In today’s vlog, I want to talk about fiber tracts. These are neural pathways that your brain builds every day. Your brain is always changing. You are either learning new things or strengthening pathways that exist.
Say you begin piano lessons. You create new fiber tracts for piano playing. It’s as if you’re in a dense jungle with your machete, and you need to hack your way through to create a path. This is hard at first but gets easier with time. Repetition beats down the path and then widens it more and more.
We come to Bright Line Eating with fiber tracts for the way we used to eat. Maybe it’s a fiber tract for swinging by a cafe on the way to work, scrolling through a delivery app, or rummaging through the cabinet for snacks before watching TV.
When we start Bright Line Eating, we abandon those old behaviors and start building new fiber tracts—new paths for writing down our food, assembling meals, weighing our food, and more.
The Bright Lifer has two sets of fiber tracts in the brain: all the ones for the old way of eating, and the newer ones for how they eat now. The old ones never go away; you’re just not using them. They’re like an old, dried-up riverbed that no longer has water in it. That’s the reality of “once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic” or “once a food addict, always a food addict.”
There’s also a third type of fiber tract. We have the old and new way of eating, but there can also be a fiber tract for relapse if you break your lines repeatedly and fall back into old ways of eating.
When you’re Bright you get a clean slate with your new ways of eating. After a few months, if you’ve been squeaky clean Bright, eating off-plan is actually hard—your brain doesn’t want to leave the new path. I live right by the Erie Canal, in Rochester, NY. Canals have thick cement walls that keep the water in. Your brain is like that when you become Bright. It has thick walls that keep you from deviating, like those canal walls.
These walls are so strong that after a few months, you might find it hard to reach out to something that is NMF (Not My Food). But if you do choose to reach for that NMF, you start to create a third pathway, an off-ramp from the Bright fiber tracts back to the old fiber tracts. And every time you deviate, that path from the new to the old gets wider. Before long, you have fiber tracts going from trigger to relapse.
After a while, those new fiber tracts may be so strong that without even realizing it, you suddenly have a handful of nuts in your mouth. So you end up with three sets of fiber tracts: the well-worn old set, the new, Bright set, and a third path that goes from Bright to not Bright.
If you find yourself in this position, what do you do about it? The same thing you did when you started Bright Line Eating. The way to create a new reality in your brain is to dam up all the water that was going down into the dry riverbed and become very intentional with your behaviors.
Dam the water upstream by recommitting to your Bright Line journey. Do not allow any deviations. This might mean putting yourself in a new Bright environment. This may involve more support, a lot of intentionality, and maintaining firm, cement-like barriers to keep the water from flowing where you don’t want it to flow.
You can’t allow any water to leak out, even though it’s easy for that to happen. It’s going to take time, along with maintenance of your Brighter than Bright Lines. You’ll need to up your game a lot.
And if you’re not in that situation, keep your canal walls thick and strong, and don’t let any deviation happen. Savor that experience, and protect it. Because the minute you deviate, you’re starting to create new fiber tracts.
I spent from 2015 to 2019 in and out of relapse. I built pathways from Bright to not-Bright. But today, I’ve been as Bright as possible, even in restaurants, for two and a half years. I changed by putting myself in a different environment with stronger support and more guidance, and I drew the line in the sand.
It took a lot of work. There’s a mysterious grace involved, too. So if you’re in this state, don’t give up. It’s not easy, but you got this. I know how it feels. And you can get Bright again, with vigilance, a stronger program, and time.
