Bright Line Eating: Part 2

In Part 2 of our Bright Line Eating episode, I explore Susan Peirce Thompson's grand claims that her weight loss program is "the most effective in the world", and come to a very different conclusion. I also chat with Dr Martina Zangger, who spent 2 years as a "Bright Lifer" and has literally been to hell and back. Not only is she thousands of dollars out of pocket, but she's had to overcome a Bright Line induced eating disorder. And she is NOT HAPPY! Diet culture constantly sells us the glossy testimonials, but the ANTI-TESTIMONIAL is much more important. The only winner here is the Bright Line Bank Account - you will not believe how much cash Susan Peirce Thompson is raking in from selling starvation. It's enough to run a small country, yet strangely, Bright Line Eating can't even squeeze out any decent research? CW for this episode, which has LOTS of explicit talk about eating disordered practices, numbers, and extreme dieting. Show Notes Welcome to part two of our deep dive into Susan Peirce Thompson’s program Bright Line Eating - if you missed the last episode, go back and have a listen. Last episode we talked about the rules of the Bright Line Eating program, which is basically a monetised version of Food Addicts Anonymous. We talked about neuroscience with Dr Susan Aamodt, and how she found some peace in the non-diet approach. Susan also gave us a great overview of how our brains regulate body weight, and how the food addiction model isn’t well supported by evidence. Now we’re going to continue by looking at the alleged ‘research’ that ‘backs up’ Bright Line Eating, and then hear from Dr Martina Zangger who nominated Bright Line for the Crappy awards and brought this rant to us. And to round things out - just how much money is this program making, and where is it heading? Content warning - there is some mention of numbers (weights) as we go through some research. Susan Peirce Thompson is always talking about research in her book, her emails and thousands of messages she sends out to program members (and prospective members) - research that supposedly proves the effectiveness of her program. The truth is that the research is much less shiny and sparkly than Thompson makes out. On her website - four publications are listed. Actually, only one of them is a published paper. The other three are posters from conferences. At conferences (for example, in the nutrition world) there are lecture presentations, panels and then ‘poster presentations’. Anyone from an Honours or Masters level student, a weight-loss industry group can put up a poster - they’re not the same as a published research paper. So, on her website there’s actually only one published research paper. And it’s interesting - Thompson has been in academia for most of her life, yet has so little in her name in terms of research publications. It’s usually a requirement of being employed at an academic institution, to be publishing often. So, let’s look at that paper. It’s from the Journal of Nutrition & Weight Loss, and the title is ‘Evaluation of a Commercial Telehealth Weight Loss and Management Program’, published in 2018. Thompson is not one of the authors. The paper overview evaluated her online eight week bootcamp, part of her monetised program. The paper said that between October 2014 - March 2018 (roughly four years), 18,778 people enrolled in the bootcamp. WOW - this program costs US $900 per person, and nearly 19,000 people have been through this program. 9,996 of these people agreed to participate in this ongoing research study of the program, and then eight weeks later 5,374 people completed the return survey. That’s a drop out rate of around 50%. Remember - you’re just paid US $900 and you’ve dropped out after eight weeks. What they found out: Demographics - people buying this program are mainly white, well off, older, female. 96% were college educated, with an average age of 55. (Targeting menopausal women who are feeling horrible about the