Body-First Healing Podcast

Food Therapy: How Nutrition Impacts Anxiety, Stress & the Nervous System with Luis Mojica

• Britt Piper • Episode 33

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Most people don't know that every few hours they're actually inducing a fight or flight response due to what they're eating. In this episode, Britt sits down with Luis Mojica, a trained Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Herbalist, Holistic Nutritional Counselor, Life Coach, and author of Food Therapy, to explore the powerful connection between nourishment and the nervous system. Together they unpack how our eating patterns can unintentionally keep the body cycling through stress responses, why healing our relationship with food goes far beyond diets or protocols, and how survival patterns, shame, and nervous system states shape the way we approach nourishment. Luis also shares his personal journey into this work after navigating chronic illness as a child, offering a compassionate, body-centered framework for understanding food through the lens of regulation, curiosity, and nervous system support. If you have ever felt confused about what your body actually needs or noticed how food impacts your mood, energy, and stress levels, you’re going to love this episode! And make sure to pre-order Food Therapy, out on April 28th!

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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast. I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut. If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place. Each week I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life. Because you can't talk your way through healing, you have to feel your way through. Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in. I am so glad that you're here.

Episode Preview

SPEAKER_02

It's too overwhelming. This is not about health, even though health is an outcome from balanced body. This is about balancing first and then letting health express itself.

Introducing Luis

SPEAKER_00

So random fact here Luis and I have actually known each other for a number of years now. I was on his podcast years ago, and he was actually one of my trainers in my somatic experiencing practitioner journey. So when I found out that I was going to be able to sit down with Luis in person in New York City for this incredible conversation, I was so thrilled. It honestly felt like two friends just really catching up. And when I tell you guys that my job was on the floor for most of this conversation, I am not kidding you. I learned so much from Luis. And I just know that you guys are going to have that same exact experience. So Luis is a somatic experiencing practitioner, an herbalist, holistic nutritional counselor, and the founder of the holistic life navigation. And he is also the author of the upcoming book, Food Therapy. Please make sure to get a copy. Now, in this conversation, you guys, we explore something that many people overlook in nervous system work. And that is how the food that we eat can influence our stress responses, our mood, and our regulation throughout the day. So Luis shares his personal journey into this work and offers a really compassionate lens on nourishment, helping us move beyond kind of rigid diet rules and culture, and instead start noticing how food actually interacts with the body. So if you've ever wondered why what you eat can affect your energy, your emotional state, then you are going to really, really love this conversation. All right, guys, let's get into it.

Interview

SPEAKER_00

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Body First Healing Podcast. I am excited today. This feels kind of like a personal episode. Like I get to sit down with someone that I know. I'm usually, you know, in conversation with people that I'm meeting for the first time, but today I am with a wonderful human, Luis. I'm so excited to have you here.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you, love. It's cool to be with you in this context.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I was telling you before we started the podcast that I've always wanted to have a conversation with someone about food and the nervous system. And then of course you're writing a book about it. Like it just couldn't feel more aligned. Your book is coming out. By the time this episode comes out, it's going to be a few days before your book is out in the world. Yeah. Which is so exciting. But for my listeners, the Body Force Healing podcast is a place where we explored kind of the intersections of trauma and healing and somatics and nervous system and

How Luis Got Into This Work & His Personal Healing Journey

SPEAKER_00

gosh, just the messiness of life. So I would assume that a lot of people probably know in my community who you are. But for those who don't and who now get the privilege of meeting you, would you be open to sharing just like a little introduction?

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. I founded a company called Holistic Life Navigation. It's also a modality that blends nutrition and somatic experiencing in a therapeutic way. So it teaches people how to navigate different experiences, emotions, even um health states through the lens of SE and nutrition. I started working as a nutritional counselor in 2010. And so about six years later, I realized I need to have a name for this because it's it was a unique way I was working. Nutritional counseling is different from being a nutritionist. You're really getting curious about people's emotional relationship to food, but also what's happening in the environment when they eat something. So it's this whole holistic approach of what's how's life impacting your food choices? Not just eat this, don't eat this, like you might be trained to do if you're a dietitian or a standard nutritionist. So after doing that for a couple years, I realized this the way I do this is more like therapy. And that's why I started training in somatic experiencing. And I thought I need a better name. And so I thought holistic life navigation, that's how I found it out in 2016.

SPEAKER_00

Ah, I love the backstory. I didn't know the backstory. Um, and also nutritional counseling. Wow, I didn't I didn't realize that was a thing either. How did you get into that? I'm curious how you landed there.

SPEAKER_02

So we have to go back to 2005. Okay, so I'm in my senior year of high school and I'm taking college-level psychology courses because I just knew I want to be a psychologist. And so I wanted to graduate early with my psychology degree. So I started taking college courses while finishing my senior year because I I was able to do that overworking, and my my flight response was doing me well. And so while I was studying, then you know, senior year was over, I went into full-time college mode. And while I was studying, I started learning about the DSM. And I just wasn't uh driving with it. It felt kind of incongruent with the way I see life because there wasn't there weren't really many questions about what someone go through.

