Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. It is November of 2024 as I release this vlog, and that means that in the United States of America, Thanksgiving is coming up. It's late this year. My daughter Maya informed me. It's the latest day. It could be November 28th, I believe, something like that. Anyway, it's coming up and whether you live in the United States and you celebrate American Thanksgiving or not, the vlog topic today is going to be pertinent to you because I'm guessing there's a really good chance that you will have experienced the mental phenomenon that I'm going to be talking about in this vlog.
Now, before I launch into that though, I just want to say I am not in this vlog going to be giving you a roadmap for handling Thanksgiving Bright, but I am going to tell you where you can find such a roadmap. I've shot many of those vlogs in the past, and if you're not already aware, it's just really important that you know that can access the whole Bright Line Eating? vlog library by going to our website, BrightLineEating.com and clicking on vlog of course. There's a search bar there, and if you just put "Thanksgiving" into that search bar, oh my gosh, this treasure trove of old vlogs will come up, but old, but very, very relevant to today because oh my gosh, it's Thanksgiving again. In particular, I want to direct your attention to a vlog I shot. It's called, "Thanks and Giving Thanks and Giving," and it's about the twin pillars of navigating Thanksgiving successfully, which are gratitude and service. Gratitude and service. That's what that vlog is all about. I also have a vlog called, Your Thanksgiving Plan." Very, very concrete nuts and bolts action steps for making it through the day Bright. I also have a couple vlogs called, "How to Have a Bright Thanksgiving." I think one of them is "How to Have a Bright Line Thanksgiving," or "How to Have a Bright Line Eating Thanksgiving." Again, really concrete action steps for navigating Thanksgiving Bright. I've done that vlog; I've done it a bunch. I've done it well, it's there for you. It's a great resource. Go access that. I really encourage you.
What I've never done is I've never shot a vlog on this particular mental quirk that so often comes up before Thanksgiving. I know that because I coach people in our Bright Line Eating community around this train of thought all the time as the holidays are coming up, and I got a new take on it the other day as I was talking with a recovering addict, a recovering food addict and drug and alcohol addict about the word "insanity" as it relates to addiction. The word insanity comes up a lot as it relates to addiction. The old famous saying, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Any chronic lifetime dieter can really, really feel that in their gut just oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I was doing a webinar recently and I put out a poll for the hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands, I'm not sure of people who were in attendance live on that webinar. It said, how many times have you attempted to get off your excess weight in the past? The options were never several, whatever, dozens, I'm not sure. Then the last option was, I'm always trying to lose weight, and over 50% of people selected that last one. I'm always trying to lose weight. If that doesn't speak to the insanity of trying something over and over and over again, I don't know what does.
Of course, for many people, they come into Bright Line Eating and it gives them a new orientation toward that endeavor, a new take on it. It helps to explain why their brain's been so hijacked in the past, and it gives different kinds of suggestions like to uncouple exercise and weight loss. Don't be trying to start an exercise regimen at the same time as you try to lose weight and don't be trying to eat many small meals all throughout the day. Just stick with three square meals a day and eat nothing in between. Don't snack or graze. Don't count calories, don't track points, don't track macros. Stick with a food plan like Bright Line Eating that's automatizable; a completely different approach. Don't aim for moderation, right? Actually just break up and divorce finally, from the foods that haunt you, plague you that you can't stop eating. Once you start eating them, stop eating them already. In Bright Line Eating, we give very different guidelines around the weight-loss journey, and that helps a lot of people.
