Learn True Health with Ashley James 524 Neuroscience Breakthrough Ends Food Addiction Creating Healthy, Sustainable Weight Loss & Peace Over The Plate, Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D.
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524: Achieve Peace Over Food with Neuroscience
https://learntruehealth.com/achieve-peace-over-food-with-neuroscience
Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and a renowned expert in the psychology of eating. She is President of the Institute for Sustainable Weight Loss and the founder of the worldwide Bright Line Eating movement. Her first two books, "Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free," became New York Times bestsellers and instant Hay House favorites. Her work weaves the neuroscience of food addiction with powerful insights from Positive Psychology, IFS, and 12-step Recovery to outline a roadmap for achieving true integrity and self-authorship around food. The Bright Line Eating mission is to help one million people around the globe discover lasting food freedom and have their "Bright Transformations" by 2025.
Join us for an enlightening journey with Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson as we explore the intricacies of overcoming food addiction and achieving wellness. This episode provides a wealth of insights and practical tools to help you gain control over eating habits and cultivate a healthier relationship with food. We discuss the concept of Bright Line Eating, a program that emphasizes clear, unambiguous rules to resist temptation and maintain a structured approach to eating. Discover how this method, inspired by Roy Baumeister's work on willpower, can help you achieve consistent results and prevent the shame spiral often associated with poor eating choices.
Highlights:
- Establishing Bright Line Eating Guidelines
- Qualifications vs. Appearance in Natural Medicine
- Understanding Food Addiction Patterns
- Silencing Addiction Brain During Cooking
- Teaching Healthy Food Choices to Children
- Food as a Poor Proxy
- Food Temptations and Self-Control
- Self-Soothing and Addiction Differentiation
- Thyroid Issues and Weight Loss Success
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I have some quick things I need to share with you in regards to this episode. So for those listeners, I do the exact same thing, so I don't blame you. For those who like to skip it, skip the intro, let's just jump into the interview. Don't do it. I'm here to share something with you.
So this episode today I actually recorded it a while ago and then Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and her team reached out to me and asked me to hold off on publishing it because they were about to launch and they hadn't launched the membership yet, or there was something. There was something that they were going to launch with a book or something, and it kind of got put to the side and I just kept going and kept doing interviews and publishing. Then she reached out to me and said, hey, I'd love to do another interview. I was, oh well, we haven't published the first one. I've been actually really excited for a while to publish this one, and so I'm publishing this one first and then I'm going to publish the one I just did with her, which both of them are valid and they build on each other.
If you are looking for real results-based tools to overcome food cravings, food addiction, at any time where you feel you're not in control of your cravings or your eating, or if you have been struggling with weight loss and if you feel sometimes you can control food, but then there's other times where you end up getting two dinners or you kind of think back and you go geez, I actually ate multiple meals today, more than three. I had two lunches, two dinners and then a snack or some.
Food addiction shows up in different ways for different people. But if you don't feel in control and it doesn't have to be all the time but if there's some time where sometimes it's late night eating, sometimes we choose to skip meals and then we feel we're stuffing our faces late at night. So if you ever feel this lack of control or that you're constantly thinking about food and you'd feel you don't have peace around food and peace in your body and you want to get to a healthy weight and a healthy relationship with food, this episode is for you.
In addition to this episode, definitely tune in for my part two of this interview with Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, which will be published soon, and I also want to share that I have a few other resources. This is something that I'm very open about in the show that I have for years. Been working on my relationship with food and I've come a long way actually, just editing the show today and cleaning it up in order to publish it.
I was listening to what I shared and some problems I'm still struggling with and some problems I've actually overcome even in the last few months since we had this episode. So it was really neat to hear that I have made strides and we're always growing, and sometimes it's hard to recognize how much we have grown just because we're always thinking about what we don't have. When you take an account of where you were and where you are now, you actually see how much, how far you have come, and that's something that I focus on in my book and I'd love for you to get my book. I love the title because I've been healing and growing from my own addiction brain and what I love about my book is that we harness the power of addiction in a positive way and get addicted to wellness in a good way, in a way that is sustainable and balanced and healthy and really motivating.
So my book is fun and light and super informative and you can pick it up and do it five minutes a day, ten minutes a day. I just today had a reader tell me that they picked up the book and just in the introduction it motivated them to go from walking to jogging and they increased their miles and they feel they're back on track in their fitness routine just by reading the introduction. They found it so rewiring for their mindset and that's so cool. It's exactly what I intended.
So definitely check out my book, learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness because as we're working on reframing and restoring the negative addictions, we can also build positive ones, ones that get you jumping out of bed, going, man, I am craving that walk or that swim or that bike ride, or I'm craving that green smoothie, or I'm craving my mental wellness and the things I do for my emotional, mental, spiritual or physical wellness.
That's such a positive mindset to move towards and focus on what you want versus constantly battling what you don't want. That's the thing we kind of get bogged down into when we're learning to heal from addiction. We focus on a lot of what we don't want. I don't want to be tired, I don't want to be cranky, I don't want to be craving, I don't want to be constantly saying no, I don't want to. I wish I could just have peace, , I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't. So anyone who is looking to work on addiction or has been working on addiction, you'll find that it just kind of gets exhausting and we tend to really beat ourselves up and when you get my book, Addicted to Wellness, it's so much positive reinforcement, but not that sickly sweet, just kind of sugarcoating a mud pie. It's legit getting deep inside yourself and realigning your focus to be on what you want and moving towards what you want and then having these small wins that really build momentum and get great dopamine hits from those small wins. So check out my book. I'd love to actually hear what you think of it as you go through it. Please feel free to reach out to me. You can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. You can also come to the Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group. You can also leave me a five-star review on Amazon. I will totally read that and to get the book you can go to learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness.
There's another book I really want you to know about and it's free, one of my favorite guests of all time, Dr. Glenn Livingston. He also teaches overcoming food cravings and food addiction in a slightly different way, but it's interesting how there's crossover between Dr. Glenn Livingston and today's guest and yet I think it's really a good idea to learn from both of them. So you're going to get the message on a deeper level and I feel that they really complement each other. You can check out his free book called Defeat your Cravings and it is a great book. It's a workbook. There's no space in the book to fill out anything, but you can have a journal beside you as you read it and you could even just be reading it on your phone, digitally, and you could go to learntruehealth.com/defeatyourcravings to get that free book.
I love his interviews. We've had him on the show several times. I've been on his show, so that's Dr. Glenn Livingston, and I have several other episodes with different guests touching on this subject of ending food addiction and healing that part of us. But it is the ongoing process where we're building our strengths and I love that all the guests that I've had give us different tools that fill this wonderful tool belt. So you can go to learntruehealth.com and type in addiction or you can type in food addiction and you'll see a lot of episodes pop up. Chef AJ is one of my wonderful guests where she shares her story of overcoming and what she did to get there and what she teaches. She teaches a way of cooking and eating for those who have food addiction. So all those guests I feel complement this picture and Dr. Susan Pierce Thompson, coming from the neuroscience background, has figured out a way that gets such great results. You're going to love today's interview and be sure, obviously, to keep listening. Make sure you're subscribed and getting notifications so when my next episode comes out with her with the updates that you will have it. Enjoy today's interview. Please share it with those that you know want to have inner peace when it comes to their relationship with food and their relationship with their body.
Ashley James (0:08:56.892)
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 524. I am so excited for today's guest. We're handling a topic today that most of at least America, most modern countries are struggling with this problem. So pretty much you throw a rock, you're going to hit someone who's going to want to hear what our guest has today.
Reading about everything you do, and especially the research, I got to tell you there's a part of me that's like, this really sounds too good to be true. So I can't wait for you to show us that it actually is true and how amazing it is the work that you're doing.
Dr. Susan Pierce Thompson, welcome to the show. Now you have a PhD and you're a professor and you're a researcher. I want to dive in. What is this amazing thing that you have created that is going to help impact over a million lives?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:10:06.525)
Yes, Ashley, thanks, it's so great to be with you. It's called Bright Line Eating, and it's an approach to food and eating and life that it's pretty radical, it's pretty unusual, and I basically take everything you ever heard about how to lose weight and I turn it on its head, which if you just think about it even superficially makes so much sense because if you look out there, half of Americans are trying to get their eating in check and lose wait. Obesity keeps climbing unchecked and just climbing and climbing, and climbing, with a ferocity that's just horrifying and our collective solution to it is, let's normalize bigger bodies, and just stop hating ourselves and fat shaming each other but really the problem is bad, health-wise, mobility-wise and nothing is working, nothing is working. People are trying all kinds of things and nothing is working. I've just got a very different approach and the research shows it's phenomenally effective. So, yes, I look forward to talking about it with you, and I know you go deep in these, in these episodes. So, yes, yes, exactly, here we go.
Ashley James (0:11:24.969)
Yes, well, let's start by understanding a bit more about you and how you and so are you the inventor of bright line eating? Did you name it?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:11:34.414)
Yes. Well, I mean, I don't know what your spiritual beliefs are, but it felt to me like it named itself. I don't know if God named it or whatever. I was in my morning meditation, 18, 19 years now. I've been meditating for 30 minutes every morning, and I was meditating on January 26th, 2014 and suddenly, a booming, clear mandate, was it just filled my meditation, write a book called Bright Line Eating, and I'd never heard the words in that order before. I don't think anyone had.
I knew what they meant, though, because I had been reading a book recently before that called Willpower, by Roy Baumeister, who's a very venerated psychologist just a really well-published, well-cited psychologist and he wrote this book called Willpower, and toward the end of the book, there was a chapter on using bright lines to resist temptation. So he was talking about Eric Clapton and sobriety and a bright line for alcohol. So a bright line is a legal term. It's a clear, unambiguous rule that you just don't cross. It's a standard that you apply consistently to get consistent and reliable results. So, in the temptation domain, if you're going to be the designated driver, you'll be better off that night saying I'm not going to drink any alcohol. That's a bright line. As opposed to gee golly shucks. I'll be sure to drink moderately tonight, which is a very fuzzy line and you never really know if you've crossed it , and so you could end up getting in trouble with the I'll be sure to drink moderately approach.
Ashley James (0:13:18.461)
Yes, so after dinner I brush my teeth and floss and then, three hours later, if I'm hungry, I say, nope, I brushed my teeth. I'm not eating anymore because I'd rather go to bed on an empty stomach and actually let myself sleep, and I feel so much better the next day than if I go, well, I can brush my teeth again. I'm going to go back downstairs and go to the kitchen and fix up a 9pm second dinner.
Then the next day I feel UGH, it could be a super healthy meal, it could be, I'm going to go down and make a salad, whatever it is. I'm still digesting. When I go to bed, my body doesn't go into that deep, deep healing mode and restorative mode. So then the next morning I just feel it yes.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:14:08.203)
So you have a bright line.
Ashley James (0:14:09.928)
I have a bright line, I brush my teeth, I floss. Because flossing is a real pain in the butt, but also having to get, I mean, thank God I'm knocking on many items that I think are made of wood now. I've never had a dental procedure, like drilling deep into a tooth and root canal. I saw my husband get a root canal and that cured me of never flossing. That is my bright line now I will floss because I saw a root canal. You should just go on YouTube and watch a root canal. You will floss twice a day.
