Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I want to talk a little bit about the brain today. I want to talk about fiber tracts. I want to talk about pathways. I want to talk about neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity sounds like a super fancy term, but really, it's very basic. It just means the brain is always changing and developing. Always, always, every single moment of every single day, you are learning new things or strengthening pathways that already exist because of repetition, because of habit, because of routine, because of the regularity in your life. This is why you can get into your car and end up driving to work, even though, whoops, you had dry cleaning in the car and you were supposed to swing by the dry cleaners, but you were on autopilot and you just drove to work. That's because the fiber tract, so T-R-A-C-T, tract, the fiber tracts for this behavior or that behavior, these habitual routines that we have, they get very, very strong. Once you kind of start on the path, you get pulled down the path. It's kind of like when you start off either as a baby or a young kid or in a new environment or trying a new thing. Let's say you pick up piano lessons at the ripe old age of whatever, 50, 60, 70. You pick up piano lessons and you've never played before. So, now you're going to try to form some new fiber tracts, the fiber tracts for playing piano, and you're starting from scratch. Now, this is kind of the equivalent of facing a dense jungle with just your hiking boots and maybe a machete or something, and you're going to try to whack a path. It's hard at first and it feels like really unfamiliar terrain, but as you walk a path through, and then let's say you turn around and come back the same way, then you turn around and go back through. You can time after time after time with repetition, with repetition, with repetition, form a path that feels well-trodden that feels maybe even wide and spacious if you do it for long enough, right? This is how the brain works. You lay fiber tracts, you create synaptic connections, and then more, and then more, and then more. You form new pathways in the brain.
We all come to Bright Line Eating? with fiber tracts for all manner of aspects of the way we used to eat fiber tracts for getting in the car and swinging by a cafe on the way to work. Fiber tracts for scrolling through food delivery apps and deciding what we feel like eating and clicking the order button. Fiber tracts for going to this favorite restaurant and that favorite restaurant and that favorite restaurant and ordering certain things. Fiber tracts for eating a full dinner, going to the cupboards and seeing if there's something salty there. Going to the freezer and seeing if there's something sweet there. And then sitting on the couch and watching TV and eating. Fiber tracts for traveling and indulging it. This restaurant and that restaurant, and this cafe and that dessert place, right? Fiber tracts for holidays and over consuming at holidays, on and on and on, we have all these fiber tracts laid in our brain for the ways we used to eat.
We come to Bright Line Eating. All of a sudden, in one fell swoop, we pretty much abandon almost all of those behaviors, and we slowly build a whole set of new behaviors accompanied by new fiber tracts in the brain. Slowly, slowly with our machete and our hiking boots, charting a new path in unfamiliar territory, neural connections that did not exist before. Slowly, slowly start to wire together until we have a well-worn path for writing down our food the night before for prepping some veggies, for assembling a meal, popping a steamer veggie bag in the microwave, putting food on the plate, weighing it out exactly, checking our book to make sure we're eating what we committed to eat. Fiber tracts for packing up a lunch before we leave the house for the day. All these new fiber tracts for our new food behaviors.
Essentially the Bright Lifer? has two sets of well-worn fiber tracts in their brain, all the neural connections related to how they used to eat and how they used to relate to food and all the new connections for how they eat now and how they relate to food now. There's almost no overlap between them for most of us. Really, really, they're very different ways of orienting to food, different sets of behaviors. I want to talk in this vlog today about a third type of fiber tract that I've never really talked about that much. Those first two types of pathways in the brain I've talked about a lot actually, and I've talked specifically about how the old set of fiber tracts are still there in the brain, even though you're not using them anymore. If you're super Bright, you're not using them, but they're lying dormant, still there, kind of like an old dried out riverbed. It's not getting any water these days, but it's there. The ravine is grooved. If you sent more water down that path, down that old dry river bed, it would be right there to receive the water in a heartbeat, right? Once you let water form a river bed over dry land and it grooves that ravine, it's going to be there for the duration, the duration of your life. Okay? I've talked about that a lot. And that old dry river bed is the neural reality of once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, once a food addict, always a food addict. It's why with the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale? instructions say to think back to a time in your life when your eating was at its worst, when the riverbed was filled with water and a rushing river and answer the questions as if it were then not because it's impossible to experience healing in the brain, not because your eating is as bad now as it was when it was at its worst, but because once you've grooved that riverbed with those horrendous food experiences, you're always vulnerable to that. Your brain always knows how to do it. And given the right circumstances, you can fall prey to it again. So, you're going to have to always be more vigilant than someone whose eating never got that bad. I've talked about that a lot. The old way of eating the old fiber tracts, the new way of eating the new fiber tracts.
