BLE momentum is hard to achieve. Don’t mess with it.

I’ve been trying to regain my Bright Line Eating momentum since January 2017 (it’s March 2018 as I write this). Lately, I’ve realized there are two tiny things my brain says to get me to break my bright lines:

(1) “Doing BLE has been easy in the past. It’ll be easy to pick it up again.”

(2) “You’ve resumed before. You’ll just resume again.”

False. False. And false. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in trying to resume, it is that it is terrifically hard to resume. It is NOT easy to pick it up again. It is NOT easy to just resume.


Which leads me back to one of my fundamental beliefs about BLE. If you’ve got some BLE momentum going, don’t mess with it.

Whatever you do, don't mess with it.

If you’ve got 2 days of squeaky clean bright lines, don’t mess with what you're doing. Keep going. If you’ve got 7 days of squeaky clean bright lines, don’t mess with it. Keep going. If you’ve got 100 days of squeaky clean bright lines, don’t mess with it.

BLE momentum is an amazing achievement. Be proud of it, bask in it, and for goodness sake, don't change what you're doing.

Resuming is much, much more difficult than you might imagine. It’s MUCH easier to just keep going than it is to resume.

Don’t mess with BLE momentum.

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

Just a Great Reminder

A little daily reminder, always inspiring:

Saying No: How to Implement One of the Most Powerful BLE Tools

The longer that I do Bright Line Eating, the more I realize how critical it is for me to reduce the "overwelm" in my life.

Getting enough sleep, meditating, those are all part of it. So is taking walks in nature and spending time with my family.

Reducing overwhelm helps me maintain peace and balance in my life. The more peace and balance, the less likely I am to feel the stress and exhaustion triggers that lead me to break my bright lines.

But even more than sleep and meditating and walking outdoors, learning to say no has been the biggest help. By far the biggest help.

I'm a huge people pleaser, so it is painful for me to say no. For a long time, I regularly said no without thinking, rather than risk someone not liking me or feeling hurt.

I ended up hurting myself because I was overcommitted, stressed, and resentful.

So I've begun actively teaching myself how to say no.

One of the best resources I've ever found for doing this is an e-Book by Christy Wright called "25 Ways to Protect Your Time."

Christy includes great, practical suggestions for how to turn down social invitations ("What a fun event. I normally would love something like that, but I'm already overcommitted. Thanks for thinking of me.") or volunteer work ("That sounds great. We actually have several organizations we volunteer for already, so we can't add anything new right now. Best of luck though."

(I have no official connection to Christy and don't get anything in return for this. I just love her stuff).

What I love is that her suggestions are clear and unambiguous, but also kind. You don't have to use white lies, but you also don't have to be rude or rejecting.

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

My morning BLE ritual

I love having a simple ritual that sets my BLE intention for the day and gets me into a positive mindset.

Rather than leap out of bed and plunge into emails, I like to ease into it. And I accomplish a few things for my nightly checklist as well, so it's win-win.

My current morning self-care BLE ritual goes like this. I wake up, get the coffee going, light a candle or turn on the scent diffuser and then sit down for three tasks:

1. Meditate. I make it a habit to meditate in the morning, before breakfast. For me, it works best to have guidance when I meditate. Lately, I've been setting myself monthly or weekly challenges. I might find a meditation I particularly like on YogaGlo (a subscription based program) or on the Breethe app and do it daily for a month. I've followed some of Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey's 21-day meditation challenges ( chopracentermeditation.com they occasionally offer free trial versions so you can see if you like their format). I like the idea that I've committed to doing a particular meditation practice for a certain number of days. It's easy to see progress that way and I don't like to break a streak once I've got one going.

2. Do inspirational readings. I keep inspirational daybooks all over. My current favorites include the classic Simple Abundance and any issue of Bella Grace magazine. I have some of the books Susan recommends.

3. Write in my gratitude journal. I prefer to write in my gratitude journal in the morning because my mind is fresher and more likely to discover creative, unexpected gratitudes. It also helps set a tone of gratitude for the day.