Then I say to myself I brushed my teeth, I spent the 15, 20 minutes it takes to floss and now I am not eating, after 6 or 7 PM and that's really helped me. The next day I feel better about myself. I woke up. I have more energy because, when I wake up, feeling gross because I ate late in the night, I beat myself up and that self talk, and then you want to go and eat things that are not as good for you to make you feel better. That little kid in you wants to go and and put your hand in the cookie jar to self soothe from all the negative self talk about the bad day you had before. So, yes, crazy spiral.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:15:35.115)
It's a shame spiral, yes, and then you eat more to assuage that shame and comfort yourself and numb it out. Yes, I think that's a cycle that a lot of people get in with their eating. I also noticed that if I eat later into the evening, I don't sleep as well. My aura ring tells me. So I wear an aura ring and I like it. My stats aren't good and my brain will say, did something disturb your sleep last night? My heart rate will be up and it'll gradually come down over the night. But it takes hours for it to come down.
I like to eat my dinner pretty early, I eat around five usually, sometimes six. Life gets lifey and sometimes I eat later. I don't care particularly, but I will notice I never eat after dinner. I'm like you. I eat three meals a day with nothing in between. So meals are a bright line. The four bright lines, just so people know, are sugar, flour, meals and quantities and quantities so that you eat enough. Actually a lot of people if they're trying to clean up their eating they make the mistake of way undereating, and that's terrible. I help people lose weight, but I make sure that they eat enough, and enough of the food. So I actually advocate a digital food scale, believe it or not, and I think I'm crazy, but, oh my gosh, look at the people, the bodybuilders and stuff people whose physiques are noteworthy. They're all weighing their food. I promise you. It's so easy to get off track, unless you're pretty clear. So, yes, those are the bright lines, but, I came real, if you asked about how I came to all this, and it really goes way back before that moment in 2014. That was the birth of Bright Line Eating, but there was a lot that came to that point, so we probably should go back.
Ashley James (0:17:27.093)
Yes, let's go all the way back. Well, you have a PhD, let's go. Let's go all the way back. What motivated you? What happened in your life that made you want to go down this road through education and research?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:17:38.899)
I was into school as a kid. I had dreams when I was a kid of visions of going to Harvard and so forth, but what happened was I went off the track when I was a teenager by getting into drugs. I like drugs because Iike to party and Iike to experiment, and my first drugs were psychedelics and I had a great, mind opening, incredible experience that way. But I also drugs because they would keep my weight off and solve my eating problem, which I already had. I already had a very addictive relationship with food as a kid and I didn't think of it in those terms, but absolutely I was addicted to sugar as a kid and eating in general. I weighed more when I was 11 than I weigh now and I started to get concerned about it in high school. So I started doing drugs and the drugs escalated.
So by the time I was 16, I was addicted to crystal meth and that resulted in me dropping out of high school. Yes, a lot of drug induced psychosis, like real schizophrenia, real intense psychiatric issues. I stopped crystal meth, thank God that's the devil's drug right there. It's really really nasty stuff and I never went back to it. But then I just got into cocaine, and then freebasing, and then crack cocaine, and so by the time I was 19, I was a high paid call girl prostitute and I was smoking up the proceeds in the crack house regularly, just smoking away my life. I hadn't been in school in years and I was pretty far from a PhD in anything. I hadn't even graduated high school.
So I had a moment of clarity in the crack house on August 9th 1994. I had my head shaved, Sinead O'Connor buzzed short and I had a blonde wig on my head and it was a Tuesday morning actually I'd been there in the crack house smoking crack all weekend long, and now it was Tuesday morning. So I'd been up awake for days, smoking and I just had this moment where suddenly I came to consciousness. I'd been awake, but I wasn't conscious, really, not really. I wasn't aware and I came to awareness and suddenly I just looked around. I was in San Francisco, where I'm from, and I was in this seedy, pay by the hour or day or week or month type hotel, just really a nasty place. It wasn't my room, it was this guy, Joe Brown's room, and there was a couple kicking heroin over to my side. They were twitching, like a fish on the deck of a boat. They were just flopping out from heroin withdrawal and there was still more crack rock on the table. So it wasn't that we were out of drugs or anything like that. I was paying for it for everybody like we had. I had a lot of money in that, we had a lot of drugs and my consciousness opened up into a clear awareness of who I was and what I was doing and what my life had become and it felt like such a creeping non-choice.
My life had just kind of gone that way. I think the drugs just gradually took over more and more of my life and I didn't really choose in the way we typically think of choices. I didn't really choose to end up there, it was just sort of, there I was and anyway, what happened was, I got the gift of a deep knowing that if I didn't get up and get out of there that second, that is all my life would ever be. I would just go through cycles of addiction and drug use and prostitution and that was going to be the rest of my life. Not that I would die, but there's that I would keep living that and try to quit and go back to it. I just knew if I didn't get up and get out of there then that was it for me and I just grabbed my jacket and I walked out the door. The thing about addiction is it's so pernicious, and I didn't have any tools for recovering. But I now believe in a very benevolent, higher power, mysterious force of the universe. I don't know how it works or what to call it or whatever.
But by a fluke that night or by a miracle, depending on your point of view that night I had a date, a first date, with this super cute guy that I'd met at a gas station at three in the morning a few nights prior and he took me to a 12-step meeting for drug and alcohol recovery that night on our first date. I'm not kidding, this guy was a sex addict. He was four years, clean and sober, and he knew I was a call girl. He used to drive as a chauffeur for a call girl and so that's. He saw my pager and he knew what I was up to. So he was a sex addict. He wanted to go out with me and he took me to this meeting and I'd never been to such a thing before. But I got a 24-hour coin because at that time I was 28 hours off the crack pipe and I've been clean and sober since that day, so I haven't had a drink or a drug in 27 years, thank you God. What happened then actually was I just got really fat really fast, I just my addiction, just hopscotch to food and before I knew it I was hitting Taco Bell and 7-11 for pints of ice cream and Safeway for boxes of pasta and English muffins and candy bars and I just ate my way into obesity by my mid 20s.
Meanwhile, I dove into academia. So I went to San Jose City College and crushed it there and transferred to UC Berkeley and crushed it there. 4.0 spoke at the graduation and I majored in Cognitive Science because I wanted to study the mind and the brain and I yes, I wanted to learn what was up with my brain, how my brain took me so far off the rails. So when I finished at UC Berkeley, I got into every graduate school I applied to. I wasn't done. I was still fascinated by the mind and the brain and I got into every PhD program I applied to and I ended up with a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in one of the top schools in the world, with a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences in one of the top schools in the world.
I did a postdoc in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, for two years, and then I came back to the States and I was a psychology professor for 16 years and I taught a course. I became an expert in the neuroscience of addiction, and food addiction in particular, and for many, many, many years I taught a course on the psychology of eating and the neuroscience of food addiction. I lost my excess weight and finally, started my real food addiction recovery journey when I was 28, right on as I was graduating from finishing my PhD and moving to Australia for the postdoc right at that juncture is when I lost my weight, I was 28. So I've been in a slender, right-sized body for me. I have no judgment about what size anyone else wants to be, but for me I had a lot of weight to lose to be in a body that felt right -sized for me.
I've been in a in a right-size body, or I’d like to call it a bright body, for 18 years now and I published studies and I help people lose their excess weight and I teach people about the neuroscience of food addiction and then when my morning meditation, when God said, or the universe said, or I thought, whatever it was, however, the idea came to write a book called Bright Line Eating. That started the Bright Line Eating movement and since then I think 1.8 million people have joined the Bright Line Eating email list and we have a membership where people join and the program, the success plan, just guides them on their journey. It's brilliant, it's really effective. So there, that's the story.
Ashley James (0:26:09.398)
I was crying through part of that. I don't know if you could hear me.
Here it’s like, oh, we have this PhD. She’s like, okay, I was a crack whore.
I love you, I love you. Okay, I went to this clinic with these three different naturopaths and one was maybe 30 pounds overweight, had a bunch of tattoos, dyed hair and she was super fun, she was dressed, super fun, and she kind of got the most clients. Then there was one that was a bombshell. She's a size zero. She's an athlete. There's not an ounce of fat on her, she's perfect, she dresses perfect, she looks perfect and all three of them were highly qualified doctors but she'd get the least amount of clients.
Then our doctor was kind of in the middle. She was kind of in the middle between the two of them and we talked about this dynamic and what “in the middle”, she told us, it's really interesting, but the reason why women would gravitate towards the woman that was had the tats and was a little heavyset I mean not unhealthy by any means, she was still within the range of healthy, because she was tall and she was muscular, but she wasn't the petite athlete, which is what we perceive as the healthiest. The women wanted to work with her because they wouldn't feel judged and they'd feel that they were understood, because they're working with someone who understands them and who's struggled and or been through the ringer, and she's lost 50 pounds and kept it off. That's the doctor that they wanted to work with, more than the doctor who's never been fat never, never looked to have ever struggled with a body issue, and what's funny is that the skinny one was, I worked my ass off, I got up at 5:38. I spend 90 minutes in the gym, I prepare all my food. I work so hard. I've worked so hard my entire life to maintain this, but she looks like on the outside that she's never struggled, and so it's just interesting that from the outside, oh, this PhD, what's this PhD who is so uppity in the world of education? What's she know about my struggle, and here you are, I've been there and your struggles have probably been worse than the average listener, and so, now we can really relate . Gosh, I hope so. I mean now we can really really relate. Now we're like, okay, now she knows my struggle. If I struggle with cookie addiction here, you've had every street drug I'm like okay, I can listen to her. Your struggle gives you credibility.
What really hit me was just yesterday I was listening to I don't know if Jacob Israel on YouTube. My husband turned me on to his really interesting Christian perspective. He's kind of if you were into conspiracy theories, research, looking for signs and Christianity and he pulls things and gives really interesting perspectives in a beautiful way, like very heartfelt messages. But he said something yesterday and it really struck me as you were talking. He says your low point, the lowest point, if someone who's listening is struggling and at their really low point. You have to remember that is your testimonial, because some people are suicidal and in this last year and a half I've been through one of my lowest points in my life.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:29:47.533)
Yes, I think a lot of us have. The last couple of years have been hard.
Ashley James (0:29:51.539)
I lost my daughter during childbirth and she died. She died four minutes before she was born and I got to hold her for hours. The medical examiner came and was going to take her away and I'm like, nope, I got to hold her for hours and hours and I can still feel her and hold her in my arms and she'd be 15 months old now.
So in this last year, I gained 40 pounds with struggling with the hurt and working through it. I'm working through it. Then, since about March, I've lost, I think, 11 or 12 of those 40 pounds. So I'm on my way back down and I'm being intentional and making that bright line, brushing my teeth and then saying, nope, no more food. Because at night, when things are quiet, that's when the emotions kick in. I've just and I've noticed this with my clients as well, but that's really when we do most of our comfort eating because during the day, I can not eat all day long. I get super busy. I'm a crazy busy mom and then it's at night that it's where we can eat three dinners through the course of four hours .
