A New Year's Resolution Benchmark

January 01, 2025

Today I want to talk about New Year’s resolutions. It’s likely you’ve set a food- or weight-related resolution in the past, and perhaps you are planning one for this year. But I want to talk about a specific benchmark that is worth shooting for on New Year’s Day.

If you’re high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, and your food and weight problem is not solved, you’ll be orienting at New Year’s toward thinking about solving that problem. Your focus will be on food and weight. However, once your food and weight problems are resolved, you won’t be thinking about your weight when the New Year rolls in. Your focus will be elsewhere—on the book you want to write, the marathon you want to run, the decluttering you want to do, and so forth… and that’s a good benchmark to note.

There are three identity shifts that need to happen to achieve this benchmark and to become someone who is capable of living at their goal weight long-term.

The first identity shift is to settle into acceptance around a certain plan of eating that you’re doing long-term, not just while you’re trying to lose weight. This plan must be the way you eat now, and who you are now. If you’re doing Bright Line Eating, for example, you identify as a Bright Lifer, and this is rooted in your deep-seated identity.

The second identity shift is to become someone who doesn’t turn to food and use it as you used to: for numbing, for entertainment, for nurturing, for soothing—whatever. Food provides fuel for living, and is lovely and delicious, but no more. You become someone who has tools, coping strategies, and friends to support you, instead of food. As part of this identity shift you fall in love with the journey of personal growth inherent in moving beyond the food…and that keeps life endlessly fascinating and the food in its place forevermore.

The third identity shift is to become someone who has solved the food and weight problem. Past tense. It’s done. You’re not focused on “the last five pounds.” You’re not tweaking your food plan, unless you need to add or subtract some food to stay in your maintenance range. All the time you used to spend thinking about your food and weight is now reallocated to other life pursuits. Relationships. Self-care. Work and vocations. Hobbies and avocations.

And this is where the benchmark comes in. Because New Year’s will arrive, and you will not be thinking about food, your weight, or your body.

And you may not even notice at first.

We have courses in Bright Lifers—Maintenance I, II, and III—that cover this and take you through these shifts. They hold your hand until you solve this problem.

So, what do you do if it’s January 1 and you still absolutely do have a food and weight problem? Then you resolve to handle it in a science-backed way. Do this by tackling your identity first, because this is central. Your identity produces actions, and they, in turn, produce outcomes. You work from the inside out, meaning you start with identity, then you take on new actions, and the meshing together of your new identity with actions leads to outcomes.

In other words, don’t resolve to lose 40 pounds by June 1st. You’ve done that before, and it doesn’t work because you can’t start with outcomes. You need to start with identity.

BUT HERE’S THE PRO TIP: Invest in following a PROVEN SYSTEM that gives you an identity and lays out your actions.

That’s what Bright Line Eating gives you. It starts with the Boot Camp and continues with Bright Lifers, in a Bright Roadmap that takes you through the transformation. It gives you an identity and a community of people who are on the same path.

If you want to hit this benchmark of noticing that you’re not thinking about your weight and food, your task is simple: surrender to following the system.

There’s a link below the vlog to the registration page for the Boot Camp. Boot Camp tells you what action to take and helps you build your new identity day by day. It’s a slow process, but it happens faster in community, and when you follow a plan you believe in. So just follow the fabulous plan.

And someday, you will notice, as an afterthought, that it’s January 1st and you’re not thinking about your food and weight. You’ve got this. Click below and we’ll see you in the Boot Camp.

*This special event has now ended.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/gu2zhh
A New Year's Resolution Benchmark | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Episode Transcript

Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Welcome, welcome, welcome to 2025! The vlog comes out on Wednesday. It's January 1st, 2025. Welcome to 2025, and I'm going to talk about New Year's resolutions today. That is the topic, and in particular, because I know that you are way more likely than average to have set a food related or weight related New Year's resolution in the past, or to be setting one for this year just by virtue of the fact that you're tuning into the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp. What we talk about around here is food and weight related things. Of course, to lose weight is the number one New Year's resolution ever. I'm going to talk about a specific benchmark, a New Year's resolution benchmark that you can hold up in your mind just to check yourself year in and year out. How am I doing in relation to this benchmark?

