Before we can discuss the four Bright Lines and how to implement them, we need to quickly recap what is happening in the brain that blocks weight loss in the first place. We’re going to begin by talking about something most overweight people are probably sick of hearing about: willpower. But hang on, because most people have absolutely no idea what willpower really is.
As I wrote in my first book, when I taught college courses in Introductory Psychology and the Psychology of Eating, I would always ask my students, “What do you think willpower is?” The majority mistakenly said it’s a quality that you’re born with or some kind of barometer of the strength of your intention to do (or not do) something. And so believe most of the people who start our Bright Line Eating Boot Camp each week.
I am guessing you are going to be very relieved to hear that it’s neither.
Willpower is actually just a brain function that originates in the anterior cingulate cortex. Interestingly, this mechanism is not only in charge of resisting temptation; it also governs our ability to focus, monitor task performance, regulate emotions, and, most important, make decisions. Which means you’re taxing your anterior cingulate cortex when you pay attention at a staff meeting, proof a report, keep your patience with your kids, and decide how to handle each of those 17 emails in your inbox. Here is the important piece: Exerting self-control in one area of our lives exhausts this finite resource and prevents self-regulation in other areas.1
Which is why, in my opinion, weight-loss programs that recommend simultaneously starting “diet and exercise” set people up for failure. The dieters deplete their willpower first thing in the morning by hitting the gym and then overeat later. Does this sound familiar?
It’s vital to understand this, because most of us naturally have only about 15 minutes of effective self-regulatory capacity at a time.* Fifteen minutes. Can you imagine if your phone only had 15 minutes of charge?
And it gets worse: When glucose levels drop in the anterior cingulate cortex, activity in this area virtually stops.2 So at the end of a long day when blood sugar levels are at their lowest, our brains are truly incapable of making a wise choice about what to eat.
And once again, we fall into the Willpower Gap.
What this looks like is starting the day with great intentions, only to end up eating a donut out of the break room after a stressful meeting and telling yourself, Oh, well, I’ll start again tomorrow.
This is why any diet that expects willpower to get you across the finish line and beyond is ludicrous.
As I often say, what we all need is a plan that assumes we have no willpower at all—because at any given moment we may not—and works anyway. Most important, once we’ve learned the scientific reality of the Willpower Gap, we can finally stop thinking we are fundamentally flawed. The fact is that limitations arising from the way willpower is wired in the brain will consistently leave you vulnerable to unhelpful food choices.
But that’s not all. At that point, something even worse happens.
Those unhelpful food choices set off a cascade of activity in your brain that creates two things: insatiable hunger and overpowering cravings.
Evolutionarily, insatiable hunger is a new kind of hunger. It’s not a survival drive to consume fuel so that we can hunt, gather, build shelter, and procreate. It’s more like, “I just ate dinner and finished my kids’ dinner and now I’m eating a few pieces of candy while I do the dishes and then I’m going to head to the freezer for ice cream.” Insatiable hunger.
Scientists have noticed that insatiable hunger differs from real hunger in two key ways. The first is that it’s accompanied by a strong urge to be sedentary. The second is that eating doesn’t actually satiate it.
All very peculiar. The scientist in me wanted to understand what this was about, even as I was in its grips. For thousands of years, though diets developed differently across the globe, in general we were a species, like all other animals, that effortlessly took in roughly the sustenance we needed to survive. So what had broken? Why did my brain suddenly think I needed so much more?
It turns out that the crux of the problem stems from what eating these new, calorically dense, nutritionally empty “foods” at all times of day is doing to our brains.
In 1949, a group of mice born in a lab didn’t behave like normal mice—they didn’t scurry or dart about.3 Instead, they sat and ate until they became morbidly obese. Eventually, in 1994, scientists discovered that the mice had been born without the hormone leptin.4 This is the hormone that tells us that we’re full and need to move. Once the mice were injected with leptin, they became totally uninterested in excess food and jumped on their wheels and got thin.
This of course led science (and pharmaceutical companies) down a rabbit hole of artificial leptin manufacturing. But what is interesting about overweight humans, however, is that we are not lacking leptin. In fact, overweight people have more leptin in their blood than slender people. So, what’s happening? Why the leptin resistance? Why are we sedentary and forever hungry? Why can’t the overweight system recognize its own leptin? The answer is that leptin is being blocked in the brain.
