Welcome to Aligned to Rise, the podcast for ambitious women who are ready to reclaim their vitality, align with their true power, and rise into the life they were meant to live.
Hosted by functional nutritionist and performance coach Alyssa Chavez, this show blends the science of gut and hormone health with the soul of mindset work, nervous system healing, and emotional release. Whether you’re navigating endometriosis, period pain, fatigue, or digestive drama—or you’re just craving deeper clarity and confidence in your body and purpose—you’ll find the support you need right here.
Each week, you’ll hear raw conversations, expert insights, and practical tools that help you:
Understand what’s really going on in your body
Rewire limiting beliefs and emotional patterns
Nourish yourself on every level—physically, emotionally, and energetically
Step fully into the bold, aligned woman you know you’re meant to be
If you've been eating a near-perfect diet and still struggling with hormonal imbalances, period pain, bloating, or fatigue, this episode is for you. I break down why the stress around clean eating can be just as damaging to your body as the food itself, and how the pursuit of dietary perfection can actually keep you stuck.
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
Why chronic food stress and anxiety trigger the same cortisol response as a physical threat and what that does to your hormones
Why highly reactive women who restrict more foods are often making things worse, not better
The difference between short-term elimination and long-term restriction, and why one helps while the other harms
How social media and wellness culture can fuel fear-based eating and the comparison trap
Why food reactivity is a symptom to investigate, not a life sentence of restriction
What I actually eat now vs. during my most restrictive phase and why she feels better with more flexibility
A real client story: from food fear and constant gut symptoms to balanced hormones and an enjoyable relationship with food
Key Takeaway
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a lion chasing you and a food fear spiral. If you're eating beautifully but living in a state of anxiety about every bite, your body is still under chronic stress, and that stress is disrupting the very hormones you're trying to heal.
Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. This may not be the best fit for you and your personal situation. It shall not be construed as medical advice. The information and education provided here is not intended or implied to supplement or replace professional medical treatment, advice, and/or diagnosis. Always check with your own physician or medical professional before trying or implementing any information read here.
SPEAKER_00
Hey my friend, and welcome back to the podcast. This one is for you if you find yourself stressing over every bite that you eat and beating yourself up if you ate something that's not on your quote unquote perfect diet plan. I want to talk to you today about how your diet might actually be hurting you even if it's clean. So this episode is for you if you are health conscious, maybe you're dealing with period issues, hormonal issues, maybe you have endo, gut issues, hormonal imbalances, all of the things, and just feeling like you can never eat well enough or clean enough. There's something more that you should be doing. So, first of all, I want to say that yes, food matters. Absolutely, it matters, right? I am a nutritionist, right? I'm a functional nutritionist myself. So of course I'm going to be an advocate for eating a clean diet. I encourage the clients that I work with to eat in a way that's anti-inflammatory. You're avoiding processed foods, you're feeding your microbiome. All of that stuff is super, super important. But there's what I have found in all the years that I've been doing this type of work and with myself, with clients that I've worked with over the years, there's basically a point of diminishing returns along that pathway. And that's really what this episode is all about. This is from my real life clinical experience out there in the field, working with actual, real life human beings and seeing how how things are actually working in their lives, not just, you know, what looks good on paper. So here's the thing: I see so many women who want to eat clean, and I think that's great, right? If you're really focused on eating your protein and your veggies and doing all of the things there, fantastic. Absolutely love that. Now, when that clean eating becomes a problem, is really, really it's more a matter of what's happening with your mindset. I want you to notice when you are eating, what's the intent, what's the feeling behind it? Or when you're planning your meals, when you're thinking about what you're going to eat? Is there a lot of fear around eating? Is there anxiety? Is there stress around eating? Is there is there hypervigilance about what you're eating? Are you finding yourself kind of isolating yourself socially because you have to eat this perfect diet and so it's hard to go out to eat? Do you find yourself feeling guilty if you slip and you eat something that you shouldn't be eating? Well, here's the thing, and we're going to really unpack this today. All of that stress has a real measurable impact on your body. So let's break that down. Let's look at how this actually can impact your body, all of those feelings that you're having. Your nervous system cannot distinguish between a physical threat, like the good old classic example of a lion chasing you, versus a food fear spiral. Your nervous system does not know the difference. And so basically, if you're constantly stressing and worried about food that you're eating, you're basically you're under chronic stress. And when you're under that chronic stress, that chronic stress is going to continue to pump cortisol into your system. And that ends up disrupting what's known as the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis. It's basically the communication system between your brain and your adrenal glands, which are those little glands that sit over top of your kidneys, and they are the glands that release your stress hormones. Now, this also very much impacts your sex hormones, your estrogen, your progesterone, all of those