SPEAKER_01

Nuance.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's no nuance. It was this is your behavior, this is your identity, here's a medication or a therapy model. I thought, why aren't we asking people what they eat or if they got in an argument that day? Or do they feel that way when they go to the beach? You know, I'm so curious about environment and food. I just so happened to be working at a health food store right across the street from my college to pay for bills. And while working there, I discovered all these incredible books about herbs and whole foods and natural supplements, and my own condition started reversing. And so I started teaching some of the customers who came in, and their condition started reversing. And one guy I remember got off his medication. Uh, he was on SSRIs for depression. Wow. And he was able to get off of it because he had such a transformation in his brain chemistry. And I realized in three months, I unintentionally helped someone get off their medication, and I'm going to school for four to six years to learn something that I don't even believe in. I'm just gonna leave and do nutrition. So for the next four years, I just self-studied and taught wherever I could. I mean, I I worked the most uh insane jobs. I was I worked at a corner store, I worked in a macaroni and cheese stand, I worked at wellness centers, yoga centers, I worked wherever I could and just taught from there. So I learned so much for you know from the streets, especially in New York City. And then I thought, okay, I'm gonna train for two years and get a certificate in nutritional counseling so I can actually go into the workforce with this.

SPEAKER_00

This is amazing. I didn't know all this about you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I had the backdoor approach into this world. You know, I didn't even know there was such a thing as this. I never thought of working with nutrition. It just kind of came for me and I followed.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I love that it's so experiential too, which I don't even us as you know, somatic experiencing practitioners. I just I love that you were learning out in the streets. Did it feel personal for you? Like you saw it working in your own life?

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. I I come from a family that's very poor and very sick. And so people in their 40s, 50s would be in the medical system. And then my grandmothers, I mean, by the time they were in their 60s, they were in nursing homes. So it was really normalized in my culture growing up. I grew up in central Pennsylvania. It was very normalized that at a certain age you just get sick and we don't know why. And it's just what's going to happen as part of getting older, and you just have to hope for the best. So I was really terrified, and I had a ton of trauma as a child. And the way I responded to that trauma, or the way I tried to remediate the pain coming up from it, was to eat. And so I ate tons and tons and tons of food. I was became a binge eater, as we call it, for years. That binge eating, especially on processed foods, turned into actual illness. So I was 50 pounds overweight, I had high cholesterol, I had cystic acne, I had such severe asthma that I was put on a nebulizer, which is this machine that pumps steroids into your lungs twice a day just so you can breathe. I was on medication, I was just, and I was 13 years old, you know, so I was really chronically ill at such a young age. And so it was normal around me. I was already getting initiated into illness. I didn't know there was a way out. And then when I started just shifting a couple things, simple things. Like I remember one of the first things was barley grass. It's this green powder supplement. And I thought, okay, I'll try this in the morning. And my acne started going away. And then I shifted some things, the kind of dairy I would eat, and my asthma went away. And I was fascinated. I didn't know the food could actually heal your body.

SPEAKER_00

It's like medicine.

SPEAKER_02

It was it's a true medicine. So when I saw my own health conditions that I was told would never go away, they would just have to be remediated with medication. Complete, not just, you know, going, you know, reducing in symptoms, but completely disappearing. I couldn't stop telling everybody. So I'd meet someone that had asthma and I would say, I had asthma my whole life, and this is what got it, you know, got me off my inhaler. And they would try. They would say, Luis, I'm off my inhaler. And so it was very service-oriented. It didn't feel like a career, it didn't feel like a job. And that's really important to me because I think these kind of modern models of authority, whether it's with mental health or physical health, where someone knows something about your body you don't, it just didn't resonate for me. I wanted this to be free and accessible. So I came from a blue-collar family. I worked blue-collar jobs, and living in the city for a while, I literally people would come off the street who lived on the street to the health food store where they could access me for free, and I would teach them. So I learned from thousands of people's bodies, you know, all these different ways to relate to food.

SPEAKER_00

I would assume, and you know, let me know how this lands with you, but I would assume there's also probably I don't know if the word is spirit, but like a spiritual component and recognizing that the natural world is such a healing remedy. You know, and absolutely. Um Yeah. I'm curious how your family, if you're open to sharing that, like have they followed a similar path?

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. I would say my parents, more than anyone in my family, my parents really got curious. And you know, my mother was diagnosed with lupus. It's been a remission for 30, 40 years. Wow. At this point, okay. Which is longer than I've been practicing. So she already had some instincts, but then as she got into my work and learning from me, she has no symptoms, she's completely symptom-free. And my father, I mean, he's reversed his heart disease, he's reversed diabetes, he's lost 50 pounds, he's lowered his cholesterol. You know, I've seen him actually cancel surgeries that are scheduled because he has learned this this way of life too. And you said spiritual, I couldn't agree more. It feels extremely spiritual for me. We have this word that your audience knows, especially from you, call co-regulation. It's this term in somatic experiencing with two different beings that essentially find safety or ease with each other. I see food as a direct connection to land, which is a being. So food to me is a potential co-regulator or a potential co-disregulator. So food to me is very animistic. It's alive, it's relational. I see it as a being more than just a product.

