Because I'm not eating sugar and flour today ...

When you stop eating crap, it's a negative. You've removed something. But you've also added a lot. You've freed up your brainpower, your energy, your health.

Sometimes it helps me to step back and notice all the little things I'm doing today because I'm not messing up my brain with sugar and flour.

So here's today's challenge:

Finish this sentence:

Because I'm not eating sugar and flour today, I ...

• got everything on my to-do list finished by 11 a.m.
• returned all my work emails quickly and without a lot of stress
• finished an essay that has been hanging over my head for a few weeks
• packed up and mailed off to a consignment store clothes that no longer fit me (WIN!)
• decluttered and tidied up a lot of papers around the house that have been piling up
• took a long walk with my pugs and enjoyed the fresh fall air

Not actually me walking a pug. But in my mind, it totally is.

Every time you give up something, you add something to your life. In the case of sugar and flour, when you give them up, you add a LOT to your life.

Inspirational self-love quote for the day

Be the love you never received.
-- Rune Lazuli

Inspirational self-love quote for the day

It's not selfish to love yourself, take care of yourself, and make your happiness a priority. It's a necessity.
-- Mandy Hale

Inspirational self-love quote for the day

You can't hate yourself happy. You can't criticize yourself thin. You can't shame yourself worthy. Real change begins with self-love and self-care.
-- Jessica Ortner

Motivation is like a shower. You need it every day.

Operation resume day 18 completed. Treat for finishing 18 days: new pair of earrings

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing -- that's why we recommend it daily." - Zig Ziglar

In my ongoing quest to figure out how to resume and stay in the healthy-eating game, I think about motivation a lot. When my motivation is high, eating on my food plan is easy.

And when do I always fall off? When my motivation sinks low.

This used to bother me. Oh, come on! I got myself all inspired and worked up yesterday. I meditated and listened to some Susan Peirce Thompson videos and prepped my meals and talked with a buddy. Why did I wake up this morning feel unmotivated?? Why do I have to keep doing all these things all over again today? Why doesn't the motivation just stick?

Then I stopped to get gas for my car yesterday and while waiting for the tank to refill, I started thinking about how gas for my car is just like motivation for me. You fill it up, it gets you somewhere, you have to refill it occasionally.

I never complain about having to refill my gas tank (well, sometimes when the price is ghastly high). 

I never start saying, "oh come on, I just filled up the gas tank a week ago! Why do I have to keep doing this every few days or weeks???!!!" No. It's just accepted that the gas will get used up and I'll need more. 

That's pretty much what motivation is like. You fill up your motivation "tank," it gets you through a certain period of time, and you know that periodically you'll need to refill it.

In fact, it's pretty much like anything we need to periodically redo. We take a shower every day and never complain, "Oh come on, I just took a shower yesterday." I've never once felt resentful that I need to reapply deodorant every day. It wears off. Of course I need to reapply.

Motivation is just like that. It wears off and you need to regularly "reapply" it. 

Every once in a while, when I feel like my motivation to do Bright Line Eating is slacking off, I take some time to really, deeply, fully reapply it. I listen to a bunch of BLE videos or coaching calls, I take a day off for full self-care (mediate, walk in the woods, soak in the tub), or read some sober blogs (I don't have trouble swapping out "alcohol" for "sugar" -- for me they're pretty parallel).

Thinking about motivation this way makes it a lot easier for me to stick to the tools that help refill my tank.

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Bright Line Eating or Susan PeirceThompson]

And this is why I don’t weigh myself often

In mid-April, two weeks into my current sober-eating streak, I weighed myself. Woo hoo — 5 pounds down! A week later, I weighed again. Holy moly, down 2 more pounds!

It was like the weigh was just flowing off of me.

Then last week I weighed myself again. Up three pounds. Whaaaa? I was devastated. I waited two days, eating perfectly clean. Weighed myself again. Up another pound.

Waaaaahhhhhh.

Now, I know better than this.

I know that if I focus on eating well, with no sugar and flour, no snacks, three meals a day, the weight will take care of itself.

If I focus on sober eating, I’ll lose the weight. If I focus on the weight, I’ll lose my sober eating.

And yet, I still can’t get over the urge to weigh myself.

We all do this, right? Losing weight is such great motivation to keep with a plan. It feels so good.

The problem is that when you rely on the scale for your motivation, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that our bodies don’t behave simply. They're wildly complex. Bodies hang onto weight sometimes. Bodies retain salt sometimes. Bodies have hormone fluctuations. Bodies are not machines. They go up, they go down. Daily fluctuations are part of the process.

Sure, the scale can tell if you’re on the right track, especially in the big-picture sense:

-- You might need to reassess your food volume if you stop losing altogether, start gaining steadily, or hit a plateau.

-- You might need to be reminded to stop adding a little bite here or an extra 1/2 ounce there.

-- You might need to cut out nuts or other shady foods.

There’s a value to the scale.

But if you’re using the scale as your primary motivation to keep on with your food plan, it’s going to mess with your brain. It just will.

There are plenty of other ways to get motivation. Keep a calendar and put a gold star on each day when you eat sober. Notice how your clothes fit. Pay attention to your energy.

I’m off to hide my scale on the top shelf of my garage shelves where it’s hard to reach.

Weighing myself once a week — or even once a month — is fine by me.

Nobody Wants to Quit

When caught in the cycle of relapse-resume-relapse-resume, one thought keeps popping up in my mind:

I’ll get back on board with Bright Line Eating when I really want to quit sugar and flour.

