Amanda Leith is the owner-operator of SHiFT Recovery by Acorn, an intensive program for food addiction recovery. She joins me on the vlog this week to talk about her own inspiring path to recovery and what her program offers to those struggling with food. You’re going to want to hear what she has to say.

Schedule a FREE 30-min consultation with a SHiFT Counselor today at foodaddiction.com or https://calendly.com/shift-one-on-one/30min. 
Learn more about the next SHiFT Intensive at foodaddiction.com. 

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/se8qb7 
SHiFT Recovery by Acorn | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I just returned from one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken—and there’s a lesson here for Bright Lifers. It was with my daughter Zoe. I take each of my three kids on a trip each year. We’ve been doing these for six or seven years now. 

We don’t usually do something as extravagant as going to Maui. But we did it economically: paying for the flights with points, staying with a friend, and doing lots of free things. 

On the plane, we came up with a list of things we wanted to do. Here’s what we planned:

That was our list—and we did everything on it! 

We went to the grocery store as soon as we arrived, and I got all the food I needed to be Bright. I bought yogurt, chia seeds, and oatmeal for breakfast—Dina, our host, didn’t have a microwave so I just mixed them together as “overnight oats” and weighed them the night before, and they were ready for me in the morning. 

Apples and clementines were my fruit; frozen peas, corn, and green beans were my cooked vegetables; and frozen shelled edamame and cheese were my proteins for lunch and dinner. And raw vegetables: baby carrots, peppers, radishes, organic lettuce, a big head of purple cabbage, a red onion—much of it grown right on the island. 

Since we were out in nature most of the time, there weren’t many restaurants. I brought containers from home, and we washed those out and reused them.

We ended up not eating out once. We didn’t plan that, but that’s what happened. We stopped at one restaurant, but the menu didn’t suit us so we didn’t stay, and went back to our food in the car. 

For me, it was a stark example of keeping my food black and white so I can live my life in vibrant color. We soaked up the soul of Maui, and our food was fuel. We ate simply, and that was a fine complement to the extraordinary time we were having. 

When people ask me how I can do Bright Line Eating when I travel, I think about how there’s so much art and architecture and nature and people in the world—and there’s only so much attention we can give to any single thing. During this trip, we focused on what we wanted to accomplish, and keeping food as a one percent share of it was fine.

I offer that as a lived experience. We didn’t intend it to be this way, and I’m not saying you need to avoid eating out when traveling. But if the food stays simple, there’s a lot of room for abundant life left over. That can be well worth it!

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An Epic Vacation in Maui | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

A new year is underway, and many people are engaging in their Bright journey. Some are here fresh for the first time—welcome to you!—and others are doubling down after years of being here. Thanks to you for your fortitude and unstoppability. I’m so glad to be on this path with you. 

I’ve been thinking about the concept of surrender. We talk about that because we surrender a lot here. We surrender sugar. We surrender flour. We surrender snacking, and eating whatever, whenever. We surrender going to events or places without having to consider our food choices. 

But there’s an orientation to it that makes it more effortless. That has to do with the depth of our surrender—how clear we are that the old way of eating didn’t work for us. Surrender is the shift that gives us the fortitude and commitment to embark on this Bright Line Eating journey in a way that sticks.

It can be hard. We’re taught that you fight to win. You don’t give up. But in this program, we surrender to win. That can feel like defeat. 

So I came up with a little story, an analogy that makes sense in my mind, and I hope it will for you too. Imagine that life is a game. The playing field is a massive playground, holding countless people and much activity. The game happens in two phases.

The first phase is the first part of your life, however many years that is. During that phase, when you make life choices, you migrate to a certain quadrant of the playground. You are just living your life, making choices as you go along, and patterns start to emerge. Your life takes on shape and form. That process moves you to a certain area.

Once you realize you’re there, the second phase begins. During that phase, your job is to notice what the teams are doing and to join the winning team. 

That’s it. 

You may wake up one day and realize that the choices you're making have a lot to do with food and weight. You know you’re like this when, every time the new year comes around, the first thing on your to-do list is to lose weight and get your food under control.

That defines your playground. What you’ve eaten or not eaten has outsized importance. Not everyone is on this playing field, but this is your reality. It’s the playground you’re on.

Now, you need to notice the teams. There are only two on this quadrant of the playground. There’s a team of people who eat whatever they want, whenever they want. They are struggling and feeling less happy; they have low self-esteem. They get to eat a lot, but at a big cost. They’re losing the game.

