Episode 16 | The Truth About Emotional Eating, Trauma and Recovery

In this episode of The Trauma Educator Podcast, I’m joined by Luis Mojica, somatic educator and founder of Holistic Life Navigation, whose work sits at the intersection of nutrition, the nervous system, and trauma recovery.

Today is the publication of his new book, Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. 

In this conversation how food can become part of the healing process, not through restriction or control, but through relationship. We talk about why so many people with a history of trauma use food to self-soothe, and what the body is truly needing in those moments.

We also go into the role of shame and guilt in our relationship with food, how these patterns form, and how they can begin to shift when we bring in more compassion and somatic awareness. Luis offers a perspective that removes moral judgment from eating and instead looks at the underlying physiology and emotional needs.

We explore the nervous system mechanics behind cravings, and why abrupt, restrictive changes are rarely sustainable for people who have relied on these strategies for a long time. Instead, we look at what a more realistic and supportive approach can be, one that works with the body rather than against it.

If you’ve ever struggled with your relationship to food, or felt confused by what your body is asking for, this episode will give you a very different way of understanding it.

Food Therapy is available now. You can buy it here https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book  

Follow me on Instagram www.instagram.com/the.trauma.educator

Visit my website www.effiekli.com  

Get in touch with us www.effiekli.com/contact

And if you enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to follow, subscribe, rate, and share to help expand these trauma-informed conversations and bring them to more people around the world who need them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello, wonderful humans, and welcome to another episode of the Trauma Educator Podcast. Today I have with me Luis Mojica, who is a somatic educator certified in holistic nutrition, somatic experiencing, and life coaching. With years of experience working at the intersection of trauma and healing, Luis has become a sought-after teacher and speaker in his field. And today is a special day for him. And that's why he's on the podcast. Because today his book, Food Therapy, is published. I'm excited to talk about this topic because I've personally read the book and I found it incredible. First, I would say it's the only book I know of that brings together the topics of nutrition, somatics, and trauma recovery in just one book. And second, it's a very practical read, and you can use simple guidance advice from Luis as presenting the book to actively support your nervous system and your recovery journey. Welcome, Luis. Thank you for joining me today.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

So good to be with you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Now let's start with your journey. And what prompted you from your personal life and your professional expertise to write this book specifically about food and nervous system and trauma.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Yeah, so um, you know, I was born into an intersex body, and that's when your body develops with ambiguous hormones, ambiguous genitalia for some people, ambiguous sex characteristics. And mine was a hormone imbalance where my body makes more estrogen than testosterone. So as I was developing, my body, I developed breasts, I developed hips, I had these male and female characteristics, and it it attracted a lot of unwanted attention, as you can imagine. And so I experienced lots of um sexual assault, bullying, harassment. And I just went in this downward spiral after that. This was in middle school, of deep, deep depression and self-hatred and devastation and insomnia. The only thing that would help me feel better was eating a lot of food. So I developed a binge eating disorder, or what I call a binge eating pattern. And that's really was my medicine that got me through the next decade of my life because I didn't know how to be with the pain of all my experiences. So fast forward, I studied psychology, dropped out, went into nutrition, then studied somatic psychology almost a decade after being a nutritionist in private practice. And I was amazed, you know, to discover how food can actually be this really powerful resource for nervous system regulation. And when you bring that in along with somatic psychology, which is all about nervous system regulation, you have these two profound modalities that can help people recover from stress and trauma.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Thank you for sharing a part of your story. I appreciate it. And uh before we continue our conversation, I would love for you, in your own words, to describe what healing looks like and means to you because I feel the way we approach healing sometimes is different depending on our journey, depending on our background. And I would love people to hear your view, what this looks like, because I think it will set a good foundation for our conversation.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Yeah, great question. For me, healing is how I stay connected to myself throughout anything. So my ability to hold depression, my ability to hold joy, not abandoning myself through any of it. It used to look like those things being gone. I would think if I'm not sad, I'm healed, but it's actually can I be okay with myself while I'm sad? That that's what healing means to me now.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Thank you for saying that, because I think sometimes, and of course, anyone can define healing in their own ways, depending on different things and their needs and their values. But I feel um the way you talk about healing and the way you just described it can be quite grounded and liberating because sometimes I think, especially coming from a background of trauma and we are seeking relief, we of course want it, and we want the pain to stop and the discomfort to stop. Sometimes we lose sight of exactly what healing looks like and what it means. And sometimes we are thinking and envisioning this kind of perfect state of well-being, which is not very realistic. So thank you for saying that. Now, I would like to ask you, because in your book you mentioned that uh food has this ability to change our biochemistry, and I would say, as a trauma and somatic practitioner myself, and working especially with people who've experienced complex trauma, almost every person I've worked with, at least at some point in their lives, used food to self-soothe. And I would like to ask you from your experience, what are we really in need of when we do this? So when we use food to self-soothe, are we trying to use food to replace something else that we do not have access at that point?