Altogether, these three tasks take me less than a half-hour (sometimes only 10-15 minutes if I'm doing a short meditation).

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

Katharine Hepburn is my BLE role model

I love biographies, especially of people who knew how to be their person. Recently, while reading a biography of classic film actress Katharine Hepburn, it suddenly dawned on me. This woman is a BLE rock star.

No, she obviously didn’t know of BLE since, of course, it didn’t exist. But a surprising number of things about her life absolutely fit the BLE recommendations. Consider this:

—     She always incorporated a lot of vegetables into her meals. According to one of her staffers, she insisted that dinner include three different vegetables, in addition to whatever protein they were having. It would be easy to get up to 14 oz. of veggies when you prioritize them like that.

—     She valued sleep over almost anything else. She was known for getting to bed really early. She once said, “I think trying to be fascinating at 8 o'clock at night is my idea of something absolutely hellish.” A minimum of 7-8 hours sleep (9 or 10 if I can manage it) has been critical to my BLE success.

—     She minimized decision-making about clothes. Like Steve Jobs, in her later years she had a daily outfit and pretty much stuck to it — khaki pants, a white or black turtleneck, a red sweater and clogs or loafers. Not having to make a decision every day about what to wear meant she experienced less willpower depletion.

There are plenty of others, but I’m guessing that even someone who incorporated just those three habits would be well on their way to living happy, thin and free.

If you're struggling, it might help to think about your BLE role model. Find someone who inspires you and then, in tricky situations, ask yourself, "What would my role model do?"

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.

Don't Mess With BLE Momentum

By far the most painful lesson I've had to learn in BLE is that I can't mess with sober momentum (I use the word "sober" to mean "day when I have squeaky-clean bright lines" because it's a faster, more elegant way to saying it. For me, having bright lines is my sobriety).

Why, why, why is my brain so hard-wired to believe I can just step on/step off the sober bus. Even when all the BLE guidelines and bootcamp videos and counselors say, "it is much harder to resume than to just keep going." My brain just doesn't want to believe it.

My brain keeps saying, "But you did it before, you just resumed, so you can do it again." Or, "BLE was easy for weeks and weeks, it'll be easy to just start again."

No. Nope. Not at all.

Resuming is much more difficult than beginning. Resuming is much, much, much more difficult than just continuing. And a new day one sucks to get through.

So whatever tools you are using that are making BLE work for you, keep doing them. Don't stop. Keep the momentum going.

Don't mess with momentum.

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.

Thought for the Day

Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.

-Buddha

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.

Two Powerful Hunger-Busting Techniques to Try

For me, the biggest challenge of BLE has been hunger. Hunger, hunger, hunger. Not sugar or flour cravings, but hunger. It took me a while to figure out the difference, and to be honest they’re always inseparably intertwined. But after paying attention to the sensations for a few weeks, I did notice a difference.

-- CRAVINGS tend to be a desire to eat when I know, deep down inside, that I don’t need food. They tend to follow a trigger. It’s a particular time of day when I habitually eat. I pass a certain store, or catch a certain whiff. I’m around certain stuff. I’m feeling bored or stressed or anxious and want the feeling to go away. If I ride it out – distract myself, surf the wave, call a friend, do my EAP – the craving feeling tends to go away.

-- HUNGER on the other hand, is physical. My stomach growls. I start to have trouble concentrating. Thoughts of needing to eat won’t go away. Even with distracting myself or riding out the wave, the sensation neither disappears nor diminishes. It’s a big bold headline in my mind.

Most of my hunger was real, physical hunger. 

I’d try Susan’s advice to just sit with the feeling of hunger for a while, assuming it would go away in about a half hour. 

Nope. The unpleasantness and anxiety of it would just grow. I’d just become MORE aware of my physical hunger. I couldn’t concentrate.

