for a couple or a few days until I would capitulate again and then binge my brains out. It was generally horrific. During that time, I believe I had nine full-blown attempts to try to get back on the wagon. I mean really intentional, full-blown attempts, and each one failed until finally it worked. I stayed Bright then for years. But I remember that some of the times during that stretch when I would capitulate and I would go back to the food, it would feel like such a relief. I would get a span of time, generally just maybe a day or two, maybe three, but not more than that, where I'd be so glad to be in the food. I'd be so happy for the freedom to get to eat what I wanted, to be able to use food as a drug to be able to go to a coffee shop and order this, and then go to a convenience store and buy that and just go through my day using food.
I'm reminded about an analogy that I share with you often, or I know I did a whole vlog on it. Maybe I haven't spoken about it often, but it's definitely one of the guiding frameworks for how I think about recovery, and that's the hourglass shape of recovery. The hourglass represents our perceived freedom. When we start before we take on a Bright Line approach to food, an abstinence-based approach to food where we're trying to abstain from certain foods altogether, we're completely free because we can eat whatever whenever, right? Meaning, we can socialize freely. We can go out to eat, we can go to dinner parties, we can move in the world freely, and that's the top wide part of the hourglass. Then we learn to get Bright. We learn to abstain, right? Our options narrow. We may reach a point where for a period of time we don't eat out at all. We really feel constrained and concerned about social engagements that are going to involve food. We might avoid them. It can seem like our world gets very narrow. If during that time, well, and I need to say, then what happens is it gets wider again, because with diligence and perseverance, your habits of staying Bright become automatic. You get practice navigating social events successfully with your Bright Lines intact, and it becomes more easeful doing that. Then you're in your Bright body, you feel great about yourself, your integrity is restored, and you learn. You really can move through the world freely and stay Bright, and then you've got the best of all worlds, and it widens all the way back out again. That's, thank you, God, that's where I'm at right now, where I can travel the world freely. I can eat out, I can socialize, and I'm Bright, and I'm in my Bright body and it feels great. I have the ultimate freedom. This is what we're hoping for. This is what I want for you. This is what I try to coach people to have. I have had it sometimes and not had it sometimes. I'm no perfect person, but the freedom at the bottom of the hourglass is what we're aiming for.
Back to the idea of sometimes going back to the food works. If you're in the earlier phases of recovery, either because you're new around here or because you've been in relapse on and off a bunch and following the Bright Lines feels restrictive because your options are narrower, you're concerned about eating out, social engagements feel hard, that constraint, that constriction, that limitation can feel so great to give up, to have it gone right, to go back to the food, suddenly things that felt difficult like going out to eat, feel fabulous, like, oh my God, I'll go out to eat. I'll order what I want. It'll be great. That Part of us that loves to use food as a solution, that loves to use food as a crutch, that loves to use food as a celebration, a comfort, a friend, something to do that loves to use food, food to numb us and to anesthetize us, oh my gosh, that Part of us is just dancing for joy, that we've gone back to the food and that solution is back on the table as an option.
I remember even at the worst of my food addiction in Australia, I did have that feeling sometimes when I would go back to the food of freedom and liberation and relief for a bit. But then, of course, what happened is the binges got worse. The eating stopped working, the inflammation built up in my body. The depression settled down in my brain. I started hating my life, hating my existence, waking up in the morning with a feeling of dread, and also the wanting and obsession became so large, and the enjoyment and the liking got very, very small. Mostly my life became a walking nightmare. This is something I want to describe also. Some people go back to the food when they're not in the early stage of the hourglass constriction. They're actually at the bottom of the hourglass and they've earned back much or maybe all of their freedom, and the Bright Line approach has been working for them and they feel great, and they've lost most, or all, of their weight and they feel amazing. Now, why would someone like that give that up and go back to the food? Well, often it's overconfidence, it's hubris. I know I've talked about this in the vlog a lot, the pernicious feature of addiction that once we're in recovery and our brain has significantly healed, we forget the horror of what it used to be like. Someone can in that state think, you know what? I'm going to try some NMD, some not my drink, which means usually alcohol, right? Or I'm going to eat a little of this or a little of that. I'm going to go on a cruise and just not sweat the food for a bit. They can go from a state of the bottom of the hourglass where they already have a lot of their freedom, but then picking up the food a little bit can feel like it works at the beginning because it feels like they have their freedom. Plus they get to have a glass of wine, plus they get to enjoy dessert on a cruise.
