What Those Who Keep It Off
Do Differently
Video 3

Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome back to the Food Freedom Video Series. This is video 3 of the series. If you caught videos one and two and you left a comment below, video 1 or 2, thank you so much. I just have been delighted reading those comments. If you didn't catch videos 1 and 2, you're going to want to see them, but not now. Stay with me right here. I promise this video will make sense to you. After we're done here together, you can catch those videos by clicking on the thumbnails above my head. Those square video clips will take you right to those videos, and I'm going to give you a recap here.

In video 1, we talked about the two foods that literally block weight loss, sugar and flour. They do that by rewiring the brain to cause overpowering cravings and insatiable hunger; insatiable hunger meaning a hunger that's never satisfied no matter how much you eat. This is why some people lose control over their quantities once they start to eat. These cravings make us drive out of our way to get just the food that will hit the spot. In the second video, I talk about the one big mistake that people are making when they try to take off their excess weight, and that is that they have a plan, but they don't have a plan for how they're going to stick to their plan long term. The solution there is automaticity adopting a structure that will become as automatic as brushing your teeth, which is something that really most people get done twice a day every day, whether they feel like it or don't, whether they're tired or sick, whether they're traveling or home, whether they're motivated or not automaticity. But here's the kicker, not every plan is automatizable. In fact, there are four features of a plan that make it automatizable, and I'm going to cover them with you now.

What is an effective plan of eating? Well, it should allow you to take off your excess weight. It should be healthy and it needs to be automatizable, which means it needs to be able to be wired into the brain to take the load off of willpower, to relieve decision fatigue, and to allow you to execute it without taxing your cognitive resources too much. I used to teach this to my students at the University of Rochester. When I would teach brain and cognitive sciences, I would explain that there are certain motor actions that lend themselves to automaticity, where even though they're incredibly difficult to learn upfront, like driving a car for example, I don’t know if you remember when you first learned to drive a car, it took all of your focus, all of your mental resources, but driving a car is very automatizable. After you've been doing it for a while, you can get in your car in the morning and show up at work without any taxing of your emotional reserves, your motivational reserves, your attentional reserves; it's almost like you get it for free. You just get in the car and whoop, you are at work. It's amazing. Here's the thing, not every plan of eating is like that. A lot of plans of eating, as a matter of fact, what most people are doing these days with their food, are not automatizable in the slightest. How they eat continues to tax their willpower reserves and requires them to make a lot of decisions on the fly every day. As they go through the weeks and the months, they don't usually get to years following a certain food plan. It doesn't ever get easier on the brain. Here are some of the approaches to eating that are not automatizable, so you can be aware that if you attempt a plan that's structured in this way, your brain will not be able to support you in following through on it long term: counting calories; tracking points; tracking macros; eating five or six small meals a day; snacking in general; eating only a certain number of grams of carbohydrates. 

The thing that makes something automatizable is its structure and there are four elements of structure in particular that matter most. The first element of structure that I want to mention is meals, because I want you to think about brushing teeth, right? We brush our teeth twice a day, and that's very automatizable because the morning toothbrushing experience gets wired into our morning routine. Time of day and location cues us to do it. The evening toothbrushing similarly gets wired into our before-bed routine. So, time of day and location cues us to do it. Now, if we had to brush and floss our teeth six times a day, we would be atrocious at the follow-through, right? It's not that brushing your teeth is so automatizable, it's brushing teeth twice a day, bookmarked at the beginning and the end of the day. Similarly, if you're trying to eat all day long, if you're trying to eat six meals a day, that is not automatizable. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can wire breakfast into your morning routine. Thank goodness there's still that glorious midday pause where people stop and think about food, and that's where you can grab the lunch that you packed or that you preplanned. Then at dinner you can wire your dinner into your evening routine. You can make fewer meals, one or two, automatizable, and it's possible to make more. I know that people who've had gastric bypass might need to eat more times per day, but really, breakfast, lunch and dinner is the way to go when it comes to making a plan of eating automatizable. 

