Susan:
Hey everybody, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to The Weekly Vlog, and I'm here with Amanda Lith. Hi Amanda. Hi. Hi. Hi. Welcome.
Amanda:
Thank you. So excited to be here.
Susan:
I'm so glad you're here. For everyone who doesn't know you, Amanda is a dear friend of mine now, and she is the owner operator of SHiFT Recovery by Acorn. I can't wait to tell you all about what that means, what SHiFT is, how it serves people. Amanda, I think of you as really a foot soldier on the path here trying to help people with their food issues in a way that's very similar to how I try to, and I just feel a huge kindred spirit hood with you. I'm sure by the end of this interview everyone will understand why we first met in England about six, eight months ago or something like that. I attended one of your retreats and it was amazing and got to see you in action, which was so wonderful. We have a dear friend in common, Tosca, who has worked for SHiFT for a while. Amanda, you and I, the first thing that we have in common is that we both came to the work we do really honestly. We come by it honestly. Why don't you give everybody the short version of your story. How did you end up doing the work that you do in the world with food and recovery?
Amanda:
Thanks, Susan. Again, thank you so much for having me here. I'm honored to be here and part of your Bright Line Eating? community. So yeah, as you said, I really did come to this work. Honestly, food was always a big deal to me. Then kind of in my teenage years, other things became more exciting to me, alcohol, drugs, and so that kind of took off through my teenage years and my early 20s. Then I really cut back on that and food took off like a vengeance. Food, I think, was definitely my first addiction. And no matter what I tried, I couldn't fix the problem, which I thought the problem was I was overweight. And so, I'd say from 22 to 10 years ago, I just celebrated 10 years, to 10 years ago, so I'm 53 this year. So, for 30 years I did everything I could to deal with my weight problem. I went to doctors and exercise programs and fat camps, and I had weight-loss surgery, I had the lap band. I took plenty of medications. I really, really worked hard and all I saw was my weight going up and up and up. I wasn't one of these people that was a successful dieter. I couldn't. A lot of people that I work with now, they've lost and gained hundreds and hundreds of pounds. This was not me. I maybe would go on a diet and lose, I mean maybe 20 pounds. I mean that would be amazing. And then that was it. I just couldn't stick to it. I remember when I decided to have the LAP-band put in, I was so excited. I knew this was going to be the answer to my problem, and it was a lot of money. I'm Canadian and there was no coverage for it, and I got it in. The first three weeks you can only eat, only have fluids, and I lost 25 pounds. That is the only weight I lost in my whole experience. So, I was pretty crushed. By the time I'm in my late 30s, I'm over 300 pounds. I have diabetes. I was told I was going to get diabetes and I better get it together and I just couldn't. I tried. I'm not stupid. I couldn't do it.
Susan:
Oh my God. Wait, so you are over 300 pounds in your 30s with diabetes. How tall are you, Amanda? Five foot four, 300 plus pounds, with diabetes. Okay, I'm just letting that sink in for a second. That is, you're going to die. You're facing leg amputation and blindness and heart attack in your 50s. Stroke. Yeah. Okay.
Amanda:
Yeah, and it was more than that, Susan. I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol. I was now diabetic. I was giving myself needles every day. I had this LAP-band, and I was over 300 pounds, and I was very depressed. And I functioned though. I got up, I went to work and I came home and my life really revolved around food. I was very much like clients I work with that were in the drug and alcohol addiction field. I mean, my life was around eating then feeling sick, hiding the food. I'm going to do differently today. I just never could, could no matter what I tried. And then, so I was an addiction counselor and working with drug addicts and alcoholics, and here I was over 300 pounds, and I heard about what was then called, "Acorn." I found it online and my mind had two thoughts when I saw it. One, it was only five days, and two, it was relatively inexpensive for what I need, treatment programs cost. I need treatment programs to be 30-plus days and 10, 15, 20, $30,000. Here's me with not a penny to my name. But it was too cheap, it wasn't going to work, and it was too short. So, I didn't go and for a year I didn't go. Then I finally, life happened, and I went there, and I actually was going. They also did a training program for people that wanted to work with food. So, that's one of my main reasons to go. Although I learned pretty quickly I was there for me. And I'll tell you Susan, that for me, I don't think I knew this at the time, but I finally got my proper treatment because I finally was diagnosed with what my problem was. All along my symptoms were being treated. I was being treated for obesity, I was being treated for diabetes, I was being treated for depression. I was being treated for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, which were all secondary to my primary disease, which was addiction. I was food addicted. And when I got the proper treatment, the level of treatment I needed for the stage of my food addiction, I got recovery. And as I said a minute ago, that was 10 years ago. It was January 17th, 2015.