And then there are those who have surrendered the foods and eating behaviors that caused them difficulty. They have adopted habits that serve them and have banded into supportive communities. They’re happier and more fulfilled. They are winning this game.

In this context, you surrender to join the winning team. You wake up to the reality that there’s one team that is playing this game to win, and they’re doing it together. Surrender to join the winning team.

That’s the game we’re playing here at Bright Line Eating. I’m pretty happy to be here. We fall down sometimes, but we help each other up. It’s a good place. 

If you resonate with that, welcome to the team. Surrender is an elusive thing. In all my years on this journey, I’ve never figured out how to wave a magic wand and give someone the gift of surrender. But maybe this concept will help you—because, truly, surrender is a gift.

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Surrender to Win | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Today I want to talk about the notion that addiction is progressive. It’s a progressive, incurable, fatal disease. 63 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to diet-related diseases. Most people don’t reach end-stage food addiction, but some do. I did.

It may start as an inability to control how much you eat… at least sometimes. You may feel a loss of control—but you’re still living a functional life. Maybe weight is creeping on, but maybe not.

Then you move into the mid-stages, where it impacts more areas. Maybe you don’t enjoy social engagements as much. Possibly you don’t like to eat in front of people or don’t like how your body looks. Maybe it impacts your performance at work, or your relationships.

At the end of the road with food addiction, it’s mental madness, with massive binges that take days to recover from. I remember packing my binge foods in a garbage bag when I resolved to quit and bringing it out to the dumpster. And then I’d return later to retrieve all the food from the dumpster. The next time I resolved to quit, I dumped vinegar on everything before throwing it away so I couldn’t retrieve it from the trash and eat it later. That’s late-stage food addiction.

I remember in my 20s, I had to take a semester off from my PhD program because I was bingeing so badly.

Many people come to Bright Line Eating early in the disease rather than as full-blown food addicts. To be a food addict, you need to be experiencing clinically significant impairment or distress.

If you’ve tried to quit and it doesn’t last, or you lose control over what you eat sometimes—those are addictive symptoms, but you need clinically significant impairment or distress to have an addiction.

In my experience, addiction always gets worse. The prefrontal cortex, which should rein in these impulses, just gets weaker and less functional over time.

I was well into my recovery journey before I heard someone say addiction is progressive. But then I heard a magic truth: recovery is progressive, too.

At first, the benefits of recovery are small and coupled with challenges. All the sights and sounds pull harder, and the brain really wants what it wants. It doesn’t like dopamine downregulation. Cue reactivity peaks a short time into abstinence.

But it feels good to lose a little weight and write down your meals. Moments of peace start creeping in. You start to notice that overpowering cravings turn into simple food thoughts. There’s a difference between intense cravings and a food thought that you can block out. That’s nice.

Habit stacks start to form, and you get traction with other things. Your mood gets better, your outlook becomes more positive. Maybe you pick up a meditation practice or become more productive. You weigh and measure your food and before long you weigh and measure your life. Maybe you learn when it’s time to say no, thank you.

The vagus nerve develops. This is the nerve that goes from your organs to your brain, and it’s the way the brain communicates with your organs and vice versa. The gut and heart, which have their own nervous systems, bring info up to the brain—these are actually 90% of the signals the vagus nerve sends—and these connections start to strengthen.

New horizons open. Suddenly, you're taking a painting class, picking up your cello, or meeting a friend for a walk. You’re showing up for yourself and others.

We become more ambitious and able to charge what we’re worth. We earn more money. These benefits all compound and accrue. With food addiction slipping away, we address other addictions. Our self-esteem builds. We find ourselves reborn.

I’m thirty years into the journey, and recovery hasn’t gotten boring for me yet. To my knowledge, addiction is the only disease that, when treated, leaves you better off than before you caught the disease. Let that sink in.

That’s why I still proudly claim the label of an addict, because my recovery means the world to me. It’s who I am. It’s what I love most in life. I am an addict, and I’m in recovery. I love this path that I’m on. It keeps getting better.

Take a look at yourself. Maybe it is for you, too.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/gqm4ui 
Addiction is Progressive | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

Today I want to talk about New Year’s resolutions. It’s likely you’ve set a food- or weight-related resolution in the past, and perhaps you are planning one for this year. But I want to talk about a specific benchmark that is worth shooting for on New Year’s Day.

If you’re high on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale, and your food and weight problem is not solved, you’ll be orienting at New Year’s toward thinking about solving that problem. Your focus will be on food and weight. However, once your food and weight problems are resolved, you won’t be thinking about your weight when the New Year rolls in. Your focus will be elsewhere—on the book you want to write, the marathon you want to run, the decluttering you want to do, and so forth… and that’s a good benchmark to note.

