Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. You know what I love? I've been doing this for 22 years about this, meaning weighing and measuring my food, no sugar, no flour, working a program of recovery so that I don't need to rely on food as a crutch. I got down to Maintenance and I've been at Maintenance now for 21 years, living in my Bright Body in a body that feels right size to me, one size clothes. Now for 21 years, I've been doing this for a long time, and I've been helping people the whole time helping, helping, helping to spread the word that using clear boundaries, Bright Lines for food is absolutely doable, sane, effective, healthy, freeing, liberating, and provides so much structure to life. It's so beneficial to live this way. And what I love is that over the years, science keeps proving this way of life. It just keeps producing evidence that what we tell people to do with their food, for example, to eat three meals a day and not snack and graze all day. And that was long before the time restricted eating literature came out showing that you need a nice long fasting window between meals and after your last meal and before the next meal, you need to let autophagy kick in.
Autophagy is the healing and repair of damaged cells and cell parts, and it only kicks in after you haven't eaten for a while, and research started to amass that it's not good to eat on top of eating. Eating is sort of like putting in a laundry load. You don't open the lid and add more clothes an hour later. You need to let the load finish, put it in the dryer, and do the whole cycle before you start another one. Eating discreet meals is so much healthier than grazing all day long. Research shows that eating a balanced macronutrient profile is so healthy that you've got five distinct appetites, carbohydrate, protein, fat, calcium, and salt. Those are the five categories of food that you will be driven to eat more food if you don't get enough in each of those buckets. It's not good to starve yourself of carbohydrate. It's not good to starve yourself of protein. It's not good to starve yourself of fat over the long term. You need each of those macronutrients in order to function. That's why the body designed a whole appetite system around each of them individually. And sure enough, in Bright Line Eating?, we just support a balanced macronutrient profile.
In this vlog, I want to talk about another way that our way of eating has been shown to be sane and balanced and healthier, which is eating cooked and raw foods, both a balance of cooked and raw foods. Now, a lot of foods, most people are going to just eat one particular way, not going to, you're going to eat your yogurt and you're just going to eat yogurt. There's no big question of like, do I cook this? I mean, the yogurt is cooked in making it into yogurt, but then you're not going to go put that in a pan on the stove and cook it up. Similarly, brown rice, you're going to eat that cooked. You're not going to try to crunch raw beans. You're going to eat those cooked. You're not going to try to crunch them raw. Typically, also fruit, you're going to eat raw. The big question is around vegetables. Is a raw diet really healthier? I remember, I don't think this is so much the rage anymore, but I remember some years ago a lot of people that I knew were being swayed by the raw foods movement. They were really thinking that?I guess the layperson?s narrative went, when you cook food, you mess it up, you denature the enzymes, you make it into something that's not intended to be, and all food should be eaten in its raw state. Is that true? Is that healthier? It's not, it turns out, and in this vlog, I just want to share that there's a lot of evidence that eating a mixture of raw and cooked foods is actually what's best. There are actually some specifics like some vegetables, you get more nutrition out of them if you cook them. And some vegetables, you get more nutrition out of them if you eat them raw. Now, I would recommend if you do Bright Line Eating that you maybe don't worry about that. Just eat a mixture of raw cooked vegetables and don't worry about it.
There is a way that the automaticity that kicks in when we eat Bright does allow us to learn a little bit of new information and then tweak how we typically prepare our meals with that in mind. Suddenly we've optimized things just a little bit more. So, for example, I learned recently that bell peppers, and I do like them colorful, red, yellow, green bell peppers. I mostly don't like the green. I prefer the red, orange, yellow bell peppers. They have 75% more antioxidant activity when they're eaten raw. So, I usually have raw vegetables at both lunch and dinner, six ounces at lunch, usually in the form of raw finger food and six ounces at dinner, usually in the form of a salad. And so, I usually have my raw bell peppers at lunch as finger food, and usually two or three ounces of raw bell pepper will go on my plate, and I crunch it and it's delicious. I learned that information and I incorporated it into my rhythm. I also learned that spinach is best eaten cooked. Why? Because something about cooking, the spinach breaks open the calcium, it makes the calcium more available, bioavailable, I don?t know, releases the calcium. Somehow you will literally get eight times more calcium, eight times, not 8%, 800%, eight times more calcium into your system if you eat your spinach cooked rather than raw. So, I don't do spinach salads. Typically I eat cooked spinach and I have a frequent dish that I make at night where my cooked vegetable and I get for me, I eat six ounces of cooked vegetable at lunch and dinner. So, my food plan is 12 and 12. I do 12 ounces of vegetables at lunch and 12 ounces of vegetables at dinner, and I do six and six, six raw and six cooked at lunch and six raw and six cooked at dinner. That's how I do my vegetable split. Everybody in Bright Line Eating does their vegetable split however they do it. In Bright Line Eating, produce is produce and you can pick the ounces that work for you and just stick with it, and you can do it raw or cooked however you like. I do a mix of each and there's a dish that I make for myself usually at dinner where I put tempeh in little strips in an air fryer with seasoning salt on it, and I crisp that up in the air fryer and then I do some cooked spinach and I literally take the tempeh strips, I break them in half, so they make little sandwich breads and I squeeze the spinach, the sandwich filler, kind of like finger foods. I take two strips of tempeh, and I squeeze a bunch of spinach and then I eat it like little finger food sandwiches, and I love it. It's fun to eat and it's so healthy. I eat six ounces of cooked spinach fairly often. I would say I have that dish multiple times a week at dinner.