So, yes, when he said your lowest points are testimonies you have to remember, for those who are struggling or maybe in your future struggles, when you're at your lowest point, you can't see a bright future, you can't. So when you were in that crack house or whatever you were in that moment, those low points, that's your testimonial to the people now that you're helping, so that for me like, I'm coming out of my low point, I can help people. I can help people because I can share where I've been and where I am now. Look, we're going to have a bright future. You just have to know that. Your testimonials now, so rise up.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:31:53.573)
Yes, I love that. It's so important. I think it's the 12 step model of like you tell the story of going down and hitting bottom, and it's not just a story of, like you said, perfection, and look at me, I'm perfect. It's really struggling profoundly with something, hurting yourself, falling down again and again and again and then triumphing. It's the transformation journey, the point where things change and then you're heading back in a positive direction. I feel it's really what people need to hear is that people suffer. Life is difficult. I think that's the first line of M. Scott Peck's amazing book, The Road Less Traveled. Life is difficult. Period.
I think you're so right about that people and what we struggle most with is where our medicine is for others. It's that special medicine that's given only to those who've experienced that same difficulty in all its tragic fullness. Those are the ones that have the medicine for others, because you can't relate to someone who's never had that particular struggle. I have three children. I have never lost a child and so I don't have that medicine in that way for what you've been through. I had twins who were born at one pound and I went through one pound each and I went through four months in the NICU, with one of them almost dying all the time from health complications due to that prematurity, and so I have experience for someone who's going through that of okay, I know what it's to to show up in the NICU every day and stare at your baby through a little glass box, and so I'm so with you. I so agree.
Ashley James (0:33:50.914)
Mary Lou Henner, I don't know if you know her. She's this iconic red headed actress. She was in Taxi. She has a photographic memory. She actually has not only photographic memory. She can remember the date. Let's say, you met her 19 years ago. She'll tell you the date and the time, what you were wearing, where you met, the weather, what was in the news with the headlines. It's crazy! But I've actually spent some time with her, a few times, and she has this great story which, I'll sum it up, is choose your heart. No matter what you're going to do, it's hard. It's hard to like going out and eating junk food is hard, it's the instant gratification, but then, the next day, I feel poopy and that's that's hard, and then I beat myself up and so it's, choosing the foods that you're addicted to is hard, just like choosing the drugs.
Going out and buying drugs and alcohol and getting sloshed, that's hard. You're choosing instant gratification, but you're hurting yourself, so that's hard. Choosing not to do it, that's hard. So she goes, it's going to be hard. All your choices are hard. Choose your hard. Be cognizant of choosing the hard that's going to lead you down the path you want to go and that there's so much more reward and internal satisfaction when we choose our heart.
Your program, which I want to get into the research because you could say you cure everything, but the proof's in the pudding. Prove it to me. What is it, Missouri? The Show-Me State? Prove it to me. But first I want to talk about this idea that people have lasting results. Anyone can lose weight on the grapefruit diet. Anyone can lose weight on the “I only eat three pieces of cheese a day”, I don't know, whatever but that's not lasting, that's not sustainable, and that's not healthy. Most of the diets out there are not healthy or sustainable. But your program is designed to help people get to a point where they have lasting results. So why is your program different from every other diet out there?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:36:13.087)
Yes, great question. It's different in some pretty major ways, major ways. So first of all, we educate people about addiction and I just need to say food addiction is real. You'll hear out there that it's controversial, blah, blah, blah. It's really not to neuroscientists who study addiction in the brain, you can just hold the brain scans up. Here's the brain that's been eating too much processed food. Here's the brain that's addicted to heroin. Here's the brain that's addicted to cocaine. Here's the brain that's addicted to alcohol. It's the same. It's dopamine downregulation in the nucleus accumbens. So when you eat things like donuts, for example, what happens is too much dopamine floods into the brain and the receptors thin out, they down-regulate, they get less numerous, less responsive, and then you have to keep eating like that in order to feel normal, just in order to get through the day without your skin crawling.
So I teach people about addiction and the reality is actually not everyone is susceptible to addiction even at all. One third of people and one third of rats, one third of mammals in general are not susceptible to addiction, meaning they won't even get addicted to heroin. You can inject them with heroin over and over again, you can send them home after back surgery with opiate prescription pills and they won't have any trouble weaning off as soon as the pain is gone. Then other people get hooked. So one third of people are highly susceptible to addiction. Addictions of all kinds. One third are moderately susceptible and one third are not susceptible.
I teach people about food addiction, which is the same, it follows the same profile. So I have a quiz people can take on a scale from 1 to 10. It tells them how susceptible they are to the pull of these addictive foods. I'm a 10, God bless me. You might have guessed that already. But if you're higher on that scale, from 1 to 10, if you're up there on that scale, you're going to need a different approach. What you'll find is that when these people actually, that they eat one bite of dessert and they put their fork down or their spoon down and they're, oh, they just savor it. They're like that, hit the spot, that's all I need. I kind of my head cocks to the side like a dog and I'm just like, what, because for me I need to eat the whole thing and then some. The one bite of dessert experiment, it never works for me. It does not hit the spot.
Ashley James (0:38:57.621)
Does it open up a gateway where let’s say you're at a restaurant, you have a little dessert, and then you go home and now you're making dessert because you don't have anything in the cupboard. So now you're like, because I don't keep junk food in the house, so I've invented. I'm going to take a banana and I’m going to microwave it or heat it or whatever. Then I’m going to put some peanut butter on it. I have these sugar-free chocolate nibs, like the ones that I use when I bake for my son. I’m going to put that in it. Now you put maple syrup on it. Now I’m going to microwave it. I just take a bunch of pseudo healthy things and I’m like, I have to make a dessert.
Well, I used to be addicted to sugar until I did a massive sugar fast. I would read labels. I wouldn't even buy a hot sauce if it had sugar in it and it was about 30 or so days. Then I noticed the draw wasn't there for me anymore and now I can do the one taste.
I used to be the, I have to eat the whole thing and then some, and now I can have one taste and be okay. But if there was a piece of cake and I had one taste, I told myself I'm just going to have a taste and I had a taste, and if it got taken away I'd be okay, it's not in my eyesight, but if it kept sitting there, 20, 15 minutes later, I'd be okay, now I have to have another bite. But I noticed that my need, that urge, has almost gone away, a hundred percent, whereas it used to be. I used to be a 10 out of 10 for needing sugar, and now I could take it or leave it. It's weird. So I feel I've almost healed that part of my brain. Can you do that? Can someone recover to the point where these substances, no longer are a draw to them?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:40:40.713)
Yes, great question. So the way it works, Ashley, is that yes and no, or yes with an asterisk. So when you take the quiz so you go to foodaddictionquiz.com, you'll notice the instructions say I want you to think back to a time in your life when your eating was at its worst not a day, but a stretch of time, a few weeks or whatever, and I want you to answer the questions as if it were that time, and so you would maybe test out as a 10. But you could take the quiz again as you are today and you might test out as a six or something, and so that would measure the degree of healing. But here's the thing, they say, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.
It is true, once a food addict, always a food addict. What that means is you will always have to be more vigilant than someone who never had the issue to begin with. For example, not keeping a cake in the house, because if it's there, you're going to eat it and then eat some more, and then you're going to rewire your brain before you know it for that pattern. So the way it works in the brain is that behaviors and addictions wire up slowly over time with neural energy. It's electricity and it forms fiber tracks in the brain, so it wires up the brain kind of like the electricity is water flowing over dry land and it's grooving a riverbed in the brain. So like the water flows and eventually it grooves a river and it can be the Grand Canyon. It can groove a massive swath of land away. Now, if you dam the water upstream, you can dry out the riverbed absolutely and not have any activity flowing through that old pattern at all anymore. But what happens is the dry riverbed is still there. So if you let water through, it doesn't take hardly any time at all to clear away whatever bushes or grasses have grown up and before you know it you have a Russian river again. So you need to be careful. There's a lot of lines of research that show this, that the brain remembers, and so you're going to have to be more vigilant.
But recovery is absolutely possible and I live in the world right now, someone who has no food issue at all, I just have to follow a few simple rules to keep like the rules of the sort of I don't eat after dinner, I don't keep cake in the house, things like that, my bright lines. I follow my bright lines and I have utter freedom. I have three kids. I serve cupcakes and cake at my kid's birthday party and, Sir, I'll cut the cake, I'll get frosting on my hands and it’s like I have paint on my hands.
I don't have any urge to lick my fingers. I go to the sink, I wash it off, no issue at all, and it looks like plastic to me. I don't have any draw toward it, but that's because I follow my bright lines. If I started to get involved again in a world where I ate cake and ice cream, I would be absolutely obsessed by it.
Ashley James (0:44:02.146)
Now, something you pointed out earlier is that if we give up a substance. I'm just going to say substance, because it could be alcohol, drugs or food or pornography or sex or whatever.
If we give up the substance that we're addicted to. Oftentimes people trade it for another substance and they don't realize it, because it's socially acceptable for an alcoholic to then start eating donuts every day. Every alcoholic who's clean and sober I have known, is incredibly addicted to baked goods and sugar. This one man who was the boyfriend I had 20 plus years ago was a super, super nice dad, and he was always surrounded by halloween candy. It was January, how do you have Halloween candy? It’s August, how do you have Halloween candy?
He'd buy enough Halloween candy to last him a whole year and he'd be surrounded by at least those giant bags of Halloween candy. He'd have at least two of them right by the couch and he'd always be sitting on the couch watching some kind of sports. He was a really sweet man. He'd smoked like a chimney. He was a destructive alcoholic, abusive, destructive alcoholic. He gave it up because he realized he was destroying his family's life and his life and he never drank another drop until the day he died. But every day he did copious amounts of caffeine, sugar and cigarettes, and so these other substances, just, from the neuroscience standpoint. He was still running the same program, just choosing different substances that were destroying his body in a slightly different way. It wasn't destroying his life because he was sober, but even when you're on that much sugar, you're not actually sober, you don't truly have control of your brain.
I had Dr Joan Ifland on the show, who talks about processed food addiction. What I thought was really interesting is that she talked about when we're in addiction, maybe you can elaborate on this, people have characteristics and they don't realize it. I'll just speak to me, let's say when I have PMS and I'm snapping at my family. I feel normal. There's nothing wrong with me, but all of you are suddenly pushing my buttons and incredibly irritable, you're irritating, all of you people are irritating me. Then a few days later, I’m oh okay, I was the one that was hypersensitive and everyone was acting normal.
People who are within addiction get quick to anger, quick to blow a fuse, and it could be just that they have traded alcohol for sugar and now they're sober from alcohol, but they're still running the same neural programs of addiction. They're still chasing the dopamine having these highs and lows of dopamine, and they're still highly irritable, short fused with anger. That's what I grew up with. My parents, my mom especially, was incredibly short fused and so I grew up in a household where there was addiction, they were sober, but she'd be addicted to the weirdest things like red jujubes and then she'd come home and have some alcohol, but it was never to the point of slurred speech or anything like that, but she'd have red jujubes all the time, and my dad definitely had food addiction. So the two of them I'd see their personalities and the amount of quick to anger, quick to being irritable, snapping, so there's an experience that your family has around you when you're in that addiction brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:48:00.560)
Yes, well, what you're talking about is cross addiction and it's a very real thing. I mean the dopamine receptors.They want their excess dopamine and they can get it from drugs or alcohol or food or pornography or gambling or any number of things. I think a lot of people, like you say, quit alcohol and they go to sugar. I mean, if you think of the molecular composition there, what's alcohol made out of but sugar and grain really so the sugar and flour of baked goods is very molecularly similar. In the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous it even says a lot of us have found that some sugar will do the trick if you're having an alcohol craving, and so that's encouraged.