What do I mean by a New Year's Resolution benchmark? Well, a benchmark is sort of a standard. It's like where you set the bar, and when it comes to New Year's resolutions, the benchmark that will tell you whether or not you have solved your food and weight problem for good is how your psychology is relating to New Year's as it rolls around to the day of New Year's and the notion of a New Year's resolution. What you'll find is that when your food and weight problem is solved, you will, shocker, I know this is very obvious when I say it, but you will not be thinking about your food or your weight as a potential New Year's resolution. And if you're someone who is high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale?, who struggles with their weight chronically and always has, odds are as New Year's rolls around, you will be orienting deeply in some kind of way.

If your food and weight problem is not solved toward thinking about trying to make this the year that you get that fixed and solved and handled already right, to make this your year where you finally lose weight and keep it off, or potentially you'll be thinking, I can't face making that resolution. I just can't face another failure. But either way, you'll be kind of noticing whether you're stepping up to the plate and attempting to solve it this year, or whether you're just sinking down in defeat, or attempting another path of self-love, body positivity, self-acceptance, health at every size, just trying to forget about the problem and essentially try to fix it through love and acceptance. I've been down that path and I wanted it to work. It didn't actually work for me. I couldn't find acceptance that way. It was like denying a problem that really was a problem. It's like trying to keep hiking and wish away a blister that you actually have. I couldn't keep pretending that the blister wasn't hurting. It really actually was.

So, here I am facing 2025. We're all facing a new year, and this year I do have a couple of New Year's resolutions. One is to be able to do five pull-ups in a row at some point this year. My New Year's resolution last year was to do one pull-up by my birthday, which was June 29th. My 50th birthday was June 29th, 2024, and I managed to get in my first pull-up by April of 2024. So, I came in a couple months early and now I can do three pull-ups in a row. My goal for 2025 is to be able to do five pull-ups in a row. I haven't hit four yet. I'm probably pretty close, but not quite to four, and I want to be able to hit four and then hit five in a row. My other New Year's resolution is to declutter for 15 minutes a day for 75% of the days. I'm going to track it with a tracking calendar and just tally up the percentage as I go through the year. That's a nice flexible goal. So, if I don't declutter for a few days or even a couple weeks in a row, I'm incentivized to get back on track. Digital decluttering counts, so decluttering email and also physical mail, which I'm terrible with opening mail. I hate mail. So, opening physical mail and stuff like that counts as decluttering as well. That is my goal. I don't have a cluttered house. I like it to be even more streamlined and simplified than it is. We accumulate stuff in this day and age. It's just who needs all this stuff? I don't want it. So, anyway, and my email's a mess. So, yeah, those are my New Year's resolutions. Nary a whiff of a food or weight related thing in there. The pull-up goal is a strength goal, and it's not in any way, shape, or form attached, even subconsciously, deeply to any form of wanting to change the way my body looks in any way. It really is a performance and strength related goal.

The reason that this benchmark I think is helpful is that there's three main identity shifts that are needed to become someone who's capable, psychologically capable of tolerating living at your goal weight long term. I use that phrase tolerating deliberately because actually what I find is most of the people I work with don't live in a psychological state where they can actually tolerate living at their goal weight. This is why they get down to a certain weight, they regain it back. Part of it is hormonal and metabolic for sure, but a lot of it is psychological. A lot of people don't realize that over the years, their psychology has morphed to the point where actually their whole system is allergic to the notion of getting down to goal weight and staying there. And there's some very, very important identity shifts that have to happen, three of them for you to become someone who actually could tolerate living at your goal weight long term.

Once you've been living with a chronic weight struggle for years and years and years, so many of us have, the first identity shift is that you need to settle into acceptance around a certain plan of eating, that it's who you are and what you do. You're not doing it short term. You're doing it forever. This is the way you eat now. This is who you are. Now, if you do Bright Line Eating?, it's understanding that this is how you eat now, and you're not going to be changing it. Once you lose all your excess weight, you're actually going to keep doing it exactly as outlined one day at a time, and that's who you are. Now, you are a Bright Lifer?. You are someone who eats this way. It's kind of like becoming a vegetarian, right? It's not a flash in the pan fly by night thing. It's not something you're doing even to lose weight, particularly. You're doing it. That's how you eat now, rooted by deep seated values and an identity of this is who you are and you've got to adopt a way of eating as deeply as that. This is who I am. This is how I eat. So, when the plate of dessert gets passed around, you say, "Oh, no thanks. I don't eat sugar. I'm a Bright Lifer. I don't eat sugar and flour," or just "No, thank you." You can just pass the plate, but you're not ever thinking or saying, "Oh, no I can't. I'm on a diet." Right? It's not a short-term thing. That's the first identity shift.