There are three identity shifts that need to happen to achieve this benchmark and to become someone who is capable of living at their goal weight long-term.

The first identity shift is to settle into acceptance around a certain plan of eating that you’re doing long-term, not just while you’re trying to lose weight. This plan must be the way you eat now, and who you are now. If you’re doing Bright Line Eating, for example, you identify as a Bright Lifer, and this is rooted in your deep-seated identity.

The second identity shift is to become someone who doesn’t turn to food and use it as you used to: for numbing, for entertainment, for nurturing, for soothing—whatever. Food provides fuel for living, and is lovely and delicious, but no more. You become someone who has tools, coping strategies, and friends to support you, instead of food. As part of this identity shift you fall in love with the journey of personal growth inherent in moving beyond the food…and that keeps life endlessly fascinating and the food in its place forevermore.

The third identity shift is to become someone who has solved the food and weight problem. Past tense. It’s done. You’re not focused on “the last five pounds.” You’re not tweaking your food plan, unless you need to add or subtract some food to stay in your maintenance range. All the time you used to spend thinking about your food and weight is now reallocated to other life pursuits. Relationships. Self-care. Work and vocations. Hobbies and avocations.

And this is where the benchmark comes in. Because New Year’s will arrive, and you will not be thinking about food, your weight, or your body.

And you may not even notice at first.

We have courses in Bright Lifers—Maintenance I, II, and III—that cover this and take you through these shifts. They hold your hand until you solve this problem.

So, what do you do if it’s January 1 and you still absolutely do have a food and weight problem? Then you resolve to handle it in a science-backed way. Do this by tackling your identity first, because this is central. Your identity produces actions, and they, in turn, produce outcomes. You work from the inside out, meaning you start with identity, then you take on new actions, and the meshing together of your new identity with actions leads to outcomes.

In other words, don’t resolve to lose 40 pounds by June 1st. You’ve done that before, and it doesn’t work because you can’t start with outcomes. You need to start with identity.

BUT HERE’S THE PRO TIP: Invest in following a PROVEN SYSTEM that gives you an identity and lays out your actions.

That’s what Bright Line Eating gives you. It starts with the Boot Camp and continues with Bright Lifers, in a Bright Roadmap that takes you through the transformation. It gives you an identity and a community of people who are on the same path.

If you want to hit this benchmark of noticing that you’re not thinking about your weight and food, your task is simple: surrender to following the system.

There’s a link below the vlog to the registration page for the Boot Camp. Boot Camp tells you what action to take and helps you build your new identity day by day. It’s a slow process, but it happens faster in community, and when you follow a plan you believe in. So just follow the fabulous plan.

And someday, you will notice, as an afterthought, that it’s January 1st and you’re not thinking about your food and weight. You’ve got this. Click below and we’ll see you in the Boot Camp. 

*This special event has now ended.

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A New Year's Resolution Benchmark | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

*This special event has now ended.

This is the last vlog of 2024. January 1 is coming, and that’s a time of year when many people think about losing weight, getting their act together, and turning over a new leaf.

I want to tell you about a fun, community-building event that starts soon. We gave it a wonderfully cheesy name: “Come Alive! Lose the Weight and Thrive in 2025!” It’s going to be a live Masterclass that we’ll repeat four times, so hopefully, you’ll be able to join us at some point. There’s a link below this vlog if you want to register for it.

That title has three components. In this vlog, I want to talk about the first one: coming alive.

I deeply value aliveness. I’ve done things that wouldn’t make sense to other people, just because it made me feel alive.

I’ve noticed that I don’t feel alive often. I mostly feel like I’m sleepwalking through life, in a fog. Things that make me come alive are rare, valuable, and interesting.

It strikes me that aliveness happens at either end of a continuum. At one end are scary, unusual, or dangerous events. If I’m jumping out of an airplane or riding on a motorcycle at 120 mph, I feel alive. I feel alive when I’m traveling in an unfamiliar country or if someone I care about has just died. I feel alive when my heart is broken or I’ve just fallen in love. A beautiful sunset can also make me feel alive.

On the other end of the continuum are moments of stillness and emptiness. Maybe I’m meditating. Maybe it’s a regular Tuesday and I’m going to get groceries. If I’m peaceful and centered, an aliveness can be born in that moment that is soft and rounded, both empty and full at the same time.

Aliveness can exist in these two extremes, one of wild chaos and the other of utter stillness.