hormones actually are directly impacted by that stress cycle, by that HPA axis. Those same hypothalamus and pituitary that speak to the adrenal glands, they also communicate with the ovaries. All of these systems overlap each other because at the end of the day, you are a single human body, right? Your nervous system is not separate from the rest of you. It all works in communication, in conjunction with each other. And basically what happens is that your body prioritizes safety and survival over reproduction, which makes sense, right? If your body feels like it is, there's a there's a major threat, your body is not going to prioritize reproduction, which isn't, by the way, just a problem if you're worried about fertility. I think this is really important for people to be aware of. And this is something I've talked about before on the podcast, but you should be concerned about your fertility, whether you are trying to conceive or ever want to have kids or not. Because really fertility is a sign of health, right? And it doesn't mean you have to, you know, be trying to get pregnant. You know, you can be actively trying to prevent pregnancy. That's fine. But you want to be worried about your fertility because with your fertility comes healthy, balanced hormones and healthy ovulation. And all of those things actually have much wider impact on your body than just being able to conceive a child. So I think that is really important to know. Because I know a lot of people hear things like that and go, oh, that doesn't really matter for me because I don't want to have kids, or I'm not going to have kids for many years, or whatever your story is at that point in time. It doesn't matter. You want to have a healthy, balanced level of those sex hormones. And if your body is sensing that it's under stress, it's not going to prioritize reproduction. And that is a problem. Your body is perceiving that there is a threat, even though it's a mental threat, and it will downregulate your fertility and your hormones, right? And this can be especially an issue if you are already struggling with hormonal balance issues, because so many of the women that I talk to, I primarily in my practice work with women who have hormone issues, right? They have period problems. I work with a lot of women with endometriosis. I work with a lot of women who just have, you know, adrenal things going on or, you know, gut issues going on, so many things. And so when there's already issues going on, honestly, those are those are often the people who are trying to eat a perfect clean diet for those reasons, right? I have these health issues going on. I want to resolve those. I, so I'm going to really clean up my diet and eat really, really well. And so this is where I see that picture of so many women out there who are eating this beautiful, perfect clean diet and still have dysregulated hormones because your nervous system is chronically stressed. And that's that's kind of this vicious cycle that you run into. And honestly, this kind of goes back to our last episode, episode 140, where we were talking about why holistic, uh holistic approach can either work or not work. And this is one of the major things that I see because if you if you are being super hyper-vigilant with your diet, it can end up really, really wreaking havoc on your nervous system. And that's where that can just become an issue. It becomes the, like I said, that vicious cycle that just it just became become hard to get out of that mode, right? So that's physically one of the major issues that I see people running into. Now, there's another layer to this that I think is so, so important to talk about as well. And that's the societal layer of it, right? It's the things that we hear and see, especially these days with social media. Now, I of course follow a lot of people who are in the food, nutrition, wellness kind of culture. I tend to follow a lot of those types of accounts on social media because that's what I do. That's what I'm interested in. That's what lights me up is learning about wellness and health and all of the things. And there's a lot of great information and tips out there, honestly. There's a lot of bad information too, of course. It's internet and social media, but there is a lot of really good information. But the problem is we're so inundated with that. We're just hit right, left, and center with all this information and recipes and what you should be eating, what you shouldn't be eating. And nowadays, you know, I go to the grocery store and you look at all the labels, and it's like the labels on the food is telling you what's good, what isn't good, what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing. And it can be so confusing and overwhelming and all of the things. And of course, with social media, now I know this as a business owner and content creator myself. It's it's such a balance point because you want to create content that's going to draw people in and make them want to watch and listen. But unfortunately or unfortunately, a lot of the content that does really well is content that is disruptive in some way, right? It really makes you think it really kind of shakes you or you know, makes people want to share their opinions on it. And so what happens is things are blown out of proportion sometimes. People are demonizing entire food groups. There's a layer of almost, I don't know, pressure and fear-mongering around food and just the culture around that. It's like anything. There's there's a pendulum, right? And it can go in either direction. It can go from one end of just, hey, eat whatever you want. I'm gonna go out and have fast food every day and eat a bunch of junk. And then there's the pendulum, the other way of like, oh my gosh, you have to eat the perfect foods and you shouldn't eat any of this and you should be doing that. And I personally believe that there is a center point, there is a balance point in between those two that's gonna work really well for most people. And my friend, this is where we have to be careful with the whole internet social media side of things, because it's very easy to get caught in the comparison trap. And that can end up breeding more stress and anxiety rather than health, which is the goal to begin with, right? So that's where that's where, again, it's