Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Okay, we're trying something different. My videographer's in town. We got some other videos to shoot, and I thought, let's shoot the vlog on the stairs. Yeah, it's good.
It's December 2024, and January 1st is coming up. It's kind of a time for us folks who struggle with our weight chronically. And we are launching a new Boot Camp cohort right at the beginning of January, end of December, early January. And so, I've been thinking about you and holiday parties. If you're in the United States, Thanksgiving is over. It's just kind of that time of year. A lot of people start to think, you probably aren't thinking about it yet, you're probably still thinking about the holiday party you're about to go to, but pretty soon you're going to be thinking, maybe this would be the year that I could really transform my life and get my weight under control, get my food under control, turn over a new leaf. And so, I want to talk in this video about what I think is one of the big sort of X-factor keys that hangs people up. I want to describe it first of all by telling you a story about a meditation that I take people through when they start the Boot Camp. Boot Camp registration is usually open for a little while. Oh, and first I need to tell you stay to the end of the vlog because we're announcing scholarship applications, the dates and stuff. So, if you care about scholarships, this is the vlog where I'm going to tell you about that. But at the end, okay, so back to the story.
When we start a new Boot Camp cohort, we always have a kickoff call day. It's a live call. It's recorded so people can watch it later if they can't make it live, but at the end of that call, I take them through a meditation so they can imagine themselves and the journey they're about to go on. It's meditative, but it's also supposed to be inspirational, and it's also supposed to set the mindset or the context for this journey they're embarking on. Lately the meditation I've been doing is, I'm just going to tell you the very beginning of it, I'm not going to do a whole long thing with you, but I have them imagine, they breathe, they sit, I have them imagine they're walking in the woods on a path. It's beautiful. There're trees all around. It's the middle of the day, they're in the forest, and then they come up to a river and it's beautiful. And they step up to the bank of the river and they look down and they see themselves in the river at the side of it, clinging to some grasses. And they're in an eddy where the river's kind of gross and foamy, and there's pieces of trash around, and it's kind of this yellow foam. And they're in the river clinging to these grasses, and they realize they've been there for so long. And as the river is flowing, if you look just downstream, it takes a bend and you can't see what's down there. And the person realizes that there they are, and they know that there's some white water and there's at least one rock poking out of the river. They suspect it's rocky, but they really don't know what's coming up ahead. There's a bend in the river. Anyway, fast forward, they decide to get in the river and shepherd themselves to let go of the grass and flow downstream and see what might happen. The rest of the meditation is what happens from there. But in real life, what I think the frothy kind of gross foamy stuff is, it's the chaos that we live in when we're in active addiction. It's the chronic repetition of bad choices and decisions that we could have done better making and relationships that we're in, or jobs we've said yes to, or chronic patterns that aren't a good fit for us, that in aggregate have the effect of keeping us in chaos. There we are eating to just fuel the chaos. You got to eat crazy to live crazy. So, you're eating to numb yourself, comfort yourself, distract yourself, excite yourself to at least give yourself a little fun or a little respite. The food is fueling the chaos, and there's a swirl to it. Can you feel it? Now, not everybody's like this, but I work with enough people who start this journey to know that this is a common phenomenon.
I think that chaos is addictive. I think it releases chemicals in the brain. Adrenaline, cortisol, epinephrine. What is that adrenaline shit? Sorry, neuroscientist, brain fart. But you get the idea. There's all these, there's a soupy cocktail of chemicals that gets addictive, and it's scary to let go of the grass and see what's downstream. There's another factor here. It's not just addiction to chaos, it's also fear, right? It's the river is bending and you don't see a head and you don't know whether there's failure or success if you let go of the grass. But I got to tell you, it doesn't matter because they both scare you. It doesn't matter. Afraid of succeeding, afraid of failing, equal measure. And you know what? They're both kind of equivalent. Because if you succeed, that sets you up for potential failure. And if you fail, then that's failure. They're both failure. It doesn't matter. It's scary. You can't see around the bend.
If you relate to this and you feel like you've got some big pieces of your life that are there serving to fuel your addiction to chaos, and you want to succeed, finally, what do you do about it? What's the formula? What are the steps? What are the big elements in play to actually be able to coax yourself out of that disgusting little frothy eddy and down the river to something better? Well, that's what this vlog is about. I think there's five things. I'm sure there's more, whatever. I can think of five big ones. One is to surrender. There's an element of surrender in letting go of the grass and letting yourself float downstream. I think that in real life, the surrender could look like signing up for the Boot Camp. It could look like just trusting and understanding that you're not the best architect of your life. I think as addicts, and you might not relate to being an addict, let's even just say as human beings, there's a point of humility. If we haven't been getting the results we want in life chronically, whether you're an addict or not, I don't care. You're an addict, you're a codependent, you're a whatever. You have chronic depression, whatever the situation is. If you have not been getting the results you want in life, at some point, there's an element of crying, "Uncle," of just saying, "I surrender the big pieces." I just can't be the architect of my life fully anymore. I can be a contributor. I can do footwork, but I got to surrender. I think that's the first thing is just surrender control over the big pieces. Then what do you do with them? You still have to live your life. So, you surrender control of these big pieces, but you still have a life. You still have to make decisions.
