#105 3 Hidden States Controlling Your Eating

This episode is not theory.
This is exactly how we coach our clients inside Live360 to finally break the cycle.

Because if you listened to the last episode, you’ve already started to see something important…

Your behavior around food isn’t random.
 And it’s not a discipline problem.

But today, we go deeper.

In this training, I break down:

•  why your nervous system controls your cravings, consistency, and metabolism 
•  why you can feel motivated one day and completely out of control the next 
•  what’s actually happening before you even have a thought 
•  why traditional dieting completely misses this piece 
•  and why you cannot “think your way” out of this 

This is the reason:

•  you can eat perfectly all day… then lose control at night 
•  you know what to do… but don’t follow through 
•  you keep starting again… even though nothing changes 

Because this is happening before willpower even kicks in.

Once you understand this, everything shifts.

You stop blaming yourself.
You stop trying to force discipline.
And you start working with your body instead of against it.

Watch my The Cravings & Fat-Burning Masterclass:  https://www.neverdietagainmethod.uk/register-podcast

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/max.lowery/

Book a Food Freedom Breakthrough Call: https://www.neverdietagainmethod.uk/call-ig

Transcript

Breaking The Food Cycle

Speaker 0:00

Today's episode is actually a training taken directly from my Live360 coaching program. So what you're about to hear is exactly how we teach our clients to finally break the cycle. And it builds on what we spoke about in the last episode. Because in that episode, we started to open your eyes to the fact that your behavior around food is not random. It's driven by something deeper. And today we're going to go even deeper into that topic. I'm going to show you why your nervous system is controlling your cravings, your consistency, your metabolism, and your ability to actually follow through. This is the piece most people are missing. This is why you can feel motivated one day and completely out of control the next. This is why you can eat perfectly all day, then suddenly find yourself in the kitchen at night thinking, what am I doing? And here's the truth most people don't want to hear. You cannot think your way out of this. This is not a willpower problem because this is happening before your thoughts even kick in. So if you've been stuck in that cycle, trying harder, starting again, blaming yourself, this episode is going to give you a completely different lens. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. Let's get into it. How do you create a life that allows you to lose weight, eat the foods that you love, and sustain the results? Over the last 10 years, I've helped thousands of people do exactly that. I'm Max Lumbery, I'm an author, political trainer, and weight loss coach. In this podcast, I'm going to share my topic, tips and tricks from within my one-on-one coaching program. It's my goal to give you the tools and the understanding so that you never done it again. Yeah, what the hell is polyvagal theory and why does it matter? Well, ultimately, stress just isn't something that is external and happens to you. It's not just inside your head. It's actually, it lives within our nervous system. And your nervous system directly impacts your metabolism, cravings, fat storage, consistency, your relationship with food, everything. Okay, so this is really important. So understanding this connection is the missing piece between everything that we've been talking about and ultimately traditional diets, right? They don't address this. So we've kind of talked about this before, but we've kind of talked about it in a quite simplified way, which was kind of the old model of stress. So for years we were taught stress is simple. You're either stressed or relaxed. Okay, it's like sympathetic, fight or flight, parasympathetic, wrestler digest. You're one of the other. And it's like some kind of on or off switch, basically. But actually, that is old and it's not accurate. And that oversimplified way of describing things doesn't really explain a lot of the issues that people struggle with. Okay. And it's why sometimes traditional relaxation techniques can sometimes make things worse. So polyvagal theory is essentially the upgrade to the old model of thinking on your nervous system. It was developed by someone called Dr. Stephen Hawkes. I think that's how you describe it. And he wasn't actually like a therapist or anything like that. He's a scientist. And he was looking at basically like stress in newborns and what impacts the nervous system from a young age. And he came up with this polyvagal theory, which has since been very much accepted and utilized in therapy and coaching and all sorts of different things. And so the name basically kind of says it all polymany, vagal is the vagus nerve. And the reason it's called vagus, because I think it's Greek or Latin, um, it actually means wandering. And the mean the reason they say it's wandering is because it literally goes it touches everything. It's it the vagus nerve is all over the body and it's connected to most of your like main organs. So it has a huge impact on every aspect of your body. You know, it runs from the brainstream, regulating your stress response, digestion, heart rate, you know, stomach, like everything is impacted. So it's very, very