Now it feels like they have the best of all worlds. They're in their Bright body, they still enjoy most of their freedom, but now they're having, maybe they're thinking of it as a treat. I hate to talk about those things as treats because they're poison to me, but they might be thinking of it as a treat that they're getting to have every now and then. What's happening here in the brain is something that I need to invoke. Another analogy to explain, it's something I used to talk about a lot, and it's the riverbed analogy. The riverbed analogy goes like this, when the brain wires up for anything, for guitar playing, for food addiction, for, I don’t know, for playing soccer for anything. When the brain wires up for a new habit, a new skill, a new behavior, what happens is what fires together, wires together. These are neurons that are firing together and wiring together. Their synapses are developing more dendrites, more connections. The neurotransmitters are flowing and fiber tracks start to develop in the brain. I think of these fiber tracks as like rivers, river beds. The river is like electricity. The water is like electricity, which the brain is electricity essentially. Neural conductivity is electricity. And that riverbed grooves over time, slowly, right? Water, traveling over dry land grooves a riverbed slowly. But eventually, if you keep at it and you keep practicing this new endeavor, you groove a very deep river bed. Now, this is how addiction forms as you do some behavior, whether it's eating a bunch of sugar and flour or smoking pot or drinking alcohol, whatever it is, you do it again and again and that river bed starts to groove its way in your brain. Those fiber tracks start to develop. Let's say then you want to quit. You want to stop that addictive behavior. You have to dam the water upstream. So you build your dam and now you've got all this water that you have to divert elsewhere. Well, that's the Bright Line Eating program. That's all of the things we do around here to stay Bright. That's your new food plan. That's the actions of not eating sugar and flour. That's the way that you go to the grocery store now and buy your vegetables and your fruits and your oatmeal and all that stuff, and you follow this new pathway. Now the water has somewhere new to go, but it feels awkward, unfamiliar, and so it's hard. Again, this is again the earlier part of that hourglass, right? When the water is trying to groove its river bed, it feels hard and weird and not great, and maybe a little constricting at first, but over time, you groove a new river bed.
Now think about someone who's got a fully grooved and formed riverbed for their new Bright life. They're at the bottom of the hourglass. Now they've got all the freedom of the Bright life and they're in their Bright body. And now let's say they decide to let some water back into the old pathway, right into the old riverbed. Well notice they've still got that old dry riverbed in their brain. Those old fiber tracts are still there. They're not being used, but they're still there in potential. They're still there, essentially. If you think about a dry riverbed, it might over the months and years have grown some grasses and maybe even small shrubs in it now that there's no water. If you let just a little bit of water down that old pathway into that old riverbed, it might feel like it's doing nothing but just watering the shrubs a little bit, like no big deal at all. But now, if you let more and more water into that river bed, you're ultimately going to have a river again with all of the consequences of that old river. All of the negatives will come pouring back as you have a rushing river again. In the early stages, it can feel like not a big deal, not a big deal in part because the shrubs and grasses kind of blunt the effect of that water. It can feel like it works for a bit what's actually happening in the brain with addiction as the water sort of flows over those grasses and those shrubs and ultimately washes them away so that you're getting a full-fledged roaring river of addiction.
Again, what's happening is the neural consequences of addiction are starting to take root again. So for example, the healed healthy brain when it comes to food, has a nice ratio of liking versus wanting, meaning there's not much wanting of food. There's a little but not much wanting of food, but when you eat, there's a lot of liking of food. In addiction, it's the opposite. There's lots and lots of wanting, lots of the anticipation of food that you might get soon in the future. There's a lot of craving, a lot of obsession, a lot of thinking about the food that you need to get or want to get. But then once you eat it, you actually often don't fully like it doesn't fully hit the spot. It's not exactly what you need. So, you go look for more, you go look for something else. Maybe you just had something salty, so now you're looking for something sweeter. You had something sweet, now you're looking for something salty because it's not fully hitting the spot, right? Well, when the addiction riverbed was dry and your brain was healing or healed, mostly healed, that ratio of wanting and liking might've been restored for you so that you looked forward to your Bright meal some, but it wasn't a big deal. But then when you got to sit and eat a meal, you were like, oh, yay, it's mealtime. I love this. The food tastes delicious. You enjoy it. Then when the meal's over, you're like, okay, that it's over. You're not feeling like you're dying a thousand deaths because you've taken the last bite of lunch, right? You're okay that lunch is over, that dinner is coming soon, it's fine. The ratio of liking and wanting might be restored.