The second element of structure that's super important and makes a plan automatizable is bounding the quantities. I literally recommend a digital food scale for this, and I know that sounds so extreme. I know it sounds crazy, but believe me, it works. What happens when you use a digital food scale, first of all, is you make sure you get enough food, which is really essential if you're going to get from breakfast to lunch and lunch to dinner without snacking or grazing in between. You need to eat more than most people think you do. You're using the scale to make sure you get enough food, but also to relieve your brain from needing to ask, did I get enough? Can I have some more? Is it time to eat? How about now? How about now? How about now? Maybe I should have some more. Taking that load off of the brain to track how much we should be eating is incredibly freeing, and you don't need to believe me on this, just try it. The people who are most against a digital food scale end up writing me beautiful cards on handwritten, beautiful stationary saying, “Dr. Thompson, I know I never wanted to weigh my food. When you said weighing food with a scale, I thought it was so ridiculous. But now honestly, if my house were burning down in a fire, I would make sure my kids got out safe. I would grab my cat and my digital food scale, and those are the items that I would rescue from the fire.” Just give it a try. 

The third structural element is writing down your food and planning it in advance. I know a lot of plans have you write down what you've eaten after you've eaten it, and research shows that people tend to forget whole bags of chips that they ate and stuff like that. I think it is somewhat helpful to do that, but what's really helpful to take the load off of willpower is to plan what you're eating in advance and literally write it down in a journal or in your smartphone the night before. What this does is first of all, it allows you to think through your next day, and remember for example, oh, I'm going to be leaving the house. I got to make sure that I have a lunch that I can pack and bring with me. Or it allows you to notice, oh, I don't have enough food for dinner. I'm going to have to make sure I get to the grocery store on the way home from work, right? It allows you to plan, which hugely increases your odds of being successful with your food during the day. 

The final element of structure that makes a plan automatizable is a Bright Line, a Bright Line for the foods that you just don't eat ever. A Bright Line is a clear, unambiguous boundary that you just don't cross. Kind of like a non-smoker doesn't smoke cigarettes, especially if someone used to smoke. It's especially critical that they never ever take that first puff of a cigarette. A lot of people think that Bright Lines don't work for food because of course you have to eat to survive but notice that you don't have to eat donuts to survive, and certain foods really are easier to not eat at all than they are to eat in moderation as part of a healthy way of life. Let's be real. For some of us, moderation doesn't work very well, right? How well does that one piece of pizza experiment work? There are certain foods that are really difficult to eat in moderation. I know it sounds scary to have a Bright Line for them, but I promise that one day at a time, a Bright Line produces tremendous, tremendous freedom. 

I talked about insatiable hunger, which is caused by leptin resistance, and I talked about overpowering cravings, which are caused by dopamine downregulation, and how the two foods that block weight loss are sugar and flour. Here's how the Bright Lines for sugar and flour solve those problems. The first thing that happens is that all the issues causing leptin resistance go away. What causes leptin resistance? Well, there's three things. Insulin that's too high, triglycerides that are too high, and overall systemic inflammation. When you take these processed foods, sugar and flour, out of your diet, all three of those things come down really fast and suddenly your brain can see your leptin again, which means you'll be getting the signal that you're not hungry anymore and that you feel like getting active. The Bright Lines for sugar and flour also solve the cravings problem, the overpowering cravings caused by dopamine downregulation. When you stop eating sugar and flour, you stop flooding the addictive centers of the brain with all that excess dopamine and with a steadier stream of dopamine the way your brain expects it to arrive, those dopamine receptors are allowed to replenish, repopulate and get back to their regular levels, and that takes care of the cravings. 

I know that structured eating is really not on the radar for most people. It sounds very strange and very extreme because our society has gone way to the other extreme of taking almost all of the structure out of our eating where people wake up in the morning with pretty much no idea of what they're going to eat that day. They just grab food where they can. It's a little here, it's a little there. It's vending machines, it's quick marts. It's deciding what you want to eat in the minute and ordering takeout. When you're coming from a completely unstructured way of eating, it can seem really strange to think of having so much order around your food. But I've been tracking people, not just a few people, thousands and thousands and thousands of people who've adopted a structured way of eating like this. Here's what happens to them. First of all, when they start doing Bright Line Eating®, which by the way is what this structured plan of eating we've been talking about is called, they lose a significant amount of weight really fast, more than any other commercial weight-loss program, and nearly double as much as people taking semaglutide drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy will lose in those first two months. Remember what I'm showing you here are results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 

Now, look at this. One, two years in, boom! They've lost a huge amount of weight really comparable to the amount of weight that people lose when they're taking semaglutide drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, except that people who are doing Bright Line Eating they're not on any drugs, they're doing it entirely by changing how they eat and how they live. What's equally impressive for the vast majority of people in those first two months as they learn how to follow this structured way of eating is that their peace and serenity with food goes up or it stays the same. Look at these numbers, it's amazing. It's relatively rare for people's peace and serenity with food to go down when adopting the Bright Line Eating plan, which is strange, right? You'd think that it would make you so obsessed not to be eating sugar, not to be eating flour, to be weighing and measuring your food, but in fact, it results in so much freedom. 