SPEAKER_00

I just posted something on Instagram today of me hugging a redwood tree and crying.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Looking back now, I

How Food And Culture Are Intertwined

SPEAKER_00

mean, I think if I went back now, I'd have a different experience. But when I was in my early 20s, I went and I stayed at my grandmother's the ashram that she would visit in India. And I went there for two weeks and I was their their guest. And so much of the service that they gave there, um, you know, of serving the people who were there to to heal and to connect with their land and their wonderful offerings of medicine, so much of it was the food that we were eating. And I wish, because I I know a little bit about food now, and I came out of disordered eating in my mid-20s. But what actually helped me to heal that was the relationship I had to food and learning about how food can be medicine in some ways. But I'm curious, you said yoga centers and stuff. Did that and even here, like in New York, how have you found that that has maybe informed some of your work? How different cultures use food in different ways? Do you see that showing up?

SPEAKER_02

I do. I mean, I think food is culture. And when I think of lineage, when I think of uh especially indigenous lineage, and when any of us look into our ancestors, our history, if if you don't know your ancestors, you know, because of whatever diaspora you might be from, it's it's interesting to learn that the relationship to land, the relationship to healing, the relationship to each other and community focused around food because food was a local being. So it was part of how you related to land and each other. And it it's one thing that it's kind of a big spiritual philosophy of this book and this work I do around food therapy is I think a lot of our illness, uh mental and physical, comes from a ruptured relationship with food. Because if it's a ruptured food relationship, it's a ruptured land relationship, which is a cultural rupture. So I think there's a collective rupture we're in with food that the focus is on health. People rightfully so. Yet I'm trying to show people, but it also ruptures your nervous system day to day based on what you're eating.

SPEAKER_00

So you have a book coming out. Can you give us a little summary about the book?

SPEAKER_02

Yes. So the book is called Food Therapy and comes out on April 28th. Anyone listening now who pre-orders it gets a free two-month book club with me. And the I would say if there was one thing I wanted to highlight about this book, because there's uh three main parts, but there's one part I really wanted to highlight. It's about food-induced stress, which means we know that life is stressful, we know parenting is stressful, work, we we know all these environmental relational things create stress. Most people don't know that every few hours they're actually inducing a fight or flight response due to what they're eating. Not about how they feel about food, that's a whole other thing. But the actual food itself is turning into stress hormones. And that was my real light bulb moment when I started practicing and studying somatic experiencing. I realized this is incredible. The same hormone, adrenaline, that's responsible for panic attacks, insomnia, anxiety, what we call the fight or flight hormone, is also released when you eat certain processed foods. And I thought if we're working with people all the time in a holistic manner or we want to work more holistically, and we want to do somatics, why are we not talking about food? Food is arguably the most somatic experience we have. We don't have to think about it. We put it into our body, which is extremely personal and intimate. The body takes over from there, it processes it. And some foods process and create stress, some foods process and create peace and actually more capacity, which makes therapy more effective, but actually allows you to enjoy life more.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Okay. Oh man. If you have a course or something, I want to take it. Um I do.

SPEAKER_02

It's coming up in July.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Why are we not asking those questions? I guess, yeah. Do we know why we're not asking those questions?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I would actually ask you that as well first. What what how have you lived your life? What have you noticed? How have you experienced not even considering how food is affecting your stress response? I have my own answer, but I'm curious what yours is.

SPEAKER_00

It's interesting because I am the type of person who I have like an awe and reverence for food, but where food comes from for me is actually pretty important. I actually started the a farm co-op in our neighborhood. It was a raw dairy farm, but they also had meat and stuff like that too, and produce that they they grew. And it was a third-generation small family farm. And so I would take my new baby Noah and we would drive, we'd get orders from the neighborhood, and we'd drive up with our huge cooler an hour north into Gainesville, so beautiful. We'd drive to Gainesville, Texas, and we'd gather food for the community and bring it back. But that was a long time ago, and there's no excuse for it. I think that I've just been like, well, life's gotten busy, you know. And so although I like to think that I eat healthy because I buy organic from Whole Foods and I try not to eat out as much. And even when I got on my flight here to New York yesterday from Texas, I brought a salad and you know, I try to eat from home as much as I can. But I do know that I'm not taking time to savor my food, to enjoy my food, to show appreciation for my food. It's kind of like I just look at it as sustenance and and fuel.