Susan:
Oh my goodness. Just now. Happy 10 years!
Amanda:
Literally. Literally. Yeah.
Susan:
Holy smokadoodles! Happy 10 years!
Amanda:
It's something! Yeah, thank you. I'll just say there's nothing in my life today that was the same 10 years ago. And yes, I've lost over half my body weight, and I no longer am diabetic, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, all of those things, which are amazing. The far bigger thing for me is I get to live life. I have freedom in my life. It's not white knuckling, which I'll talk about in a bit. I really get to be free. I'm not obsessed with food all the time or my body or feeling sick, so I just get to live life. It doesn't mean my life is rainbows and unicorns, but it's a pretty spectacular life. And it's because I got treatment, proper treatment for addiction, which involves so much more than just medication and or food plan, which I'm?
Susan:
Yeah. So tell us about that. You went to Acorn and now you're the owner-operator of Acorn. So, 10 years ago you went as a patient, so you were thinking, I'm a drug and alcohol counselor. I need to help my patients with food addiction. You're 300 pounds and you go there and it's like a rude awakening, okay, this is for me. And you get the food in place, you get abstinent, you get Bright, you get freedom. What was your journey then to actually owning Acorn, which is now called SHiFT Recovery by Acorn and transitioning your whole professional life to serving and helping food addicts?
Amanda:
Yeah, so I knew before I went, because I had talked to the owner at the time, Phil Wardell, and he was like, you need to come for your own treatment, which I didn't much like that, but I was like, okay, off I go. And I was a mess. I just remember, I'll just say this briefly about my experience there. I remember being there that week, and I had no idea my life was about to change even when I was there. This didn't feel like groundbreaking treatment for me. I was just there. Here I go again, another one of, I don't know how many things I've done in my life. And yeah, I'll follow this food plan here, but as soon as I go out there, there's no way because I've never followed a diet in my life. But something happened. And I remember leaving there and going back to my home in Vancouver. I started, I had already been attending 12-step meetings, and I started attending different 12-step food meetings. It was so much more than a food plan for me. The food was just the smallest part. I had to get physically sober, absolutely. So that I no longer was going to be in the physical part of the disease, the cravings, not white knuckling, not obsessing about food. I had to do that and get back clean. And then really quickly, I had to work on my mental, emotional, spiritual part of my disease, which is the far more important part. When I say real treatment, that's what I mean. It's treating all of that physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. And so, that was my journey. I started going down that road. And as I say, I was working with drug addicts and alcoholics at the time, and I kept volunteering at Acorn because I knew I needed to be close to them. I just kept going up, kept being there, and then I started working there. I was working at both places and both of them around the same time said, we really need you full-time, Amanda. Here was my thought, "Wow, working with drug addicts and alcoholics is so much easier than food addicts." I just knew I was called to work with food addicts. It robbed me of my whole life. I was however old. I was 42, or maybe by that time I was 44, 45. I just knew that's where I knew where I was meant to be. I had been, I think one of the reasons I was so called to it was I had worked so hard and had so many well-meaning professionals try and help me over the years but were treating me for the wrong disease. And so, if I could do anything to help someone else not have to go through that, I was willing to do it. So I went full-time with Acorn, and Acorn is based out of Florida, and as I said, I'm Canadian, so I would track back and forth. We were doing programs in Vancouver and Florida, and then the owners at the time, Phil and Mary, who had owned it for over 30 years, Acorn's been around, this food addiction treatment program has been around for 32 years, and they were getting ready to retire. It just kind of all happened. It was just right. And so, I started running the company and then I was going to say they fully retired, but they didn't stay working for me. I purchased the company coming up six years ago in March 4th, it'll be six years ago. Phil and Mary stayed working for a while, and they're both retired. Phil's passed now, but Mary's retired, so I own a company now and it's amazing. It's amazing.