Here's the thing. When you know about automaticity, when you realize that automaticity is the linchpin, the key that's going to allow you to be successful long term, it's going to be your plan for sticking with your plan. What happens is you realize that starting an exercise regimen at the same time as you start to learn how to eat in this new way is completely counterproductive. The reason is that starting an exercise regimen also takes a lot of effort to learn initially and starting both of those things, it's like it's too much for the brain. It just crashes your cognitive reserves. When you do the eating piece first and you pretty much minimize other distractions or things going on in your life, you keep everything else as simple as possible to give yourself three to four months to allow this new way of eating to wire in and become automatic, to learn it like you had to learn how to drive in a car, right? You hold off on starting that rigorous exercise regimen until after that precious period of time and your eating has become automatic, you're way more successful. I have data on that too. People who don't listen to me and who start an exercise regimen while they're trying to lose their weight, they lose far less weight because they never achieve automaticity. I just want to be clear. If you come into this way of eating with an established exercise regimen already completely automatic, keep going with it. If you're exercising to maintain strong mental health and you've had depression, anxiety, absolutely keep exercising, right? It's nuanced. I'm really just talking about people who start exercising to lose weight, doing it at the same time as they start a new plan of eating, not so productive. 

Let's go back to the Bright Lines for sugar and flour. Am I saying that I think everyone should have a Bright Line and never eat sugar or flour? No, that's not what I'm saying. For some people, that's going to produce a lot of freedom for other people, it's really not and it's not going to be necessary. So here's the thing, people's brains are very, very different. Not everyone experiences insatiable hunger and overpowering cravings. Not everybody experiences leptin resistance. Not every brain has dopamine downregulation, right? Some people really have a natural ability to get full when they've eaten and then they stop wanting to eat. No matter really what you put down in front of them to eat after that, they're not going to want to eat it. They frequently leave lots of food on their plate. They just realize they don't want to eat anymore. These are also people who don't really have cravings for food. They like certain foods more than others, but if it's not around, they're not going to get in their car and go out of their way to get it right. They don't have cravings. I've learned over the years, and the research shows there's a spectrum, a continuum. I like to think of it from one on the low end to 10 on the high end, and the ones and twos and threes. No, they don't need a Bright Line for sugar and flour. It's just simply not necessary. But as you go up that scale, you start to get into the range of 7, 8, 9, and 10. These are folks who are so distracted by their relationship with food and with weight. They're thinking about what they've eaten or not eaten, whether they're on their plan or off their plan so much that really having a Bright Line for the foods that are torturing them mentally is incredibly freeing. 

There's a quiz you can take that will tell you your Food Addiction Susceptibility score from one to 10, and I'll email you a link so that you can take it. But even right here, I can help you get a general idea. Do you think about your food and your weight more than you wish you did? When you start to eat, do you sometimes overeat when you didn't mean to perhaps do you even binge? Sometimes binging means eating a larger amount of food than most people would eat in a shorter amount of time with a feeling of being out of control. Now, not everyone who's high on the Susceptibility Scale binges, but some do. Here's another question for you. Do you have food cravings like we've been talking about, and do you sometimes not feel satisfied after finishing a regular sized meal? These are all the signs that you may be high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™. 

If you turn out to be high on the Susceptibility Scale in that range of 7, 8, 9, 10, I can predict with absolute certainty that Bright Lines will feel like freedom. You might be wondering; how did I get to be so high on this Scale? Is it genetic? Is it environmental? Well, there's research on that. It is highly genetic. You can look through your family tree and if there's a lot of alcoholics, if there's a lot of heavy smokers, if there's a lot of people with obesity, these are the kinds of things that get carried down through genes. The reward centers wire for dopamine, downregulation. In our current food environment with so many processed foods, that's what's going to cause the cravings. Also, these are the cells that wire for leptin resistance, and that causes the insatiable hunger. So, it's highly genetic, but it's also environmental. Research on rats shows that if you take the non-addictable rats and you mate them with non-addictable rats, they'll pretty much always give birth to baby non-addictable rats. Likewise, with the addictable rats, they give birth to addictable rats. But if you take some of those non- addictable rats, and you raise them in really hard conditions like without parents or with tons of food insecurity, some percentage of them, not all, but some will turn into addictable rats in adulthood. So, there's an environmental component we think as well. 

