At one point we had a discussion about offering
a *fast track* for those who wanted to lose weight NOW. And it was pretty heated. But this kind of dialogue is what makes the community so wonderful. Your ideas, your thoughts, your questions move us.
There were a lot of people who want fast track, a lot of people who feel it is nuts. I figure my job is to make sense of
all of this.and to come back to you with my own reflections.
Radiant Recovery® is about HEALING addiction. It has two parts: changing the biochemistry by changing what and when you eat and changing your behavior to change the patterns of addiction.
The first part, changing your food can be done as quickly or as slowly as you might choose. Many people have done it very quickly and successfully that way. The question remains is that the best way?
Here is my sense of this one. If
you come in with a lot of 12-step recovery, or emotional maturity, or other skills, and you are not into drama or wacky, you can of course, simply do the food without a big fuss. As many people said on the forum, you might have already gone off of sugar, you might already be eating three meals, etc, and you simply adjust some without it being a big deal. Or at least that is what you think.
Now, if you hadn't done any of that stuff, and simply decided that you were READY NOW!!! Doing all the steps all at once would of course, put your body into shock, give you a HUGE BE spike and be very dramatic, all of which are actually addictive patterns. But you might be able do it. But you might not be able to hold it.
Now, what I have learned over the last 20 years is that Radiant Recovery is way more than just the content of the steps. Healing the addiction is a process and happens as you follow the 7 steps. They are incremental and build on one another. The PROCESS takes time to learn and reintegrate behavioral patterns. In addition, the process actually re maps brain patterns. And this does not happen in a week. It is the process
of doing each step, savoring what each step means, and integrating the tiny parts of each step that create huge change in your heart and life.
When I talk about what else is embedded in the steps, I am talking about all the code hidden inside each step. And the code is what unlocks the PROCESS of recovery. The food gets your
brain settled. The process teaches you a different way of healing. When we add the chemistry of the food to the code, we get a mighty combination, one that is deep, rich and powerful. One that is life-changing.
So, in the end, do I want a fast track? No, absolutely not. I like savor. I want a track of commitment, of listening,
of sharing, of building on a foundation anchored in a steady biochemistry. I want a track that is formed in dialogue, sharing and learning to trust. Actually, I want what we have. I love Radiant Recovery. I love this community.
Many people come to Radiant Recovery saying they are already doing most of the steps and just need to
add a potato. I often suggest they get a copy of the talk I did at ranch in 2007 about what else is embedded in the steps. That discussion goes through each step and outlines the biochemical changes encoded in each step. But there is another key issue one I havent really talked about. Structure antidotes blind lurching.
When we are in active addiction, it is as if we lose our center and we stop being grounded. We lurch from one thing to another. Maybe from diet to diet, job to job, person to person, place to place or interest to interest. We have 6 knitting and crafts projects going on. We present ourselves as creative and curious, liking to try new things. We collect little things like offices supplies or pens in case we need them. We lurch and resist being pinned down.
We might say that structure ties us down, thwarts our creativity. Structure seems dull and old fashioned. It seems routine and boring and who would want to do that. Nowhere in our brain have we thought of our behavior as lurching. We never really thought that a little of this and a little of that might be saying something about our sugar addiction.
Why is it that we dream big and stay small? Why is it that those sparks of insight and knowing sputter and fade rather than bursting into our passionate flame?
My
hunch is that we have avoided the gift of structure. We havent considered that structure, doing things in an intentional order might actually shape us. And it might change the lurching to intention. If you do this, you will get this result.
Now think about that. For so many years, we have worked how to forget the consequence of
our actions. We forget that if we eat sugar, or skip meals we get cranky and unpleasant. We forget that we lose direction and we lurch. We forget a lot.
So when we have structure, we stop lurching and we do not lose direction. Even early on in the program, when we are still forgetting because of our biochemistry, the structure
itself guides us. The steps, those funny steps, lead us into intention. They guide us with if you do this, you will change. If you do these steps, you will have a life you cannot imagine. Everything will shift. And it will shift in ways beyond anything you have considered.
Now, many of you may feel that this is simply talk. It
is not. We now have enough people who are doing the steps for a long enough time that it is really, really clear that there is a developmental pattern that emerges very predictably over time. The promises we make happen.
The steps are bigger than the food. Dont think of changing them. Do them, do them and get the miracle.
