Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I am very sensitive to the fact that holidays are coming up, and with holiday season typically comes a great deal of socializing and socializing around food. And it can be hard and scary and daunting to face, especially if this is your first Bright holiday or your second Bright holiday season. It's a lot to face. I was thinking, because a friend shared with me something recently that happened to him, I was thinking, I don't think I've ever shot a vlog about that, about the worst that can happen. Typically, when we say, ?No thank you,? within reason, people respect that, right? But I think there's actually value in exploring what's the worst that can happen. Would someone ever actually fight us and insist that we eat? Would they ever pin us down and force us to eat? How bad could it actually get?
I have three stories to share with you. I think it is helpful to explore the bookends. The extremes of human experience, because once you face sort of the worst that could possibly happen, and you're like, okay, well, now I know kind of how that would play out. Everything else is more within the realm of reason, and it is just helpful sometimes to say, okay, what's the worst that could happen? The story this guy shared with me is that he was recently around a campfire with his family and a family member. Well, they were cooking food over the campfire, like NMF food, not my food, like food that we don't eat in Bright Line Eating?. There was some food at the end of the stick, and a family member put it in front of his face so he could smell it and said, here, have some. And he said, ?Oh, no thanks.? And they didn't lower the stick and take it away. They shoved it more up into his nose and said, ?No, no, no, here have this.? Now, this person knows that he doesn't eat sugar. And he's been eating this Bright now for, I don't know, six, 12 months, something like that. And they've socialized together before, during this stretch of him losing weight and eating better and stuff. So, they should know better, but they obviously didn't. A third time, they shoved it up into his nose and said, ?Here, have this.? He started to get mad, and he said, ?No, I don't want it.? His wife, this was actually a member of her family, his wife was there and said, in their native tongue, he's not going to have any, he's not going to have something like that. He was sharing this with me afterwards. He said he got really mad. His blood started to boil. He was pissed. And yeah, it really rocked him for his no, not to be respected like that.
It reminded me of a time back in the day when I lived in Sydney, Australia, and I'd just been through my three months of relapse, the worst my eating had ever been. I had been binging my brains out for three months. I'd gone from a US size four binged my way up to an Australian size 24. Within three months, I was trying to stop eating sugar and flour practically. That whole time. I couldn't do it. The food had me by the throat up against a fence and was banging my head against the brick wall. I was so tortured, and I finally put down the sugar and flour and got some peace again. But it was tenuous. It was hard. I was fighting cravings. I was in a fragile situation. As happens with the brain in early abstinence, cue reactivity is higher. The sight, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the thoughts, all of the cues that predict, rewards, all of the logos, all of the times of day when we would usually go get something. All of that triggers the addictive part of the brain more during early abstinence. It's a vulnerable time. It just really is. Now, during this time, we were Bahai. Now I'm not Bahai anymore. I've since left the Bahai faith. But at that time, I was a devout. We were going to religious gatherings that were called feast, and it was called feast, but it was supposed to be a spiritual feast. It was like we would read Bahai scripture and there'd be a social part, and there would be food at the end. We were in Australia, and the Bahai community in Australia and in the United States has a large contingent of Persians. These are people who have left Iran, often under threat of religious persecution, and they move to other countries. This is what I learned at that time about Persian culture. There's a thing called Ta?arof. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Where in Persian culture, there's a dance between host and guest, and the host offers some food, and the guest says, no, thank you. The host offers a second time, and the guest says, no, thank you. The host offers a third time, and the guest says, okay, I suppose I'll try some. This dance is called Ta?arof, and it's woven into their culture. It's how they do it. It's actually rude to say yes. On the first pass, you're supposed to say, oh, no, I couldn't possibly. And then they offer it again. Okay? Now, you can see already this is a torturous setup for someone who's newly off sugar and flour and trying with all their might not to relapse into their addiction. I would go to these feasts. We would say the prayers. We would do the devotional readings, and then the social portion would come, and I would be kind of trying to have my can of sparkling water or whatever. Invariably, a host would come around with a tray of baked goods or something, and they would put it up in my face and say, please have some. I would say, ?No, thank you. I don't eat sugar,? as clearly and strongly as I could. They would lift the tray higher into my nose and say, ?Oh, please, you must.? And I would say, ?No, really thank you. I don't want, don't eat sugar. It's not good for me.? They would just do their dance and lift it up into my nose higher and say, ?Oh, please, yes, please. They're delicious. You must have some. I insist.? And at this point, typically tears would spring into my eyes. I would say, ?No, really, I don't want any.? And I would find a way to escape. I wouldn't eat it, but it was awful. It was very, very hard to not have my no respected. I started talking to some people about it, and that's when I learned about Ta?arof. Like, oh, that's their culture. They're expecting you to say no, and they're going to insist. Oh my gosh. What I did about that was I stopped going to those events for a while. I think I went to two of them, and I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't face it. It was too much for me in my early abstinence.
The third one of no one's going to hold you down and shove, shove food in your mouth, typically. That's true. But actually, that's happened to me once. Seriously. I mean, I wasn't held down, but I was standing and a guy that I didn't know very well at a camping event, an outdoor camping event, I'd had a conversation with him. I'd told him that we were friends, and I told him that I did not eat sugar or flour. I told him a little bit about my food addiction and that I was never going to eat that stuff in front of him. I don't eat that stuff. And he took a chunk of not my food, and surprised me and held me and shoved it in my mouth. It was a joke. He thought that?what he thought was that since I wasn't initiating the action of eating it, I would get to eat it as a freebie because it wasn't my fault, and that I would enjoy it. Everybody enjoys that stuff. That's what he was thinking. God bless him. I freaked out. I pushed him away. I ran to the sink. I got the stuff out of my mouth. I spit it out. I looked at him with flames in my eyes. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ?Oh, well, that's a freebie.? I was like, I don't?anyway, I exploded. I'm not friends with this guy anymore. Terrible boundaries, horrific consent violation. He didn't get it. He just didn't understand that I wouldn't think that was funny and that I wouldn't appreciate getting that freebie.
