I have exciting news: we’ve published a paper in the prestigious journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. It’s titled “Six-Year Follow-Up of an Abstinence-Based, Food Addiction Recovery Approach to Weight Management,” written by me, Nadia Briones, Aaron Blumkin, and Betty Rabinowitz. The article is in a special issue on ultra-processed food addiction.
More than 80% of the people who have food addiction are also living with overweight or obesity. There’s reason to think that addiction is underlying much of our society’s weight struggles. Addressing the addiction component and building a weight loss program around it, as we’ve done with Bright Line Eating, might be more effective than a weight-loss program that doesn’t address addiction at all.
Published Research: Is Bright Line Eating Effective for Long-Term Weight-Loss?
For this paper, we conducted a survey of people who participated in the Bright Line Eating Boot Camp in October of 2017. We sent our survey to anyone who started the Boot Camp, filled out the beginning survey, and for whom we had a phone number. 500+ people met our criteria, and we got usable survey responses from about half—267 completed surveys.
The sample is biased because it’s reasonable to assume that those who responded are likely to be more keen on Bright Line Eating. That’s an issue with this type of research, but it would have cost millions of dollars to do a randomized controlled trial. It's also a relatively homogeneous sample: mostly older, white, educated women. That’s the demographic Bright Line Eating attracts because it’s also my demographic and it’s the demographic most likely to sign up for a science-based weight loss program.
Here are some of our findings. If you’re listening to this on a podcast, you might want to check out the video, because I’ve got some graphs to show you.
Does Bright Line Eating really work?
First, I have a graph showing participation level by year. Even six years out, about half the respondents are still doing Bright Line Eating. About two-thirds of those are members.
The next graph shows the percentage of weight change for members and non-members. There’s a dramatic dose response here. Members generally have better results than those who are taking Wegovy and Ozempic. People who are doing great are more likely to be members and working their program.
Dose response is important. There was no randomized control group because of the nature of this study, so we can’t prove that BLE is the cause of the weight loss. However, we can infer a causal connection from the dose-response relationship, which says that the more rigorously someone is working the program, the greater their weight loss results.
How does Bright Line Eating compare to GLP-1s?
The next graph shows the published weight loss results for a variety of options: semaglutide (branded as Ozempic and Wegovy), Bright Line Eating, Noom, Weight Watchers, and more.
The only options that deal with addiction issues are the GLP-1 drugs and Bright Line Eating, and that’s where you see the greatest results. Bright Line Eating addresses it by removing the addictive foods and letting the brain heal naturally. At six years out, there is 13.9 percent weight loss for BLE, while the semaglutide drug shows a 10 percent loss after four years.
What’s the most effective long-term weight-loss method?
The next graph is, to me, amazing. If you average the weight loss through the entire cohort, it was 6.87%, six years out. This includes people who may have signed up for Boot Camp and never completed it, who went on to other programs, or aren’t doing any program.
I find it remarkable that these people, half of whom may have drifted away from BLE, still maintain an average 7% weight loss. When you look at the rest of this graph, there’s a 13.91% weight change for those who are current members as opposed to 7.88% for non-members who follow BLE. It’s having a positive impact six years later.
There’s much more detail in the paper. If you want to learn more, I’ll include a link to the paper below. We paid for it to be open access, available to all. We didn’t have grant funding—Bright Line paid for the publication in an open-access journal so everyone can access and read it. If you have questions, check it out. I’m proud that Bright Line Eating is still having an impact, six years later.