I learned that about spinach and now I just make sure to prioritize ways that I get cooked spinach into my diet, and it works for me. Another one is mushrooms. Mushrooms are better cooked because there's a toxin agaratine, it's debatable how bad it is. The studies on it being carcinogenic are in rodents, and they used a pretty high level of agaratine in those studies more than you would get from just eating button mushrooms raw. So, if I'm going to have button mushrooms in a salad once in a blue moon, I don't sweat it. But I have heard from people I trust that I shouldn't be eating my mushrooms raw. I should be eating them cooked. And so, I have a mushroom dish that I love. I get organic mixed frozen mushrooms at my local grocery store, and I cook them up with some balsamic vinegar and some garlic and cook it all up and it's delicious, and I make enough for several servings, and I have cooked mushrooms pretty often. Cooked mushrooms are also extremely anti-cancer. Mushrooms and green tea are the two most anti-cancer foods that I'm aware of. A little bit of mushroom every day is very, very good for fighting cancer. I mean there's some others like carrots and tomatoes, you get more antioxidant activity in them if they're cooked. Carrots and tomatoes, both. It's good to have them cooked. I haven't quite incorporated that into my regimen. Mostly when I eat carrots or tomatoes these days, I eat them raw and that's all right. I'm still getting a lot of good benefits. All vegetables are healthy no matter how you eat them. Interestingly, onions and garlic are better raw. Now that's tricky. I just said that I put garlic in my mushrooms and I cook it. That's true, I do. I don't avoid eating them the other way. It's fine. They're still healthy. It's just maybe not optimal. I put red onion raw in my salad every night, a fair bit of it, like I would say between an ounce and an ounce and a half, which is a lot of raw red onion, and I've been buying jars of pickled garlic. Raw garlic is hard. It's pretty pungent, but pickled takes the bite out of it and it's still raw. And so, I do pickled garlic as part of my finger foods often at lunchtime. Anyway, just a smattering of evidence to show you that anyone who's trying to say that all foods are healthier raw is just wrong. That's actually not accurate.
If you want all the details, the Food Revolution Network has a beautiful vlog. It's not a vlog, it's a blog. It's a written blog and it's called something like, what is it? It's raw versus cooked. Oh, I wrote it down over here. ?Raw versus cooked: The Healthiest Ways to Eat Your Veggies,? ?Raw versus cooked: The Healthiest Ways to Eat Your Veggies.? I avoid freaking out about stuff like this though. Here's my overall perspective. I trust and know, and I see evidence of this now, I look at myself in the mirror and I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'm 50 and I just know because I meet people and tell them I'm 50, and they look at me like I'm mad. They're like, ?You're 50?? I don't look 50. They tell me, and I've been doing this for a long time. I know that what I'm doing is healthy. I can feel it. I have evidence for it. My body is, I'm just doing well because eat this way. And so, my orientation is I trust my Bright plan. I trust my Bright plan, and I trust that what really matters is that I do it and I stay immaculately Bright because when I do it and I stay immaculately Bright. I'm 95% of the way there to optimal nutritional health. I really am. What matters most is that I don't get myself so emotionally and mentally freaked out about anything that some sort of Caretaker Part of me thinks that a big bowl of NMF comfort food fill in the blank, ideal toxic comfort food would be what's needed to calm myself down emotionally. In other words, I've got to protect my mental and emotional well-being so that I can be Bright, because as long as I'm Bright, immaculately beautifully, brilliantly Bright, as long as my feet are solid on this path, my nutritional well-being is 95% handled and 95% in most spheres is like that's a solid ?A,? I don't need to optimize more than that, right?
I do sometimes tweak, like I said, at the margins here and there, I care about my bones. Osteoporosis runs in my family. I eat cooked spinach, right? Okay. I do that. I found other ways to optimize, like I said, but I am not freaking out over eating some raw tomatoes and raw carrots, even though that's maybe not optimal, I'd get a little more antioxidant activity if I cooked it. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. I'm Bright. I'm Bright, and all that matters is that I stay Bright, and I am golden. I've been getting an ?A? in this category for a long time now, and that's all I need. I'm a straight ?A? student in Bright Line Eating, and that's all I need.
So yeah, just wanted to say it's not necessarily healthier to eat a raw diet. It's not. What matters is staying Bright. There are ways, if you want to learn a little bit about nutritional optimization, just be careful that you don't go down the rabbit hole of orthorexia, like obsessive focus on nutritional excellence to the point where it's harmful, to the point where you worry about eating out in a restaurant. Oh my gosh, they might put some raw mushrooms in your salad or something. It doesn't matter. It's okay. You're Bright and that's what matters. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