By insulin.5
The sugar in our diet is elevating insulin levels far beyond where our bodies were intended to idle. Research on overweight kids has shown that their average insulin levels rise 45 percent between grade school and high school,6 which is creating a surge in type 2 diabetes.
And that’s not all that sugar is doing to us.
Overpowering cravings may seem very similar to insatiable hunger. And while the net result of both is that we end up eating more food than our bodies need, they’re not the same thing.
Insatiable hunger, caused by leptin resistance, is what drives people to mindlessly put food in their mouth all day—in other words, graze. Overpowering cravings, on the other hand, are the bingeing mechanism. It’s eating a whole jar of peanut butter or a full bag of Oreo cookies. Overpowering cravings are what make people, myself included, drive miles out of their way for that one specific food—their fix—just to scratch that itch in their brain.
But where does that itch originate?
The nucleus accumbens is a cluster of neurons activated by dopamine and designed to motivate our behavior with rewards, which is why so many life-sustaining activities stimulate the brain to release dopamine: sex, physical exertion, and, yes, eating. Of course, this is also the seat of addiction. Our brains simply weren’t designed to process the modern chemical flood we can get from porn, drugs, or donuts. When you start pumping that much dopamine into the nucleus accumbens, it protects itself from the overstimulation by downregulating.
Downregulation is an adaptive process. When the brain is hit with an onslaught of stimuli, say from PornHub or Cinnabon, the brain thins out the dopamine receptors in an effort to adapt to the overload so that the next time a sensory tsunami comes, the response will be more manageable.
The problem is that now you’re changing the physiology of the brain. If the stimulation is not forthcoming, you don’t feel very good. In high school, long before I became a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, I was a crystal meth addict who dropped out of high school and became a crack cocaine addict. With incredible help and grace, I was able to kick both addictions before I was even legally old enough to buy the alcohol I no longer wanted or ever touched again. But food was harder. Food was an addiction that took me years and years and years more to finally kick. But what I will say about drugs is this: They virtually wipe out the dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens. And, after a certain point, getting high didn’t feel pleasurable or even good. It just felt like I needed more.
Once the dopamine downregulation kicked in, the state I was forced to tolerate between fixes was the extreme absence of pleasure. Pretty soon I needed more . . . not to get high, but to get normal. This is something I think a lot of people misunderstand. They think the addict is using to feel good, but really the addict is using just to be okay for a bit.
When it comes to food, it’s the same story. Sugar didn’t enter our diets until the 1700s. Our bodies and brains never really adapted to process it well. For a long time that was okay, because for hundreds of years it was expensive and only people of means, like nobility, could afford it.
With the advent of the sugar plantation, all that changed. Then, as we all know, over the last few decades of global trade, terribly misguided federal subsidies, and progressively more ingenious snack food manufacturing, sugar consumption has increased dramatically, and that means that we are hitting our brains with ever higher, ever more potent levels of stimulation. We are flooding the receptors with dopamine and they are thinning out. From a neurological perspective, the research is very clear. We need to stop looking at the culprits as food and start thinking of them as what they really are: drugs.
Cocaine comes from the coca leaf of South America. Hikers in the Andes Mountains chew on these leaves, making their cheeks a little numb and giving them a little lift, like drinking a cup of caffeinated tea. Has anyone ever committed a violent crime to get more coca leaves? No. And research has actually proven that coca leaves, on their own, are not addictive.7 But when you take the inner essence of those coca leaves and refine and purify that inner essence into a fine powder, you now have a very powerful drug.8
Heroin comes from the poppy plant. If you sit in a field and eat poppies all day you’ll fail a urine test for opium, but you’re not going to become an itchy, desperate heroin addict. It’s only when you take the inner essence of that poppy plant and refine and purify it into a fine powder that you get the drug called heroin.
Next is sugar. We get sugar from the sugarcane plant, as well as beets, rice, corn, and coconuts—all foods I eat freely. (I could probably even chew on a stalk of sugarcane, but it would involve a little travel and a very strong jaw.) But, when you take the inner essence of those plants and you refine and purify it into a powder or thick liquid, now you have a drug. You’ve taken a food and you’ve turned it into a drug.
And finally, flour. Where do you get flour from? Well, any number of plants, including grains, tubers, nuts, and legumes—all healthy foods, in their whole form. But when you take their inner essence and refine and purify it into a fine powdery substance, you now have created a drug.