This brings up a second form of insanity, which I talk about, which is that insanity is finding what really works and then deciding to stop doing it for some reason A lot of people come into Bright Line Eating, they find that it works so well that before you know it, they're thinking they can deviate from the plan or just walk away from it altogether, and then they realize, oh, I had it way better when I was just Bright. I want that back. Many times, they find that it's not so easy to get it back after you've walked away or started to be wonky or loosey goosey with your Lines. It's hard to get solidly bright again. To that point, I want to speak about this particular insanity that I see before holidays, before big events, and it's the insanity of thinking that what's really needed to make that day work is some alteration to your food plan. Like, oh, Thanksgiving meal is going to be at five o'clock, so it's a dinner meal, but I don't get fruit at dinner. So, what I really need to do is rearrange my plan for the day so that I have fruit at dinner because I need something to eat while everyone else is eating dessert. Or geez, I would never eat mashed potatoes. Normally I would just eat a plain baked potato or a boiled potato or something or rice, but it's Thanksgiving, so I have to have mashed potatoes or what would be another classic version of it, or, yeah, I don't get grain at the Thanksgiving meal, but I want to have grains so that I can have mashed potatoes or something like that, thinking that some form of sexify your food, or I guess just I'm going to take a break from Bright Line Eating for Thanksgiving.
Typically, people don't call in for coaching with me around that, although, although I'm sure a lot of people are thinking, maybe I'll just take the day off from Bright Line Eating and then get back to it, which is of course a pretty severe form of diet mentality thinking, right? If you set yourself up to buy into that notion, then of course you're going to need to do that for your birthday and your spouse's birthday and the cruise you're taking and Valentine's Day and the 4th of July, and it just never ends. Before you know it, you're on a horrible roller coaster of back and forthing. The only way to really live Bright is to adopt it as a deep identity and to just do it 365 days a year. To just really think Thanksgiving is a Thursday. It's just really a Thursday. What I want to talk about in terms of this particular pre-holiday insanity, this notion that, let's just take the fruit one that, because I feel like that's the most common thing people ask me is I don't get fruit at the meal that's going to be the Thanksgiving meal. Can I move my food plan around that day? What they're typically usually asking is, can I just not have my fruit at breakfast or lunch and just have it at the dinner meal or swap something else out? The particular insanity of that thinking is a form of insanity. I call it insanity. If you look in the dictionary, I'm not talking about insanity as needing to be checked into an inpatient psychiatric hospital. I'm not talking about bona fide mental illness. What I'm talking about is usually the fourth or the fifth or the sixth definition of insanity, which is more like a lack of proportion, a lack of the ability to think straight, having your thinking be so out of whack with what are the obvious facts of the matter that you would say that's insane thinking. It's just way out of proportion. It's way out of whack. It's not taking good account of the facts of the situation. I think of the scales of lady justice, where you've got the scale on one side, like a pan balance, a pan scale where there's this on one side and then an equal weight on the other side, and it balances out nice and evenly.
What's the proportion of the situation? What really matters on this end? It's so interesting that putting six ounces of strawberries over here so that you have six ounces of strawberries to eat when other people are eating Thanksgiving dessert, right? That somehow in our mind, that grows in importance to where it seems to counterbalance everything else that's on the other side of the scale, which might amount to, for example, I'm going to be thinking about this idea many, many, many times a day, day in and day out for weeks before Thanksgiving Day actually arrives. I'm going to be obsessing about it. It's going to be occluding, my ability to think about my life, the people I love, the things I care about, the day I'm actually living today, because I'm thinking so much about six ounces of strawberries that I may or may not decide to eat in two weeks.
So, there's that. There's the mental obsession. How much mental real estate we're going to give over to this. Will I, won't I, should I, shouldn't I? Negotiation that started in our head. And then on the other side of the scale, we've got the very real possibility that mucking with our food plan might throw us off our bright lines altogether and set us up for months, maybe years of wonkiness with our lines, an inability to get our weight off the way we want to. Potential health challenges related to weight cycling and maybe our weight going up again, the potential diabetes or heart disease implications of that. We've got on the other side of the scale, the reality that if we believe the lie, that six ounces of strawberries is actually going to do it for us and make the whole dessert course of Thanksgiving so much easier, when the reality crashes in that six ounces of strawberries are eaten very quickly and everyone else is still eating dessert, and now you still have nothing to eat while they're still eating dessert.