The second identity shift is you've got to become someone who doesn't turn to food and use it in all the ways you used to, for comfort, for numbing, for entertainment, for nurturing, for soothing, for entertainment, for relaxation, for a reprieve, for all the things. You've got to become someone who does their inner work and is committed to building a whole cadre of tools and coping mechanisms and strategies and community friends who will support you in getting your nurturing, your excitement, your support elsewhere than from food. The good news is you'll discover very quickly that food was doing a terrible job of filling all those roles all those years, that there's way better ways to find excitement and support and nurturing and soothing and all those things, which is fabulous. You've really hit on that second identity shift when you've just fallen in love wholeheartedly with the journey of personal growth and becoming a better and better version of yourself, and expanding ever, ever more into the layers of wonderment that exist when you are learning how to meditate more and different systems and practices of inner work, whether it's IFS or the 12 Steps or a CT or DBT, or, I mean, there's just countless ways to improve on yourself as a human being. When you get excited about that nonviolent communication?oh my God, there's so many paths. It's amazing. Spiritual paths, religious paths, there's just, the world is your oyster. As soon as you really fall in love with the process of self-actualization, it's just exciting and it never ends. I mean, it really is what makes this journey never boring, always exciting, always fulfilling, and it's got nothing to do with food. Food is a terrible way to meet deep human needs. The only deep human need it meets is the need for fuel. And it does that brilliantly. Occasionally, it's also lovely that it tastes good and so forth, but it's really not good for much else. That's it. That's what we get. Our, what we use food for is to give us the fuel to live our life. As soon as you fall in love with getting all your other needs met elsewhere, you've undergone the second identity shift.

The third identity shift is becoming someone who has solved the food and the weight problem. Who doesn't have that problem anymore. Who's not tinkering with their weight, not tinkering with their food plan. They may adjust their food plan because their weight creeps up, so they take out their fruit at dinner or whatever, but it's rote, it's mechanical, it doesn't matter. They're not thinking about it all the time. They get the support that they need to externalize that commitment. Oh, my weight is up a little. I'm taking out my grain at lunch or my fruit at dinner, or whatever, and just reducing my food plan a little bit. And all of that time, whether it was 30% or 60% or 95% of your life, focus and mojo and attention and effort and energy and volition that you used to spend on thinking about your food and your weight and how you wanted to change your body, and whether you were on your plan or off your plan, whether you needed a little more food or a little less food, whether all of that focus is now reallocated to other life pursuits, and you're spending that time and focus on relationships, on self-care, on work and vocation, on hobbies and advocation. You're spending that time elsewhere. You've filled in the gaps. You've allowed the food and the weight issue to vacate the premises, leaving a big vacuum, and you've filled the vacuum with other pursuits and interests and focuses, which I guess I should say foci, but nobody says that, that's when you've accomplished identity shift number three, and this is where this New Year's resolution benchmark comes in. You will know you're there because New Year's will come, and you will not be thinking about your weight or your body or anything about it whatsoever. If you're not there, that's okay. That's okay. If you're not there, you're not there. Now, you know what you're aspiring to. We have courses in Bright Lifers called Maintenance I, Maintenance II, and Maintenance III that cover all this, that take you through these identity shifts that hold your hand and walk you through a process of becoming someone who really has solved this problem.