important. And essentially, there are three nervous system states, and you can think of it like a ladder. The way that it's described by experts is you're moving up and down the ladder based on what state you're in. So we have, and I'll go into more detail, I'm just gonna describe them now. We've got the ventral vagal, sympathetic, which most of you have heard, and dorsal vagal. And what's interesting is it's not kind of on or off. You can be kind of switching between the three throughout the day. And all of these are normal, right? All of these different states serve a purpose. The issue is if you spend too long in either sympathetic or dorsal vagal, that can potentially cause problems, which we're going to go into now. So you have to love the AI images, by the way. So ventral vagal is kind of safe and connected. This is your regulated state, your optimal zone. This is where transformation happens. You feel calm, present, clear-headed, socially connected, and genuinely motivated. Your prefrontal corpus is online. You plan, choose, and follow through. And this is where fat loss, making life changes, feels doable. And what it kind of looks like planning meals feels simple and even enjoyable. Going for a walk feels natural and not forced. Uh, you feel in control of your choices, and food is fuel, not an emotional battleground. The biology of it is that when the ventral vehicle is active, your heart rate variability increases. Yeah, your heart rate variability is it's essentially a measure of the gap between heartbeats. So people think that you have like a steady heart rate and the gap's equal. Between heartbeats is equal, it's not equal. There's a variation in the gap between heartbeats. The higher your heart rate variability, it's essentially a measure of how well your body is going to respond to stress. And all sorts of things like aura rings and Garmin watch, as Ellen says, uh, can actually measure heart rate variability now. So in the ventral vagal, you have a high heart rate variability, which means your nervous system is functioning optimally and you're going to be able to deal with stress and everything's going to feel effortless. But also, digestion improves, inflammation decreases, and your body naturally regulates appetite hormones. Then we have sympathetic, which most people have heard of fight or flight. This is stress activation. It's your body's alarm system. Originally designed for physical threats, it's now triggered by email, social media, or most importantly, your inner critic. So how you feel in sympathetic, anxious and on the edge, overstimulated, physically tense, a constant sense of urgency. To be honest, that's how I feel most of the time. That's why I felt most of today, rushing, a bit on edge. Like fit, I don't necessarily feel bad, but I'm a bit amped up. But sometimes this is where weight can be impacted because if you use food to regulate your emotions and particularly to calm yourself down, then you're more likely to turn to food in this state, as well, as well as there's digestion issues, there's heart rate variability issues, there's all sorts of issues that happen as a consequence of being in sympathetic for too long. Right? This is you don't want to completely uh never be in sympathetic because that's a whole other issue. Um, it's normal to shift between different states, but if you spend too much time in sympathetic, that can potentially cause problems. But cravings can increase, impulse control drops, sleep can worsen as well. And I definitely struggle with this. I find it very difficult to fall asleep because I'm so wired. So I have to very much try and calm myself down before sleep. But then we have another state, which we call dorsal vagal or shutdown. Okay, it's kind of like freeze. So this is freeze and collapse, your nervous system's emergency break. When fight or flight fails, the body shuts down to conserve energy and protect you from overwhelm. You can feel flat, unmotivated, hopeless, heavy, and numb. Everything feels impossibly difficult. It's not laziness or a character flaw, and it's not lack of willpower. This is literally nervous system shutdown, goes into conservation mode, essentially. So it's really interesting and important to understand that all of these things serve a purpose. And really the vagus nerve, so particularly the um the shutdown, is that you know, they've looked in terms of evolutionary biology, it's 500 million years old. It's been evolving for 500 million years. It's like one of the basic states which protects animals, right? And then the fight or flight is a bit newer, it's like three or four hundred million years old. The vagal ventral, the kind of more social one, is newer. So we didn't actually kind of develop that aspect of the vagal uh nerve until later, which is interesting. So, why is all this relevant? Because the modern world is causing a lot of problems for our nervous system. The nervous system evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, like I said, it was built for short-term danger, a predator, a physical effect, something that would resolve quickly, right? That's basically why it develops. It's like teaching us how to behave under pressure and when there's danger. But the issue is the danger isn't a tiger or falling off a cliff, unless you're me. It's deadlines from work, which creates constant time pressure. Perfectionism, right? So putting all this pressure on yourself to be perfect and not accepting any failure. Chronic