For some people, depending on how bad their alcoholism is, that can be a harm reduction approach. I'll just eat sugar. But you’re very right that it's triggering the same receptors and, yes, they want their hit from somewhere. I've been in recovery now for 27 years and the reality is that recovery is real and it's a long, slow process. Those receptors will heal faster if you don't deluge them with anything. If you don't drink caffeine, if you don't smoke cigarettes, if you don't eat sugar and you don't get into relationships with a bunch of infatuation, and new relationship energy hitting those receptors, that'll do it too. You don't watch pornography. But I certainly haven't managed to do that and I don't know very many people who have. But over time you can kind of step yourself down and wean yourself off. I'm in a place today where I am mercifully free from all addictions. I don't smoke cigarettes. I don't drink caffeine. I'm just in a state of freedom, but I'm not always there. Sometimes I'll be back on caffeine.
My God, a few years ago I started smoking cigarettes again. I was outside a meeting and there were all these young, good looking people in a circle smoking a cigarette and I just bummed a cigarette. God bless me. I have three kids at home. My husband hates cigarette smoke and suddenly I had to buy a pack after that meeting and I smoked up most of that pack within the next 24 hours, I'd smoked up that pack. It felt like I wanted to puke. Now I was in a state where I was sneaking out of the house to smoke cigarettes and to get back in the house.
I had to sneak in the house, strip down my clothes, throw them into the washing machine, go into the bathroom, get into the shower, wash my hair, brush my teeth, just to emerge to see my family, and I would do that multiple times a day and my life got so unmanageable. Then I'm out in the middle of the night smoking cigarettes in the snow, snowflakes falling on my head and I'm smoking eight cigarettes and then going back in and showering and washing my clothes, and then I quit. Here's the kicker, Ashley. I quit a few weeks and a month or two off cigarettes, free, mercifully and then I'm outside a meeting and I bum another cigarette and I went through that cycle four or five times over a year or two. I finally quit for what I hope, god willing, will be the last time, on April 7th of 2018. So over four years now without a cigarette, merciful, so grateful.
Ashley James (0:51:43.712)
What kind of bright line could you create to not hang out outside of your meetings and bum cigarettes?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:51:49.924)
No, no, not a puff of a drag of a cigarette. None. The bright line is no cigarettes. So meetings are important and healthy and I still go to them, but no cigarettes. I read a book, I think it's Alan Carr's, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, I think, and it really really helped me psychologically to just remember that what a drag of a cigarette does is it predisposes you to need the next puff of a cigarette, that there's nothing relaxing about it. Cigarette people who smoke cigarettes are more anxious, more agitated, all it does is make you need the next cigarette. So the part of me that looks at people smoking and thinking, oh, they have it good, they're just hanging out and smoking I think, no, no, no, they're tortured, they're going to leave that social circle and need another cigarette and another one and another one. I'm the one who's free. Thank God I'm free. That switch helps me.
Ashley James (0:52:41.120)
If you look into how they used PR to transform smoking from being back in the golden era of Hollywood when everything was black and white. It was Edward Bernays and he's fascinating. People should definitely watch documentaries on Edward Bernays. I believe he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Don't quote me on that. I think he was related somehow, maybe a cousin of Sigmund Freud, but Edward Bernays, he is the modern father of PR and back I don't know, maybe it was the 40s somewhere, this is before I was born. So this was back in black and white everything, and they don't have TVs yet.
Only the bad guys would smoke. So you go to the movies, it would be a Western and the bad guy, the bad guys with guns, chasing down the other cowboys with the Indians and all that stuff. The bad guys would be the ones smoking and I don't know, maybe the Indians would have peace pipes or something in the movies, but it was always this macho bad guy thing. Or maybe there'd be a movie about these car racers and it would always be just these cool bad guys, and so men were, oh, it's this macho thing. Women were, ew, I don't know, I'm not going to smoke. That's manly, that's gross. Edward Bernays was hired because the tobacco industry realized they were pretty much missing out on half of the population. The women wouldn't smoke. Then what he did was he linked smoking to the women's freedom movement. You are free because women, they didn't have careers.
You could be a teacher, you could be a nurse, or you could be a homemaker, you could be a secretary, but yes, but until you have kids, then you have to be a homemaker and so, he linked it to you are free, you're a woman, hear me roar, you're so sexy, you're like Marilyn Monroe, you're so sexy, sexy women.
So in Hollywood, all of a sudden, all the sexy women who are free and jet setting and shaving their legs was a new thing, because women didn't shave their legs either and the razor companies wanted to literally double their sales. So all of a sudden they made women look like they were prepubescent by shaving their legs. Women never shaved their legs before that and they got to double their sales of razors, double the sales of cigarettes. Because they tricked, they brainwashed an entire civilization into thinking these were sexy ideals. But if you go a few years before, just a few years before, women had hairy legs and that was considered sexy, hairy armpits, that was normal and sexy. Women didn't smoke. I mean, this was in America. I'm sure women smoked in Europe, but it was just in our culture.
Because I don't drink alcohol and it's not because I was ever an alcoholic. I've never really done it. I was a bartender and taking care of drunk people just really turned me off alcohol. I mean, I was a bartender. I can appreciate a good drink, but I don't like it. This is nothing about alcohol. When I'm on vacation, I go to the bar or like you're at a restaurant or whatever and there's a bar there, I'll look at the pretty shiny bottles, and then I'll look at the menu and there's these fun looking drinks and I'm almost glamorized by the PR of alcohol. You're going to look cooler, you're going to feel cooler, you're going to be one of the hips. You're going to be in.
This is what's going to make you one of the cool kids, and I'm almost glamorized by the PR of alcohol and I snap out of it and I go, well, that's gross, it's not good for my liver. I start listing off this as my bright line. I can start listing off all the chemicals in a cigarette, all the bad things, how my body has to detox the alcohol. I could talk myself out of those things. But that little part of my brain is, ooh, that'll be fun, let's go on a bender. That doesn't sound fun to the rest of my body. But how much of addiction is influenced by the media? Like you said, I look at these cool kids smoking in a circle. I'm like, oh, that looks fun. That's the marketing you grew up with.
You don't realize it, but when you were a kid, the shows you watched had all the cool kids smoking. The movies you watched, I mean, when I watch old stuff with our son and old movies that I used to watch when I was a kid, and all of a sudden people are smoking and I just want to turn it off because I can't believe how much smoking there was in the 80s or the 70s. And all the cool and hip kids and everything, I don't want that getting into my seven-year-old son’s brain but that's what we grew up with. How much addiction have you seen in terms of neuroscience is affected by, because it's like mirror neurons? It's controlled brainwashing by marketing.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (0:58:06.534)
It is, and Ashley, I love the cigarette analogy. Then let's think about it in terms of food, because our society is in a collective food addiction trance. We have been so conditioned by the big food industry to think of food as celebration, as fun, as entertainment, as relaxation, as self care, as indulgence, as everything that's good in life. We're under the spell. They are pouring billions of dollars into our orientation toward food in that way so that when someone moves into your neighborhood, you bake them cookies or bring them a pie or bring over some food to say welcome to the neighborhood if you're a good neighbor.
We don't think about bringing over flowers, or fresh cut flowers from our garden, or apples off our tree, or anything like that. We think of bringing over processed foods. Just think about birthday parties and what you have to serve at a birthday party, or kids menus in a restaurant. The kids' menu is absolutely the most processed food, and we've gotten to the point where now two thirds of the calories that our kids are consuming are classified as ultra processed foods. They were born in factories, made out of chemical industrial ingredients and poured into bags. Two thirds of the foods that they are eating are ultra processed, and we've got a long way to go in terms of detoxing our minds about what food is and the role that it should play.
The reality is that food isn't the best connection, celebration or entertainment. As a matter of fact, it's distracting from the real connection, like when you're just eating and they're eating, and you're eating and everybody's just face down in the food. There's less laughter, there's less eye contact, there's less genuine connection. We're just all eating together, and yet most gatherings focus around food as opposed to things that would foster real human connection. We've got a ways to go, Ashley.
If you think about the role of food in the media, and especially commercials. The addiction piece comes in around cues. The addiction reward centers of the brain focus on the cues that predict rewards, the cues that predict a hit, the sights, the sounds, the times of day, the brand name, outlets and so forth and anyone with an addictive brain is going to wire up and be drawn toward those cues and then get their hit after that. So the media giants know it, the food companies know it and they market their materials. Basically, they put people in fMRI machines to make sure that both the taste formulations and the commercials advertising their products hit the addiction centers in the brain optimally, that's what they're testing for. They know they're hooking us and they've got us by the short hairs really.
Ashley James (1:01:34.244)
I actually interviewed a food chemist. I think she helped make one of the Doritos, one of the flavors of Doritos, and she explained, because I was like, how evil are you guys, do you guys have a secret evil cackle like an evil scientist? Do you put your fingers together, you clasp your hands and put your fingers together, they go, (evil laugh), that's what I imagine they're doing, and she goes, no, none of us have that in the culture. In the lab, we all geek out on how we can make these chemicals hyper palatable. How much sodium can we pack in? How much sugar can we pack in to get that balance, like you said, to hit those dopamine receptors to absolutely do maximum damage, to do maximum addiction, iImpact, and do it in a new way, in a new flavor.
She left that industry realizing how much damage she was doing, and now she basically teaches people how bad all the processed food is, just like Edward Bernays did to smoking, cigarettes were already highly addictive, now, the chemicals that they spray on it are even worse.
My husband said something yesterday about quitting. He said quitting Marlboros is harder than any other brand. I said why, he goes, because the chemicals they use, it’s like you're not just detoxing from just tobacco, you're coming off of whatever, all the stuff they put on. They get to put chemicals in those cigarettes in addition to the tobacco. It blows my mind because they need to make them hyper, hyper addictive, as addictive as possible. Your food is the same if you buy it. You need to eat plants, not food that comes from plants. If it came from a plant. There's a room with a bunch of evil food scientists that want to make the food so crazy that it tricks your brain into needing more of it. That is sick because you said the cross addiction, let's say you get that bag of Doritos and now you've had the bag of Doritos and a few hours later now you need to come up with something to now get your dopamine up, because that jacked up your dopamine. Now it comes crashing down. Maybe it's 10 hours later, I don't know how long it would take. But now you're going to go for another substance. It's not necessarily to go for Doritos every time, but you might cross addict over to now you're going to pick up a pack of cigarettes, if you haven't smoked since college but now you're going to go get a pack of cigarettes, or you haven't had any while you have some sugar and now you're off buying some ice cream. Now the next day you're getting some alcohol. So that's the slippery slope is that when we use processed food, even if we're thinking we're using it in moderation, it is designed to mess with our brain so much that we're more likely to cross addiction into other substances.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:04:51.042)
Yes, totally, and it's interesting what you said about plants. If you think about it, heroin, cocaine, sugar and flour, they're made the same way. Think about what a drug is, what makes something a drug. Where does heroin come from, Ashley? Pop quiz. Where does heroin come from?