SPEAKER_02

So you just does that make sense? So that's the couple pieces I'm gonna pull from that, and this was my experience as well. I think the number one reason why we don't think of food in this specifically this nervous system stress way, is because we've been so conditioned to think about it as health. And there's a distinct difference in my book between eating for health and eating for peace. And I want to explain that a little bit. So when we think about health, we think about long-term goals. So we think, I want to lose weight, or I want to have nice skin, or I want to age beautifully, right? These are future ideas. Whenever we're oriented toward a future idea, we're disoriented from where we are right now. So it's not an embodied experience. It's I'm eating this because down the line is going to help me. What's so brilliant about understanding food through a nervous system perspective is your food affects your nervous system 30 minutes after eating it. And it cycles every three to four hours based on your glucose levels. So every four hours, you literally have this opportunity to have an entirely new mind. Wow. An entirely new nervous system, new adrenals every four hours because of your glucose and higher glucose affects your adrenals and your fight or flight response.

SPEAKER_00

For someone who doesn't know, let's just assume someone doesn't know what glucose is and the um intention behind glucose. Could you explain that's a really big yeah, thanks for saying that.

SPEAKER_02

So glucose is uh just a simple term for blood sugar. It's the sugar that our food turns into in the intestine and then goes into our bloodstream. We need glucose.

How Nutrition Impacts The Nervous System

SPEAKER_02

The body runs off of glucose. Think of glucose as fuel. What's fascinating about it is you only need around one to teaspoons in your entire bloodstream to function adequately. So if you think of uh any dessert or any food that turns into sugar, you have one or two teaspoons worth of the threshold before it puts you over. Over means you get what we call a glucose spike. This has nothing to do with having diabetes. When we think of blood sugar, we immediately think diabetes or prediabetes. This is every human being goes through this. So you have a glucose spike. Whenever you have a glucose spike, you will have a fight or flight response. It's part of the the subsequent chain reaction in the body, the biochemistry. And this is why it's so important because if you're talking about health, yes, you can drink uh fruit juice and you're getting a ton of vitamins and nutrients and antioxidants. So we would call that healthy. Or you could have sushi. We call this healthy. These foods are glucose spiking superheroes when it comes to your or villains perhaps, but they spike your glucose considerably, which means within an hour, an hour and a half, you're going to have your fight or flight response kick in. And that affects how you sleep that night, it affects how you parent, it affects how you experience yourself in the world because our brain changes when we have more adrenaline. So thinking about food through this lens literally means each meal becomes an opportunity to stress me out or bring me peace right now for the next four hours instead of health, which is this concept about the future. So we're not even connecting to the food in this moment.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's like it either becomes an opportunity or it becomes opposition in your your daily life.

SPEAKER_01

That's right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So I think lately I have been looking at food more, or I've been treating food or relating to food more as health. How much protein can I get? Because I worked out today and I need I need muscle gains or I need to function. Or I'm still nursing after almost six years. So I got to make sure I have this.

SPEAKER_02

You know, and what's really interesting about that, I just want to say again, you can achieve certain health outcomes while stressing out your nervous system. So you can intermittent fast, you can eat organic raw food, you can have, like I said, fruit juices. There's certain things you can be eating that will result in weight loss, will result in skin health. These certain markers we categorize health. What fascinates me is we think about this again conceptually from the mind, but am I feeling rested? Am I feeling supported through the day? How do I sleep? You know, what's the actual felt sense of my food? This is where the somatic experience is so important. Can I track how this body feels after I eat these certain meals? Or am I dissociated from how this body feels because my mind says I need more protein for muscles? Okay, maybe you do. But how do you go about getting that in a way that settles your body or stresses out your body? That's what I'm curious about.

SPEAKER_00

So for those who

The 3 Types Of Foods: Stimulants, Depressants And Balancers

SPEAKER_00

are listening now and they're like, wow, this is a really big topic. Like, where do I even start besides go get the book, please? What would you say are some first steps for people who are maybe either one new to somatics or two who are like, I know nothing about food. Like what foods are stress-inducing and what foods bring peace? Do they start with the food or do they start with the body? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02

It makes so much sense. Yeah. So in the book, I bring them into the body first, and then we go into food. Body first. But what I what I like to plug.

SPEAKER_01

I didn't try that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Didn't try that. But what I find really important for this conversation for people watching and hearing this food-induced stress concept for the first time. I want to teach you and your listeners about the three categories I put food into. Because this is the most instinctive way to start doing this practice. There are three categories: stimulants, depressants, and balancers. Now, everyone hearing this can already decide as I say this, right? Because a stimulant is something you would eat or drink to wake up. A depressant is something you would eat or drink to fall asleep. A balancer is something that doesn't put you to sleep, doesn't wake you up, it keeps you right where you are, supports you in what you're experiencing now. So if anyone right I'll ask you right now, the name for you, and there's no right or wrong here. If you think of waking up and you're tired, what's something that stimulates you personally that you've experienced?