I’d try saying “no one ever died of hunger.” Didn’t work. My immediate reaction was always to say, “well, yeah, duh. I’m not dying. That doesn’t change one iota the fact that this is an astronomically stressful feeling. I’m so overwhelmed with hunger I can’t focus. It’s interfering with my life and I can’t get rid of.”

Because hunger has been such a huge barrier to my having any success with BLE, I implemented some techniques borrowed from other recovery programs:

1.      YESSING. This is a technique borrowed from Eastern religions that I call “yessing.” You become aware of whatever thoughts, feelings, emotions or situation is present and also notice the panic that starts to arise. That panicky feeling is part of the problem. We have an instinctive desire to escape the unpleasant situation but we cannot. So what if we just stay with the original feeling and welcome it. Say, “Yes, I accept this feeling. I won’t do me any harm.” Then I say yes to the next moment, and then the next, and so on. This is more a thought process of, “This feeling that I’m having, I welcome it and accept it without any judgment.” It’s very powerful.

2.      7/11 BREATHING. This is breathing from the diaphragm rather than the chest. As you inhale, count to 7. As you exhale, count to 11. Inhalation invokes the sympathetic nervous system while exhalation invokes the parasympathetic nervous system. People who suffer from panic attacks and anxiety disorders practice this technique to tip the body towards relaxation rather than stress. It takes a little practice, but the results are immediate and powerful. It relaxes the emotional part of the brain, which is where the stress arising from hunger arises. And it frees up your brain power to do other things.

It sounds like most people doing BLE don’t have this challenge. In my social support group, one person said it took her about a week for the hunger to subside. Another said it took her 12 days.

It took me about 8 months until I could consistently go 3-4 hours with extreme hunger. And about 12-14 months until I could go 4-6 hours with a bearable level of hunger.

It took a long, long time for me, but it did happen.

[Disclaimer: This blog is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bright Line Eating Solutions or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.]

Three turning points that were essential in my BLE journey

After slogging along on this BLE path for so many months, it's easy for me to feel like I'll just never get it. It's just never going to click for me.

So sometimes I have to stop and acknowledge that I've had some many "ah-ha!" moments on this journey. And those turning points have been profound. Here are the three most remarkable turning points I've hit:

1. Realizing that I cannot have "just one" and resume BLE tomorrow. This belief wasn't something I ever really consciously articulated. In fact, the longer I did BLE, the easier BLE seemed to be. So, since it didn't seem that hard, I couldn't understand why I couldn't just resume. "I do this every day. I can take a day off and then just go back to doing it." It took 16 months of trying to resume for me to realize that resuming is wildly, incredibly difficult. So no, I cannot take a day off. I cannot take an evening off. I cannot have just one.

2. Realizing that flour is as much a problem for me as sugar. Early on, I thought that my real problem was sugar, so I could have flour, at least in moderation. It wasn't until I eliminated sugar entirely that I realized how quickly my addictive behaviors switched to flour-based foods. After binging for months on Ritz crackers and croissants whenever life got hard, I realized that, yes, flour is a problem and yes, I need to eliminate it.

3. Realizing that "not eating" is not a substitute for "eating." When I broke my bright lines, it was usually because I was trying to avoid something: feelings I didn't want to feel, thoughts I didn't want to think. For a long time after starting BLE, I didn't know how to deal with those overwhelming feelings and thoughts. Eating had been my primary, if not my only coping mechanism. "Not eating" wasn't a coping mechanism. I needed better coping strategies and habits. Meditation was a good start, but it wasn't enough for me. I needed a lot of other tools: gratitude work to help shift my thinking patterns, developing solid self-care habits (learning to say no, relaxation rituals, time-outs), learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings. I needed tools to deal with the feelings I was trying to avoid by eating. Only when I got those in place did BLE work for me.


An eating-disorder recovery expert, Andrea Wachter, said, "If you keep going and don’t give up, your awareness will deepen and your progress will reveal itself, often when you least expect it."

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.

Best Motivator There Is

Last week, after a presentation of Eleanor Roosevelt, I was talking with audience members when a very kind man, a member of the program organizing committee, came up with a big slice of cake and whipped cream for me.

