Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. As you know, I just had my birthday and one of these days, one of the days leading up to my birthday, I went to the mailbox, and I found this little guy in the mailbox. Oh, look at him! This is the Lorax. Someone sent me a Lorax. A dear, dear, dear Bright Lifer™ in California. You know who you are, sent me a Lorax. First of all, I love stuffed animals. I do. I have many of them. Wraucetur is my oldest and most beloved, as you might know, I've shot other vlogs with him. But the Lorax is so special because I often say I am the Lorax. If you don't know, the Lorax was this little guy who would pop up in this Dr. Seuss story, pop up out of the tree trunks that were the trees that were getting cut down, the truffula trees that were getting cut down in this beautiful idyllic paradise of an environment and environmental destruction was happening. And he always said, “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.” His point was that the trees have nobody to speak for them. Nobody is speaking for the trees. I speak for the trees, and when I say I'm the Lorax, I speak for the tens. I speak for the food addicts. The reason I do that is because nobody else is speaking for them, and it's 20% of our population.
I want to give some context in this vlog. What do I mean by that? What do I mean when I say no one else is speaking for them? What are the ways in which we need someone to be keeping an eye on how things pertain to people who are high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™? And in this case, the 10s, the people who are really high. I've thought of four ways that I speak for the tens.
I speak for the food addicts, and the first way is in interpreting dietary recommendations. So many people out there are advocating for people's health, and this is important. This is so critical. Food impacts health. And to most doctors, this is news. They don't think about it much. They're busy prescribing pills. But a lot of doctors, and especially functional medicine doctors, lifestyle medicine doctors, are starting to really think about how our food and our lifestyle impacts our health. And they're advising things, right? And then of course, there's all of the other people online and elsewhere who are advising things about what to eat, how to live, how to exercise, what to do for your health. And that's really critical. There's a lot of people advocating for people's health. But in the midst of this, no one is really thinking about how these recommendations impact people in particular who have a brain that's already hijacked by sugar and flour, already hijacked and tweaked and warped in that particular way that addiction warps the brain. Let me give you an example. Green juice smoothies, celery juice, wheatgrass juice, if you've got cancer, all of these sorts of green juices for health, and etc. Great idea for health, not great if you're a food addict. The reason this matters is that these foods have their fiber lattice network destroyed. They're going to hit the bloodstream really fast with their fructose and glucose and not just impact blood sugar. That's one thing, but they're going to impact the reward centers of the brain. To the food addict, that might mean a pint of ice cream tonight for dinner, which is going to undo all the great effects of that wheat grass juice, right? It's like no point in drinking the thimbleful or the shot glass of wheatgrass juice if you're going to chase it down with a pint of ice cream. So, it matters that someone is saying, “Hey, it's actually not worth the health benefit of that juice if you're a food addict.”
Another example, whole food plant-based advocates are very fond of saying it does not matter how much you eat when you're eating the right things. If you're eating plant foods, low density foods, fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, you can eat as much as you want of that. Well, that's true, but not if you're a food addict, not if you're a 10 on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, because quantities alone are incredibly triggering, and it is detrimental to your health to eat seven Honeycrisp apples and top it off with a pound of Brussels sprouts. That is not good for your health. Overeating is not good for your health, and most people will never overeat those foods. But the people that I speak for, the people that I speak for will, and we know we will overeat even on vegetables. And so, I get people coming in all the time from the whole food plant-based community saying, I was told that I could eat as much as I wanted of all these foods. And I say, yeah, well, not for someone who has a brain like yours. That's one whole class of examples like interpreting health and dietary advice that applies really well to everybody else, but not to us.
The second class of examples has to do with research that isn't done right or isn't done with us in mind. Now, let me just give you an example here. This PET scan, this PET scan, you've seen it from me. It's all over the internet. I don't know if you've ever noticed that it's completely flawed and erroneous, right? It's got this word obese here. That shouldn't be obese, that should be food addicted. It's conflating and confounding food addiction and obesity. They're not the same thing. They ran the study on people probably with class 3, class 4, obesity, assuming that they would have brains that would be hijacked by modern foods, and they'd be right. And oh, 56% of cases or some such, right? But not across the board. Obesity and food addiction are not the same thing at all. Research often isn't even done with the right parameters, the right variables in mind. As I get to know more and more people in the field as my career advances as a general understanding of food addiction advances, this is getting corrected. But I speak for the reality that food addiction needs to be considered and considered properly also in research.
Now, here's a third example. Oh, so apropos for what's going on in the world these days, right? These GLP-1, weight-loss drugs, well, fine and great, all the things about them. I think that for some people who have an extreme case of food addiction, these drugs could be absolutely part of the solution for them. Who's going to be watching? Who is going to be watching in particular, to notice when someone went on those drugs with an extreme case of food addiction and experienced the mercy of the food chatter quieting down in their brain, and then they stayed on those drugs for a year or two years. Now that's about the average that people stay on those drugs for 13 months actually for diabetics is the average. And then they need to get off them maybe for the side effects that they're no longer willing to tolerate, maybe because of the cost that they can no longer afford for whatever reason they decide to get off of them. What's going to happen to their brain? Now, those GLP-1 receptors are all through the brain, all through the reward structures, the reward structures of the brain, the mesolimbic addictive reward pathways. Are their cravings going to spike up to levels that they've never experienced before because they experienced some kind of downregulation while they were on those drugs? Are their cravings going to be lighter than they ever were before, indicating that some period time on those drugs was healing in some kind of way, meaning that maybe a lot of people who have food addiction should consider a year on those drugs. Are their cravings going to go right back to the same levels? Shoot back to where we started. Who's going to be watching that? I am I the Lorax. I speak for the 10s. I speak for the food addicts I am watching. That is what I care about. What happens to your brain, not their brain. Lots of brains are different than ours. But what happens to brains like ours who go on those drugs and then come off? I am watching for that.
Finally, in our community, our beloved Bright Line Eating® community, in these vlogs, in my books, I slant things. I tilt things. I have a bias toward protecting and educating the brains, the people who have the brains who are highly susceptible to the pull of those addictive foods. Why? Because they need the protecting. They need the educating. They're the ones that nobody's looking out for. And so, my books, my materials are slanted in that way. What that means is if you're not a 10, if you're a 6 on the scale, you need to interpret my materials accordingly. But know that I'm biased in that way, that's what I'm speaking to. You're going to need to factor that in. I'm not always speaking directly to you. And when I am, I usually flag it. I'll say, this is a vlog for the 7s, or whatever. But in our community, I'm biased in that way as well. I want our community, especially, to be a safe space. Here's an example in our circles, which are the Online Support Community platform. That's not Facebook that we have. And in the Facebook group for that matter, in our Online Support Community, we do not allow pictures of foods at all. We have a special place for recipes and pictures of Bright Line Eating compliant foods. Nowhere in our community can you post any pictures of non-Bright Line Eating compliant foods. That includes memes that are funny that everyone would laugh at, but if they've got a picture of that food, we don't allow it in there.
Those are some examples of how I am biased, and I've taken on the mantle of acting like I'm the Lorax and I speak for the 10s. I speak for the food addicts. It's a job. Somebody's got to do it. Thank you so much for that precious stuffy, that beloved, beautiful stuffed animal. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to keep it in my office, in my bedroom, but in one of those two places, it will have a place of honor. I so appreciate it. Thank you for spurring this vlog so that I could talk a little bit about what I mean when I say that I'm the Lorax. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
