40 Magic "Sober Eating" Tools

Susan Peirce Thompson of Bright Line Eating gives heaps of great tools in her bootcamps: a gratitude journal, daily meditation, 5-year journal, bright lines! 

But when I relapsed, I needed more tools to create a “container” for myself to keep from relapsing.

I borrowed a tip from a sobriety blogger who challenged herself to make a long list of possible sober tools. This is my adapted list of “sober eating tools.” 

Some of these are small tools, some are bigger.

 I recommend you pick 10 things from this list, tools you can implement this week. Even better, pick 20. You can ease off later when you have some momentum.

1.  Write about your food journey daily for the next 30 days. Start a blog. Post every day on Facebook. Write in a private locked journal. Doesn’t matter. Write about what you’re experiencing, whether you’ve had an easy day or a challenging day.

2. Rethink your evening routine and add as much relaxation to it as you can. Give up anything that adds overwhelm. Make your goal in the evening be to “reduce overwhelm.”

3. Set up a relaxation habit for the times of day when you tend to most reach for food. Drink a cup of a favorite herbal tea every day when you get home from work, no matter what. After a while, your body starts to want its tea at that time. It doesn’t have to be tea. It could be taking a 10-minute bath or turning on a diffuser with a favorite essential oil or playing a favorite relaxing song. Better yet, make it relaxation ritual. It doesn’t have to be long – 5 or 10 minutes could be enough. Wouldn’t it be great to come home every night, take a 10-minute bubble bath, change into your softest pajamas, put on the diffuser and sit for a few minutes with a hot cup of herbal tea?

4.  Remove anything sugar and flour in it from your house. Throw it away, move it to a friend’s house, give it away.

5.  Give yourself a daily reward for the first two weeks. For every day your lines are bright, you get a reward. It could be a fun magazine, a scented candle, some flowers, a great cup of coffee, watch an episode of a new TV show or movie, anything that feels like a reward and a prize for being bright. I’ve washed my car, gotten my eyebrows done, bought a new lipstick. After that, give yourself a treat every two days, or four days, or weekly, or whenever you feel you need to be rewarded.

6. Stop weighing yourself. Put the scale in the garage on a tall shelf where you can’t easily reach it. Instead, measure your success according to how clean your bright lines are. How many days of squeaky clean bright lines do you have?

7. Give yourself big rewards when you hit big milestones, like 30 days or 60 days or 100 days of squeaky clean bright lines. Establish new, non-food ways to treat yourself.

8. Get as much sleep as you possibly can. As much as humanly possible. Make it a top priority. Take naps. Notice how your body feels when you get a lot of sleep.

9.  Go to bed every time you feel overwhelmed, you feel crappy, you feel irritated, you feel you’re about to eat off your food plan. It doesn’t matter if it’s only 9 p.m., or 7:30, or 6 p.m. Bed is a safe, healthy place to go.

10. Give up any expectations that this will be a productive time. Just get your lines bright. Having bright lines is enough. Bright lines first. If you load up on too much at this time, your saboteur jumps in with “this is too much and it’s too hard.”

11. Pretend for a while that you are pregnant or you have the flu. Pregnant and sick people are allowed to take really, really good care of themselves. Don’t do anything that people wouldn’t expect you to do if you were pregnant. You come first. Not forever, but for now.

12. Give up the idea of a clean and tidy house. Let the house be messy. For now.

13. Listen to or read something by Susan daily. Rewatch a bootcamp video or watch one of her vlogs or listen to a coaching call. Read a chapter in her book. Listen to your favorites on repeat. Make notes of your favorite quotes.

14. Think about, maybe even write down, all the many, many ways in which sugar and flour are not your friends. How has sugar/flour lied to you. List all the things your saboteur tries to tell you (like “it makes me happy”) and come up with your most powerful counter-arguments (“people who are struggling with diabetes and obesity aren’t usual very happy about either”).

15. Avoid overwhelm. Reduce overwhelm. Strive for “underwhelm.” Engage in some truly slothful behaviors. It’s OK to be wearing your pajamas watching Netflix at 5:30 p.m.

16. Decline anything that involves eating out for the next 30 or 45 or 90 days. Say no. It takes a while to feel less wobbly about eating out in a restaurant or at a friend’s house. If you feel weird, don’t go. You don’t have to push yourself to act like normal. Your job is to get your lines bright. It’s not forever, it’s just for now.

17. For the social occasions you do attend, plan your food carefully AND give yourself permission to arrive late, leave early, bring your own replacement food, say you have somewhere else to go to afterwards. You job is to keep your lines bright.

18. Ask for help. Ask for help with housecleaning, laundry, dishes, chauffeuring, anything.

19. Accept help. Let people do things for you.

20. Consider going to a face-to-face meeting. Find some other BLE friends in your area, if there are any, and get together for a walk. Go an OA meeting or an FAA meeting. You can go to AA or NA. They’ll let you sit in the room and not speak, just listen.

21. Get a buddy. Get two buddies. Get more if you have to.

22. Share on FB or with a friend or with a buddy the silly things that your saboteur tells you. All the sneaky ways Sabby tries to get you to break your bright lines. Be amazed that we all hear the same sneaky things.

