Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I have a topic to talk about today that I talk about in the Boot Camp, and it's kind of central a bit to the ongoing discussion we've been having together about getting ultra-processed food addiction listed as an official diagnosis in the DSM-V and recognized by the World Health Organization and listed in the ICD-11. Those efforts are absolutely ongoing. A team led by Ashley Gerhardt has submitted a proposal, an application to the DSM-V to get it included there. It's pending review. We haven't heard back yet, and the committee that's working on the proposal to the ICD-11 is still working on that proposal.
One of the things that was central at the conference that we held in London back in May of 2024, the first International Food Addiction Consensus Conference, one of the things that emerged as a central aim of the research that needs to be done is on withdrawal food addiction withdrawal. Like when you stop eating ultra-processed foods, when you stop eating sugar, stop eating flour, do you have withdrawal symptoms? A lot of us know that we do because we've experienced it. I wanted to talk about an update on this research because just in the last couple of weeks, a group that I'm a part of called the Food Addiction Professionals Network, FAPN, Food Addiction Professionals Network?it's a loose network of people generally who are clinicians who treat people with food addiction?I'm a little different in that group because I'm not a one-on-one clinician per se. A lot of them are social workers, therapists, psychotherapists coaches, and they really have a practice of where they work one-on-one with people who have food addiction. I lead Bright Line Eating? and I work with you all more in a one to many format. But anyway, still I'm in the group and there is a journal article club reading group that is hosted by the FAPN, the Food Addiction Professionals Network, and we met recently, and the article that was chosen is called?it's on a Process Food Withdrawal Scale. I think it's introducing the Processed Food Withdrawal Scale. Ashley Gearhart was one of the authors, and it was an old article, old meaning 2018. Not young, not new, not hot off the presses 2018, and I'd never read it before. I was stunned like, "Oh, I didn't know there was a processed Food Withdrawal scale." And they validated the instruments.
They created a scale with a bunch of questions, roughly 30 or so, and it goes through symptoms of psychological withdrawal and physiological withdrawal. Let's talk about the two because they're different. Physiological withdrawal is I feel nauseous, I feel jittery. I have a headache. I am shaking. I feel like I have the flu. My body aches, my muscles are aching. Those are physiological symptoms of withdrawal?can be, I'm not sleeping. Those are physiological symptoms. Then there's psychological symptoms. I feel stressed out. I feel depressed. I feel anxious. I'm having a lot of cravings. I'm having a lot of food thoughts. I'm experiencing a lot of distress. It feels like my nerves are jangled because I feel like I can't cope. I feel overwhelmed. Those are psychological symptoms.
It seems to me that the physiological symptoms are kind of two kinds. One, we could consider acute withdrawal, and a lot of people experience this, not everybody, but a lot of people experience flu-like symptoms, headache, muscle aches, shaky like that in the first 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 days of ultra-processed food or sugar flour withdrawal. But a longer time course of physiological withdrawal is going to happen as your leptin resistance fades away as the leptin receptors stop being blocked, and leptin is allowed to bind again in the hypothalamus and in the brainstem. And as the dopamine receptors replenish and repopulate in the nucleus accumbens, that's going to largely take place over the first one to let's say eight weeks. I have data in my research showing that both of those are largely resolved in people by eight weeks. That's extrapolated data because what we're really measuring is that cravings and hunger have all but gone away at eight weeks, which shows that the systems that were dysregulated that were causing that craving and that hunger are now righted. They're healed; they're resolved. They're doing better. So, that's a longer time course of physiological withdrawal, right? That's like up to eight weeks or longer. That was an average over about 1200 people, but that's average. Some people would've experienced way longer.
Then there's psychological withdrawal, which tends to peak pretty quickly in the sense of in the first day, two days, three days, few hours after giving up sugar, flour, processed foods, your cue reactivity is really high, meaning anything that reminds you of your food is going to be more distressing, and those cues are going to hit you harder. If a TV commercial comes on with the swirling whatever, the food, the, yeah, it's just going to be more burdensome and attractive. You're going to have more longing, more craving to it. That's cue reactivity. Cue reactivity goes up in early abstinence, early meaning, I don't know the first few days, the first couple weeks like that, but that can last longer than just the first couple weeks. In some people, and for some people, Q reactivity is high for months. In some people it's high for a year or two. The time course of psychological withdrawal can be long, really, really long. You can have cravings for a long time.
Now, if you're not staying fully Bright, you keep stoking that engine and you could experience physical and physiological withdrawal forever. You could keep by intermittently reintroducing the things that are causing the cravings and the hunger and the longing and the yearning and the shaking and the headaches and the nausea and all that. But even if you abstain completely, it can legit be a couple years or a few years before it's resolved. There are huge individual differences in the time course of the resolution of these types of withdrawal. Generally, what the clinicians on this book study group mentioned was that they see a peak at seven days. In the first seven days. There's a lot of intensity around the withdrawal, and then it really starts to resolve more rapidly. In most people, they turn a corner at around seven days. I think that's helpful to hear. I think that's comforting, right? It's good to know that there's a time horizon there to look forward to. I know that for me, when I was in the worst throes of my food addiction, I could never get seven days Bright in a row. Never. I could get one or two, usually not more than that. Once I got six, but never more than seven. And so, what's important about these withdrawal symptoms is that seeking relief from them can drive us back to the food early on. Getting through that first week is really, really critical. It's really, really critical.
It's a big deal that those of us in that professional group discussed this article because some of us are really looking to fill this gap in the literature, the scientific literature, to put out some good studies using this validated scale on what people actually experience in terms of food addiction withdrawal. Studies with a control group, studies with daily measurements, and careful controlling of things like caffeine intake or caffeine cessation. Because no fair saying you have a headache and calling that food addiction withdrawal when you're also just stopping caffeine at the same time while that headache might be because you just stopped drinking coffee.
So, we need scientists who are doing rigorous research, and I would really like to be in that group doing that study. I think that our Bright Line Eating community could really lend itself to doing this study really well. We've got a lot of people coming through that are stopping sugar flour, processed foods abruptly, and we could be asking them to take a scale like this. Right now, I'm writing up two papers for submission to "The Journal of Frontiers and Psychiatry." They're doing a special issue on ultra-processed food addiction, and I've got two papers to submit to it. So, I'm really excited about that. We are retooling our research program so that everyone who comes into the Goot Camp at any time of the year can be included in our Boot Camp research if they want to be. It's always voluntary, consensual and voluntary, and people can stop at any time and so forth.
I suspect sometime in 2025 we will look to participating in some kind of withdrawal study. I have a research colleague named Tosca who is working on a withdrawal study as well, and she's going to be pulling from a Facebook group where people are, have food addiction issues potentially, and are always trying to diet and stuff like that. There's a whole different Facebook group, I don't know what group it is, but she said there's a group where she thinks that she could entice people to try a protocol for a couple of weeks, promise them that they would lose some weight and get a bunch of people to eat like we do here in Bright Line Eating, and get them to stop sugar and flour and get them to measure the right thing. So, that would be great.
Anyway, I just wanted to update you. If you're starting Bright Line Eating or you've tried Bright Line Eating before and you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms, or you did experience withdrawal symptoms and maybe they led you back to the food, just know that withdrawal passes. It really does. It resolves. It passes. It's temporary. And when we keep that in the forefront of our mind, it's just a lot easier to get through a hardship if you know it's temporary, right? There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and you can have every faith that you will feel bright and free pretty darn soon if you just hang in there. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