SPEAKER_00

Well, the first thing that I go to every morning is I grab my magic mind.

SPEAKER_02

What's magic mind?

SPEAKER_00

Magic mind is like one of these little green shots of like Ashwagandha, and um oh man, it has lots of things in it. I've been taking it for over five years, so I should know more than things.

SPEAKER_01

I should know more.

SPEAKER_00

There you go. Yeah, I should know more by now. I take my little magic mind shot to wake me up, and then I make coffee.

SPEAKER_02

Perfect. So coffee is one of the top stimulants, right? So the the top three stimulants I talk about, caffeine in general, coffee's part of that, theobromine, which is from chocolate, and sugar. These are our top three stimulants because uh any food that I categorize as a stimulant, there's a bunch in the book, but these are the top three. These are foods that either rapidly turn into glucose, so you have a spike, which ends with the adrenal response, or foods that directly impact the central nervous system or directly stimulate the adrenals. So these foods stimulate your body into activation. They hyper-arouse the system, they induce fight or flight. And the fight or flight response is brilliant for people that are in freeze or overwhelm or shutdown, or for whatever reason, dependent on the biochemistry we get from these stimulants, like more dopamine, more serotonin, these kind of things. So, someone who wakes up and they're completely exhausted or they're dissociated, a lot of functional freeze, you'll see this. Coffee is one of the first things we reach for because the fight or flight pushes us, it helps us mobilize. So essentially it's a really great boundary breaker because exhaustion is a boundary. And so we've learned to stimulate through that. Now, depressants, these are the foods that exhaust us. This is something you think of when you think of comfort food. When you think of I'm depressed, I'm overwhelmed, I just need to eat something to lower me, to kind of hold me. What what's one of your go-tos or has been?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, first thing would be like just carbi, carb type, you know, pizza, oh yeah, red pizza's a good chips. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You named it. So see how instinctive it is? Yeah. You don't have to know anything about nutrition or nutrients because there's a felt sense. There's a oh, when I eat this, it makes me tired.

SPEAKER_00

And it makes me full. Yeah, it makes me full, then makes me tired. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So this is the cool chemistry, the biology behind these foods. Let's start with pizza. Well, one of my favorite depressants, personally, and then and then french fries or potato chips. When you eat a depressant, the reason why it's so successful depressing your system is because of this fancy term postprangial blood flow. Postprangial means after eating. So all it means is a shift in blood flow after you eat. Blood leaves the brain for the stomach. The heavier the food, the more concentrated and rich it is in carbohydrates, especially and fats. That's why pizza is a perfect example. Potato chips, right? The more concentrated it is, the more blood flow has to leave to digest it. When you have anxiety, you have more blood flow to the brain. That's one thing adrenaline does. So as this is coming down, you feel yourself coming down. You get to actually mimic a state of being grounded. You feel centered. You are fatiguing your system and redirecting blood flow to suppress an anxiety response. This is why we late night binge, because we're so activated. It's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00

And we don't know how to come down.

SPEAKER_02

Correct.

SPEAKER_00

How to rest, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Correct. And what's interesting about depressants, you know, stimulants, they stimulate. Depressants initially exhaust, then stimulate. So they do both. And this is why one of the most uh common reasons people wake up in the middle of the night with a nightmare or a dry mouth, a really hot and kind of racy heart is because they ate a depressant to fall asleep. Three to five hours into sleep, they have an adrenal response, they have a fight or flight response because of then how it stimulates us and it wakes us up with anxiety. We have disrupted sleep, we wake up exhausted, and guess what we need? A stimulant. And then we're activated by the stimulant, and then we need a depress. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It kind of reminds me of like the burnout cycle or the burnout loop in the nervous system. It's like stimulate, depress, stimulate, depress, stimulate, depress to move back and forth between that shutdown response and then back up into fight or flight. Now we're shutting down. And the balancer, you said the third was the balancer, right?

SPEAKER_02

These are the boring foods. Okay. So think about that. You name for me a food that if you were really overwhelmed or devastated would be the worst thing for someone to serve you. Like get it away from me. What would it be?

SPEAKER_00

Uh sweet potatoes, like a side of like, yeah, just roasted sweet potatoes.

SPEAKER_02

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00

Just a side of roasted vegetables, which I like, but I wouldn't be craving. I used to crave those back in the day, but that's one of the balancers.

SPEAKER_02

So the three main balancers are beans, protein, animal protein in particular, and vegetables.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And why these are balancers is because they don't stimulate your body the same way these depressants and stimulants do. They can, depending on how they're cooked and refined. I go into that in the book. But generally speaking, they don't have that same response. So they don't change your biochemistry that quickly. They're really subtle. That's why I always say if you had a really hard day of work or you're grieving or you had a huge uh fight with somebody, no one runs home and says, I'm going to steam broccoli and have salmon. It's like the last thing you do.