You would've been better off finding another way to approach the day and the meal and that course of the meal, for example, resolving that at that time, you're going to be the one doing the dishes, or at that time, you are going to be the one launching everyone in a lovely round of gratitude sharing or what you're most looking forward to for the rest of the holidays sharing, or what was the highlight of your 2024 so far sharing? Or you could be the one, instead of thinking about will you or won't you decide to move your food plan around to get six ounces of strawberries on Thanksgiving, you could have been spending all that time researching interesting ways to have your family connect more on the day, fun question prompts to ask people looking into different ways to talk with your nieces, your nephews, your grandmothers, your grandfathers, your people, whoever is going to be there looking into things they're interested in, so you have things to talk with them about. You could be doing so many other things with that mental real estate. This form of insanity is a lack of proportion, a lack of the ability to think straight. In my experience, it's one of the biggest hallmarks of my disease of food addiction. What happens for me is when I'm in my state of diseased thinking, I can put my health, my happiness, my well-being, my ability to show up for my kids, my ability to show up for my husband, my self-confidence, my feeling of being at peace and my own skin, my love of life, my joy and my heart, my ability to connect in my soul with my higher power, with gratitude and peace, my physical health, my ability to wear all the clothes in my closet that fit today, thank you, God, my comfort in my own skin, my ability to get a good night's sleep, my lack of needing any cholesterol or blood pressure or diabetes medications whatsoever. I can put all of that on this side of a scale, and then somehow an extra six ounces of strawberries on the other side of the scale feels like it balances out. I might need that extra food so badly. I mean, I'll be honest. For me, it's usually not six ounces of strawberries on the other side of the scale, whatever. Let's say it's a cookie, right? Whatever it is. And my lack of proportion, my lack of ability to think straight when I'm really in the grips of my disease, I am so unable to call to mind with the necessary force, the consequences of going back into my food addiction, that the presence or the desirability or the availability of some bit of food right now actually seems like it balances out the risk of giving up all of those other things.
That is insanity. That is absolute utter insanity. It's kind of like if you were allergic to strawberries, and you liked the taste of them, but every time you ate them, your throat closed up, your mouth and lips got swollen, your whole face broke out in hives, and you stopped being able to breathe. The notion that liking those strawberries would even come close to balancing out the consequences of eating those strawberries is preposterous. You would never eat strawberries. You would think, I don't eat strawberries. I'm allergic to strawberries. You would develop a mental aversion to strawberries, even though once upon a time you liked the way they tasted, because you wouldn't have any insanity about those strawberries. You would be sane about them. You would have mental proportion, the ability to think straight about it.
But with the addiction problem, we lose that ability to think straight, to actually properly assess the reality of the situation and the consequences. I'm not actually saying that it's a federal crime or even a Bright Line Eating crime to move your food plan around so that you have six ounces of strawberries while everyone's eating Thanksgiving dessert. What I am suggesting is I invite you to be curious if the Negotiator Part of you, it's a form of the Food Indulger called the Negotiator, if that Negotiator has started with its insidious, "Maybe I should, could I? What if I?" on and on and on in your head about the Thanksgiving meal coming up, if that insidious negotiation has started, I'm just inviting you to be curious and to watch and to maybe even inventory the pros and cons, to look at the scales and see what actually balances out. If there's a story in your head that some amount of food at some time of day during this meal is the only way to make that day go well, I invite you to be curious about the lie that might be buried in that story. Because in my experience as a recovering food addict, the only way that I have a joyful, blessed holiday day is by focusing on the gratitude and the people and the meaning behind the event and keeping my food in its place and feeling my heart burst with peace, and how grateful I am to be Bright and how happy I am that food isn't the center of the day. As soon as I start believing that a little bit better, different sexier food at this time of day or that time of day is the answer, I've already lost the plot. I've already lost proportion. I'm already buying into that insanity, that lack of proportion, that lack of the ability to think straight.
Anyway, I don't know if you're experiencing any of that particular form of pre-holiday insanity. I know I've experienced it a bunch in my life, and I just float these ideas for your consideration. Remember, there's no Bright Line Eating police. You do what you want to do, and I'm so excited that we have a beautiful holiday coming up where we can bond with the people we love the most. I invite you to really think deeply with proportion and clearly about what will make your heart soar on that day. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