tricky because the the algorithm tends to reward the extremes, not the nuance, right? That's probably why, probably why my Instagram account has a few thousand followers, whereas, you know, some of these accounts that are really going at it and and throwing shade and you know, demonizing things and being really disruptive are have many, many tens of thousands of followers. And you know what? I'm okay with that. I would rather speak truthfully and in a balanced, healthy way and speak to the people who really care about that stuff. So if you're here listening, thank you. And I hope that you appreciate that because I know that's what I would like to hear. So, and I I I want to remind you too. This is something that I remind my clients of all the time. Nobody's health journey should look exactly the same as somebody else's, right? I often share my story and, you know, what all has happened in there, and I I will share that momentarily as well with you. But your journey is not going to look the same as anybody else's, and it shouldn't, right? You are your own unique human body. You are a bio individual, you have your own needs, you have your own capacities, you have your, you have your own light. And I think it's so, so important to remember that because it's easy to, it's easy to get stuck in that comparison trap of just wanting to see what everybody else is doing and I should be doing what they're doing. And honestly, I find that nowadays, more and more, that's become such a huge part of the work that I do with clients. People hear that I'm a nutritionist and just assume that all I do all day is just tell people what to eat and give them a diet plan or something. If I'm perfectly honest, that's a very small part of what I do. Do I help people figure out what to eat? Yes, and how to eat, and you know, even changing things up depending on where they are in their cycle and where they are in their life and what's happening right now, what's happening with your gut. So absolutely I work with people on diet, but honestly, so much more of it is coaching, right? It's about helping people to navigate life. And I think that's just so crucial and quite quite frankly, underutilized these days. Because I think, I think in our current day and age, just with all the social media and you know, everybody, so many people working from home and kind of being isolated on that front, it's so interesting because I know I've fallen into this trap myself where I just become, you know, Miss Strong Inpendent woman and I don't need any help and I can figure it all out on my own. And I have to say, the times that I've worked with a coach personally, and I know that my clients say this as well, just having a coach on your side is so incredibly important because your mindset just really, really matters when it comes to your health and well-being and all of the things. So that's my two cents. So just to share a little bit about my personal journey with when it comes to all of this stuff. When I first let me think back to when this all started. I guess this was really after I had been struggling with my fertility journey. I'd found out I'd been diagnosed already with endometriosis. I'd been struggling with fertility. I had that miscarriage back in 2020. And I decided at that point in time that was really my low point, my kind of rock bottom mentally and emotionally, where I just wanted to turn things around and do whatever I could do to take care of my health. I wanted to be able to take my health into my own hands, which is, you know, absolutely what I encourage people to do. But I definitely went through a phase of being intensely clean with my diet. I cut out gluten and dairy and corn and soy, and I was eating zero sugar, and I really wasn't eating dessert at all unless it was just like some really dark chocolate or something like that. Uh I was trying to avoid any sort of added sweeteners, even the natural kinds. I was only eating, you know, low glycemic fruit and just, you know, basically doing all of my own cooking at home. And I still do a lot of that stuff, to be honest. I I still primarily eat similarly to that. Um, and I don't know, for me, maybe I needed that for a short period of time. And I I think that that kind of diet can be helpful for short periods of time for people, but it's not sustainable. For most of us, it's not sustainable in the long term because we have we have lives. We're busy people, we have, we have social lives. We want to get out and do things and eat out and hang out with people. And so what I actually do now is I still eat really healthy. I am still completely gluten-free, primarily dairy-free. I've actually loosened up a little bit on that because I do eat some goat and sheep dairy, whereas I used to not do anything at all. And you know what? And I do it's I do a little butter. I do some ghee, which is a clarified butter if you're not familiar with that. Uh, so I do a little bit of that kind of stuff. Um, I do eat corn, although I do my best to do non-GMO uh type corn or you know, organic, so it's healthier. Uh I just I personally don't have an issue with corn. So why restrict a food if I don't need to? And I don't do a whole lot of soy either. Um if I do, it's in whole food form, like eating itamame or something like that. I don't eat a ton of sugar, but I do eat some because I have a sweet tooth. I like eating sweet things and it makes me feel good emotionally. And the thing is that I actually feel a lot better now than I did when I was eating that really intensely clean diet. I've loosened up a fair amount, to be honest. Even with things like, for example, you know, when you're eating out, they're probably not gonna use the same healthy oils that you do at home because they're more expensive, right? If you're cooking at home with things like coconut oil and ghee and avocado oil, that's those are the types of oils that I use at home because they're more anti-inflammatory. Most restaurants are not going to use that stuff unless you find a really good quality restaurant, which is going to be, of course, pricier as well. And at this point, I just say, you know what, I don't eat out every day. If something is cooked in a way that's not perfect, it's not a style of cooking that I would use at home, it's okay. My body can handle that. And