What you do next is you start to triangulate support to make different kinds of decisions. It is not just going to be you running the show anymore. Find a mentor if you can. Ideally someone who has lived the way you're living now in their past, someone you have a lot of things in common with someone you have similarities with. In 12-step programs, this might be a sponsor. In Bright Line Eating?, it might be a guide in Bright Line Eating. It might be a friend who just used to be in the food and now is bright and slender, and you want their life. You want what they have. Find someone who's living now the way you want to live, but they also have to have had experience with the kind of mess that you've got in your life in some kind of way. Find a mentor. That's a big component of the triangulation of support that you're going to try to build here.
But there's also a process of having tools to access your own inner guidance, whether that's writing or praying or meditating, being in therapy, because you are going to have to make your decisions ultimately. Your chosen mentor can weigh in, but your decisions are yours. Your life is yours. So, you're not abdicating control over that here. Then there's also other resources, trusted texts. I don't know, are you a Christian? Read the Bible. Are you a big fan of a certain form of therapy? What books are about that? Books about personal growth, whatever it is, there's so many resources out there. Triangulate and have a circle of friends.
Here's the next one, I would say this is my third piece of the puzzle, is surround yourself with people who are living just a little bit better than you are. Just enough of them. People who can inspire you to be your better self. People who I really do think it's true ultimately, that we end up roughly the average of the five people we spend the most time with. So, look around your acquaintances. Can you find some more people who are doing how you want to be doing in life? Now, if you start doing Bright Line Eating, that gets a lot easier. You can look around our community and start associating with people who are Bright and shiny. Make friends with them. Just adding a few more people to your support network who are living the way you want to live. It's going to help a lot.
Now, the fourth one is pretty obvious. It's you need to be walking a proven path. Success doesn't just happen because you start making better decisions out of nowhere. There are success paths all over the world in all kinds of fields of endeavor. I ran a marathon once in my life. I'll never do it again. My knees are bunk. But I ran a marathon once and I used a book called, "The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer". It was a success path. It took me from not being able to run to the mailbox, to being able to run a marathon in six months. It was written by some professors who had a college course in taking people who were couch potatoes to running a marathon. That's what they knew how to do. They wrote a book on it, and it's a fabulous blueprint. Find a path. It could mean you want to get buff and do a pull up like me. I can now do three in a row. By the way. Hire a personal trainer, whatever. Find a success path in Bright Line Eating. We have a success path. It's called the Bright Roadmap?. It starts with the Boot Camp, but be on a path. Don't imagine that you're just going to start walking with your triangulated support being all surrendered, and then just start wandering into the woods and you're going to know which way to go. It doesn't work like that.
Finally, this is the key, you got to just be willing to live just a little, little at the edge of your comfort zone. Because if you're doing it right, it will feel uncomfortable a lot because things will be changing. Things will be changing, and it could mean big things are changing. You're changing your relationship status, your job status. Maybe you need to move. I don't know what the big pieces are in your life that have been causing chaos. It might mean that you need to not make any major changes for the first year. They talk about that in 12-step programs a lot, and just ground yourself in the life you have and stop making the chaos in your own mind. If you change, your circumstances will change a lot. But that's not going to help if you're being beaten up at home. That's not going to help if you have a job with a boss who's about to fire you if you don't work 90 hours a week. You might actually have to make some structural changes. I don't know your situation, but either way, whether you're making big structural changes or not, you're going to have to live at the edge of your comfort zone because getting more peaceful is uncomfortable. Changing big pieces of your life is uncomfortable. Letting go of the reeds at the side of the river and floating downstream in the river is uncomfortable. It's scary. That's why you haven't done it yet. And so, you're going to need to develop some tolerance for discomfort, but the new people you're surrounding yourself with will help that. If you're on a proven success path, you'll be getting so many pieces of feedback that it's working along the way that it's going to be way easier than you think.
If you're addicted to chaos and you're afraid of failure and afraid of success, this vlog is for you. I feel you. I understand you. I was so addicted to chaos when I started my recovery journey. You don't live a life of prostitution and crack addiction and dropping out of high school and living the life I was living unless you're that addicted to chaos. So, I got clean and sober, and then I picked up skydiving and motorcycle riding pretty quickly. I'm not saying I recommend that. I'm just saying sometimes we need a sufficient substitute, something to kind of fill the holes.
Anyway, before I sign off, I just want to say we do have a Boot Camp cohort starting up. We're not going to leave you high and dry. What we always do when we launch a new Boot Camp cohort, which we do periodically every few months typically, is we give away 20 scholarships. It used to be 10. We've upped it to 20. These are full scholarships for the Boot Camp because we know that not everybody has the means to pay for the Boot Camp, and we want to help you. We want to serve you. It's by application. Be sure to put in your application if you've applied before, because we know that there are people who are hoping for a scholarship and applying time and again, and we want to get you, if you haven't gotten one yet, we do our best. We're accepting applications now, Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, until Sunday, December 15th, 2024, is the application window. Then that'll give us a little bit of time to select the winners, and they can register and so forth. But the Boot Camp won't start for three weeks after that. Sunday, January 5th, 2024, is the kickoff call we'll be doing, I'll be doing, and the Bright Line Eating Team. We'll be doing some really fun brand-new live Master Classes over the New Year's time. Keep your eye out for those. They're going to be super fun. We don't accept any applications beyond the window of time, I just said. Click if you want to apply, there's more information on that page if you want to know how it all works.
I hope you'll be considering the Boot Camp January 1st. If getting your food straight is not what you need to be doing in 2025, I hope you'll be using the thoughts in this vlog and all the other supports that you have to think about how you're going to, okay? I'm going to blow the title of our upcoming live event, How You Can Come Alive and Thrive in 2025. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