I provide much more research evidence in my first book, but know that science has proven that food addiction is real. As real as cocaine or heroin addiction. There is no physiological difference. Have you ever made a rational decision to turn away from foods that are harming you, but then found yourself eating them anyway? That’s addiction. People ask me, “Really, sugar and flour are as addictive as cocaine and heroin?” Actually, researchers estimate that they might be more addictive.
Dr. Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, is one of the leading experts on the effects of sugar. He describes how it takes only three weeks of consistent overstimulation for the dopamine receptors in our brain to thin out.9 Once that happens, addiction takes hold. Meaning, first, that life in between eating the stimulating foods feels bleak, which is one of the links between the Standard American Diet and depression. Second, the ability to taste food actually diminishes.10 In addition, studies have shown that the anticipation of food in the brain of an obese person is much stronger than a slender person, but when they eat, their pleasure is lower.11 In other words, if you’re on one of those diets I discussed in the Introduction, and you start to think about how amazing it would be to eat something off your plan, your brain will exaggerate the upcoming payoff. If you actually eat it, that payoff won’t come; you’ll just be left craving the next hit.
I used to live like that. In my early 20s, I remember driving to the all-night supermarket to scavenge the aisles for cookie-dough ingredients, pints of ice cream, and bags of chips, going home to eat compulsively for hours, waiting for some feeling that never came. I wanted to feel full. I wanted to feel done. I would finish—the bowl, the bag, the pint—but I was never done.
Until I was done with sugar and flour completely.
I can hear you. “Wait—what? Done with sugar and flour???” Perhaps that is such an overwhelming concept that your mind is drawing a blank as to what that life would even look like . . . as if I just said, “Give up air.” That is part of the mission of this cookbook—to show you that there is so much wonderful, delicious, nourishing food that doesn’t contain any sugar or flour. Eating this way has worked for me for a long time now, and I have seen it work sustainably for thousands of others around the world.
But the parts of your brain that have been hijacked by sugar and flour are going to put up a huge fight. They want you to find the “diet” that will let them keep getting their fix while somehow getting you into a right-sized body. If you ever find it please let me know.
Maybe you were given this book by someone who has lost—and kept off—100 pounds, or more. Someone who is off all their diabetes medication, their cholesterol meds, their antidepressants, and their anti-inflammatories for their knee pain. Someone who is living life like they never have before. Maybe you know one of us personally and you want some of that for yourself. I hope so.
Enter Bright Lines.
The most important contribution of the Bright Lines is that they bridge the Willpower Gap. Bright Lines give you clear rules for what you do—and don’t—put in your mouth. And the result is that eating foods that are good for you becomes automatic. You don’t have to think about it. There’s no decision to make. It doesn’t matter that it’s 4 P.M. and you have a tray of donuts in front of you. You will stand there knowing exactly what you are going to eat next, and those donuts aren’t it. The purpose of the Bright Lines is to enable you to stop thinking about food, and to stop grappling with the 221 food-related choices the average person has to make in a day.12 There is only one choice—respect the Bright Lines.
Bright Line Eating, as I designed it, is a commitment to follow four Bright Lines we never cross: Sugar, Flour, Meals, and Quantities. I’m going to outline each Bright Line in depth and explain the science behind why it works.
This is the keystone Bright Line, without which none of the others stand a chance, because only by taking sugar out of the equation can the brain and body heal. This means eliminating sugar in all its forms: cane sugar, beet sugar, date sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, evaporated cane juice, rice syrup, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, agave, maple syrup, molasses, sucrose, dextrose (indeed, anything ending in ose), maltitol, malted barley extract, maltodextrin, saccharine, NutraSweet, aspartame, sucralose, xylitol, sorbitol, and, yes, stevia and Truvía.
It might surprise you to read that artificial sweetener is also out of bounds. But studies have repeatedly shown that artificial sweeteners will absolutely derail your weight loss. Artificial sweeteners mimic a starvation state in the brain, leading to a 50 percent increase in food consumption.13 They also destroy your gut microbiome and lead to glucose dysregulation.14 In addition, many of the products containing artificial sweeteners, like diet soda and sugarless gum, will keep you hooked on the behavior of putting something sweet in your mouth as a crutch to get through the day. Let them go.
The second Bright Line is Flour. For people high on the Susceptibility Scale, flour is this very sneaky seductress that hides behind so many mythologies to keep people overweight. “I bake homemade bread.” “Baking was a huge part of how we bonded as a family.” “My mother made her own pasta—from scratch.” “It’s whole grain.” “It’s high in fiber.” “It’s health bread!” So many people come into Bright Line Eating having experimented with giving up sugar, only to watch their flour consumption, and their weight, balloon. The science of flour addiction is in its infancy. We know that flour raises insulin levels,15 but we haven't uncovered the dopamine connection. YET. But no one has ever driven out in the rain at 3 A.M. to get sauce and cheese on broccoli. Why do people rate pizza as the number one most addictive food in existence?16 It’s the flour.
