Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I usually don't date vlogs, but this one is very date specific. So, I'm going to say this is the vlog for Wednesday, December 18th, 2024, and what's significant about this date is that smack in the middle of the week where we will be officially ending our one-year-long celebration commemoration of the 10-year anniversary of Bright Line Eating's? launching, which happened in 2014. It's also the end of 2024 for all of us, which is kind of a trippy thing because can you even believe that we're now entering the second half of the 2020s? The decade of the 2020s. The first half of it is 2020 to 2024, and the second half of it is 2025 to 2029, and we're entering the second half of this decade, a decade. That started for all of us with Covid, just a really horrific, but also strangely, globally unifying experience because there really has never been anything that every human being on planet Earth experienced before. None of the World wars were actually everywhere. This was pretty unique, and for me, it's kind of hard to believe that it's five years since then, really, but it is. And here at Bright Line Eating in our little corner of the world, we're celebrating our own little milestone as well. Rhat's what this vlog is about, and there's a big evolution in thinking that's happened here at Bright Line Eating. There's a big change that I've never really languaged properly for you, so that's what I want to do in this vlog. The milestones of Bright Line Eating's inception are the impetus.
The first idea, the birth really, or maybe even the conception, of Bright Line Eating was January 26th, 2014. The story, I was meditating in the morning, in the winter in January in the dark at 5:00 AM and the universe flooded me with this series of visions. It came with words. The mandate was to write a book called, "Bright Line Eating," and then there was a series of visions of this book spreading around the world, having global impact, me being on the Today Show talking about it, and then there was feelings. I swayed, I think a bit back and forth as I ached and felt these prayers that people were saying on the order of "God, please help me with my food and my weight. What do I do? I'm so lost. I need your help. I started to feel it." I don't know if those were prayers that were being said right then, or through time and space, I don't know, but I felt them. I sort of tapped into this global pain and desperation around utter powerlessness over food, and I was kind of thinking myself in a very cerebral way about what I knew about how people's brains were being blocked from losing weight and how experts didn't understand that and how misguided people were in thinking about the obesity pandemic and what I could contribute to that narrative in shedding light on what was really happening globally as a society.
That was January 2014. I got to work trying to write this book, and fast forward to August, 2014, I'd started the Bright Line Eating email list. That's really the day that we consider to be the birth of the Bright Line Eating Movement. The day that the "me" became a "we," and some of y'all joined me, and I know there's someone watching this vlog that signed up for the email list on that day, August 5th, 2014. By the end of that day, there were about 75 email subscribers and it grew from there. So far in these 10 years, over 2 million people, probably close to two-and-a-half million people by now have signed up for the Bright Line Eating email list. They're not all still on the list actively. People don't always open and click, and we're very selective. We only send emails to the small cadre, relatively small cadre of people who are opening and clicking and paying attention at that moment. But those two, two-and-a-half million people have been educated to some degree. They've had their perspective shifted and in aggregate it's a pretty big impact. They know people who've heard from them about the reality of ultra-processed food addiction and how Bright Lines can actually be helpful, and we've had a pretty big impact through that email list. And then in October of 2014, the Boot Camp launched, the very first one, and we've had a huge impact with our Boot Camp and our other online courses. Well over 100,000 people from all over planet Earth have signed up for one or more of our courses, most of them in the Boot Camp. That was a prototype of what later became a fully fleshed out online course with videos and stuff. It was just a series of six conference calls that I led on a free conference call line at the time, but it was the first Boot Camp, and there's people around, I know several of them who were in that cohort of 40 people, and they're still here and they're still maintaining their weight loss. Not all of 'em, I think most of them that I know who are still here are still maintaining their weight loss from that time over 10 years ago.
So now, we're 10 years later, we are wrapping up our first decade of Bright Line Eating this week. We're pulling down all the assets, the digital assets of the celebration, the commemoration, which means we're pulling down the webpage with the logo and the timeline that we created that I just kind of shared with you. It had more on it, but the timeline of how the team grew and the different courses we launched and so forth, we're pulling down the page where people could comment and share their celebrations and their appreciation for what Bright Line Eating has done in their life. We're retiring the special 10 year commemorative logo. Maybe you got a mug with it on it or whatever. I dunno, maybe there's still mugs in the store in the Emporium, I dunno. But we're pulling it all down that the year of celebration is over. We had a lovely luncheon in August in Rochester, New York for people who wanted to come to commemorate. It's over.