So, these are some of the things?this kind of thing does not happen often. This is the extreme end of what happens when people don't get how you eat. What do we do about it? First of all, I think understanding that we're likely to have a very strong reaction to such circumstances is important. And bring it here. Bring it here. Bring it here. I hope that you have some people in your life who eat the way you eat, who do not succumb to the madness that's going on out there with food and people who you can bring these kinds of cray cray circumstances for sympathy, for commiseration, for consolation. When something awful, this happens to you, it probably won't happen to you. I mean, I've been doing this for a lot of years, and I have three examples to share with you no more.
This is at the very, very, very fringe of human experience, but in milder ways, stuff like this happens all the time. The rogue comment of, ?You are not going to still diet? It's Thanksgiving, right?? I mean, a comment like that can cut to the quick. When we're doing our best to survive an event that's hard for us, and we don't need that. It's hard. So, bring it here. We have a lot of resources for you as the holidays come up. If you're a Bright Lifer?, we have so many resources for you. Let me start actually the other way around.
If you're not a Bright Lifer, let's imagine you're not in the Boot Camp. You're not a Bright Lifer. You don't pay for anything with Bright Line Eating. You're not a member. You just watch the weekly vlog sometimes. Maybe you're catching this on social media, just, it's a fluke. Where can you get some support? I have some free vlogs that you can access. You can always access the archive of vlogs at brightlineeating.com. Go to brightlineeating.com, and then click on the vlog tab. There's a search box there, and there's a vlog called, ?How to Talk with Your Partner about BLE.? How to talk with your partner about BLE. This is a vlog that goes into the depths of what if there's someone in your life that matters to you and is really obstructing your process, your ability to change how you're eating, they're really sabotaging you. They don't like that you've changed the way, but you want to stay in relationship with them, right? This vlog is for that. I also have lots of vlogs about how to navigate the holidays. So, go into that search bar and put Thanksgiving, put Halloween, put holidays, and I've been shooting vlogs every holiday season now for nine years, and there's a lot of videos on that stuff. Absorb some of that ancient, ancient, eight, nine years, ancient, whatever. Absorb some of it, right? There's good tips in there. Year after year, I've thought through how do people need support around this time of year? I've put out vlogs on it. There's also some good stuff around socializing, generally speaking and navigating social situations in the books. ?Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living, happy, Thin and Free? and reboot Rezoom?. Oh, the book is called, ?Rezoom,? sorry, R-E-Z-O-O-M, Rezoom. You can get those from the library, or you can buy them cheap on Amazon, right? Those are low cost resources that you can access.
Now, if you're a Bright Lifer, there's more support for you. We have a whole course called Bright Line Holiday. If you're a Bright Lifer, Bright Line Holiday, and it goes into depth about navigating the holidays Bright, this is the time of year to take advantage of those modules. Cue them up. Start listening on your drives, while you're doing dishes, while you're chopping vegetables. This is the time to start to bathe your soul in. Here's how we navigate the holidays Bright. We also, in the Boot Camp, which every Bright Lifer has access to Boot Camp 2.0, or if you're in the Boot Camp right now, we have that first module, bonus module number one. It's called, ?A full Flourishing Life: Navigating Family, Friends, and Social Situations.? Take advantage of that. And then there's the Friends and Family video in there that you can copy the link and send it to your friends and family if you want them to understand. If you want a neuroscientist, aka me, to explain how your brain is different, how not everybody, not everybody's going to be thrilled with the notion of a freebie and a treat when someone shoves cake in their mouth, right? That's not going to be a good thing for everybody. Well, why is that? How is my brain different from his brain? Why is that an assault to me and not a gift? We have a lot of tools for you.
Mainly, I just want to say, bring it here. Bring it here. Bring it here. We get you. We love you. We support you. These insults and injuries and rejections and misunderstandings are hard to navigate. But the reality is, it's not their job to understand what you're doing with your food. They may never. It's not their job to understand what you're doing with your food. You can stay strong in your no thank you, regardless of what they do or whether they even accept your no thank you. Right? Think about it this way. If you were allergic to peanuts and they'd made you a peanut butter sandwich, you wouldn't eat it. No matter how many times they shoved the platter of peanut butter sandwiches into your face, you would look them in the eye and continue to say, ?No, thank you. I don't eat peanut butter. It makes me sick.? That's helpful language. Sugar and flour make us sick. It warps our minds, our bodies, our brains, our emotions, our spirits. It warps us and makes us sick. Anyone who cares about us or loves us can hear it perhaps in that language. If you don't need a relationship with them, then just disengage. I stopped going to those gatherings where they were shoving those platters in my face. I needed to for a bit. It was the right move, and I don't regret it in the slightest. I was better off not being there.
I am going to leave you with a beautiful quote by the famous Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who famously said, ?t is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.? What we have out there is a food landscape, a food environment that is sick. It's crazy. People are eating themselves into leg amputations, and open-heart surgeries, and early death, and Alzheimer's. They're dying too young and in pain from the way they're eating. For us, it's even worse because we have a more addictive relationship with those ultra-processed foods. It's not good for us. Not even on the holidays, right? Not even for a one-off. It's not good for us. So stay strong. Stay strong in your no thank you. Be grateful that most people will accept it. God bless the ones who don't. And bring it here. Bring it here. Bring it here. We get you. We love you. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