Ashley James (1:05:08.952)
I'm going to really get this wrong, but I think it's gasoline in the coca plant?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:05:14.041)
No, so cocaine comes from the coca leaf.
Ashley James (1:05:18.179)
Poppies
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:05:21.622)
Yes, yes, exactly. So cocaine comes from the coca leaf, which is a bush in the Andes mountains and hikers pluck off the leaves and put them in their cheek and chew them. There's literally a published scientific paper saying it's not addictive. It does make the inside of the cheek a little numb and it gives people a little bit of a lift, maybe, like drinking half a cup of caffeinated tea or something but it's not addictive when you just chew coca leaves. However, if you take the inner essence of that plant and then refine and purify it down into a fine white powder, you've taken a harmless plant and you've turned it into a drug. It's the same with the poppies. You can eat poppy seed bagels. If you eat a few poppy seed bagels, you will fail a drug test. You will fail a drug test, but you won't get addicted, it won't harm you. But when you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and you refine and purify it into a fine brown powder, you've created heroin. This is what sugar and flour are too. I eat corn, I eat beets, I eat wheat, like wheat berries and boil them and it's like rice kind of. I eat wheat, I eat rice. But you take the inner essence of any of these plants and you refine and purify it down into a fine powder and you've created a drug out of a healthy plant. So that's what a drug is by definition. That's how we make them.
Ashley James (1:06:56.029)
We have to look at everything that goes into our body and ask ourselves, was this processed to make it more addictive? Or is this in its whole plant form? Because you could eat two to four cups of broccoli a day. I mean, besides getting a little gassy, you're going to feel great, and there's no negative impact on the brain. In fact, there's lots of positive impacts on eating, on eating vegetables. Okay, so we want to set up some bright lines in our life. Let's say not eat things that are made from flour, which is my addiction. I think right now it is pasta, and I'm gluten free, so it's brown rice pasta. It sounds so innocent, but it's made from flour and I know that is my addiction now, because when I think about cooking, I'm like okay, well, I'm going to start with the pasta and I'm like no, let's just eat brown rice and vegetables.
So I know I definitely get an addiction hit, when I get to have pasta and then when I just do the brown rice and vegetables, I don't get any hit. In the process of cooking food, I love cooking and I make these great stir-fried vegetables. I'm whole food, plant based, so I'm making these vegetable stir fries and the brown rice and everything, and my brain the whole time is telling me this isn't going to be fun.
I've got fresh ginger grated in there and I love using some stuff that makes it spicy. I like spicy food or I love curry. I put curry in there and I don't cook with oil. I'll put a little bit of broth at the beginning to saute or water, and then a spoonful of arrowroot powder at the end. It's made with stir fries but it gives a great mouthfeel and it's a prebiotic, so it's really good for the gut.
But the whole time I'm making it, my brain is telling me this isn't fun, let's go make some pasta to put with this, or this isn't fun let's go add all these other things that aren't good for you. The whole time my brain's like this isn't going to be satisfying, this isn't going to be fun. It's the addiction brain talking to me, yes, but when I sit down and actually eat it, it's delicious, I'm happy, and when I'm finished eating, I'm satisfied. Does your program address that? As you're following your bright lines, your addiction brains are doing its best to get you to break those lines. What can you do to quiet that chatter?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:09:45.519)
Yes, great question. So, way back in this conversation you asked what's different about Bright Line Eating? So I started talking about first, we teach people about the addiction and I think we've covered that food addiction is real. Not everyone is equally affected. But now I think we've come to the point where it's like, what do you do if you are affected and you've got that brain that's trying to hijack your eating pretty much at every turn? The answer is that a structured approach to eating is going to be the road to freedom. For people who don't need it, putting a bunch of structure on their eating feels just unnecessary and if you have an addictive brain, you might really balk at making your eating structure. But when you do it you'll find that you have freedom. So, just like you said, when I actually sit down and I eat the meal, I'm satisfied and I totally enjoy it and it feels great.
So in Bright Line Eating we have a food plan and we write down our food the night before. This is a big kicker. You write down your food the night before. Now we don't do this alone, we do this in the Bright Line Eating community. There's a membership. It's just a monthly membership. It's super affordable and it's really, really effective. So you get with a group of people. Every health attempt that is done with others is way more likely to succeed. so you write down your food the night before and then you commit it. You can commit it to a buddy, you can commit it into the Bright Line Eating group community. We have mastermind groups and just different ways that people can connect up with others.
But you commit what you're going to eat and your food plan is categories and quantities. So, for example, you're plant-based and you're talking about cooking stir fry for dinner. You would have vegetables, you would have a protein in there, so you could have tofu or tempeh or beans or what have you? Nuts or whatever, and once you've lost the weight you need to lose, you would have a grain of brown rice or whatever as well, and a fat. So you could do nuts for your fat serving. You don't have to do oil or anything like that. But you've got these categories and certain quantities and that, so you would commit the night before. Actually, you'd be writing down I'm going to have 14 ounces of stir fry vegetables, I'm going to have four ounces of tofu, I'm going to have four ounces of brown rice and I'm going to have half an ounce of sesame seeds for my fat and sesame seeds are great in a stir fry, you'd have written that down the night before. What happens is, at first it feels like you could feel the parts of you really wanting to break out of that structure and balking against it.
Ashley James (1:12:43.909)
It's like an unbroken horse, an untamed horse. My brain now is like, I'm not going to do that. You can't tell me what to eat tomorrow. I want the freedom to choose. That addiction brain is giving you the middle finger now.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:13:00.629)
Totally, and that is a rebel part and usually if you have a strong rebel part of you, often that comes we get that, honestly. I don't know if you had a parent that was rather (inaudible – 1:13:13.353)
Ashley James (1:13:17.420)
Maybe you haven't listened to my episode, but I love my mother and she was nicknamed and I hope no one is offended by this and I love my mother. She passed away when I was 22. She was my best friend but she was nicknamed by other members of our family as the Nazi because she was so controlling. It was insane growing up in my household and I thought that was normal because as a kid you think your household is normal until you visit other people's households and all the other moms I'd visited. I was like, you guys are like aliens. This is so weird.
But my mom was so controlling around food. It was scary. She actually stood up in a restaurant once and screamed at me in front of everyone. It was very uncomfortable. I was 12, and I thought I made the selection. I ordered the grilled fish with a side of steamed vegetables and a side of rice, because that sounds like something you'd order in a restaurant, and that's what it came with. I just said I'll take the fish, and she stood up and yelled at me. I was athletic. I did not have an ounce of fat on me. I did sports every day when I was 12. I was incredibly fit. She was so scared I'd be overweight because that was her mental thing for herself. So she projected it onto me. Carl Jung teaches us, we project our unresolved material onto our people closest to us in our life.
I get how much pain she had in order to treat her family this way, but for a 12-year-old who's already insecure, going through puberty, she stood up and yelled at me because there was rice on my plate, and it took me years before I was comfortable with eating rice. In whole food plant-based, they're like, eat as much rice as you want, especially if it's brown rice. This is healthy for you. I'm okay, are you sure, though? Because I was told that rice was literally made by the devil.
Incredibly controlling. So it's just the fact that I'm this highly rebellious part of me, which I recognize in a lot of my friends too. So it's interesting, the pendulum swings. If our parents are really really strict with something, then we kind of swing the other direction and become really lackadaisical with our children, and then the lackadaisical children then swing the other way and become very strict with their children. So we need to heal. We really need to heal so that we are more balanced with our children. I'm consciously doing that with food around my son, because I’m constantly catching myself being my mother, who isn't when they're a parent?
But at the same time, I want him to make good food choices for himself, and so I let him have a little bit of sugar and then we talk about it. What is it doing to your body? How do you feel? He doesn’t like how he feels when he eats too much sugar, and so he chooses not to eat too much sugar because he hates feeling sick. So, yes at age seven he's got it. That took me into my 30’s to get but being conscious of it.
So the fact that you said that because I've got this rebellious thing, it's because of how I was raised I imagine a lot of listeners do as well, and that's why I am so vulnerable on the show, sharing my what I go through, because I want I want you to be able to to come out and share how this works and how we can heal, because I know the listeners are going through the same or something similar.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:16:49.821)
Totally, and this is probably a good place to mention that in Bright Line Eating we do our inner work on this stuff we eat over. There are reasons we eat. We're eating often as a coping strategy to handle emotions and life, and we do something called internal family systems work. So I don't know if you've heard of IFS, Ashley?
Ashley James (1:17:13.295)
I've heard of it, but I don't know much about it, so please go on.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:17:18.099)
Yes, so it's often called parts work. So the idea here is that we have parts of us. We're not just one unified consciousness with one unified desire and one unified way of reacting to the world. We have a highest self, our authentic self, which is we know we're operating from that place.
They call it the eight C's when we're calm and clear and compassionate and confident and connected and curious and courageous and creative, that's when we're in our authentic self. When we're anything other than that, calm, clear, connected, compassionate place when we're anything else, we're in a part of us. So when there was a part of you that was raising up giving me the middle finger for talking about writing down food the night before, that's a part that's not calm, clear, connected, curious, compassionate. It's rebellious.
So there are different parts. There's wounded parts, which we can all relate to, wounded parts, and then there's protective parts. The rebel part is a protective part. It's protecting the wounded, the wounded child who was over controlled as a kid, and a rebel protector part came in. So we have protective parts that are trying to get ahead of our wounding. So a rebel part would be a manager part that's trying to make us not be wounded in the future by over controlling influences, and other types of manager parts are controlling, trying to organize life and the world to be just so a lot of us with food issues have a food controller part that tries to restrict or control our food to the extreme, get all the ducks in a row, in order to help us lose weight or to get our food together and that controlling part is often in polarization with a food indulging part, and the indulger protectors are swooping in after we're wounded, trying to numb us, distract us, soothe us, comfort us.
Ashley James (1:19:30.431)
That was my dad.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:19:31.584)
Okay, there you go, you had the controller and the adulterer in your mom and your dad.
Ashley James (1:19:36.623)
Absolutely. It would happen just like that, my mom would come down on me for food, my dad would take me out for ice cream. It was like, here, let me, let me soothe you and at the same time he was soothing himself.
It was a beautiful dynamic and so I have this really big love for food because when I was three years old, my dad took me. It was one of my first memories with my dad just spending time with him. I think it was the first time I ever just spent time with him. On my third birthday, he took me out to an authentic sushi restaurant and I fell in love with Japanese food.
Then he took me out to dim sum and he wanted to share with me his world of food addiction and so he brought me to these really unique restaurants and I completely fell in love with the food and, at the same time, I was feeling love from my dad, because that was where we connected and we also had our little dopamine hits at the same time. So we're shooting up heroin together.
So we're using together and so these foods, especially really greasy foods and typically Asian foods he gravitated towards and greasy chicken. For me. I realized it was actually on the show as an episode with a woman who kind of decodes food addiction much different from you. She doesn't talk about bright lines or anything like that, but she did talk about understanding our stories and our family stories around food. I realized that at the time I wasn't whole food plant-based, I was still very addicted to chicken, eating it every day, and that wasn't helping with my weight. It's really funny about chicken.