dieting really has a massive impact on nervous system regulation. And obviously, all of you have got yourself out of chronic dieting, which is excellent, but perfectionism obviously is still a struggle for some of you. Caregiving, so meeting everyone else's needs before your own is going to impact your nervous system. Comparison is going to impact your nervous system, as well as financial insecurity and pressure, et cetera. So these are just a few, but there's a whole host of things which are causing us problems. Okay. Um, and so what I want to start doing is addressing this at its source and helping you regulate your nervous system ultimately. So, what actually happens when you do have chronic stress? Remember, the stress can be external, but it can also be internal from the perfectionism, et cetera. So when you stay in sympathetic activation for extended periods, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline continuously. Digestion slows down, blood sugar regulation worsens, muscle tension increases throughout your body. So when this continues long term, the body can't sustain that level of activation, being in fight or flight, and it can shift into dorsal shutdown to protect you from complete burnout. And so this is kind of why you can feel wired and tired at the same time. But also kind of wired and hungry, right? Sympathetic state, you feel anxious, restless, constantly craving quick energy, food becomes a way to soothe the internal alarm. And but then equally you can be exhausted and numb. So dorsal state, you feel depleted, disconnected, and cannot muster the energy to care. Food becomes irrelevant or a source of shape. So both of these states sabotage weight loss. It's not a choice, okay? You can't kind of will yourself out of this, it's your physiology, which is why it's kind of deeper than mindset and habits, et cetera. And we're going to do more on this. So for now, this is just an overview, but we're going to actually start to get you guys to be better at identifying where you're at. And this has been really useful for me personally, because again, without awareness, you can't potentially improve anything, can you? So if you don't know you're in that sympathetic state, or if you don't know you're in a dorsal state, there are two different things you have to do in those different states. So we want you to be really uh clear on this. So once you understand your nervous system states, you recognize these patterns everywhere. And again, this is not to do with your personality, it's not to do with willpower or motivation. It's it's deeper than that, right? It's like so, so deep. So, clients, you know, you guys that are stuck in sympathetic like me, snacking constantly when stressed, eating very fast, but barely tasting food, craving sugar and quick energy, feeling intense guilt after eating, restless, anxious energy, and difficulty sitting still. But then the dorsal clients, right? So skip meals, then overeat later, cannot plan or follow through, avoid exercise completely, feel shame and hopelessness, heavy, immobilized feeling, and disconnect from their body. So often what most of you are doing is blaming yourselves, blaming willpower, thinking that there's something wrong with you, lazy or broken, but it's your nervous system, it's how you're wired. So, again, just to kind of drive home, like why are we talking about this in terms of weight loss? Like, so chronic stress is is strongly linked to fat gain. And this is not theory, it's backed by substantial research. So cortisol and fat storage, so elevated cortisol promotes abdominal fat storage, particularly visceral fat around the organs, which is linked to metabolic disease, as does menopause, unfortunately. Okay, so all these hormones and the lack of hormones plus cortisol during the menopause can cause more belly fat. Insulin resistance, which is essentially metabolic inflexibility, which we talk about a lot, especially at the start of the program. We want to get all you guys to be more metabolically flexible. Chronic stress increases insulin resistance, ultimately, which can mean it's harder to regulate your blood sugar and therefore indirectly make weight loss harder. It can have a massive impact on your hunger hormones as well. So poor sleep and being stressed will will impact ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and uh leptin, which is the hormone that makes you feel full. So ghrelin goes up, which makes you feel hungrier. Leptin goes down, which means you don't feel full when you eat food. It's kind of a perfect storm environment for consuming too many calories, isn't it? Like you feel hungrier and you're not getting the same effect from eating the food. And then your vagal tone, so stress reduces vagal tone, which is associated with poorer metabolic health, higher inflammation, and worse blood sugar control. So it's all tying back directly to like food, how you process food, digestion, blood sugar regulation, appetite control. Okay, so it has a big impact. But equally, if the vagal tone is low, overall you're gonna find it harder to regulate your emotions. Okay, you're more likely to turn to food and more likely to have extremes in emotions. Um, I kind of alluded to this a few weeks ago. Do you remember we were talking about obsessing over the number on the scale? And we were talking about creating the right conditions for weight loss. So rather than focusing on the outcome, creating the right conditions. Does everyone