I have a story to share, about a man named Marshall Goldsmith. He’s famous as an executive leadership coach and author. He coaches CEOs of Fortune 10, 50, and 500 companies.

When I wrote my first book, Bright Line Eating, we were looking for people to write jacket endorsements, and his name came up because someone on my publishing team knew him well. They sent him my book, and he loved it. He said it was exactly right for people who needed sustained behavior change—so he wrote an endorsement.

Later, I talked to him on the phone. He wanted to talk about human growth and potential, behavior change, and habits. He told me his personal system: He tracked a handful of personal variables that mattered to him, and that could change his life for the better.

He gave himself a score each day for each variable and even paid someone to call him the next morning, every day, to get his score and hold him accountable. He said the most important variable for him was how much time during each day he felt really alive, truly present for what was happening.

He measured this variable as a percentage, and then he confessed something I will never forget. He said, “I usually get three percent, maybe five. Once I got ten percent.”

My mind was blown. It was the humility he had to admit that, and to still be excited about pursuing a variable that he only managed to get 10% right a fraction of the time. But it also confirmed what I already knew: that we’re mostly sleepwalking through life.

So when I say, come alive, I’m acknowledging that aliveness is a precious commodity. We don’t get much of it. And anything we can do to develop it is worth pursuing.

Here’s what I know for sure: as a recovering food addict, I don’t have a prayer of being truly alive if I’m in the sugar and flour. Then, I’m obsessed with getting more, numb from what I’ve eaten, in a foggy bog and plagued by gremlins.

So if you want to come alive, and lose weight and thrive in 2025, click the link below. I invite you to think about what it would take to optimize your experience of being alive.

*This special event has now ended.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/zi6hym 
Come Alive! | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I usually don’t date vlogs, but this one is date-specific. This is the week we are officially ending our year-long celebration of our ten-year anniversary. 

Bright Line Eating was conceived on January 26, 2014. That day, I was meditating at 5 a.m., and the universe told me to write a book called Bright Line Eating. I saw it spreading around the world and having a tremendous impact. At that moment, I felt the prayers that people were sending up, asking for help with their weight and their food. I tapped into a global pain over their utter powerlessness. I knew I could help. 

Fast-forward to August 2014: I started the Bright Line Eating email list. That’s the day the “me” became a “we.” In these ten years, more than two million people have signed up for that list. Some of those people are still with us, and some are not, but they all had their perspectives shifted. 

In October 2014, the very first Boot Camp launched, which—along with our courses—has had a tremendous impact. Well over 100,000 people, from across the globe, have signed up for one or more of our courses. 

This week, we’re taking down all the digital assets from our anniversary year—the logo, the timeline, the anniversary page. And now, moving into our second decade, there’s something else I need to retire.

Early on, I could feel the impulse, deep down, to make sure this movement had global impact. At first, I articulated that by saying we were going to get a million people to goal weight by 2040. That’s what it says in the first book, Bright Line Eating. A year later, I was talking to a marketer who said I should make it earlier, so we went with a million to goal weight by 2030.

Then we stopped talking about goal weight. We noticed the frustration of so many people who had lost huge amounts of weight but were still focused on “the last few pounds” and realized it wasn’t about weight loss; it was about transformation in body, mind, and spirit. 

So our slogan became a million Bright Transformations by 2030. Then, in 2021, I got a fire in my belly and felt a calling to scale up. So then we said a million Bright Transformations by 2025. 

We hired a couple of executives to help us scale up the company. It was a disaster, and a wake-up call. But it taught us an important lesson about what, and who, we want… and don’t want to be. We rediscovered our soul through that process. 

A few years ago, I started to publish more papers, and got in touch with an international community of people studying food addiction. I attended and spoke at conferences. It became clear to me that the big needle-mover is to get ultra-processed food addiction recognized as a disorder in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases. 

With those changes in place, amazing things will happen. People seeking bariatric surgery will be educated and tested for ultra-processed food addiction. People with eating disorders will be screened for it. Ultra-processed foods will be subject to policies and regulations. Perhaps they will be banned from schools, daycare centers, prisons, and hospitals. 

The big limiting factor in getting ultra-processed food addiction recognized is having more studies on treatment, and what happens to people who stop eating these foods. With our community, we can contribute in significant ways. 

I no longer have a big drive to grow this company to a million customers. We’ve got 6,500 Bright Lifers now, and we serve them well. I’m not closing the door to amazing growth, but as a CEO and founder, I wanted to let you know that although the global impact of the company is massive, we as a company get to be cozy. It’s a sweet arrangement.