SPEAKER_00

That's what I had for lunch was salmon with roasted carrots.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so you're pre-gaming for this discussion. But very rarely will someone do that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Because it grounds you into where you are. And just like we know, somatics was essentially developed in the response of distracting yourself from your body. You're trying to come in. Balancers pull you into your body, they give you what I call food sobriety, where you don't make the same dopamine, you don't have the huge serotonin bursts. It's very subtle. And when you're looking to have an immediate shift in your physiology because you're depressed, coffee's going to do that. Beans and chicken are not. They're going to stabilize you, but you're going to feel where you are. You're not going to be taken from yourself. So I start with these three categories because just like you nailed it, everyone listening will nail it because it's so human and instinctive.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Yeah, it does feel really instinctive. I'm I'm even thinking now, I would say my lunches are my biggest meal of the day. And they're very stabilizing. It's usually some kind of green or lettuce or arugula with rice. I like bowls. And I'll add some kind of protein with some veggies mixed in. Um, but yeah, I have a lot of stimulants throughout the day. They just keep stacking and stacking.

SPEAKER_02

And the the the thing I'll just say out loud before we go on is I like people just to be able to identify those. And then once you do, I I speak about this in the book, I call it becoming the conscious alchemist. Because it's not about stimulants, depressants being bad. So this isn't a good or bad, healthy, unhealthy. This is it stimulates me, it balances me, or it depresses me. And so you use your body sensations and your instincts to learn as you eat something, what is it doing? And then you get to choose does a stimulant support me right now? Will eating a depressant support me for the day? And you get to make a choice. That's all it comes down to.

SPEAKER_00

I love that. So it's like just take it as information first and then use it to create more intuition for yourself when you're moving forward.

SPEAKER_02

And that's why diet doesn't create intuition. Diet gives you a guideline, which I have a protocol for people to try. I have guidelines, but diet gives you a rigid thing that someone else designed for your body. When you actually play with this, and just how you were doing now in your mind, you went through your inventory. Okay, stimulant, stimulant, balancer, stimulant.

Somatic Practices For Tracking How The Food You Eat Makes You Feel

SPEAKER_02

That's what I want people to do because that will teach them instinctive eating.

SPEAKER_00

So can I ask, what's the format of the book? So I know it sounds like we start with the body, learning how to be with the body, the felt sense, and then coming into the food. For someone who's never been in their body before, or who doesn't know that language, the language of somatics or or feeling, um, what would you recommend for them?

SPEAKER_02

Oh, yeah. So I have three somatic practices I begin before we even go into food.

SPEAKER_00

Love it.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00

Good.

SPEAKER_02

Tracking the charge, finding the safety, moving through numbness. These are my top three. If I had to take anything, I call them my Swiss army knife of somatics. If I had to take anything to the wild with the jungle with me, isolated by myself on an island, it'd be these three practices.

SPEAKER_00

Can you say those again?

SPEAKER_02

Yep. Tracking the charge, finding the safety, moving through numbness. And I can do it right now. I mean, they take a minute.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Would you like to do that? I could do that. Yeah, that would be wonderful.

SPEAKER_02

So we can do it together. People listening can try it. Tracking the charge is really simple. You sit down or you stand or when you're walking, whatever the situation is, you just pause to notice where do I feel tension? Where do I feel constriction? Where do I feel pressure? The charge is just another word for activation. And I ask everyone who does it just to put their hand wherever they might feel a little bit. Like I have a slight amount of constriction being on camera right in my solar plexus. And I feel a little bit in my throat, but I always say to start with one place, and the job is just this, just to notice it and touch it for a moment. Because you can think about where you're constricted, but when you touch it, there's no thinking, there's just a physical being with it. So tracking the charge teaches people how to track tension, how to track pressure and activation, which is super important to be able to do deeper work in the book. Finding the safety is the opposite. You literally look around the room, again, wherever anyone is listening, you look around the room and you focus on one thing that is pleasant for you. I'm looking at a fake ficus tree, which is very pleas very pleasant for me. And I just feel instantly the back of my neck softens. I wonder where you see and how your body- Oh, you just yawned. So what were you looking at?

SPEAKER_00

I was looking at this uh Edison-looking light bulb up here. I just like the the glow of it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and you yawned. And I yawned. Where do you feel the softness when you look at it or the ease?

SPEAKER_00

Uh in my shoulders, and I also notice my feet came out. Uh I feel they kind of stretched out more my legs. The tension I'm holding in my belly, because I ate quickly a little bit of food between interviews, but I can hear my stomach gurgling. And so I'm trying to clench my stomach so it's not loud.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00

So I'm like, yeah, there is tension there.