What I want to talk about today is the fiber tracts of relapse. The fiber tracts of the pathway from a trigger when you're Bright into breaking your Lines and either reinstituting, falling right back into old ways of eating or just breaking your Lines and getting wonky a bit. Bites, licks, tastes. A handful of nuts after dinner. The unraveling of the program, the Bright program, that leads to potentially bad outcomes downstream. Leads to Maintenance weight creep. Leads to never getting off all your excess weight. Leads to finish line anxiety so that you hover above your ideal weight range and never let yourself get there, or leads to full blown relapse and being in the ditch.
What's true is that the pathways from being Bright to not being Bright are their own set of pathways, and they too start out like a dense jungle, a jungle that's so dense that there's no visible passageway through. When you start out Bright and you're really, really Bright, you get such a clean, fresh slate with these new fiber tracts for your new way of eating and eating off plan after a bit actually is difficult, like the brain doesn't want to. The brain takes the Bright Lines very seriously when they're followed immaculately from the beginning, and it creates a strong buffer wall, almost like I live right by the Erie Canal. I live in Rochester, New York, just very close to the Erie Canal, spitting distance from the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal, as are all canals, is a manmade structure that looks like a river, but it's not a river. It's manmade. It's got walls of cement. These are manmade channels with very, very cement thick firm sides, walls to the canal. We've got this word in English to canalize, right, to take your behavior and put it along a canal, a channel directed towards something.
When you build your Bright life from scratch, from the beginning, the canal walls on the sides of those pathways, they're very thick and strong. It's almost as if after a few months you could reach out for some NMF, some "not my food," "not my drink," or whatever. The brain almost wouldn't let you bend your elbow and put it to your mouth. It would be hard to do it at first, but you have free will. You can choose to bend that elbow. And if you do, what you do is you create an off-ramp, a deviation, a pathway from the Bright set of fiber tracts back over to the old eating set of fiber tracts, and you start to form a new set of fiber tracts that go from one to the other. It's as if you take your machete and start whacking into that jungle and you start to create a new path. The next time you do it, the path gets stronger, firmer, wider, more passable, and the next time you do it, it gets yet more passable, wider, clearer, and before long, you've got fiber tracts that go from trigger to relapse that are as strong as any of the other forces you've got going on in your life. Then you find?remember the analogy I gave at the start of this vlog of getting in your car and just boom, you're at work and whoops, you forgot to drop off the dry cleaning?
You can have those new fiber tracts of relapse be so strong that you start the day fully intending to be Bright and, whoop, there you have a handful of nuts in your mouth, and you're like, how did that even happen? I don't even remember deciding to pick up the food. Many people in Bright Line Eating, maybe you are in this situation where you have the old way of eating, those fiber tracts are well worn through decades. You've got the new way of eating Bright, Bright, Bright, which you probably did for a while, super Bright. Then you've got this third set of fiber tracts that go from Bright to not Bright, and that have beaten down a path from Bright to not Bright, so that it's very easy to intend to stay Bright, but to end up not Bright, right? Because the path from here to there is really, really well established now through a lot of inattention, through a lot of believing the food Indulger that says, "It doesn't matter." "It's okay, it's just a little, we'll start again on Monday." "Nobody's here to see." "It's just a baby carrot off the cutting board." "There aren't many calories." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Food Indulger, the seductive rationalizer Part of us has all these reasons why it's fine, why it's okay. Suddenly, we're either in the ditch or our weight loss has stalled out, or we used to be at Maintenance, but now our weight is creeping up. We don't have peace anymore. The will I, won't I, should I, shouldn't I, is back. The "I'm trying to get Bright again" is now the dominant narrative. I'm trying to Brighten it up, trying to Brighten it up, trying to Brighten it up. There's no peace. There's no peace there, right?