23. Take on a meditation challenge. You can use an app or a website or just commit to doing a particular meditation for 30 days or 60 days or whatever. You can even just commit to sitting in silence every day for 10 minutes (or 15 or 45 or whatever feels right) for 30 days. Get an accountability partner and report on your progress daily.

24. Find some small activities to do in the evenings to help occupy the time. Make a list of, say, 100 small clutter-busting tasks (clean out a kitchen drawer, declutter one bookshelf, organize your earrings, clean out a junk drawer). Do at least one daily during the time when you struggle most. Or do one any time you’re tempted to eat off your food plan.

25. Make a list of your favorite, most yummy, most enjoyable BLE meals. Commit to eating all your favorites this week. Or just commit that your meals will be as delicious as you can make them.

26. Have something you can wear, like a special piece of jewelry, that reminds you of your bright lines. Rub it. Give it magical powers. Give it super powers. I was in Hickory House, so I have a pendant made of hickory wood. When I wear it, I am endowed with super powers that make it impossible for me to break my bright lines.

27. Build momentum. Make a chart and give yourself a bg star for every day your lines are bright. Get a streak going so you will have incentive not to break your streak.

28. Do a challenge. Rather than saying "I'll never eat sugar or flour or snacks again," set up a challenge for yourself (and maybe for a buddy or friend too) to have squeaky-clean bright lines for 30 days or 90 days or 100 days. Check in with each other daily. Get a calendar and put a shiny gold star sticker on every day of your challenge when you’ve completed it.

29. Write a letter to your future self on futureme.org and arrange to have it delivered to you in 30, 60, or however many days you want. In your letter, give yourself huge congratulations and hugs and cheers for making it that many days with your lines squeaky clean.

30. Find ONE person you can be completely honest with about your eating, your thinking, you struggles, your excitement. It could be a BLE buddy but it could also be a therapist, a thin friend, a life coach. Make sure you have at least one person who really gets what it’s like to be you.

31. Accept that the first time you do everything it’s going to be weird. The first vacation without sugar and flour will be weird. The first Christmas or Thanksgiving or other food-related holiday. The first birthday party. The first long airplane ride. The first …. Whatever. It will just feel weird. Then from then on, it will become the new normal.

32. When attending social events with people you don’t like, stay active. Do the dishes, talk with the teenagers, play with the kids, go outside for a break, post from the bathroom on FB. Remove yourself briefly from whatever situation is making you crazy. Give yourself a moment to accept that it’s making you crazy and that’s OK and you don’t have to eat over it.

33. Make a commitment to your buddy or another trusted sponsor that you will report every single bite off your plan to that buddy. Every single bite.

34. Take photos of your meals and post them on Instagram. Photos will encourage you to make your plates visually appealing, and having to photograph them will help ensure your saboteur doesn’t sneak any non-BLE food onto your plate.

35. Make up an Emergency Action Plan toolkit and carry it with you everywhere. It could include things like a phone number of a friend, essential oil to inhale, a special crystal or stone to hold, a meditation or prayer to repeat.

36. Don’t second-guess your choice. Ever. Your saboteur might start pushing you to question your decision over and over again. When you start to wonder “should I eat this?”, shut down the debate. It’s not open for discussion. This is not something you’re going to debate or wonder about or try to convince yourself to do. You already made the decision. There’s no decision to be made here.

37. Surrender daily. Figure out what surrender means to you. To me, “surrender” means I don’t try to take back control. In the big picture, I don’t try to change how I do BLE (unless it’s a deliberate, public, all-the-time modification). On a daily basis, I don’t change my food plan. I don’t adjust my portions or swap vegetable choices. I don’t second-guess my decision to not eat sugar and flour.

38. Don’t worry about the future. Remind yourself that the only time you have to decide whether or not to sugar/flour is right now. Right now is all that matters. Are you eating sugar and flour right now? No? Then your bright lines are clean. You don’t have to decide if you’ll eat sugar and flour in 20 years or 5 years or next week or tomorrow. Focus on having squeaky-clean bright lines today, right now.

39. Or, if you find yourself bogged down and panicky at the thought of NEVER again eating a piece of cake or drinking a glass of wine, give yourself some random date. “I’ve got permission to eat that in ….” 6 months or a year or 6 years or 60 years. If it helps your mind to calm down, just tell it it’s not forever. That doesn’t mean you WILL eat that thing in 60 years, just that you have permission at that point to reassess.

40. Set up your own learning course. Challenge yourself to learn as much as you can about healing and addiction recovery. Read books about recovery – even books about sobriety from alcohol or drug use. I don’t recommend memoirs that wallow in the pain of food or alcohol or drug use (they spark urges in me) but I do like books with sober tools and recovery tips that can help me change my own thinking. Look for books that help with healing not just physically, but mentally, spiritually, environmentally. Learn about how to find your ideal job, redecorate your home to make it your happy place, meditate, and on and on. Seek out teachers and learn. One of my favorites is Belle Robertson's book Tired of Thinking About Drinking (the inspiration for this adapted list).

Disclaimer: This blog and I are not officially affiliated with Bright Line Eating or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.