Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. A couple people have written in some questions that are related, and I'm excited to talk about this topic. Dana wrote in and said, "I have lipodystrophy, an autoimmune disease and cancer. I need to maintain or gain weight. Can this work? I'm a 10+++ on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Quiz?." Linda wrote in a related idea, but a little different, "I've been listening to your vlogs and they're helpful even if someone like me has no need to lose weight, maybe a vlog on how meal plans are just a means of self-care and better health." So, let's talk about Bright Line Eating? in the context of someone who does not need to lose weight, someone who needs to maintain weight, or someone who needs or wants to gain weight.
The x-factor here, and what I guess Dana, but not Linda addressed directly, is the Food Addiction Susceptibility score. So, to what extent does someone have food addiction? Some people have no food addiction, some people have a little food addiction on board, like a slightly addictive relationship with food, and some people have full-blown food addiction, and any of those three states could be present in someone who has no weight to lose and in someone who has weight to gain. As a matter of fact, in my first book, Bright Line Eating, I've got a table in there that shows the relationship between BMI and likelihood of being high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale?, and perhaps to some counterintuitive result of that massive data collection effort that we did, is that the two BMI categories that are most likely to be very high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale are those who have class 3 or 4 obesity. So, serious obesity. And those who are underweight are more likely to be high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale than those who just have Class 1 obesity say, or who are overweight. People who are underweight are more likely to be full-blown food addicts. It just goes to show you underweight is just the other side of the same coin when it comes to food addiction. Indeed, research shows that a very high percentage of people who have anorexia nervosa actually have an underlying food addiction.
What if you need to maintain weight? What if you need to gain weight? Well, so maybe you have food addiction, in which case you use Bright Line Eating by starting on a Maintenance Food Plan, meaning now you're going to have to figure out what's Maintenance for you. The Weight-Loss Food Plan is standard. It works pretty much across the board for anyone who has weight to lose. A Maintenance Plan is far from standard. Some people need to eat the Weight-Loss Plan, plus let's say 2, 3, 4, or five adds. An "add" would be a component of food that gets added to a meal on a regular basis in order to make the meal larger. Like our Weight-Loss Plan at dinner has no fruit at dinner. Well, you could add fruit at dinner. That would be an add, right? You could also add an extra fat, add one more tablespoon of oil to your food. That's an add. You could also add four ounces of rice or potatoes, four ounces of grain, what we call grain. I know potatoes aren't a grain, but we're not biologists here if we're talking about categories of food. So, we count it as a grain. Those are adds, and some people don't need any adds, like they literally maintain their weight on the Bright Line Eating food plan. They might be quite short, they might be older, they might be quite sedentary. They might have a metabolism that's been wrecked by years of dieting and inactivity, whatever. For whatever reason, they don't need any more food than our Weight-Loss Food Plan to maintain their weight.
A Maintenance Food Plan could be everything from that all the way up to, oh my gosh, in the case of athletes and people who have amazing metabolisms and are super vigorously active, it could be 20 adds, 25 adds. I don't know if I've ever seen more than 25 adds, but it could be a lot. Michael Phelps would've needed more than 25 adds to maintain his swimming regimen when he was training for the Olympics. So, a Maintenance Plan can vary widely. What you're going to need to do is make your best guess. Start there and then be weighing yourself once a week. If you're losing weight, add more food. If you're losing a fair bit of weight, if you drop three pounds in your first week, add a bunch more food, add three more adds or something, and then weigh yourself again next week and see where you're at. The first trick is you've got to find a food plan that will help you maintain or gain weight, whichever you're trying to do, right?
If you're trying to gain weight, this is a particular thing. I have an old friend, dear, dear, dear, beloved friend named Lionel, and he's tall and skinny, just naturally tall and skinny, like thin as a rail, and he wanted to gain weight at one point. This was years ago, and he came to me and asked if I could help, and I said I can. He was eating based on his natural biological feelings of hunger, and it kept him very, very thin. Now, he started going to the gym and lifting weights, and he was told by his trainer that he needed to eat more, but he was not motivated to eat more. He wasn't hungry for more food, and he would forget. He was busy, productive, successful, and he didn't have the structure or wherewithal to consistently eat more. He would eat more. Sometimes he'd be sitting there and he'd think, he'd think, oh yeah, I'm supposed to eat more. So, he would order a little bit more food or he would make himself eat a little past the point of fullness, but he couldn't do it consistently. When I started working with him, now, he was also vegan, which made it hard. There's a lot of heavier foods that he just didn't eat anyway, because he wasn't eating meat and dairy, and for him it was very hard to gain weight on the types of vegetables and legumes and fruits that he liked to eat because he was a healthy guy. I told him that his "best friends" would be nuts and seeds and grains and predictable, steady categories and quantities and automaticity that he was going to need to pack his own food, have a food plan with categories and quantities, just like Bright Line Eating. Basically, I put him on Bright Line Eating and I put him on a Maintenance Plan that had, I don't know, probably about 10, 12 adds, and he started gaining weight. He started gaining weight. He was being way more deliberate and thoughtful. He would pack his meals and there would be three ounces of nuts or seeds like mixed in with each meal. He'd make his typical lentil brown rice stew or something, he'd weigh it out, so he made sure that he had eight ounces of brown rice and six ounces of lentils, and then he'd put three ounces of nuts on there. He started gaining weight and he was doing it consistently.