SPEAKER_02

Um so this this is just for everyone listening, it seems so simple. If you do it along with us, you will see how profound this is. Because this gets you in touch with the parts of you that feel this is why it's called finding the safety, parts that feel safe, that feel settled, that realize there's no threat anywhere, and parts that are tense, that are preparing, that are bracing. Once you know these two parts you carry, then you have this ability to go into these food conversations. Because then you can drink coffee and then you can track how does it activate me? Or you can have beans with chicken and broccoli, and then you can notice where do I feel safety being created? So you get a sense of how are these foods actually creating safety in your body or creating more stress and activation. But first we have to do that. Moving through numbness, I won't go into right now, I'll just explain it. You use a pillow, you use pressure, and you find the places that are numb or hard to reach, which are just signs from the body that that place is at capacity with sensation. And so I have a couple little interventions to help you essentially let sensation emerge, and then you can go into tracking the charge, finding the safety.

SPEAKER_00

Beautiful. So it sounds like it's a book that is gonna have education and also the experiential work too.

SPEAKER_02

Every chapter ends with a somatic

Access, Education, and Embodiment

SPEAKER_02

practice based on what I taught to you.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, I love that. Okay. So one of the things I would love to talk about, I've seen some of your if you don't follow Whis on um Instagram, please do. Or on social media, just because I I love how honest and um I just love your mind. You just have you have a beautiful mind. Yeah, and you you share it so openly with all of us. But I'd love if you're open to it, to just having a conversation about like access, education, embodiment. You've said that like when it comes to food, the issue today isn't access as much as education and embodiment. Can you share like what you mean by that and just why information alone isn't enough?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So the general idea that I hear when I go into the world with these practices, this conversation, is people will say, What about access? Now, I developed a lot of this when I was living on food stamps. So I personally experienced poverty. I personally experienced living in very, very poor neighborhoods where the corner store was our grocery store. People don't realize people will shop with their food stamps at a corner store. You can get bread, you can get eggs, you can get milk, and like a bunch of tasty cakes, honey buns, and those are the kind of things we would get. When you have a sense of nutrition, when you are educated, when you read this book, and you just understand certain foods are going to stimulate my body, certain foods are not, you leave the quality conversation. Now that's a whole other one. I agree with quality. Access to quality foods, that's something we need to work on based on the class you're in and where you live. But you can have low-quality foods that will still not activate your nervous system. You can go to a corner store right now and buy a bottled water, a bag of nuts, and beef turkey, and your glucose will be so happy for the next five hours.

SPEAKER_00

That's what's in my bag right now. That's what's sitting over there on that table.

SPEAKER_02

There we go. So it for me, the privilege isn't access or money at this point, it's education. No one's educated on how to feel their food, how to track how food affects them, or to really know how it how it breaks down in their bodies. Because the people talking about it, they're either brilliant, like NASA-level biochemists, so it's so out of reach, right? Or it's really expensive wellness influencers that are saying you have to only have superfoods and organic. You don't. You can be on a super, and this is what I loved about when I was saying earlier, how I got into this work. I worked with people who are homeless. I mean, I saw people put this into action regardless of situation. That's what inspired me so much and made me think if we can learn just the basics here, anyone can apply this to themselves. So I really like people to know is it don't let yourself feel down because you can't afford organics, or you think you need to shop at a certain store or have a certain supplement or a certain blender. You just need to know which foods stimulate you, which ones don't. That will increase your capacity to experience your life, your stress, you know, whatever you're trying to get through.

SPEAKER_00

I've found that the simpler the food is for me, that the better I feel. Um I think sometimes we think eating well or healthy, you know, we're talking about healthy, you know, health conscious here, but um yeah, it has to be like the the fancy organic food that you buy at the nice grocery store. But um my breakfast every morning is just cottage cheese with blueberries, avocado, and a little bit of almond butter like mixed in.

SPEAKER_01

There you go.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and it just feels really it feels stabilizing. It's like this is something I know that will sustain me throughout the day and I'll feel good and it won't affect me one way or the other.

SPEAKER_02

Um the entire bowl is extremely balancing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And it reminds me of somatics, just that concept of how simple is better.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You know, um, sometimes we try and overcomplicate and confuse things, and maybe food is kind

Luis' Favorite Foods For Nervous System Balance

SPEAKER_00

of the the same way. I'm curious what your food habits look like if you're open to sharing. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I love sharing mine.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I'm always beans. Beans are the base of my diet. So beans are the where I start with everything. Each meal has some kind of bean with it because there's soluble fiber in beans. Soluble fiber actually lowers how much adrenaline is circulating in your bloodstream, which is incredible. So every time you eat beans, you're literally lowering your stress hormones and your sex hormones, even. And even eliminating microplastics is incredible how much will bind to the soy.

SPEAKER_00

Can I ask which which beans you'd recommend?