I think it's really a testament also to just how far I've come in my health, that my body is able to handle that and tolerate that. But I think that that's just so much healthier in the long term to eat well, but not be so perfectionist that you're restricting yourself to where you feel terrible mentally and emotionally. Even if you feel really, really good physically, how are you feeling mentally and emotionally? Because it all matters. You are not just a sack of muscle, right? And bones and all of the organs and things in your body. You're not just a physical being. Your mental well-being and your emotional well-being matters just as much as your physical body. So we have to support it as a whole. And so when we're looking at your yourself as a whole, we're looking at that's going to be a little bit different, right? There, there's, there has to be a balance in the way that you're eating. And like I said, there is a time and a place for everything. Sometimes I honestly do recommend a client eat more restrictive in the short term because they have a lot of health stuff going on. We're trying to figure out what foods they're reacting to, and that's okay. But at the end of the day, this is something that I think is really important to know too. And I'm going to share a client story with you in a moment that really highlights this. But at the end of the day, food reactivity, and you know, if you if you're one of those people who just feels like they can't eat any of those foods because you feel terrible, maybe you you get really bloated if you eat certain foods, or you have symptoms coming up if you eat certain foods. When there's a lot of food reactivity, that's a signal from your body. That's a symptom. It's not a life sentence of you should never eat those foods again, right? If you're reacting to a lot of things, restricting more in the long term is not the answer because that reactivity is a message from your body that is just telling us we need to investigate that further, right? That can be things like gut permeability, also known as leaky gut, where the lining of your gut is basically letting large food particles through where your immune system can react to them. There might be some immune dysregulation, there might be some imbalance in your gut microbiome. That's why the gut is one of the first things that I investigate with people, especially if they are highly reactive, they're having a lot of this stuff going on. I use a test called a GI Map, which is a stool test. And that's something I use with pretty much every one of my one-on-one clients, and that we were able to really investigate all of that. And so many times when we do that, when we do that, when we do the testing and then do the work to bring things back into balance based on what we find, I find that most people then pretty much, I would say actually everybody who I've worked with on this ends up being able to eat more foods in the long term, which is pretty awesome. Because when you're really, really restrictive in your diet, when you have a very narrow diet, you can actually end up having nutrient deficiencies because you're there's so many foods that you're restricting. And you have that increased anxiety around food. So all of that can be an issue. So I have a client who I'm still actually working with, but when she first came to me, she had a ton of food fear and anxiety. That was one of the first things that she talked about. That she has two kids and she just felt like she couldn't eat anything. She was like afraid to eat and um just didn't know what to cook and was just really freaked out about everything because she was having so many gut, primarily gut-related issues, some hormonal stuff as well. She was having some period type symptoms, but honestly, a lot of it was just um gut issues. She was, she was bloated, she was having stomach aches after she ate, she was just feeling kind of yucky, she was getting nauseous, and her relationship with food was just really suffering. It was really affecting her her life. And so we started with that. We did the GI map and found figure out what was going on with her gut. We supported her gut health foundationally, but we also did a lot of that mindset work along with that at the same time and are continuing to do that. And nowadays she's feeling much better physically. She's having uh, she's feeling good when she eats. She's not having the bloating or the stomach pain or she was getting some some acid reflux kind of symptoms as well. She's not getting any of that. Her hormones are actually much more balanced now as well. And she's able to actually enjoy food. She's less reactive, she's less anxious, and she's actually able to eat more food than she had been before because we approached it from all angles. So there you go. So I hope that's helpful for you, my friend. Um, I know this is something that so many women struggle with, and so I hope that this helps you along your journey. But so just remember, if you're really reacting to foods, restricting more is usually not the answer. If you're highly reactive, you want to pay attention to that message from your body, and it's definitely worth investigating, right? Because think about the long term. How, how long do you want to live with that? How how long do you want to have those issues, right? Um, do you want to be restricting your diet to the point of having those nutrient deficiencies and having the anxiety around food and not being able to go out to eat all of these issues? So instead, what I really encourage is work with somebody to investigate why you're reacting, address the root cause. Um I work with clients doing this. We I like to start out with doing that GI map um and really investigating what's going on with the gut. So if that's something that you're interested in, definitely reach out to me. You can find in the show notes there is a link where you can book a free 30-minute consultation with me. We can just chat through what's been going on with you and um figure out what might be the best pathway forward for your unique journey. I would love to help you on your journey to get you feeling better and better than ever, my friend. All right. Thank you so much for being here today. Can't wait to join you for the next episode. Uh much love to you, my friend.