And now, as we move into our second decade, there's another retiring that I need to do that I think is going to be maybe emotional for some of you. I guess it's emotional for me. Very early on, I felt the need, the call, the drive to make this movement global in its impact. In the first year or two, I put that to words by saying, we're going to get a million people to goal weight. In the first book, "Bright Line Eating" that was written mostly in 2016, but was published in early 2017, what it actually says in there is we're going to get a million people at goal weight by 2040. Then a year or so later, I was talking with a marketer from Silicon Valley who said, that's too far in the future. It's not inspiring. You need to make it 2030. No one can imagine 2040. It's only 2016 or 2017, whatever. You got to make it earlier. So, I just was like, okay, I mean, it's all pie in the sky to me. I dunno. We're just making this stuff up. So, I was like, okay, a million at goal weight by 2030. I was like, okay, that's actually galvanizing. I can feel that. I could see 2030 and a million at goal weight by 2030.
Then, we stopped being comfortable talking about goal weight so much, and there's a reason for that. We were really noticing the frustration and shame and heartbreak of not they should be ashamed, but it's a shame that people who were losing 150 pounds were struggling to lose what they thought was the last 10 pounds. They had set some number that they weren't hitting, and they were not feeling done with their transformation, and we were feeling like, oh my gosh, that's not how we want to be framing this for people. It's not about hitting a number. It's about being reborn, body, mind, and spirit. It's about being able to move past the food and the weight into what's next in your life and being hung up on two pounds or five pounds or 10 pounds or 40 pounds, whatever. It's not the point. So, we stopped talking about goal weight. We started talking about goal body, which is what can your body do, right? My goal body can now do three pull-ups. I think I've shared that with you before. I'll shut up about that. But anyway, what can your body do? Do you want to be able to touch your toes, whatever, play with your grandkids on the floor? So, we started talking about that. We started talking about Bright Transformations, and the slogan became A Million Bright Transformations by 2030.
Then what happened was in 2021, I got a fire in my belly. I was lit up, and I had the feeling we are sending this Bright Line Eating movement to the moon. We're going to be big like Noom, like Weight Watchers. We're going to really, really impact the world. Again, I felt the calling, the urge, the drive, the impetus, the mandate, whatever, to scale this thing to really impact the world. And I moved it up. I said, A million Bright Transformations by 2025. Let's get this done in the next couple years. Let's just get whoever? Oprah's about to come, or Brene Brown, who knows who, right? And let's just, something's going to happen. We're going to get venture capital funding. We're going to scale this company. We're going to go Silicon Valley style and we're going to explode. We literally hired a couple of seasoned executives to scale the company, and we had our Bright Ticket Week and dropped our prices dramatically to be in line with pretty inexpensive online apps and stuff. We tried to scale, and I don't talk much about what happened after that, but it was kind of like watching something launch and then explode in the sky in front of your eyes. It failed spectacularly, not just slightly, but dramatically. One of the executives turned out to be incredibly unscrupulous. David and I were really focused on our family. It was very hard here at the home front.
What ended up happening was the venture capital market overnight shriveled to nothing. Just the money dried up and we were on pace for bankruptcy really fast, and it was a huge wakeup call. That executive, having him on board was a real wakeup call too. It really taught us a lot about what we don't want to be as a company, who we are and who we're not. There are all kinds of people who run companies in all kinds of ways. So, this isn't about any one individual, but it is about the soul of our company that we rediscovered through that process. And what we had to do to survive that transition was we had to scale down. We literally had to lay off half of our employees in a very short period of time. We had to get out of a very expensive technology infrastructure that we'd built over years that was costing a fortune and just scrap it and go into a very automated kind of smooth, tinker toy system that isn't as customizable, but actually works better. Thank you, God, and is like one 10th the price. That was a miracle that we found that.
We had to think long and hard about what we can offer and what we can't and who we serve and who we don't. We really developed and found our soul as a company. Just a couple days ago, I was online with some dear, dear friends who originally helped me grow Bright Line Eating, Ryan Eliason, Sage Levine, ocean Robbins, and Ryan Eliason said something really profound. He said, as companies mature and develop, there's different ways that can go. Companies can mature and develop by growing and scaling. That happens for some companies. I mean, it happened for Starbucks, right? They started as a little coffee shop in Seattle, and they grew and grew and grew and grew and grew into this massive international company. It doesn't go that way for most companies. Most companies go bankrupt is what happens. The vast majority of companies are not around in five years, let alone 10 years. But for the companies that succeed and continue to exist, most of them do not just keep growing. What they do is they discover their real identity, who they serve, and how and what feels right sized to do that work in the world.