They say eat chicken breast for weight loss, but at the same time they also tell bodybuilders to eat chicken breast to gain weight. So I'm like, oh well, that is contradictory, which one is it? But for me, if I eat chicken, I just start gaining weight like crazy. It's really weird. But I was addicted to it and I didn't understand why. She asked that question and all of a sudden I was like snapped back to every happy memory with my dad and even a few with my mom, and there was always chicken in my mouth and in my hands or chicken wings or something, and it was, oh, I associate because both my parents died in my 20s and I miss them both.
I was the only child. I love my parents and I sympathize now with their pain, because I can look back and see, especially as a parent, their flawed behaviors were really their cries for help and their pain. They were beautiful, complex and incredibly intelligent, incredibly successful. They both had their own businesses, separate from each other. They both independently became millionaires and they both built beautiful businesses when I was a teenager, and in my 20s, I watched them become incredibly successful but also very self-destructive.
I see that the specific foods that I had the greatest addiction around, chicken and Asian food that it would bring me right back to the emotions of feeling safe and loved by my parents, who I missed, and so I had that addiction brain going on, but I also had that anchoring, that association with those past emotions.
Glenn Livingston, who I had on the show and he also asks questions to help people make food rules, his program is great and your program also seems much more complex. So different but similar, which is beautiful because you're seeing that these bright lines work and he asked questions like, well, what can you do in your life besides eat chicken and still have the same emotions and get the same outcome.
So, yes, I can sit here and meditate in a happy memory, remembering my parents and just feeling my love for them, and I don't need to have food in my hands or my mouth to do it. So I can still recreate and fill that need or I can go spend family time, bonding time with my family, not around food, because you talked about how when we all kind of get together and eat, it's we're at a feeding trough. I look up at my husband, my son and my mother-in-law and we're not talking, we're not connecting, our eyes are down. I feel like we're a bunch of cows at a feeding trough during our family meals. There's no emotional connection here, whereas if we played a board game together or went for a walk or nature, bird watching or something together that didn't involve food, it's much more emotionally satisfying to do a conversation together.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:24:12.066)
Yes, food is a poor proxy for most of the things we use it for. Food is a poor proxy for connection. It's a poor proxy for entertainment. It's a poor proxy for comfort. It can fill those needs to some degree, but not, well, I just want to say, for the listeners who feel I'm an ascetic around food, that I'm into denial and purity, and not enjoying food. That couldn't be further from the truth. I love my meals, I enjoy my food and what I do, though, is I eat, because I follow this structured way of eating.
I'm in alignment with my eating. I'm in alignment with my body. I'm not obsessed or owned by food anymore, and my meals are like a hot shower. I love taking a hot shower, but I don't think about it obsessively before or after. I'm not looking forward to it all day long. If I think to really enjoy it, which I often do while I'm in there, I take a very long hot shower. I live in a part of the country where we have ample water, which I'm really grateful for. I live near the Great Lakes, where there's a big chunk of the world's fresh water and, yes, I take a long hot shower every day and that’s like my breakfast, lunch and dinner. I sit down with my meal, take a deep breath, and just think, oh, this is awesome! I love this food, I savor it, it’s delicious, it hits the spot. I’m satisfied afterwards and then I move on with my life and I’m not thinking about it in between. For me, that's food neutrality. For me, that’s a healthy relationship with food and that’s what I help people achieve.
I used to teach this college course on the psychology of eating and I used to draw a big circle up on the board and I would say imagine, this is a pie chart, everyone. This is a pie chart and I want you to carve out a slice that represents the proportion of your life focus, your thinking, your energy, everything you're about, like your thinking and your focus and your energy that relates to your food. You're eating, your weight, your exercise, what you've eaten or not eaten, whether you're on your plan or off your plan, how many miles, how many calories, how many pounds, what percentage of your life is not. And Ashley, I’d tell you I would have slender, regular weight, lovely, college gals start to cry. I would just say I noticed you're having a reaction to this exercise. What's happening for you? She would just carve out almost all but this tiny sliver and she would say 95%.
So the way we eat in Bright Line Eating is the antidote to that. If I do that pie now. I don't know what it would be. 10%, 15%. It takes some effort. I got to focus. Do I have enough blah in the fridge? I got to go to the grocery store and I worked out and blah, blah. But mostly my life is about my life now. I have my life back. I don't need to be thinking about making my food sexier. I don't need to. It's in its place.
Ashley James (1:27:39.695)
Yes, I'm not there, I want to get there. The needing to make the food sexier. I know this food’s delicious because I love shiitake mushrooms. They are so delicious I put them in everything. I'm looking forward to those shiitake mushrooms and I got some lion's mane mushrooms. My gosh, the mouthfeel of these things is insane. I love them and they're also really good for your brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:28:05.412)
Mushrooms are so healthy, ridiculously healthy.
Ashley James (1:28:08.097)
That's what I made for dinner yesterday. I did a three-mushroom, I did oysters, and what's cool about oysters is when you cut them, they're like little scallops, you cut them so they're circular. It kind of tastes like scallops, not taste, but it has that mouthfeel. It's a little meaty, yes.
So I did a three-mushroom, I did oyster, lion's mane and shiitake stir fry with onion and tofu, and then my hot sauce because I'm addicted to hot sauce. I read this study that it's really good for you on many levels and I'm down for it. It's anti-parasitic, it helps the body. Anyways, so many good things about hot sauce and I'm sold. So now I realize I actually can't eat a meal without hot sauce. Now, I'm wondering if that's an okay addiction or not, but it's fun, it's fun to put on food, and in moderation, I guess. It's so delicious.
But there's that part of my brain that's saying the whole time, so I'm in a part this isn't going to be good enough, this is going to be yummy enough, and it won't. That part wouldn't be satisfied until there's, I don’t know, peanut sauce, and noodles, or chicken. That stuff that's not optimal for me and I know the next day I'm not going to feel good having eaten that meal. So there's this part of my brain that isn't happy until I've adulterated a healthy meal to make it unhealthy and I just tell it to buzz off. I tell it to buzz off. But I'm really looking forward to the day that I can cook a meal in peace, because now I'm not cooking in peace. But I've come a long way because I look back to where I was in 2010, living off of the dollar menu at fast food restaurants, we hit a rough streak financially and we thought that we would save money eating at the dollar menu and turns out you actually have to eat way more. We'd end up buying like 10 burgers, we each have five, dollar meal burgers. We'd feel horrible then. Very soon after, we really hit a good stride with healing foods. It was good that we hit that bottom and experienced that. Also just how crazy addictive the dollar menu is, that at pretty much any fast food restaurant.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:30:38.644)
I did a study recently that you can eat for way cheaper than the dollar menu on Bright Line Eating. People say that healthy food is expensive but not all. For example, in Bright Line Eating, you have a serving of fruit at breakfast and a serving of fruit at lunch, in addition to, obviously, a lot of other things. But for serving a fruit, you can have a pint of organic raspberries out of season for $7 or you can have a banana for 12 cents or whatever.
Beans and rice and bananas and cabbage, oh my god, cabbage can be so good. You get the whole cabbage and you slice it up and you cook it in some vinegar with some salt and pepper and it cooks down and this really cheap cabbage can yield a whole week's worth of vegetables, practically. There's so many ways to eat inexpensively. The dollar menu is not. It's not the way to go.
Ashley James (1:31:40.816)
It's not. But the person I was back then highly, highly addicted to processed foods could not say no to sugar. It was a daily thing. My blood sugar was out of balance. I was incredibly sick. It kind of ramped up to my late 20s and early 30s. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist I'd never have kids. And the thing is, every MD I've ever been to, said you can't cure that. I'm like, watch me, and my last few blood tests I've had showed everything's normal and I had really bad polycystic ovarian syndrome. I'd had three cycles a year, infertility. I was told I'd never have kids and I conceived naturally twice and we have our son.
I also had out of control diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and I had pica or cribbing, so my body was completely void of minerals. Then, I got on this healing journey. I got on these really fantastic supplements that filled those gaps. I started eating healthy. I cut out processed foods and I just watched as things transformed.
Just the first month of all I did was shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. I wasn't even avoiding things I'm allergic to like dairy, and I was eating meat. I was eating dairy, but I was only shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, so I wouldn't buy anything in a package and then a cereal box, none of that, and I chose organic. That first month my chronic infections that I was on monthly antibiotics for went away, and that was in 2008. That was my first big health wake up. That was like, oh, I can solve something with food. It's interesting because all the doctors I've gone to say I have to be on all these drugs for the rest of my life. But look, I can make a health change. One, one change, well, two. I chose organic and shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, still wasn't eating healthy, frying up big steaks and stuff like that but it was steak and vegetables as opposed to a bunch of packaged foods, and choosing organic and so, just getting the process, getting the pesticides out of my life, boom, all my infections went away.
I also had chronic adrenal fatigue, so bad that in the morning, I couldn't process human language. It took me about an hour to two hours before my husband could speak to me. I couldn't even understand what people were saying. It was really weird. My cortisol levels were incredibly bottomed out, but it was food. Then, like I said, supplements just to fill in the gaps. But it was food changes. Everything melted away and MDs told me I would have these problems for the rest of my life.
Of course, in addition to all these health problems, then I would have food addiction. But I didn't even know because I was self-soothing, because I was in so much pain from out of control diabetes, from polycystic ovarian syndrome, from chronic infections, from chronic inflammation. I was in so much pain that food was just what I could use to soothe. Thank God I don't like alcohol because I would have become an alcoholic just to numb the pain. So I understand people out there, because 70% of the adult population is on at least one prescription medication. They don't need to be on and so we've got at least 70% of the population feeling so sick in their body they're turning to processed food to self-soothe. So it's like you said some one third of the people aren't necessarily susceptible to addiction, but that doesn't mean they're not going out and self-soothing.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:35:27.755)
Yes, bad habits. I mean you can eat a lot of processed food just out of liking the taste and mouthfeel and out of bad habits, and the difference there is that without necessarily getting a lot of support around it, if you just really make up your mind to do differently, you can. So addiction is where you're really trying and you still continue to harm yourself in the same way.
Ashley James (1:36:02.561)
That's a good distinction to understand. My father-in-law was an alcoholic and he smoked cigarettes and then one day I think he got into a minor car accident or maybe he drove home drunk, and that was his wake up call. He was always drunk and always had a cigarette in his mouth. This was I don't know in the 70s, when it was acceptable, and he just snapped. He just goes, I'm not going to drink anymore. Boom! No backlash. No addiction. Then he decided he was going to stop smoking because I think it was affecting his cycling times. He was kind of a professional cyclist. He just went boom! He just stopped and anything he had ever been seemingly addictive to other people. He could just stop and have no cravings and be done with it. So I thought he was really weird. But you're telling me one third of the population is like that. Okay, because that's definitely not my experience of life.
It's interesting because listeners who are those people where the addiction brain isn't a thing for them. Please have compassion for your family members who are struggling with addiction, who say they're going to stop and they can't and they say they're going to stop and they can't because it's easy to get angry at them and say, well, you're not trying hard enough, you're just lazy, but they're having an internal fight that is so hard. They don't want to destroy their lives and their family. So please have compassion and even though you don't personally understand that, you could put yourselves in the shoes of understanding that there's an internal struggle going on.