If you're not there, then the first step is to solve the food and the weight problem because it's still there and it's an albatross around your neck. You could pretend you don't have it, but it's like pretending you don't have a blister and continuing to hike, it's not going to work for very long, right? So, what do you do if it's January 1st and you still have a food and a weight problem and it's glaring? Well, then what you do is you resolve to solve it in a science-backed effective way. That way is identity first, identity at the center and actions in the core outside of that, and outcomes as the outer layer. You go from the inside out, not the outside in the inside out, meaning you focus on identity first. Identity spills over into actions. You take new actions, and the combination of a new identity and a new set of actions will produce the outcomes you're looking for. The outcomes are derivative. They're an effect, not a cause. You do not resolve on January 1st to lose 40 pounds by June 1st and think that that's going to do it for you. It's not right. You've done that one before. It doesn't work because you don't start with outcomes and get anywhere. You have to start with identity and then actions. There is a pro tip to doing that because frankly, I don't know anybody who can hear you start with identity and actions and get anywhere from that. It's too obscure, it's too ambiguous, it's not clear enough. It's like, okay, identity, but how do I build a new identity? Okay, actions, but which actions, if I knew which actions, I would've fricking been doing them already. So, it's one thing to know that identity and actions are the core of sustained behavior change, but it's another thing to be able to do anything with that information. Here's what you do, the pro tip, the linchpin, the way to handle that is to invest in following a system that gives you both of them, that gives you a new identity, and that lays out your actions. It has to be proven system. It's proven because you've seen other people follow it and you've seen it work for them. There's a lot of people following this system in a community and getting the results you want. They can't just be any people. They have to be people with a problem like yours, people who actually have a brain like yours who have the type of problem you've always had and who've had it solved by following this proven system. And that's what Bright Line Eating gives you: the success path.

The system starts with the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, and then it goes on from there in Bright Lifers in a Bright Roadmap? that takes you all the way through the full transformation, right? All the way through. It gives you an identity because the identity is as a Bright Lifer, and that name is on purpose. It's not just the name of a membership program. It's your name. Once you adopt it, you become a Bright Lifer, and it's incredibly galvanizing to have that identity. Identity is built in community. When you join a group of people, whether it's all the fans of a specific football team or all the people who do CrossFit or all the people who went to Texas A & M University, there're communities of people that are very galvanizing as an identity communities form identity.

You need to follow a proven system that consists of a community of people who are on a path to achieve a certain thing. Now, I wish there was a community of people I could join who are looking to do more pull-ups. If there was a gym I could go to, if there was a bunch of people, if there was a proven system laid out that I could use, that would be all the better. I don't actually have access to that, to my knowledge. If you know of one, put it in the comments, I'd love to know. What I'm going to be doing is I have a personal trainer and I'm going to be doing pull-up workouts to utter failure twice a week and using extra weight on my body, like weight vests and ankle weights and things like that to make myself heavier as I do my pull-ups to get stronger and stronger. And then the other pull-up workout each week will be just more pull-ups to failure. Then every day I have a pull-up bar in my bathroom and I'm just going to crank out a bunch of pull-ups every day, and I have a tracking calendar. I'm tracking it all. So, that's my system and my identity is as someone who does a lot of pull-ups. I've done my best with the identity and the system with weight loss. It's a big juggernaut. So much to it, and this is why the comprehensive system of Bright Line Eating that's very involved is warranted. It really is, especially if you've got any degree of food addiction on board.

If you want to really solve this problem and ultimately set you up, set yourself up to have hit this benchmark of noticing, and it literally might be a passing awareness of like, oh, look at that, it's January 1st and I'm not even thinking about my weight or my food. Amen. And hallelujah. Look at that. I remember that vlog that I heard Susan Pierce Thompson talk about all those years ago, and here I am. I've hit that benchmark. It's not even on my mind. That problem is solved. If you want to set yourself up to one day, have that awareness, it's very basic. You just surrender to following the system. I've got a link down below this vlog because I'm here to help.

It's January 1st. I know what you're thinking about. If you're watching this vlog, odds are you're thinking, I got to solve this food problem. I got to solve this weight problem. And if you're not, by all means click off and go enjoy your day. But if you are, I'm talking to you. Yes, you. Then when you click down below, you're going to get access to the registration page for the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, because that is the beginning of the Roadmap that takes you there, that gives you the system that tells you every step of the way what action to take and builds your new identity for you. Brick by brick, breath by breath, day by day, building a new identity is a slow process, but it happens faster in community and faster when you watch yourself take actions in accordance with a system that you believe in. So, just become someone who, JFTPS - just follows the fabulous plan. Sign up for the system, follow each action one day at a time, and oh my gosh, you will get there. There's a Bright Roadmap, and it works. It absolutely works. And I pray, I hope, I predict that someday, maybe next year, maybe five years, maybe 10 years from now, you will notice as an afterthought perhaps look at that. It's January 1st, and I'm not thinking about my food or my weight at all. It actually happened for me. I really didn't think it would, but it did. You've got this. As they say, every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You've got this. Click below and we'll see you in the Boot Camp. It's rocking. We'll see you there. Bye.

A New Year's Resolution Benchmark

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