Susan:
You've told me that you think, and I think this is maybe a bone of contention between us or maybe a milder way to put it is just like something we see a little differently. I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but you've told me that you think that you and I serve different people fundamentally, that the people who are successful with Bright Line Eating are not the same people who are successful with SHiFT Recovery by Acorn. Am I right about that? And what do you mean by that? This is a Bright Line Eating vlog or podcast, right? I've got an audience of people who have been listening to me talk about Bright Line Eating. What do you think is different about what you offer and who would need it, who maybe isn't being served by Bright Line Eating?
Amanda:
I think Susan, that we serve food addicts, we serve people that are dependent on food. I think SHiFT serves the much smaller group of people that are further along in their disease. They're later stage addicts that need more support. And I fought that for a while. And then in the last year or so, we've had a fair amount of Bright Line Eaters come. That theory is coming true when I sit with them, when I talk to them, when they're in our program, it's just a level of support that many, many addicts need that's completely normal in drug addiction and alcohol addiction, but not in food addiction yet. They need intense support. I think our programs offer, we talk the same language. We're doing the same thing. We're treating the whole person physical, mental, social, spiritual. Ours is just a little bit more intense, more hands-on, more supportive. My thought is that our program is for the people that have really given Bright Line Eating a go, and they still are struggling, struggling or they can follow the food plan, but they're still in food obsession or they're white knuckling. I think they've really followed your program because if they've just gone in and followed your food plan, that is not treatment for food addiction. And I know that's not what you promote. So, we have to do all of it to be free, and we're going for freedom. We're not going for white knuckling and obsession. If they've tried all of it and really can't stay Bright in your words, abstinent in our words, then there's a good possibility that another level of support could really help them. We're definitely a much smaller group than the amount of people you can serve. I think there's a lot of us out there, a lot of us out there that a don't even know that this exists, or they don't want to spend the money or that kind of thing. As a matter of fact, we just had someone this last week from Bright Line Eating, and we had three people I think, and one of them was just like, oh my gosh, I've given Bright Line Eating everything I've had for the last nine years. She said?nine?Anyways, it was a while. Long enough. She said Long enough. And she was like, this is what I need. I needed this level of support. And I had no idea.
Susan:
I think I did a vlog just recently on how food addiction is progressive. So, you would be treating later stage food addicts, and sometimes people do need a deeper level of support. Just more intensive. More intensive. Your food plan is a little different than ours as well. I mean, Bright Line Eating's, adaptable, there's everything you do is Bright. It's a formula a day plan, which is really helpful for people who have a lot of binging issues. Dr. Joy Jacobs has worked with our people who are struggling with binging to adopt a four or even sometimes five meal a day plan. There's some other things that you've worked into your food plan that I admire that we haven't worked in yet, which I think are amazing. I don't know if you know our food plan well enough to know what those differences are. Do you want me to speak to them or do you feel like some of 'em?
Amanda:
I know some of them, but I don't know all of them, but I know some of them. I can tell you what I think I know. And then, you let me know. So, we are also a formula a day waiting to measure food plan sugar-free, artificial sweetener free. I think so far, we're the same. And then we are also free, and flour, absolutely flour free, flour free, sugar free, weighed and measured, and then any, if anyone has personal binge food, and four meals a day and four meals a day. So, we are also caffeine free, which is, it's very interesting. I will say this, I know many food addicts that drink caffeine and they're fine. So, I want to be really clear about that. What we realized, so this food plan, I'll say was created, I'll just briefly say Acorn came out of Glen Bay Psychiatric Hospital in the '80s, had a food addiction wing, and this food plan was created by their dietician specifically for recovering food addicts. This food plan has been around for almost 40 years. We've had some tweaks as sciences have changed and caffeine was on the plan, caffeine was on the plan. So were artificial sweeteners in the beginning, and they've both been gone for about 10 years, no, maybe 12 years. What came up with caffeine is that it can elicit cravings in people. And so, what we really have tried to do is take everything out of a plan that's a possibility of a craving, and we say to people, at least do this with no changes for a year. At least do this with no changes for a year. Give yourself the best possible outcome. So, we have no caffeine. The other thing is that there are certain textures of food that can really trigger the binge response and food attic. That is crunchy and smooth and salty. Crunchy, smooth, and salty. So, salty, crunchy, sorry, salty, crunchy, sweet and smooth. Like rice cakes, peanut butter, we take those things out, crackers, and again, it's just crackers, flour-free crackers, crackers, any of those kinds of things. Because there was enough evidence over the years that when you're food addicted, these were eliciting the binge response and food addicts. So, we just took them out and we really suggest people follow it for at least a year. It's really helpful for a lot of people. I was so grateful that I had those things and people could change. I could change my food plan, then we can see where we fit. So those, I think are the main differences. Am I correct?