SPEAKER_02

Anything but soy.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And I say that because soy has phytoestrogens. Some people are really sensitive to that. It can change their estrogen levels. Um, if you're not, go for it. But I always say just anything but soy canned, make them yourself from dried beans. I don't care how you eat them, if you just eat them with each meal, sleazy beans. Um, green vegetables, because they're extremely stabilizing to the nervous system and blood sugar. Anything that stabilizes your glucose is stabilizing your nervous system. That's the the connection here for people to understand. If the glucose is out of balance, so is the nervous system. Um, some form of animal protein. I was vegan for a very long time, stopped working for me, and I learned okay, animal protein helps you synthesize neurotransmitters better than anything else. So it affects your brain chemistry directly through the day, but it also stabilizes your glucose like nothing else because it's zero carbohydrates. So I usually have a green, a bean, some kind of animal protein with each meal. But I let myself have fun too. If I'm walking by a pizza shop, I'm getting the pizza because I come from a history of binge eating and purging. So I would withhold or I would dive in. And it's because of this health-centered approach to food of domination and control of I either need to control my cravings and eat perfectly for health outcomes, or the food controls me. And now it feels more reciprocal, more consensual. It's like I'm gonna choose to eat a slice of pizza and love every moment of that pizza without any shame, and then I'm gonna have my beans and my kale. You know, I'm gonna bring it all together. So it's it's a diverse diet at this

Unpacking Our Emotional Relationship To Food

SPEAKER_02

point, but there's a baseline for my meals to keep me balanced.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I mean, the whole digesting piece and the emotional, I feel like, mirroring that happens when we talk about digesting emotions and metabolizing life. And I'm sure you probably see that play out in some of the food either practices that we have or eating practices as well.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you said it when you were talking about simple food. Simple literally means not exciting. And our food, our processed food, especially, is so exciting. It's literally excitatory. It stimulates your brain. So you have this massive dopamine response when you're eating.

SPEAKER_00

Is that why we take pictures of everything we eat?

SPEAKER_02

It's a part of it. But when you're eating these foods that are not stimulating, these simple balancers, they don't excite you, which means you have to feel how you actually feel. And so I like to always remind people: food, especially these processed foods, food helps us tolerate the intolerable. And when you're eating simple foods as the baseline, there's nothing distracting you sensationally from how you actually feel about your life. So that you're you're, let's say, gripping, your grip on a craving, right? Your body's desperation to eat something, or the massive loss if you imagine not eating something, that tells you how much you're medicating with food. Because you're having something in your life that's very hard to sit with.

SPEAKER_00

Wow. There's so much here. I remember what came up during the SE training was um I eat food so slow. Like so I'm always the last person at the table. I'm always the last person eating. I know I've shared my story with you. When my mom was pregnant with me, she was living on food stamps. Um, and she considered herself to be malnourished at the time. But I think back to those early months in the womb and the lack of access to food and how that plays out. Do you notice those patterns? I know in somatics we can work a lot with pre-verbal experiences. But do you see any of that show up in people's relationship to food?

SPEAKER_02

Oh, absolutely. I was just teaching about this earlier that if you think about the whole processed food industry is a collective trauma response to the Great Depression. These foods didn't exist before then. So there's this collective experience of a lot of immigrants who fled their countries for America because. Because of poverty, because of food insecurity. And now suddenly we're in this land of promise and there was no food. That's a massive collective rupture and trauma. So these food industries found a way to process food so um so greatly that they wouldn't go bad on a shelf. Essentially remove all the life force so they would just be a stable product.

SPEAKER_00

Life force.

SPEAKER_02

It's not a sinister thing. It's out of we need to survive, we're afraid we'll go without food. So when you see people that have a direct lineage to that, like your mother would, usually when they have money and access to food, they pack the cabinets because that feels like security in their body. And that gets passed down to you and you know your children, and it becomes a lineage trauma for sure.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, so fascinating. Well, I know that we are coming to a close here.

SPEAKER_02

And I guess if there's any last thing that you want to share about the book, again, I really think I want people to walk away from this conversation and the book with really understanding eating for stress and peace or eating for health. And when you realize that your food decisions every three to four hours are literally increasing your capacity for your life or decreasing it because of the stress it causes, every moment of your life becomes touched by this. Every moment. Your parenting, your work, your workouts, the way that the ability to travel, your perception, your curiosity, how you relate to people, so many things start to shift because your body is settled, and then this settled body is going into an activated world rather than this activated body from the food, then having to meet more activation. It's too overwhelming. So I just really want them to get this is not about health, even though health is an outcome from a balanced body. This is about balancing first and then letting health express itself.

SPEAKER_00

I love that. Absolutely beautiful. Well, I am so excited to read this. Thank you just so much for making time for the podcast and being here. So, how can people connect with you?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, the easiest way is to go to holisticlifenavigation.com. All the information is there. I have nutrition courses coming up. I have an ADHD course coming up. I have all these programs that bring in nutrition and somatics so people can easily dive in and see everything there.

SPEAKER_00

That's incredible. Well, thank you so much again for taking time to be with us. You guys, thank you for joining us this week on the podcast, and we will see you again soon. Thanks, Luis. Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for tuning into the Body First Healing podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love. I'll see you back here next week. And until then, be gentle with yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough. Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.