Just as with sugar, the Bright Line for flour covers ALL flour. It’s not about the type of plant. It’s not about gluten. It’s not about “whole grain.” It’s about surface area. When the food is processed, the surface area gets multiplied exponentially and the resulting molecules hit the system too fast and too hard.
Eliminating sugar and flour is a good start, but if that’s all you do, odds are you won’t be successful long term. Eventually you’ll fall prey to the Willpower Gap and your efforts won’t last. This is where Meals, the third Bright Line, comes in. When regular meals become part of the scaffolding of your life, it takes the burden off willpower. When you set up a schedule of eating three meals a day at regular mealtimes (breakfast at breakfast time, lunch at lunchtime, and dinner at dinnertime) and in a designated place that is not your car, your couch, or your multiplex—not only does eating the right things become automatic, but passing up the wrong things in between also becomes automatic.
The fourth and final Bright Line is Quantities. This is the Bright Line that clicks everything into place and ensures that your weight will melt off and leave you in a right-sized body. It works even if you’re postmenopausal, on medications that increase your hunger, genetically predisposed to obesity, struggling with hypothyroidism, or, like me once, pregnant with twins. Don’t worry, the Bright Line for quantities is your safety net.
The quantities of Bright Line meals are generous, but they are finite. What this does is take your judgment out of the equation and ensure your sustained weight loss.
I recommend a digital food scale.
Seriously.
Initially, when weighing and measuring was first suggested to me, I refused to do it. And I kept struggling with my weight. But then I tried it, and what I found was that weighing my food with a digital scale actually gave me psychological freedom. When I weigh my food I know I’m getting the right amount. And when I hear that voice in my head telling me that maybe I didn’t get enough food and I should have some more, I know it’s lying to me and I can ignore it.
Bright Line Eating is carefully constructed so that eating behaviors are shifted out of the part of the brain where decisions are made, the prefrontal cortex, and into the part of the brain where things are automatic, the basal ganglia. Bright Line Eating takes some willpower to set up, of course, but uses little to no willpower at all after that.
We don’t want you ever making decisions about what to eat next. When you’re making decisions on the fly you are too vulnerable to the Willpower Gap and the voice of your Saboteur. We want to set you up so that all the crucial components of every Bright Line day are automatic. This accomplishes three goals: It takes the burden off of willpower, silences your internal food chatter, and, most important, keeps you at goal weight easily.
The difference between using willpower and using your automatic brain to accomplish something is huge. If you’ve ever tried adding a new habit to your routine (jogging, getting the laundry going before work, meditation . . .), you’ve probably experienced what it’s like to forget, get too busy, or decide to skip it. But now think about brushing your teeth. I bet in a year’s time you will have accomplished brushing your teeth 730 times, regardless of travel, sickness, or work stress. It’s nonnegotiable. What’s more, you spend exactly zero energy worrying that you won’t get it done. When something becomes automatic, it frees up tremendous cognitive resources for other things.
Researchers have found that it takes, on average, 66 days for a behavior to become 95 percent automatic.17 However, that was just an average and the range was immense. On the low end, automaticity was achieved in as few as 18 days, and on the high end, 254 days.
That means you’re going to have to give yourself at least 18 to 254 days to focus on this pretty intensely. However, keep in mind that the people in that study were asked to add one new behavior to their life. Getting Happy, Thin, and Free is going to require adding several new behaviors, breaking many long-standing habits, and, for some, kicking an addiction too. That’s a big ask.
During the initial set-up period, before Bright Line Eating becomes automatic, I want you to be very protective of your willpower and do whatever you can not to overly deplete it. Reduce stress at work if possible. Bow out of that time-consuming committee. Be conscious of the activities that tap your resources, like moving your kids through their bedtime routine, and plan your Bright Line meals accordingly. Either eat dinner beforehand or have it laid out ready for you. Don’t go straight from Goodnight Moon to the kitchen or you may end up in the Doritos.