We've covered the right kind of plan, an automatizable plan with Bright Lines for the foods that are going to cause you difficulty with meals at consistent times that can be wired in so that your eating behavior becomes really automatic. But who are the people who are following a plan like this and how are they following it? What are they doing differently to be successful? There are a few things that they do differently. These successful people, and yes, they have a good plan, an automatizable plan, but they orient toward it in a way that really enables their success. I want to tip you off to the things that they do differently because I want you to be successful. Here's the first thing that they do differently. They don't do it alone. They get support. Now, this is really critical because believe it or not, human beings are herd animals. We know deep down in our genes that we will not be effective at surviving if we are all alone in this world. This is so critical that conformity is this psychological principle that we teach in Psych 101. I used to love teaching the conformity day. I had all these great videos of people doing what everyone around them was doing in an elevator, turning around to face the back if everyone else was, because the pressure to do as others do is intense, whether you know it or not. In our society, people eat in this catch-as-catch-can, whatever, whenever kind of way, which is fine. But if everyone around you thinks you eat weird over time, it erodes your resolve. But not if you have some really good friends who eat the way you do. And so, doing it with support is key. 

Second, they build an identity around their way of eating. An identity, it's kind of like someone becomes a vegetarian or they become vegan. CrossFit. Those folks, they have a strong identity around doing CrossFit. When you build an identity around the way you eat, it becomes more a part of who you are. You can hear this in someone's language, someone who doesn't have an identity around it, the dessert gets passed and they say, “No, I can't. I'm kind of on a diet right now.” For someone who's got their identity clear, they say, “No, thank you. I don't eat sugar.” You hear the difference? 

Finally, the third element is they have a maintenance mindset. They know they're in it for the long term. They're not looking for a quick fix. They're not dieting. They're looking to change their life, and they go into the plan, imagining it being for the long term and really settling in. Here's where that shows up. The people who don't have a maintenance mindset, they get really distressed if they're losing weight slightly slower than the next person. The people who have a maintenance mindset, they know they're doing this for the long term. What does it matter? If they reach their goal weight in six months or 10 months or 12 months, it doesn't really matter because once they're there, they're still going to be eating essentially the same way, just maybe with a little more food. They're not losing weight anymore, right? They're in it for the long term. 

When we started, I talked about how 70% of people in the United States are living with overweight or obesity. I talked about how we're careening really fast, faster than predicted, toward a state where 50% of us are living with obesity. I talked about how it's really strange that rates of obesity aren't going down because people are trying so hard to lose weight. And these are smart people. These are people who are successful at so many things, right? They've gotten their education and they've had careers, and they've raised families, and they've solved all manner of problems, but they can't seem to solve the weight problem. I so relate to that because I was one of them, right? I was living with obesity in my mid-20s, and I had done all kinds of things. I'd quit drugs, I'd quit alcohol, I'd quit smoking, and I'd run a marathon. I graduated top of my class at UC Berkeley and spoke at the graduation. I was studying the brain. I was happily married. I had so many good friends, I could do so many things, but I couldn't take off that excess weight. About three years later when I finally did take off my excess weight, and I started to teach other people how to do it, and then I started teaching a college course in the psychology of eating, and I started teaching my students about the solution. Then people started saying I should write a book. I did write a book, and it became a New York Times bestseller. At that juncture, I realized we really need a course because my psychology of eating students were just a few students every year. The book was teaching people the theory, but not really showing them the practice. And so, I started an online course called the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp, and I started teaching thousands and thousands of people from almost every country on planet Earth how to really do this. I started publishing the data of how successful they were, like way more successful. Now there are these weight-loss drugs that have come out where people are losing all this weight, but research shows if you stop taking the drug, you gain back all the weight. These people were losing that much weight with no drug, with no side effects, with no copays, and not in a state where they have to keep taking a drug to keep the weight off. They were keeping the weight off on their own. If you want to know more about the specifics of the program that they followed, I just want you to know that there's a cohort opening up right now. 

I have one more video that explains that program. If you're not interested in that, that is totally Kool and the Gang. This video series that I've produced has been a free gift to you, and I just hope you've enjoyed it. I want to hear what you got out of it. As always, I have just one small ask, which is please scroll down and leave me a comment. Good, bad, indifferent, ugly, pretty, whatever your thoughts are, I would love to hear them. There's a little email box there. If you want to be notified when the fourth video comes out that explains the program, put your email in there. Really what I'd love to hear are your thoughts, your honest thoughts. Please scroll down and leave a comment. I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. This has been the Food Freedom Video Series. Thanks so much for joining me.