What happened over the last couple years as this was developing for Bright Line Eating is I started to publish more papers like academic peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, and I started to get in touch with a very, very nascent, fledgling international community of people studying food addiction. I went to a couple of food addiction conferences over in the UK, spoke at one of them, started to connect with the Food Addiction Professionals Network and the Food Addiction Institute, and Esther Helga's INFACT School, which is training food addiction professionals and all these wonderful, beautiful things that are happening in the world. I got very clear that the big needle mover, the big needle mover, is to get ultra-processed food addiction into the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which gets put out by the American Psychiatric Association, as a disorder, as a substance use disorder, and into the ICD, which is put out by the World Health Organization, the International Classification of Diseases, that also has substance use disorders and ultra-processed food addiction needs to be included among them. With those changes in place in the future, so many amazing things will happen. People who are coming up for bariatric surgery will get a different kind of education before they go under the knife for that procedure. They'll be educated about the condition of ultra-processed food addiction and tested to see whether they have it, and certain foods will be recommended that they don't eat, and certain programs will be offered that could help them with that. People presenting with eating disorders will get screened for ultra-processed food addiction to find out if they just have bulimia, binge eating disorder, anorexia, or if they also have food addiction, which presents a complicating and important factor in their diagnosis and in their recovery. And ultra-processed foods will now be subject to regulations and policies, maybe limiting their advertising to the most vulnerable populations like kids. Just like we limit that for cigarettes and for alcohol. Maybe they won't be allowed in daycares or schools or prisons or hospitals where people are there needing to eat what's available, and it's important that we don't be addicting them and hijacking their brains in the process.
In short, what happened is I started to see this avenue, this vehicle for global impact and the role that Bright Line Eating can play in that, because what's real and true is that the big limiting factor to getting ultra-processed food addiction recognized globally as the condition that we know it is, is not learning more about it in the brain. We know all about that, and it's not learning more about its diagnosis. We know all about that thanks to the Yale Food Addiction Scale. It's having more studies on treatment on people who actually stop eating the addictive foods, and what happens then? There's almost no studies on that. Bright Line Eating has published most of them, but there's 10,500 studies now on food addiction, and less than 10 of them are on treatment. With our population, our community of people who are voluntarily undergoing a treatment of sorts, a program that is a treatment for this type of condition, we can contribute in significant ways to the achievement of this goal that will have global impact.
That's really good news because I got to tell you, I'm over here thinking, I don't at the moment have any interest in growing a company that would have a million customers. We've got 6,500 Bright Lifers? right now. We serve them with a really cozy team. Could Bright Line Eating be that big? I guess I wouldn't say no to it if it happened organically, but I am not in a position to feel like I want to go out and get venture capital funding and sell out a bunch of this company and get a bunch of suits on Wall Street telling us how we have to do things. I got close enough to that fire and felt the burn of it to go, oh, yeah, no, that is not what I want to do. With what we're doing here. We feel right now best relatively boutique now we could double and triple and quadruple in size. That would be fine, and we would be honestly nowhere close to having a million clients, nowhere close. I started to look really at those numbers and go, that's la la land compared to where we are right now.
The thing is though, that we may have already impacted that many people, it's just that we don't have any way to tell. They've read the book long since maybe it was on a library shelf. They're not watching this vlog. They're not going to be signing themselves up into any database. A million Bright Transformations by 2025 is just not something that can easily be measured, and it doesn't feel wise to pursue. Again, I am not closing the door to amazing growth that the divine universe just decides to create. But as a CEO and a founder of a movement, I just wanted to let you know that there's been this branching off where the global impact of our company gets to be massive, and we as a company get to be cozy, and it feels like the sweetest arrangement possible, like a miracle that I cannot even tell you how glad I am to witness. And so, for the moment, I just want you to know that we're officially retiring, not only the 10-year anniversary web assets and saying goodbye to our first decade of life as a company and moving into our second decade, but we're also going to retire that tagline or whatever it was, a million Bright Transformations by whatever year.
I'm not sorry that we had it for as long as we did. I think there's a lot of value in throwing a dart at a wall and seeing where it sticks. What's that old saying? Like, shoot for the stars, you may land with the moon, or whatever. Maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, shoot for the moon, you may land among the stars. Shoot for it. Go for it. Good goals or goals that you've maybe got a 50% chance of attaining, right? You'll be impressed with yourself that you tried, and we did try, did everything we could, and I'm not saying we failed. I'm saying we learned. I'm saying we grew. I'm saying we developed and we matured and developed eyes to see what actually we want and what at the moment we don't want. So, as we move into our second decade, we're going to be revamping our mission, vision, and values. I'm sure I'll be sharing those with you when they're done. The team is firing on all cylinders, operating beautifully and loving working together, and the community is stable, happy, thriving. We're creating Bright Transformations at a super beautiful rate and impacting circles and circles of people even beyond those that we're literally helping to shed their excess weight and keep it off. We're having a big impact. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being on this wild ride for however long you've been on it. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