In general, in the early days, I want you to imagine yourself going through your day wearing bunny slippers. Be kind to yourself. You may feel very tired for a few months. That’s normal, and it will pass. Drink a lot of water and know that the fatigue is real, but it’s temporary. The time for feeling fantastic and being out in the world is coming, but later. Right now, give yourself permission to be gentle with yourself. And a key part of that is . . .
You were waiting for the good news? Yes, Bright Line Eating is a no-exercise plan. During the first four to five months of the weight-loss phase I strongly discourage people from starting a new exercise program because it depletes willpower, which is dangerous to your long-term goal. We have found in our Boot Camps that the people who insist on continuing to exercise lose the least amount of weight. They’re overtaxed. They can’t keep their lines bright, and it all unravels from there.
Now, I am a huge believer in all the documented benefits of exercise and, as someone who has been Happy, Thin, and Free for more than a decade, I enjoy it tremendously. Once you’ve lost all your excess weight, or have been steady on the plan for months and the Bright Lines require no willpower from you, you’ll probably find that you naturally want to get moving again.
It’s also important to recognize that exercise is part of the pathology for many of us. Many of the regular exercisers who land in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp have used overexercising to compensate for overeating for years. And they don’t even realize it. But try to take it away from them, even for a few short months, even for a very good reason, and the neurosis starts to surface.
What we want at Bright Line Eating is to get to a place where exercise is valued for all its health benefits, but totally and completely uncoupled from weight loss in dieters’ minds. They truly are not related.
If one or more of the things I said in the preceding sections shook you up, I understand. It’s a big change from what you’re used to. And . . . that’s why it works. I invite you to just surrender to the plan. If you do it with full commitment, you will end up with a magical automaticity that will pay dividends for the rest of your life. Your efforts now will result in nearly every dream you’ve ever had for yourself coming true. And not just because you’re thinner, but because you’re more you, in every way. But if you don’t carve out the time to do it right—if you insist on exercising too much, working too hard, and cutting corners—the system won’t get set up properly; you’ll hardwire in exceptions here and there, and this will go down in your history as one more thing that didn’t work.
So, I invite you to decide right now to commit to the program as it’s laid out—no wiggle room, no exceptions—and to trust. It’s time to be unstoppable. It’s time to give yourself the gift of really doing this.
STARTING DATE February 16, 2017
HEAVIEST WEIGHT 292 pounds
STARTING WEIGHT 259 pounds
GOAL WEIGHT ACHIEVED April 29, 2018
CURRENT WEIGHT 180 pounds
HEIGHT 5'6"
I’ve always been a great cook, and mostly a healthy cook, and though I made a lot of foods that did not serve me well over the years, I mostly provided meals with lots of vegetables for my family. But in the worst seasons of my food prison it was store-bought things that fed my cravings, and I knew I was getting to a dark place when I eventually found myself doing that fast-food drive-in routine so many lament.
When I started BLE I immediately enjoyed the giant lunchtime salads with protein and fruit. I made great yogurt-based and tahini-based dressings and loved building a salad around a particular theme. Some Tex-Mex, some Italian, some salad Niçoise, and some based on flavorful cheeses or olives.
I keep a wipe-off board on my fridge for tallying up the ounces of veggies and beans and meat I use to make one of my favorite soups or chili or marinara, and I tweak final amounts to get good proportions that make a meal. Just about perfect is a soup where 2 cups contain a protein serving and 6 or 10 ounces of vegetables. I can measure this out into freezer containers, label it, and have an instant meal I can microwave in a pinch. It’s like a gift I give myself!
Favorite flavor discoveries for other meals include grapefruit and banana, ground cloves on sweet potato or butternut squash, and a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard baked on top of fish. I had a hard time adjusting to the idea of eating yogurt without sweetener, but I found that just an ounce or two of banana mellows the tartness. A little banana also helps oatmeal carry tart berries. Fresh lemon zest or a grating of fresh ginger can do wonders for almost anything!
My options have expanded as I’ve moved into maintenance and I’m enjoying more choices in my menus. But the basics of our beautiful Bright Line foods are delightful in themselves—I can be perfectly content at an airport with a couple of salted boiled eggs and a collection of sugar snap peas, carrots, and fresh pepper strips with a piece of fresh fruit and nuts on the side.
I have had bright and shiny lines for two years and am confident I can fully enjoy eating this way for the rest of my life. The things I’m missing out on in my old life are totally not worth going back for. I look forward to new discoveries in healthy eating!
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* In several studies, a 15-minute exposure to temptation was enough for a large number of the subjects to have impaired performance on a subsequent task.