Susan:
Yeah. And I think it's your no nuts and no cheese too, right?
Amanda:
We are. That's right. So, no nuts is the same thing. It's that crunchy snacky binge response. So, the nuts go with the salty crunchy and the cheese, same thing. We had a lot of people come in and their binge food is cheese to come in with. Even though they're weighing and measuring it, a lot of people were relapsing on cheese. So, that was taken out. I think, from what I understand, I wasn't around then, but I think cheese was on the plan for a year and it got taken out. They can have feta cheese. Yeah, they can have feta cheese, but no other cheeses.
Susan:
What about seeds like hemp seed, flaxseed, chia seed?
Amanda:
No nuts and seeds are on the plan at all. And there are some things that I think as the world has changed and science has changed, so things like that, I'm like, it could be. And Susan, you know what I just realized when I say this to people is that this is a healthy food plan and this is a plan that for over 40 years has helped thousands of people. And so, just surrender and put your stuff down. Extra surrendering will do well for us in years to come. So, that's our food plan. People at first are like, oh my god. And it's a lot of food. People are like, there's too much food on it. And then people love our food plan. I think we also have more fruit, not, I think I know we have more fruit than you.
Susan:
And more grain. More fruit and more grain.
Amanda:
More grain. And those are two things that can be very controversial. One day they might change. For now, I just see it working for people over and over and over. Of course, if someone has major medical issues and we need to make personal changes, we will. Otherwise, that's the food plan.
Susan:
Yeah. Love it, Amanda. Love it. Describe what you offer. Mainly it's retreats, right? Then there's follow-up care. I know you have one coming up, right? You've got a retreat coming up soon as this vlog is going to be released in late January, 2025. You've got one coming up. How often do you offer them? Virtual? In person? How long is the follow-up? What do you offer?
Amanda:
Yeah, so our kind of mothership program, it's called an intensive, and it's changed a bit over the years, but it's really the solid foundation of it has stayed the same. It's a residential or virtual, I'll talk about that in a minute. It's a residential eight-day program in Florida, and it is in that first week, people are getting physically abstinent. So, sometimes there's detox going on, withdrawals. We're giving them some basics of food addiction as well as we start introducing them to other parts of treatment. Like mental. We do counseling from many different modalities. We bring in IFS, we bring in somatic, we have lots of different areas that we bring in. We start bringing in different 12-step work, and we talk about the powerlessness and really what's going on for people. It's an intense first week made up of groups and writing time and their meals. And then the intensives are followed by a 10-week aftercare program. The aftercare is every week for 10 weeks, you meet as a group on Zoom for three hours. You have a one-on-one session with a counselor and you do a daily email that has responded to from one of the counselors. That program has been around since the beginning. It used to be five days with no aftercare. When I took the program, it was five days and no aftercare. That's what I have. This is what we've changed it to. So, eight days, 10 weeks of aftercare. And then during Covid, we started, we were like, we got shut down and we were weeks away from an intensive and we're like, should we try this virtual? Which I was not a fan of. I was like, this is not going to work. And we did it and it's been amazing. We now offer that. So far now we haven't had, we're not as many years away for the data, but we don't see a difference with long-term recovery. There's things I love about in person. I still think in person is better, but in terms of data, there's nothing. It allows people that don't want to fly, they don't have to pay for the flight. So, that's our main program. We have them six times a year. We just finished a virtual. Our next in-person is in March, coming up in March. It is March the 19th. March 19th in Florida. Then we have four more throughout the year. There are?all those dates are on our website. We have a lot of programs for our alumni because this is not a one and done deal. We're changing our life. We're really buying ourselves a new life. We're recovering ourselves, so we get to live a new life. Especially in the first two years, there's