So you have these people who have food addiction. They try to diet over and over and over again, and that keeps failing. Then they blame themselves. But because the underlying problem is processed food or food addiction in general, mostly processed food is the culprit and so they've got food addiction. Now they hear about Bright Line Eating, is this a 12-step program? What are the first few steps? Someone's coming in. They're not even 24 hours sober yet, they just finished their last bag of Doritos and they log into brightlineeating.com. Walk us through the first week of food sobriety.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:38:26.684)
Yes, sure. So someone goes to brightlineeating.com, they sign up for the membership, they do a free trial, so they haven't paid a dime and they're just going to give it a try, and the first thing that happens is they'll get a warm welcome message from me and they'll get to create their password and log into the system, which is super easy, and then we'll walk them through getting started. They'll get to download the food plan, they'll need to buy some supplies, they'll need to get a digital food scale, a food journal, some things like that, and they'll need to clean out their kitchen, like really clean out the cupboards, clean out the kitchen. There's guidance on that. It's fine if you live with people who eat differently than you. They don't have to do Bright Line Eating but then maybe have a conversation about like, okay, can we keep the pies off the counter? Maybe we could put them in this cupboard or here's a place where all those foods can live and you can access them freely, and then they just won't be out for me on the counter. That kind of thing.
Two or three or four or five days, for some people, one day, they're all set up and they're ready to start. Then, we have like a day one experience where, it's kind of ceremonial, you start and we have a meditation called the Crossing the Line Meditation, where we guide them to really step over the line and step into a world where they're committed on their Bright Line Eating journey and they really begin. They write down day one in their food journal. They write down what they're going to eat the next day and they start their day one. The game is really you write down your food the night before and the next day you eat only and exactly that, and then you start setting up morning routines and evening routines to support that. You start to form your place in the community. You find a buddy. You join a mastermind group. You start to get connected in a community.
After the first couple weeks, what will happen, Ashley, is someone will have lost if they have weight to lose when they come in and not everybody does but they'll have lost a significant amount of weight. Often they'll be stunned by how much they lose in just those first couple weeks and their brain will have already healed so much that their hunger will be lower even though they're losing weight. Their hunger will be down statistically. Their cravings will have already subsided significantly and they'll start to have this automaticity that comes in.
What's happening, Ashley, is we're wiring their brain so that the part of the brain that governs eating is no longer the, what do I feel like I want? something sexy? or what am I choosing at the moment? Part of the brain which is very vulnerable to willpower depletion and looking for a fix from our food and we're starting to use the same part of the brain that executes brushing teeth for most of us, which is a part of the brain that just kind of does it. Whether you're tired or in the mood doesn't really matter whether you're traveling or you're sick or whatever, you just brush your teeth. That's the part of the brain that we start to access by this pattern of writing down the food the night before and then the next day eating only in exactly that. It's kind of like you’re starting that habit of after dinner I brush and floss and that pattern starts to get really anchored in.
Two months after they've started, what happens is they've now lost one and a half times clinically significant weight loss after two months and then after a few more months it's three times clinically significant weight loss. So we measure it typically as a percentage of starting body weight, but we're talking about enough weight that their joints aren't hurting anymore. Their inflammation is way down. You were talking about all manners and I can't make medical promises or whatever according to the regulatory bodies, but what we see is people who are on insulin are getting off their insulin. What we see on average is that people who are on all manner of medications are starting to phase off their medications. That's not a promise to anyone, it's just a prediction on average from what we see. Cravings go down after the first two months to levels of little to no cravings anymore ever. Hunger goes down to little or no hunger ever. This is published research that we've published in peer reviewed scientific journals. We also see people at every age of the lifespan losing weight equivalently like in those first two months, women in their 50s, 60s and 70s are losing the same amount of weight as women in their 20s and 30s, which you might think. Well, that's not possible, because it's harder to lose weight as you age, and everybody knows that. Well, the reason it's harder to lose weight as you age is that estrogen, which goes down in both men and women. In the 50s and 60s it plummets in both men and women, but because women had more estrogen to begin with, the difference is more striking for a woman's body. Estrogen has a facilitating effect on insulin, which helps to smooth out the edges as you eat processed foods made out of sugar and flour as you eliminate sugar and flour from your diet, it doesn't matter as much anymore whether you have the estrogen to facilitate your insulin and so with sugar and flour out of the equation, what that does is, it levels the playing field. Women in their 50s and 60s postmenopausal women are losing weight just like they were 20 and 30. Again. So that's really exciting.
A lot of people come with thyroid issues. They think they can't lose weight just like they were 20 and 30. Again, so that's really exciting. A lot of people come with thyroid issues. They think they can't lose weight, or autoimmune conditions or PCOS, like you and I had. I have Hashimoto's thyroid too, and it really works across the board. Within two or three months, people are on their way, they're hooked, this is their life, and what we call them are bright lifers. Bright lifers, they're just doing it for life. We published results showing that two years later, they're maintaining every pound on average, on average every pound that they lost when they started Bright Line Eating two years later, published in the Journal of Nutrition and Weight Loss in 2001.
Ashley James (1:45:29.694)
Wow, congratulations.
I read a study once where they took people who've always been of the healthiest weight possible and people who are obese and I think kind of being a neuroscience study people who have always been of the best body weight for them, the healthiest they have almost no pleasure derived from thinking of food before they eat it, and when they ate food the pleasure was high, high, high, high. And then they went on with their day. It was like, I don't know, I don't think about it.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:46:17.248)
It was like my hot shower analogy.
Ashley James (1:46:22.835)
You don't sit there like getting off on thinking about your hot shower that's coming up. Although, I could think about a nice hot bath and I can't wait for that. I have this tongue scraper and I love using it, I can't believe the stuff. I use it twice a day. Everyone needs a tongue scraper. Go, run, buy it now.
I had a listener ask me in our Facebook group, why can't I just brush? I'm no, no, no. Someone else said because you're just brushing all the bacteria around, you're not actually removing it, but you're removing this biofilm that the bacteria lives in on your tongue. It's pretty crazy and I love doing it. It's the best part of brushing teeth, but I don't think of it throughout the day.
I gain maximum pleasure while I'm doing it, like for the 30 seconds I'm doing it to get, let's see all the crap coming off my tongue twice a day. It's really cool, and how clean my tongue is afterwards. It feels like your mouth doesn't feel good until you've cleaned your tongue. Go do it. It's amazing. But it's just this metal, round, u-shaped thing you just scrape your tongue with, but I don't think about it throughout the day.
So the study, they found that, the ideal weight people who've never had obesity issues don't derive pleasure from thinking about food, but when they're eating it it's orgasmic. The obese people, they poked them up to machines, looked at brain scans and saw that they derive quite a bit of pleasure. Not as much pleasure as the skinny people did from eating food, they would drive, but still substantial pleasure just from thinking about the meals they could have, like chicken wings, hot dogs, whatever. But when they went to eat it, the obese people were disappointed because the fantasy was better than reality.
My husband told me a long time ago, when you're not married and you're dating around, let me tell you, he goes. He's a happily married man. The fantasy of what you can do with women as a man, because in their mind you're the God of the bedroom, and if you live in that fantasy world, you're always disappointed from reality. So that's the same with pornography. If you avoid pornography and you avoid this fantasy world, then the actual real thing is amazing and when you actually get to go do it in the bedroom with your spouse, it's amazing.
That hit me because first of all, I thought everyone thought about food throughout the day, I thought that was normal. That's what made me go, wow, I really do think about what am I going to cook later? It's pleasurable. I love cooking, but it's making up these meals in my mind and I realized, wow, I do get more pleasure from the fantasy of what the food is than when I sit down to the meal. So your program gets us to the point where now we've rewired the brain to be all the skinny people.
We have the preset of what we're eating that day, and then we don't fantasize about it and then we start to drive more pleasure when we're sitting down to eat. So it’s as if you're getting people to rewire their brain to become skinny people. Have you ever heard of, they take the mice, who are always, always skinny, and they take obese mice and then they give the fecal transplant of the skinny mice to the obese mice.
They all eat the same and get the same exercise. But the obese mice become skinny and the skinny mice become obese just because the microbiome changes. It's like you're taking a fat person but giving them a skinny brain way of making their brain be skinny brain people and having skinny brain habits.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:50:25.236)
Yes, totally, and the research you were talking about is what addiction scientists would call the distinction between liking and wanting.
So, the liking and the wanting systems are very different in the brain and as addiction wires up, what happens is your wanting goes up and up and up, but your liking, once you have it, goes down and down and down and that changes over development as you wire up an addiction and it is its own kind of torturous hell.
To live in a world where you're wanting food, wanting food, wanting food, but then when you eat it it doesn't give the payoff and then you're thinking, oh well, now I need something sweet, now I need something salty and you're eating but you're not even liking it that much. But you still want it and the elbow wants to bend and the mouth wants to chew and you still want to be eating and you're wanting and wanting but not even liking. If you haven't had an addiction it doesn't make sense but that is the experience of it and that is exactly what Bright Line Eating does. It heals that. It heals it and it's rigorous and it's not for everybody, but it works. If you have weight to lose and you want to have a brain that doesn't torture you about food anymore, it works.
Ashley James (1:51:41.050)
It sounds very empowering. In terms of getting people back into their place of feeling freedom in their body, freedom in their life, freedom in their brain.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:52:03.764)
What else can you be doing in the world? Ashley is the person who's going to solve cold fusion like it isn't even working on those equations right now because they're starting Atkins for the third time this year. Think about how much wasted potential is buried underneath all of this obsession about what we've eaten or not eaten, whether we're on our plan or off our plan, how many miles, how many calories, how many pounds, what we're cooking, what we're eating. The food that we're wanting to eat. There are so many. I mean it's like two billion people now in this world are overweight or obese and food obsessed.
Ashley James (1:52:41.900)
I'm very, very, very grateful. My son, his body shape is just like me as a kid. I was thin and muscular and athletic, and he is the same way and he could take or leave food. In fact, when he's playing with his friends, I'm like, can you please eat your lunch? He's like, no, I'm busy playing. It's only when the world has calmed down there's nothing more fun to do. He keeps asking like, okay, are we doing something more fun? I'm like, no, now it's quiet time and let's eat our meal. Then he's hungry. He's not hungry until there's no nothing else to do in the world, whereas me now, as an adult, I'm like, well, the food is the fun. What are you talking about? Let's go, let's go eat, but as a kid I watched him. He is just go, go, go, fun is fun all the time. He could take or leave food, so I'm so grateful for that.
But clothing doesn't fit him and I think this is crazy because I have to go out of my way. I go to kids clothing stores and I have to order online their special sizes for, quote unquote, skinny and slim, the skinny, slim fit, because I am telling you, he is not. We go to an amazing pediatrician, a naturopathic pediatrician. She measures him, she says he's healthy and healthy rangers, he's not unhealthy weight or anything. He's growing, he's so tall now I can't believe it. He just grew up to now he's in eight-year-old clothing. He's seven and he just went another size up. Yet I have to go out of my way to find clothing that fits him, because the average child now is obese and he has a lot of friends that have more weight than I saw as a kid in the 80’s.
