Vivid Line Consuming: The Science of Dwelling Pleased, Skinny and Free

This book changes everything we think about weight loss and the obesity epidemic. It can change your life.
This book. THIS BOOK! Wow. It’s a game-changer. It changes everything. Not only is Susan Peirce Thompson’s approach to getting control of your food and your weight powerful and compelling and based on brain science, she also presents it in a clear, convincing, wonderfully readable way.Thompson overturns so much — so much! — of what is standard, unquestioned, deeply ingrained thinking about weight loss (the old canards like “you can eat anything, just in moderation,” “exercise promotes weight loss,” “sugar, eaten in moderation, can be part of a healthy diet.”) No, no, and no. At least, not for the majority of us.In her compelling argument, people struggling with their weight aren’t lazy or lacking in willpower. They don’t need to get off their lazy butts and get to the gym. They don’t need to just stop eating so much. No. Their brains have been high-jacked. And the substances doing the high-jacking are NOT fat, salt, or simply an excessive consumption of calories. The substances are sugar and flour. Period. Fat people aren’t sloths — their brains are addicted to these substances and practicing moderation can be as much a no-win solution as practicing moderation in drug use would be to a brain addicted to heroin.There are two things I especially love about Thompson’s approach. One, that it’s based on science. She’s not guessing here. She’s not making things up based on what seems reasonable. She’s looking at the science. And what the science suggests is pretty persuasive: Sugar is addictive to your brain. And flour might very well be too. We live in a toxic food environment where sugar and flour are everywhere and in everything. As with other addictions (in varying ways depending on your own brain susceptibility), the way forward is to remove these substances from your diet.The bright lines are simple, clear, and unambiguous: no sugar, no flour, three meals a day, and weighing all your food.The second thing I love is that her style is so wonderfully loving, supportive, and inspiring. Thompson writes in a way that is never condescending or dryly scientific. She tells stories, she shares her own experiences, she makes academic scientific studies easily comprehensible. The whole book is highly readable and accessible. Her warmth and love and understanding shine through her words. Writing this way is not easy to do and I am wildly impressed at her ability to do this.My only singular concern, which she does address, is that for all that this approach is simple, it’s not easy. It’s no easier than quitting cigarettes would be for a cigarette addict. Or quitting alcohol for an alcoholic. This is hard to do. And she does say so, when she notes that (I’m paraphrasing here), if a food plan is all it took to lose weight, everyone who wanted to get thin would be thin.Still, I worry that readers might fall in love with her wonderfully supportive, upbeat tone and think that simply deciding to follow the bright lines is all it takes. Make no mistake, this is hard to do, and it requires a TON of support and self-love-and structure and help (the bright-line eating approach provides that, but you have to be diligent about seeking it out and getting it).Bottom line — this approach works. It simply works. And no other program for addressing the general public’s weight and food issues does. Not in terms of long-term, sustainable weight loss. There’s a reason why commercial weight-loss programs, all of them, are vague about how many people who sign up achieve and maintain their weight-loss goals.I wasn’t 1/4 way into her book before it all was making SO MUCH SENSE. There’s a reason why major weight-loss organizations don’t publish their success rates. There’s a reason why I’ve failed SO often on SO many diet programs.It’s not often that a book comes along that has the potential to cause a seismic shift in our thinking, but this book does that. Bright Line Eating should have as profound an impact on our thinking about weight loss and the obesity epidemic as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had on our thinking about pesticides and the environmental movement.I really hope that everyone struggling with weight and food issues, whether they have a modest problem or a serious food challenge, gives themselves the tremendous gift of reading this book.Like so many other reviewers, all I can say is thank you thank you thank you Susan Peirce Thompson. My deepest wish isn’t that this book will help me (although I hope it does); my wish is that this book changes the world.

We always avoid the truth that permanent weight loss requires permanent changes, this book is eye opening that commitment needs to be part of our life, and create a new “normal” way of eating is necessary, and unfortunately many of us are addicted to food and we suffer greatly not being able to control it.Susan explains why and everything makes sense. I got great results following a keto diet, and lost my progress once I allowed sugar and flour back in my life. Now I understand why.In regards to the nutritional part, I am a bit skeptic in adding grains, and I feel that the protein is in a low threshold, and I do enjoy fasting, but I am ready to give it a try and definitely adopting to the bright lines of committing to not allowing sugar and flour back to trigger my addictions.Thank you Susan for this incredible book.Looking forward to join the BLE community.

Me resonó totalmente la información contenida en este libro. Estoy aplicando sus principios. El plan alimenticio me parece algo extremo pero hay personas que necesitamos eso.

I paid a couple of thousand for the course of a few years ago. It was very good but you become dependent on people or that is the purpose of different groups and calls etc. I’m not really into that kind of thing so it’s about five years later and I’ve bought the book and I think it’s great. So easy to follow.