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Yeah. So there's two ways I break this down in the book. One way is through three ways I categorize foods, and another way is through understanding how to work with cravings. So the first are the food categories. And these are the three ways I categorize foods as stimulants, depressants, and balancers. And this is a really easy approach for most people because you don't have to study nutrition. You can feel into your body. Most people listening, if I ask them, what would you eat or drink or do to wake up? If you are exhausted, what would push you through? They'll have answers. Those are their stimulants. If I ask people, if you're completely overwhelmed, have a lot of anxiety, and you just want to comfort and settle down, they'll have answers for their depressants. You know, usually the stimulants tend to be sugar and chocolate and caffeine and skipping meals. And the depressants are the fried foods, the heavy foods, really processed cheese, eating a lot overeating. So we find these ways subconsciously to stimulate and depress our system based on what we're experiencing. And then there's the balancing foods. They don't really do that, they support you to feel where you are. So if you're depressed, you're going through a breakup, you're grieving somebody, you tend to go toward the depressants usually to comfort yourself. But if you had a balancer, if you had a plate of beans and salmon and you know, steamed broccoli, that you wouldn't think of that as a comforting meal for grief. It would just nourish you, but it wouldn't take away the way you were feeling. So we start with food unbeknownst to us. I call it unconscious alchemy. We start by being led to these foods because of the state. So if I have a lot of activation, I'm really anxious, heightened, my body is gonna lead me toward the depressants to try to counterbalance that. Or if I'm really depressed and low and fatigued, I'm gonna be led to this the stimulant. So I call this seesaw regulation. We go all through the day stimulating, depressing. Again, unbeknownst to us, most of us are consciously saying, I like chips, or I'm having a hankering for chocolate, but it's not I. It's there's actually a place in me that's propelling me toward that. So I'll stop there for now.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Yeah, so because you're giving me so much information and I want people to have the time to absorb it because it's so useful. And also I want to say something um important is that uh your advice that you're giving in the book felt very simple to me, in the sense that I don't think that you need to make such huge, complicated changes in your life and especially fast in order to see some change over time and support your nervous system. And I'm saying this because uh people who maybe are not um in any way experts in nutrition or they are not used to reading about nutrition, they might feel a little bit overwhelmed, thinking, oh my god, what does this look like? Um, but I want really to reassure people that this was a very easy-to-read book to follow and um very practical as well. So going back to what you just shared, so let's use an example so people can understand better. Let's say that I every night or every now and then in the evening before I sleep, I have the habit of eating a few chocolate biscuits. I'm not hungry, but my body is craving them. Can you explain what is happening in terms of the mechanics of the nervous system at that point? And what are the biscuits giving me?

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Absolutely. So, this is what I mean when I say stimulants, depressants. So the biscuits are interesting. And any American listeners, we call these cookies, but the biscuits are interesting because you have a blend. You have a blend of fat and sugar and flour. So they initially, if you're eating a bunch of these, if you're eating a bunch of biscuits, you're gonna have this depressant effect first. The depressant effect comes when you overeat something or you eat something very dense, very heavy. And what creates that effect, and when I say depressant, I mean literally you feel like the energy is coming down into your stomach where the food is, kind of temporarily grounding you and slowing you down, even slowing your thoughts down. There's this phenomenon called postprandal blood flow. And it's when the blood in your brain, some of it starts getting redirected down to your stomach to digest. So, in that moment of redirecting the blood flow to your gut, you actually lower your anxiety because a high amount of blood pressure in the brain creates that anxious feeling and makes our thoughts go really fast and spiral. So the postprangial blood flow is this depressant effect from eating a bunch of foods like these biscuits. Now, what's also really interesting about most processed food is these biscuits also pretty quickly turn into glucose, which is the sugar in our blood. Any food that turns into glucose very quickly will then stimulate an adrenal response. So the same fight or flight response you have in a car accident or outrunning a predator is the same thing happening in your body when you're eating something that makes your blood sugar spike. So initially you're feeling this slow comfort and this slowing down, but then an hour to two hours later, you're actually gonna have a subsequent fight or flight response. You're gonna have an increase in stress hormones, which usually then causes you to go back to the biscuits to try to quell that. And then you're in this tug of war between temporarily soothing yourself and then subsequentially stressing yourself out more.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Yes. And now if I do this, if I have this habit, in the moment, is there anything that I can do before we talk about, let's say, the overall approach and maybe the big picture of that? Is there anything I can do in the moment that will gradually help me to change this habit? Something that I need to pay attention to that I might not be aware of that is happening even.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Yes. So this is what I teach in one of the chapters about cravings. And there's a whole practice, the roots of your food cravings or food habits. And the practice is really about interrupting. So it's not about eliminating the biscuits. Diet, culture, and the way I was even trained as a nutritionist, it would be eliminate. It would be stop eating those, right? How often does that work for anybody? It doesn't really work long term because it's not you that wants them. There's a place inside of you, a state that's hard to be with, and eating those temporarily transforms that state. So it's the clenching in your jaw, it's the pressure in your solar plexus, it's the tension in your hips. That's what's actually calling out for this. So the food behavior is just showing you that there's something going on internally that you're not even aware of, you can't even feel yet. So when you interrupt the craving, when you notice, I want the biscuits, and then you pause, and the practice I have in the book has you pause, feel the part of you that delights in it when you imagine eating them, but also feel the part that comes up if you imagine not having them. So what starts to emerge when you don't impulsively eat them, when you even give it five minutes, that state that emerges, that's the gold. It's not about the cookies or biscuits, it's that state. And what people end up finding is oh my gosh, there's grief there. There's frustration with someone I have to have a conversation with, there's exhaustion, I just need a nap. All these unmet needs start emerging. And this is why I say cravings are a compass for unmet needs. Because they point you toward your nutritional, your emotional, and your relational needs. And in this case, I'm giving you an example of emotional needs that these biscuits will meet temporarily. And I can't even say meet. What they'll do is they'll soften the energy, the activation coming up. They don't ever meet the need, they just soften it. So letting it come up and witnessing it lets you know what you're holding and what you're needing. Then from there, you can choose to meet that need in some way, or you can go have the biscuits. But people are learning to at least eat them with a little more consciousness and more embodiment instead of impulsively going into it.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