So we’re officially retiring our tagline of “a million transformations…”. I’m not sorry we had it. Good goals are goals you maybe have a chance of attaining. We didn’t fail. We learned, and we grew. 

That’s what happens to companies as they grow and mature. Some scale up and get bigger, bigger, and bigger. Most go bankrupt and cease to exist. But some get wiser and clearer on their vision: who they serve, and how. 
We are a boutique company who provides exquisite care to the people we serve. That’s who we are.

As we move into our second decade, we’re going to formally revamp our mission, vision, and values, and we’ll share those when we can. The team is firing on all cylinders. Our community is stable and thriving. We have a big impact on our members and beyond. 

Thanks for being on this wild ride with us, however long you’ve been here. The future is BRIGHT!!!

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/sviufm 
The Dawn of BLE’s Second Decade | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

January 1 is coming up, and we’ll be launching a new Boot Camp cohort at the beginning of the month. At the end of this vlog, I’ll tell you about the scholarships we’ll be offering.

I’ve been thinking about you and holiday parties and all the overeating that goes on this time of year. I know that many of you will want to turn over a new leaf come January 1st, and make it stick this time.

What’s been holding you back?

Could it be addiction to chaos? Perhaps coupled with fear of failure AND fear of success?

There’s a meditation I do when Boot Camp starts up. I take the participants through what I hope is an inspirational meditation that gives them a mindset for this journey they’re embarking on.

It starts by having them imagine they’re walking in the woods. They come to a river, and they look down and see themselves in the river, clinging to some grasses in the water. They’re in an eddy where the water is gross and foamy, and there are bits of trash around. They realize they’ve been there for so long.

The river takes a bend downstream, and the person realizes that they don’t know what’s coming up beyond the bend. And then, fast forward, they decide to let go and take their chances down river, and the meditation continues from there.

That foamy, gross water, in real life, is the chaos we live in when we’re in active addiction. The bad choices we’ve made, the relationships we’re in, the chronic patterns that aren’t a good fit—all of this keeps us in chaos, and we eat to fuel that chaos.

Chaos is addictive. It releases chemicals in the brain—adrenaline, cortisol, endorphins, and more. There’s a soupy cocktail of chemicals that gets addictive.

It’s scary to let go of the grass and float down the river. You don’t know if you’ll face failure or success—but that doesn’t matter because they both scare you.

If you can relate to this imagery, and feel like there are pieces of your life fueling an addiction to chaos, what do you do? What are the steps to coax yourself out of the eddy and down the river? I have five thoughts that may help.

One final thought: We do have a Boot Camp cohort starting up in January. We always give away 20 scholarships. These are full scholarships because we know not everyone has the means to pay for it. We are accepting applications now, until Sunday, December 15, 2024.

The Boot Camp starts Sunday, January 5, 2025. We’re doing some fun live masterclasses over the holidays. I hope you’ll consider joining us. And I hope you’ll use the thoughts in this vlog and all your supports to see how you can “Come Alive and Thrive in 2025.”

*Applications for a Boot Camp 2.0 scholarship are now closed.

FOR THIS EPISODE and MORE: https://ble.life/o0ylan 
Addicted to Chaos | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

I’m five years from my last slip with sugar and flour and eating outside of mealtimes, and two and a half years into being 100 percent immaculately Bright. I’ve been doing this for 21 years, with good and bad times, and I can testify that consecutive, sparkly Brightness confers a lot of gifts. 

If you’ve never had a stretch where you’ve lived like that, I want to give you some ideas of why it’s worth striving for; and why it can be a good idea to work your program strongly enough to achieve it. 

We always say this is not a diet. That we need to focus on “non-scale victories.” That it’s about so much more than the food. But why? What does that mean? These are my top eight answers to that question. These eight factors are the reasons why I am grateful to be strongly and consistently Bright. 

I hope that none of this sounds like bragging. I hope it sounds like inspiration. If you are suffering with your food, I get you. You have so much to give in this world. So please, come all the way in and sit all the way down. Let go of the foods that make you crazy. Weigh out your meals and eat with gratitude. You are on the path, and there are good things ahead. And know that I love you.

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Why We Stay Bright | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast

You work hard to remain Bright on holidays, but there’s another pitfall you may need to address the day after: post-event collapse syndrome, or PECS. PECS occurs after holidays, when you may have let your guard down. Knowing it may happen, however, can help you avoid it. In this vlog, I break down what it looks like and offer tips to fight it.

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Post-Event Collapse Syndrome (PECS) | Bright Line Living | The Official Bright Line Eating Podcast