If this is you and you find yourself in a scenario where the fiber tracts from Bright to not Bright are now well grooved, so well grooved that you can intend to be Bright, start off the day Bright and just end up back with wonkadoodle eating behaviors without even knowing how you got there, what do you do about it? Well, you do the same thing as you did essentially when you started off getting Bright in the first place, which is to say that the way to create a new reality in your brain is to dam all the water that used to be going down the dry river bed to just dam it and be very, very intentional from that moment forward with where you allow your neural energy to flow with what behaviors you execute, keeping in mind that every last thing you do is forming fiber tracts in the brain. You damn the water upstream. So, meaning you recommit to your Bright Line Eating journey, you do not allow any deviations to take place. Now, this is going to involve probably putting yourself in a new Brighter environment. As we say, "Come all the way in and sit all the way down." It's probably going to involve maybe even orders of magnitude more support than you got in the past. It's going to involve a lot of intentionality, and you're going to have to maintain these firm cement barriers against the water flowing anywhere where you don't want it to flow. Big, fabulous canal borders along the edges, and then it's going to take Maintenance and vigilance so that you never, ever allow any water to creep out. You never allow yourself to walk down that path again. But remember, walking down paths where you've already got a path, laid water leaking out where there's the propensity for water leakage is very easy to let happen.
It's going to take a lot of vigilance, and it's going to take time. It's going to take vigilance combined with time and the maintenance of your new set of Brighter than Bright habits. To make it so that those pathways from Bright to not Bright are not traversed anymore, that the water's not leaking out from this canal back over to that canal. It's a hard thing to do. It's doable. It's doable. I mean, shoot, starting Bright Line Eating and getting these new fiber tracts laid is a hard thing to do. It's doable. People do it all the time, but it's hard. It's hard to build new fiber tracts, and it's hard to block off old pathways that have existed. My encouragement, if you're in that situation, is it's doable, and you're going to have to up your game a lot.
My encouragement, if you're not in that situation and you're Bright right now, you're squeaky clean, Bright right now, you feel me when I say that? If you started off Bright and you stayed Bright, those canal walls are so thick and cement strong that it's almost like the water can't deviate. Even if you wanted it to. You seem to not be able to bend your elbow and put some junky food into your mouth, right? If you're in that position, savor it, cherish it, protect it. Because the minute you start deviating, you're in this whole new territory of creating fiber tracts from Bright to not Bright. And you don't want them. You don't want those off roads there. You don't want them there.
It's one of the harder things in my experience, to coach people who have months and years of ingrained fiber tracts laid from Bright to not Bright. That third form of neural energy that goes from this path of being Bright with a trigger, some sort of emotional or locational or temporal trigger, whether it's time of day or some sort of place, your mother's house, a business trip in your car going down this road where there's that fast food outlet, whatever the trigger is in your kitchen after dinner, just eating a little extra in your kitchen, prepping a meal, popping food into your mouth, off the cutting board. All of these scenarios can be triggers for that third kind of pathway. Again, when those fiber tracts are laid, it's a hard, hard thing. But I guess I just want to end this vlog on a note of hope.
I spent, oh gosh, whatever, from 2015 to sometime in 2019, in and out of relapse, four years, give or take, in and out of relapse. During those four years, I absolutely built the pathways, the fiber tracts from Bright to not Bright. It wasn't just Bright to not Bright, it was from Bright to binge my brains out. That pathway was very well established, and it got to the point where I couldn't string 30 Bright days together. Really, at some point in 2016, 2017, I was in that state where I could not string 30 Bright days together again. I stand before you with no sugar or flour now for five years, Bright as Bright can be, Thank you, God. Even in restaurants with quantities in every way for two-and-a-half years-ish. It's doable. It's doable. But I put myself in a different environment with stronger supports, with more vulnerability, with more guidance, with more support, more support. I really, really drew the Line in the sand, and I stayed Bright from that day on, and it took a lot of work, and it took a lot of grace. I was trying to do it that whole time. God bless me. I was, it's not like I wasn't trying to do it. It takes what it takes. This is kind of the miracle of recovery and long-term abstinence or sobriety or Brightness from anything. There's this mysterious grace involved. It takes what it takes until it takes, and then at some point it takes. If you're in that state, don't give up. Raise the bar, raise your game. You got this, you got this. But it's not easy. My heart goes out to you. I've been right where you're at, and I know how it feels. I know how it feels. But there is a way to get solidly Bright again. It takes consistency. It takes working a stronger program. It takes vigilance, and it takes time. It takes time. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