Well, the more you let sugar and flour and alcohol back into your life, the washing away of the brushes and the grasses is going to be the rewiring up of a wonkadoodle ratio between liking and wanting so that the wanting starts to take over and the liking starts to go down and down and down, and you get trapped again in that hell of wanting food all the time and then not even liking it that much when you get it. It takes time for that to come back. So at first, when you pick up the food, you might be in the state of having that lovely healed brain and just liking the food a lot, and now you're liking dessert and a glass of wine and this feels extra nice because oh my God, it's really working for you. You sort of forget that in due time it won't work.
If you could handle one more analogy, I think of flushing a toilet, right? Addiction, it's just going down the drain. It's like addiction is just a swirl down a drain, and you're going down. But if you think about how water goes down a drain, it might kind of curve up a little bit. That flushing water might, as it swirls around, swirl up a nice little bit on its arc to ultimately then swirl down and down and down and down and down the drain. I guess I offer this just so that sometimes that if you go back to the food, it's not really a big shock if sometimes it works at first and you can have the meta picture of eventually it won't work anymore. The working at first is a temporary phase that's followed by the reality crashing in as your brain changes, again, the way it did before. Then you're in a state where it doesn't work because maybe your health is deteriorating, maybe your self-concept is deteriorating, right? All the things that led you to Bright Line eating in the first place, they're still waiting for you. It just might take a little bit for those consequences to gain traction again. How long that takes is going to depend. It's going to depend on all sorts of things. I would say most notably where you're at on the Susceptibility Scale™. In Australia, I never got more than two or three days of it working. Sometimes I barely got two or three bites before I was hating it again and thinking, why am I back in the food? I hate this, but sometimes I would get two or three days. It's just important to look at the meta picture that ultimately it doesn't work.
The last thing I want to say is that we need to be mindful also that we have Parts. Odds are you've got a Part of you that's more inclined to see the ways it's working, right? We call this a Food Indulger Part. It likes to use food as a go-to strategy, and it's so happy and relieved when you go back to the food. Then there's other Parts of you, maybe a Health Monitor Part of you, a Food Controller Part of you, maybe a Body Controller Part of you, maybe your highest self that is looking at the big picture and saying, this doesn't work on balance. It doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. If you're trapped in the war between the Part or Parts of you that think it's working and the Part that doesn't think it's working or the Parts that don't think it's working, what do you do about that? That can be a really tricky one. It can be a really tricky one, and I have lots of other vlogs on all that. But basically it's going to require a new surrender and then a bunch of actions that ultimately turn into habits. Oftentimes, patterns of breaking and Rezooming™ can be really entrenched because of this honeymoon effect where at first when you pick up the food, it can feel like it's working for a bit, right? I see a lot of people who are lower on the Susceptibility Scale go through these cycles for years. They'll be Bright for quite a while and they'll feel like it's really working, but a Part of them really misses the food and the alcohol. Then they'll go back to the food and the alcohol and it'll kind of work for a while. Then a couple years later, all the consequences of buildup months or years, I don’t know, weeks or months or years later, the consequences have kind of built up again, and then they come back to being Bright and people can do these cycles for years. I just think it's helpful to have the meta picture that if you have any significant amount of addiction on board, that means like you're a six or above on the Susceptibility Scale.
Remember that addiction is progressive, which means that over significant stretches of time, it gets worse. On average, the spans of time where it works will get shorter and it will work less well. The spans of time where there are consequences and it doesn't work will get longer, and the consequences will become more severe. Especially as you age. We're all aging every day, especially as time marches on, those consequences will get more severe. I just offer this as a gift perhaps, so you can see the big picture. If you pick up the food and it actually feels like it's working, that can happen sometimes. It really can. That's the weekly vlog, and I'll see you next week.