He was so happy to be helpful to me and I was appreciative of the kind thought. But .... arrrgh. I had to say no. I gave my usual effusive praise — that looks beautiful and it’s so thoughtful of you! But I don’t eat sugar.

It always bothers me when people are being so kind and want so much to make me happy, when I have to turn them down (I do because my life depends on it, but arrrgh, it still hurts).

To turn it around in my mind, I have started telling myself that the best thing I can do, if I really want to make my own little mark on the obesity epidemic, is to be a good role model.

The more people see people turning down sugary foods, saying no to dessert, eating vegetables, the more likely these things are to become normalized. We NEED more people saying no to angel food cake.

That’s the only way we can get to a place where people really don’t assume everyone needs or wants to eat cake.

Being a good model in how I eat is the best motivation to keep eating well.

[Disclaimer: This blog is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bright Line Eating Solutions or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.]

Why I Live in the Real World

When I first started eating without sugar and flour, I happily went right along with the recommendation not to mention certain foods to other sugar-free and flour-free folks.

 Anything with substantial sugar or flour in it was referred to as “not-my-food” or “NMF” so no one would be triggered by the mention. 

I also avoided any situations where NMF was served and kept my eyes off the NMF aisles at the grocery store. In meet-ups and phone calls with fellow plan followers, I strictly avoided ever saying the actual name of a food that might trigger someone to eat off plan. 

And certainly I never, never, never posted a photo of a cupcake or milkshake because that might trigger someone.

But it always bothered me. However much I tried to live in a world where I would never again ever be reminded of trigger foods, I was always pushed back into the real world. As soon as I stepped out my front door, I always come up against the reality that we do not live in a triggerless world.

In fact, it’s the opposite. We live in a world flooded with food marketing. Driving to work, I pass billboards trumpeting sugary snacks, trucks emblazoned with photos of sugary drinks and radio ads touting sugary foods. 

Being abstinent from sugar and flour is a unique thing in this world. And this world is not built for and doesn’t really care much about people who are trying their best to avoid these foods.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why people get triggered about food. I can understand why people want to seal themselves off, protect themselves, and build a world that is as free from triggers as possible. 

Some people can even do it long-term. They can live happy, fulfilling lives by avoiding as much as possible any sight of or discussion of or mention of sugary or flour-y foods. They eat at home mostly. They have someone else do the shopping. They might even avoid watching TV. They don’t have friends who eat crap, or at least not ones they hang out with much.

At first, it was useful for me to do the same thing. Especially in the early weeks when it took everything I had to not pick up a snack or a dessert.

But now that I’ve got some momentum, I’m increasingly uncomfortable trying to live in a trigger-less world. I’d rather take what I’ve learned and use it to negotiate living in the real world. I prefer living as a non-crap-eating person in a world that eats a lot of crap. After all, this is the world we live in. It’s a lot easier when you can live in the real world.

But my reason goes deeper than that. I also want to live in the real world because this is a world I’d like to help change. 

I think we need to see more non-crap-eating people out there living, enjoying restaurant meals, hanging out with friends, having fun, celebrating holidays – and none of it with crappy food. 

We need more non-crap-eating people who are celebrating and enjoying life in a world where people think you can’t celebrate or enjoy life without crappy food.

I didn’t give up sugar and flour so I could hide away at home or only attend events where no cake is served or eat every meal at home for the rest of my life. I didn’t get free of sugar and flour so I could tiptoe around the substances that ruled my life for years. Food doesn’t get to dictate how I live my life any more. I want to live life to the fullest.

So I’m out there in the real world. I go into grocery stores. I pass billboards. I see foods with zero nutrition all the time. 

I don’t pick them up – but not because I’m forcing myself to not look at them. Because I know they offer me nothing. They have no value for me, nutritionally, emotionally, or in any other way.

Sugar and flour served a purpose. Avoiding triggers served a purpose for a while. But now I want to be out in the real world, being me.

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.