been a lot of science to prove it in the first two years, addicts need a ton of support. I think food addicts need more support than drug addicts and alcoholics continuing to eat. So, we have the aftercare and then there's another program we called that's called The Practice, which goes for six weeks. These are all virtual, which is just six weeks practicing how we live in recovery, practicing how we live in recovery. Ee do three different, we call them emotional sobriety, six-week courses online, and they cover relapse prevention, addictive thinking and codependency. We have three-day weekends for alumni. They'll come together and they're amazing. People just come and do deep process work, and we also have coaching. You can have coaching and you can have counseling. Those are kind of our main, not main, those are our programs and they're pretty amazing. The SHiFT community, like your Bright Line Eating community is very, very tight. We have free, four times a week, there's free calls. Anyone can join in just if they want to get to know the SHiFT community and who we are, you can join in on those. And we also do two 12-step meetings a month that are also free that anyone can join.
Susan:
Great. The 10 weeks of aftercare then leaves people as alumni, and could they also do Bright Line Eating at the same time at that point? Or do people go to 12-step programs at that point? What are your, or do they just stay SHiFT alumni, and they get all their needs met as SHiFT alumni through your ongoing aftercare meetings or what ?
Amanda:
I hope, I hope it's just not SHiFT. We need a lot of support. So, absolutely 12-step meetings. To me, the 12-step fellowships are far more important than SHiFT ever will be. It's all over the world. It's for life. We really want them to broaden and absolutely, so many of the tools that I've witnessed that you have at Bright Line Eating, and I know you Bright Line Eating has a 12-step meeting they can absolutely use. It's kind of like what works? Whatever works, whatever works. Even when people, now that we've had more Bright Line Eating, people will talk about Bright Line Eating in there and the tools and what they need. And so, absolutely they can stay with their buddies in Bright Line, attend the meetings, any way that they can get support to have long-term food addiction freedom. We support that. I just think what Bright Line Eating has, is it's brilliant. It's brilliant, and it's such a big community.
Susan:
Last question, Amanda, you and I have been kind of sisters watching the food addiction landscape worldwide kind of morph and SHiFT and open up, and I don't know if explode is the right word, but certainly there's a transformation happening globally around food addiction. What excites you most about that? What do you see happening and what excites you most?
Amanda:
Yeah. Well, for me, Susan, it's so personal, and I kind of touched on this early that I worked so hard. I almost want to cry when I say it. I worked so hard for so many years to get better, and there was no help for me. People were trying to give me help the best they knew how, but it wasn't helping. I was only getting worse. What I love is that as the world of food addiction opens up more and more and more, people are hearing that food addiction is actually real and there's treatment for it. What I feel excited about is the medical world getting into that and just the general population so that if people are out there in the world wandering around in this deep shame, there's this, "Wait a second, there's this food addiction thing going on. Let me see. Is that me? Am I a possibility?" That's all I want. That my dream would be that when you go to your doctors and they do your yearly check-in and everything, that if someone's struggling with weight, overweight, underweight, or diabetes or high blood pressure, that it, there's a possibility that food addiction is present so that they can get screened, so then we can give them the proper treatment. That would be my dream, that it's just there. It's just there.
Susan:
Yeah. I love it. I'm with you in that. I see that, and I'm with you in that. Amanda, so good to talk with you. Thank you so much for being on the Weekly vlog. We're going to put a link down below this video so people can access your website, check out your intensives, and you're just a delight and a love, and if there's ever anything I can do to support you, you just call. It's so sweet to be with you. Thanks so much.
Amanda:
Thank you so much, Susan. Thank you so much. So grateful to be here.
Susan:
All right. That's the weekly vlog, everyone. I'll see you next week.