And that is because, like you said, most kids now eat processed food. When I was a kid it was kind of an oddity, I didn't know I had a choice. The parents go, my kids only eat macaroni and cheese, or my kids only eat hotdogs. When I was a kid I didn't even know I had a choice. I had to eat what my parents ate, and so we sat down and we'd have grilled fish and we'd have wild rice or we'd have legumes, we'd have grilled chicken, we'd have a Caesar salad with grilled chicken. Those were pretty much the staple meals in our house, were vegetables, some kind of lean meat and steamed vegetables and some legume or a little bit of complex carbohydrate in there, but that's how I grew up eating and I don't remember eating much processed food at all. Maybe on my birthday I could get that. Once in a blue moon was processed food, and now children are once in a blue moon having a vegetable.
Imagine this generation. Yes, we have adults who need to lose weight, but I think you need to make a bright line for the parents who want to help their kids heal, because now we have seven-year-olds with processed food addiction brain and twelve-year-olds with processed food addiction brain who are going to rebel and who are sneaking sugar. I even have a friend whose daughter steals. She's 10 or 12 years old. She will steal. When they're at Target, her mom has to pat her down because she will always find hidden candy bars that she's stealing because it's that processed food addiction brain that we've given our children, because they've grown up mostly eating foods that have hijacked their brain. So, yes, we need this for us, we need the Bright Line Eating program for us, but we also need a gentle one for the children to help the children heal and maybe the children could just heal when we start actually feeding them real food like teaching them to listen to their body. We have to be gentle.
So my husband once a year does a fast and he's aiming for 40 days. This time he's done 28 day fasts and it's water only fast and he's fantastic at them. But today's day eight, and what I noticed, because I've been more conscious, I would say actually since my interview with Jonah Flynn, so this was maybe March or February and because of the last year, I really did turn to food as one of my mechanisms for handling grief and then I acknowledged that on the scale. Now, I'm coming back down and being much more conscious of how I'm eating and I wasn't going off the rails either last year. If I'd gone off the rails it would have been 80 pounds, not 40 pounds, but my husband has been fasting for the last eight days.
I have observed myself and I realized it has been so much easier emotionally to cook healthy. The thing is he also eats whole food, plant based, and he will eat whatever I eat. So he's sitting there like, oh let's crack out the whatever processed food, but just having to be responsible to feed multiple people, cause I mean I'm feeding our son, I know what to feed him, but just to be responsible for, or sometimes it has to be like, oh, let's just go eat out and then giving into that. It's kind of being with the person you used to be with, because he and I used to have food addiction together, go to the dollar menu, get off on that together many years ago. He showed me his sugar addiction back when we were dating. We sat down to watch a movie while we were dating at his house, and he cracked open the family-size, family-size, this is a thing of ice cream so big that it requires a handle. Have you seen those? It has a big round lid and it's a tub of ice cream. The tub has a handle that's like a bucket of ice cream.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (1:58:56.137)
No, no
Ashley James (1:58:57.543)
It’s in Albertson’s. It’s crazy. He told me every weekend he'd polish one off single-handedly and he was so excited to share it with me. I did not do dairy, so then I did dairy with him and that was a disaster. But it made me see, wow, this is an addiction. He's inviting me into it.
Sometimes he'll pull me into that and be, let's go eat out at a restaurant. Yay! It's easy to give in. If he had said let's go get a pack of cigarettes or let's go do this addictive party together, when you've got an accomplice. So now that he's not eating for over a week, I haven't had an accomplice and it's just been me and it's been so much easier. I just want to talk about this, how does your program help people who have a spouse or have kids that they have to cook food for, that isn't on the program. How do they heal their addiction and have to be surrounded by the substances that they're craving? Because you said there's a point of willpower that your program helps to remove by planning what you're going to cook the next day. But now let's say you've got the spouse who wants the bad food and you have to cook for them also.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:00:22.286)
Well, I won't lie, sometimes that can be hard. What I have found is that if you're cooking for a family, typically you can prepare what you're going to eat, which in the initial weight loss phase, for dinner, for example, is going to be some protein, some vegetable, some salad, some fat on that, and you can prepare that and then also add, for example, a big pot of pasta and some bread and butter for the family, and they can eat that, and you're having the protein vegetable salad that you've also made. So you don't need to cook a whole separate meal. Typically you can just add, typically, a big pot of starch of some kind for the family to add to that. So that's typically what I recommend.
This isn't 1950 anymore. Other people can also cook for themselves as well. But I mean, that's the way I always did. It is have done it, and I have three kids and a husband who none of them eat the Bright Line Eating way, and so these days we do some sort of mix, because my kids are older and my husband can cook, and so we do some mix of I'll cook or, or everyone will fend for themselves, or we'll go out to dinner, or if I'm cooking, I'll cook what I'm going to eat and I'll add, I said, another component or two for other folks.
Ashley James (2:01:52.292)
In your program when you're planning for the next day. Can you plan for eating out and would you look at the restaurants, choose a restaurant, let's say, your family's going out because we're getting together with friends or other family members. Would you choose the restaurant, look at the menu and already choose what you're going to order and how are you going to order it to be on program?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:02:12.244)
Yes. So you can pretty much eat out in any restaurant and do Bright Line Eating and you're still looking for the same categories of food. I don't always choose in advance what I'm going to eat, because sometimes you arrive and the menu's changed or whatever, and so I would just commit a Bright Meal out, but in the restaurant I'd be looking for the same, protein, vegetable salad kind of thing. If it's a Thai restaurant, I'm ordering vegetables and tofu or whatever.
Ashley James (2:02:47.478)
Well with Thai restaurants, I love that if you don't see anything you like, you can order, the side menu always has steamed vegetables and brown rice, and I've done that where I've said can I please have a big thing of steamed vegetables, big thing of brown rice, and then bring me soy sauce or something, or sometimes even they'll steam tofu, which I mean steamed tofu, to me is delicious, but I'm I'm one of those people.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:03:11.466)
Yes, me too.
Ashley James (2:03:14.742)
It’s Bragg's liquid aminos and I'm all good. Okay, we've been teasing the listener the whole time because we've been saying we would talk about the statistics. I want to talk about statistics. Let's wrap this up by really talking about your studies, because you even said that your hunger goes down statistically, and you emphasize the word statistically, meaning you are tracking people's results. Do you have any more data or more studies to share with us about your program? Also that people have lasting weight loss, because what I said earlier anyone can do any diet, but how do we have lasting success to being as healthy as possible? This isn't about weight loss. This is being as healthy as possible and feeling mentally and emotionally healthy, along with physical healthy.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:04:11.058)
Sure. I've mentioned the studies before, but I've got one additional one to mention, but I can give you the numbers. By two months after doing Bright Line Eating, not only have people lost weight, but I just want to emphasize, when most people lose weight in most ways, their hunger and their cravings go up. Because that's what happens when you deprive the brain and the body of enough food to survive. The brain compensates by making you hungrier and crave more, but not when you do it the Bright Line Eating way.
The difference is you're not eating processed foods, you're not eating sugar and flour, and you're eating enough whole foods and vegetables to create enough bulk and you're weighing it. People typically don't eat enough vegetables unless they weigh it. So know you're good. The amounts and the fact that you're using a digital food scale to make sure you're eating enough it's not about restricting quantities. It's about making sure you're eating enough. It dupes the brain into feeling you're getting ample food, so you're losing weight.
By two months in your hunger ratings on average are down to 1.5 out of five, that's average, little to no hunger anymore, ever, and craving levels are below that, below 1.5 out of five. So hunger and cravings go down.
I mentioned that people at every age are losing weight equivalently, which is just a miracle and a blessing. If you're over 50, you're just like, yay! So after two months, people on average are losing 13 to 17 pounds after the first two months and three months after that, that's doubled. Those weight loss results are maintained years later, literally two years later, on average, zero pounds regained. We have people in our Bright Line Eating who have been around now for about seven years. Our first program rolled out a little over seven years ago and we have people maintaining their weight loss all that time.
Then the study that I didn't mention actually has to do with a study we did after COVID hit, where we looked at the well-being metrics of someone, psychosocial metrics, things like energy, perceived social support, which means like, are you feeling lonely in the world or are you feeling deeply supported and connected? If you had an emergency, do you have people who would come over to your house to help? Do you have enough support in life?
We looked at depression, days of bad mental health versus good mental health, levels of depression. We looked at these metrics and what we found is that after two months of doing Bright Line Eating, people have more energy, less depression, fewer days of bad mental health and their feeling of feeling loved and connected and supported in the world has gone way up. But then we looked at that during COVID, I'm talking about the heat of when COVID was first rocking the world. We're talking April, May, June of 2020.
We looked at those months versus before COVID hit and versus after COVID had been around for a while, and what we found was that those effects were actually heightened during the worst catastrophe. So, in other words, people experienced a lifting of their depression, but even to a greater degree. During the worst of COVID, people experienced more energy, but to a greater degree. People experienced feeling more loved and connected in the world, but to a greater degree, meaning that Bright Line Eating as a community and as a way of life is so conducive to well-being that during a catastrophe or an emergency. The effect was amplified because people had a community to lean into all the more and a program to lean on to get them through the worst times. Ashley, I've been thinking about you over the last year. Food can help us cope to some degree but we've been talking about it, it's a poor proxy for real support and connection and coping. When people have Bright Line Eating to lean into, they flourish extra during the hardest times. It's quite remarkable.
Ashley James (2:08:54.512)
I love it. I love your program. I love that it's science-based. I love that it's holistic, because it's looking at every aspect of your life and you're showing that it brings in that joy and satisfaction throughout someone's life. So that is truly holistic. That is what true health is. To me, that's the definition. My husband, he's the one that titled the podcast. But the idea of it being true health, the True Health Podcast, the true health is all aspects of your life are in that balance, that have joy and that have health. So it's not just physical, it's not just mental, it's everything. It's emotional, it's social, it's spiritual, it's every aspect. So the fact that you have this very well-rounded result is beautiful.
I'm so excited that we brought this information to the listeners today because, just statistically, we have helped some lives today and even if we help one person to get out of that torturous suffering, this has been an incredible success. So I feel so blessed that you came here today to share this information. Thank you so much.
Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Thompson does is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com, including brightlineeating.com and the link to the membership. Is there anything you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview and please, I want to say, come back on the show when you have more studies, more information. We'd love to have an ongoing conversation, because what it sounds like is you are always refining and making this even better as you study this further.
We're never done. We're always developing and you've developed a fantastic system through this constant evolution with your community and being totally geeking out on neuroscience. I can appreciate that. So definitely come back on the show, but is there anything you'd like to say to the listener to wrap up today's interview?
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:10:59.806)
Yes, I guess I just want to say there are a lot of people out there and maybe you, dear listener, are one of them who really have tried so hard to change the way you eat, to turn the corner with your health, to start taking care of yourself better, but the food just keeps being an issue. I just want to say you're not alone. It really is a real thing. It's addictive in the brain and you're not alone. I just want you to know that I have walked the path of that struggle and I see you, I feel you and you got this. You got this. So come check us out at brightlineeating.com. We would love to see you. There is a roadmap that works. There's a path that works.
Ashley James (2:11:44.612)
Brilliant. I'm so happy that we're helping people. I say we because I was here too, but you are helping people today to end that suffering and get on that roadmap to success. I geek out on personal growth and development. That's one of my favorite things, so thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's have you back.
Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson (2:12:05.148)
Thanks, Ashley. It'd be great. I'll come back anytime and it's just been delightful talking with you. Thank you so much.
Outro:
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