remember that? So what we're talking about here is an essential condition for weight loss is stress and nervous system regulation. We've been talking about it, but not enough, and now we're going to be going pretty hard on it from today and onwards. And this is really important. This is why it's deeper than mindset, because it comes before how you think. So you're essentially your state, the state that your nervous system in comes before the meaning you attach to a situation. So basically, it doesn't matter how, like I would say that I have a pretty dialed-in mindset having worked on this for a long time, but it doesn't really matter what's going on with my mindset if I am in that fight or flight response and super stressed and my nervous system is feeling unsafe, it's going to cause problems. So you can't outthink, you can't kind of use your brain necessarily to outthink your nervous system. So, as this says, you can't think your way out of a 500 million-year-old survival system. Remember 500 million years old. Your nervous system responds to safety cues, not logical reasoning. Right? So, what does not work? Positive thinking alone does not work, affirmations without action doesn't work, willpower and discipline certainly doesn't work, ignoring your body signals doesn't work. These tools can help, but only after the nervous system feels safe. This is key. Okay, all these things that you're trying, the mindset things, are going to be much harder if you are not feeling safe and you're dysregulated within your nervous system. So what actually does work? Well, there are proven physiological interventions and breath work. Breath work is one of the fundamental ways to regulate your nervous system. Gentle regular movement also helps to regulate the nervous system. So another interesting thing is co-regulation with safe people. So co-regulation is a key, is a key layer of regulating your nervous system because we are social, we take cues from other human beings. And the reason this is important is because if we could see that someone else was stressed and scared, and obviously we're in like hunter-gatherer times where there are all these dangerous things around, if we couldn't pick up on those cues and then basically start to maybe feel the same things, then we wouldn't be ready to run away from the tiger. Because remember, sympathetic nervous system is all about fight or flight, running away. And so if we weren't picking up those cues, then potentially we wouldn't survive. But the issue is if you are hanging out with people who are super stressed themselves, stuck in fight or flight, like I love my mum. My mum is a great mum, right? But she really does make me quite anxious because an example of this is we're in a small village, everyone is late in France anyway. And on the day of going out for dinner to this small village where we'll be the first one in the restaurant, anyway, because it's we'll go at seven o'clock, everyone else goes at eight, eight thirty. She sends literally sends me in capital letters, don't be late, right? So that is the kind of thing that really winds me up and makes me feel a bit anxious. Other people can really impact your nervous system regulation. And it's ultimately why us as coaches need to regulate ourselves. Because if imagine if I was to come to a coaching call with one of you guys and I'm super like amped up and breathing in a shallow way and um talking really quickly, that's essentially going to set you off as well, especially if you're already kind of feeling in that way, anyway. So consistent quality sleep is key. You are gonna be in fight or flight response when you are haven't slept enough, and then nourishing your body. So all you know, all these things we've spoken about before were just taking you to a deeper level. But this is why the you know the reset phase of this program is very much fueling yourself properly. That's why we constantly go on about the three square meals per day, eating enough protein, eating enough fiber, fueling yourself properly, because that allows your nervous systems to feel safe. So when you do these things, when you're regulating your nervous system, then everything else beyond that, the mindset, the identity, the beliefs, the self-talk, the consistency with your habits becomes much, much easier. So just to kind of build on what I was just talking about, the order in which you do things. You guys have been here for quite a long time. The newcomers are gonna be aware of this, but the never diet again method is three phases: reset, rewire, realign. I'm actually going to change the first reset to regulate because I feel like reset is a is a bit of a strong word. And really, we want to regulate the nervous system, but we also want to regulate your eating and find structure. So there is going to be quite a big shift in in how we're talking about these changes. But the regulate thing is stage one. Everything else is almost impossible if you're not regulated. And who here has felt this, right? Who here has felt, you know, they know what they need to be doing, but they're just not doing it. Everything's just so hard. Most likely is because there's issues with your nervous system and nervous system regulation. All right, so this is why I'm excited to talk about this because I think this is going to be really important. It's made a huge difference for me, and it's still ongoing for me. And I'm looking forward to getting you guys to really lead into this more.