But here’s the thing. Nobody with food issues wants to quit sugar and flour. At least, nobody I’ve ever met. I have yet to meet a single person who adores those things who wakes up one morning and says, “you know, I just don't want to eat those things any more.”

What we want to get rid of are the consequences of eating sugar and flour and snacks. We want to get rid of the things sugar and flour do to us. The clothes that don’t fit. The bloated feeling. The avoidance of photos and swimsuits. Feeling sluggish and lethargic and not fitting into airplane seats and hating our bodies.

But the actual act of giving up sugar and flour? No one WANTS to do that.

So you can’t wait for motivation to strike you. It won’t.

There are plenty of ways a person with food issues can get support and motivation and enthusiasm to do BLE, and plenty of reasons why you should eat this way. But waiting for the desire to give up sugar and flour to magically hit you isn’t one of them.

When your brain tells you that you’ll do BLE when you really want to give up sugar and flour, just remind it that nobody wants to do that. It ain’t gonna happen. Do it anyway.

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in an official way with Bright Line Eating or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions in this blog are entirely my own.]

Do I have to do this forever???

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, my father “went on a diet” for a week. He ate lots of hard-boiled eggs, cottage cheese, tomatoes and apples. At the end of the week, he announced unhappily, “I only lost 3 pounds! Three pounds! What’s the point?” And immediately gave it up.

You can guess what happened. He immediately gained back the three pounds and continued his old eating patterns, which included putting chocolate chips on his breakfast cereal and eating chocolate chocolate chip ice cream every night after dinner.

For almost any weight loss program I’ve ever followed, three pounds is a huge amount of weight to lose in a week. So his mindset was clearly not in a logical place. But that’s not really the point. The point is that if you are unhappy with your weight, something is going on with your pattern of eating. The only thing that’s going to change your weight permanently, the way you want it to, to overhaul your eating permanently.

And yet, so many people, even in BLE, cling to the idea that this is a temporary way of life. Once they reach their goal weight, they’ll go back to eating “normally.”

Their vision of “normal eating” rests on a fundamental — and flawed — assumption: That eating to get down to goal weight is a temporary thing and you don’t have to do it forever. The thought of eating just vegetables, protein, fruit, and grain forever is somehow unthinkable. There’s an underlying dread, “My God, do I have to do this forever?” It’s like a life sentence somehow.

When I hear someone say, “Do I have to do this forever?” I always want to say, “I certainly hope so!!!” I love the idea of a life of nourishing my body with healthful, nutritious food that will help it stave off disease and keep me active as long as possible. I love the idea of becoming someone who eats tons of veggies all the time, who chooses the salad on the menu because that’s what she wants (not what she HAS to order), who never snacks during the day. This isn’t a life sentence — it’s a life opening-up!  It’s not that I have to live this way, I GET to live this way.

In fact, not only do I love looking forward to eating this way forever, I look forward to continuing to do ALL the tools that are getting me where I want to go with food and my body. Meditating, journaling, continuing to grow my gratitude, learning to say no, reading about healing and self-care, getting massages, taking time for me — I hope to heaven that I’ll be doing these things — and more — forever.

That’s what life as a full human being is to me — always healing and growing. I hope I never am tempted to give up the process. I hope I’m doing the tools that made BLE work when I’m 90.

So if someone asks me “Do I have to do this forever,” I say — yes, yes, yes, PLEASE!! Please let me be a person who gets to do this forever.”


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:

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.

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

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.]

Finished Day 20 and I'm Still Sober!

Still managing to abstain from sugar (especially sugar). Hooray. Still struggling with overwhelming urges when I'm tired and stressed.

Thing I've Discovered: The more I let myself think about breaking a bright line (should I give in and have another handful of nuts?), the more likely I am to break a line. If I can interrupt the thinking and analyzing, I'm much more likely to stay on course.

There's a quote from Tim Grover (an author and performance quote) that I love: "Don't think. You already know what you have to do, and you know how to do it. What's stopping you?"

I already know that I have to abstain from sugar, flour, and snacks. I know that one cookie is likely to spark out-of-control cookie eating. I know that having a snack to "just the ease the hunger" will wake up my addictive brain and make my mind miserable.

I don't need to think about it. All I have to do is act on that knowledge. Not think about it, act on it.

And best part is, the less that I even think or ponder or wonder about breaking my bright lines -- the more that I just do the things I have to do -- the more motivated I become to do bright line eating. The more I keep my bright lines, the better the chance that I'll shatter the addictive thinking that always leads me to break my bright lines.

That sounds obvious, but for me, it's kind of mind-blowing. I always thought (even if just subconsciously) that you have to be motivated in order to act a certain way. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that motivation isn't what creates action. It's the other way around. Action creates motivation.

Behaving like a bright line eater is what creates a bright line eater.

Day 1 of the 90 Day Challenge

Today I am embarking on a 90-day challenge.

For the next 90 days, I  will not eat sugar or flour. I will follow the Bright Line Eating Plan. No matter what. Bad things might happen, but I won't eat sugar or flour. Incredibly horrible things might happen but I won't eat sugar or flour. Funerals, illnesses, weddings, birthdays, all these things might happen but I'll be sugar and flour-free. I can say no to whatever I want. I can leave early or go to bed or cry, but I'll be clean. I'm not eating sugar or flour for the next 90 days. No matter what.

Today's date: Feb. 6, 2018
90 Days from Now: May 7, 2018