For someone who has food addiction or no food addiction on board, if they want to gain weight, often the trick is the predictability and the consistency that Bright Line Eating can afford. If you do have food addiction on board, you're high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, then you're going to be doing Bright Line Eating, obviously not to lose weight, but for the peace, for the peace, for the freedom, for the feeling of agency. And then, once you find your steady food plan that helps keep your weight where you want it to be, you're going to be like the rest of us who are in Maintenance. You're going to weigh yourself once a week and you're going to tweak your food plan if needed. If your weight starts to trend up or down outside of your target range, your weight starts trend up week after week after week. Well, you're going to need to remove some food. Weight starts to trend down week after week after week. Just making sure I got that right. Yes, if your weight starts to trend down, you're going to need to add some food. That's what we all do when we're in Maintenance. That's how it works.
Okay. Now what about for the person who doesn't have any weight to lose and doesn't have any weight to lose? They might want to gain, but they might want to stay the same and they're really not a food addict. Is Bright Line Eating for them? Why would this be helpful? Well, I really appreciate what was written in this notion of can't this food plan just be healthy and a good idea just because it's a form of self-empowerment, and I think absolutely yes. Bright Line Eating is for people who need it. It's also for people who choose it. Here's what I think about that. Doing Bright Line Eating regardless of your weight status is going to help with your health because it's going to ensure that you're eating way more vegetables, not eating sugar and flour is one of the linchpins of health that's going to be amazing for you, and your blood's going to improve. Your mood is going to improve. It's going to be amazing for your health. It's also going to be amazing for your time management. People waste a lot of time on their food, and when it's streamlined, when it's automated, you're going to save so much time and eating only three meals a day is going to become the scaffolding of the structure that makes the rest of your time management so much clearer. You're going to know where you slot in the other things in your day between breakfast and lunch, between lunch and dinner. It just cleans up your whole day from a time management perspective.
Finally, doing Bright Line Eating contributes to a feeling of mastery. It's like out in the big bad world there, the standard American diet, it's so defeating and disappointing and deflating to just notice that you're eating a bag of chips out of a vending machine and just succumbing to a yummy, but definitely not healthy, choice at lunch and going into a movie theater and feeling like you have no willpower, and there you are eating schlocky food at 15 times the price value of it, and it's just defeating, right? It's the opposite of empowering. Doing Bright Line Eating gives you a structure that provides mastery, a feeling of mastery. And mastery is one of the three components of what's called self-determination theory. It's what every human being needs in order to be happy and flourishing, which are human relationships, autonomy and mastery. Those are the components of a happy life. And doing Bright Line Eating provides so much mastery over this domain of nutrition and food as it relates to health, which lifts your self-concept, your feeling of feeling good about yourself, and that's going to spread out into other areas of your life too. It's going to make you willing to tackle hard projects that maybe you would've shied away from in the past. Write that memoir, run that marathon. Doing Bright Line Eating is going to make you feel well and happy and good in so many areas of your life.
I'm not saying that anyone who doesn't have a food addiction problem and doesn't have weight to lose needs Bright Line Eating, I'm saying if they want to do it, it will absolutely improve their well-being. For sure, for sure. I think it's just a really good point that orienting toward food and a structured mastery-oriented way is a good idea in this day and age, right? We're not all getting fat and sick, but we're not 75% of us getting fat and sick and on pharmaceuticals and dying from chronic degenerative diseases for nothing, right? It's happening because we're slipping as a society. We're not taking good care of ourselves. And swimming upstream from that toxic flow is empowering. It feels good, and it feels good in every way from the psyche all the way down to the red blood cells all the way down, all the way down to the toes, baby. So yeah, Bright Line Eating can absolutely work for people who have no weight to lose or who have weight to gain, and that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