In terms of the soothing effect that food can have on us temporarily, and especially the way you describe it, that it's not that the need is not there anymore, it gets softened. So this higher activation that is happening and we're not very conscious of becomes more tolerable in the moment, but only for so long. Now, have you seen in your experience a link between our need to self-soothe, especially when we do this repeatedly, with any past trauma around attachment and maybe our soothing needs and our human needs not being met as we are growing up?

SPEAKER_02 14:37

Oh, absolutely. So I have a there's an example in the book, and this is common, I find. And in this example, there was a woman I was working with, and she had this exact scenario where every night on the way home from work while she was driving, all she craved was ice cream. And she wanted to lose weight, she was prediabetic, she had all these health concerns, yet she couldn't stop herself from eating this ice cream. So we did this exact practice. We paused, we imagined eating it, because the the best thing about the practice is you don't have to wait for the craving. You can just imagine it, and all the information comes up in your body. It's the beauty of somatics. So we imagined her eating it and we felt the sensations, we sat with them a little bit, and what emerged was her father. And she realized, oh my gosh, my father and I used to go out for ice cream. He's been dead for years. I had no idea that eating this ice cream was invoking his memory. I was feeling the comfort of him, I was feeling my attachment to him. He was the one that made everything better. He made me feel safe. So the ice cream was reminding her body of the safety her father offered her. And that was an attachment need and an attachment rupture. That's what grief is. Your secure attachment, your love for somebody is ruptured because they're gone for some reason. And the ice cream kind of bridged that for her. So if I was speaking to her from a traditional nutritionist standpoint, it would be purely analytical. It would be, well, ice cream is high in calories and fat and sugar. You're eating it at night. We need to stop eating ice cream. For her, being told to stop eating ice cream, her body, I should say, it was like telling her body, stop communicating with your father. You know, that's how deep this stuff is. So when she got that, she started realizing, oh, there's also a park we used to love to walk around together. I can go there. Oh, this song, he loved the song. I can put this song in and dance with myself. I can look at his picture and talk to him. All these amazing ways she could connect to her father that weren't just limited to ice cream. And that's what people get from this.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Such a potent story. Thank you for illustrating this. Now, something that comes to mind in my own experience is that I personally don't, let's say, use food as much for self-soothing. Not that I don't have other strategies to do that. Just in case I misunderstood, because that's not the case. Uh, it's just my food is not my go-to, let's say, straight away. But of course I use food at some point. And I remember specifically that something that I would go to sometimes was chocolate. And what I noticed is I would go there when I would feel low, when I would feel this sense of emptiness, this sense of holelness, not knowing what to do with myself, as if the feeling was as if I was just alone on earth. And um obviously that was a very hard feeling at the time. I wasn't trained in somatics, maybe I never even had therapy, but I remember I noticed because I became aware of the impulse, and I noticed that I was running away from that feeling, which of course was very normal because that reminded me certain moments of grief in my childhood when I had lost my mother very early. And the chocolate in the moment helped, but of course, it didn't take the grief away, and I had eventually to learn to create capacity in my nervous system to sit with grief. So your story really brought this up for me.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Can I can I share the chocolate story from the book? Because this is I I love that you bring in chocolate. It's such a good example. So, one reason it's a good example is you were saying I don't soothe with food. A lot of people will say this to me. Let's say I don't have a food thing, I don't really eat for comfort. Some people don't eat for comfort, but they do eat for stimulus. So they might not think of I don't sit with a bag of chips, that's not what I do. But you might wake up and without your coffee, you can't get through the day, right? Or you don't eat until lunchtime because if you eat, it will slow you down. Not you in particular, but the general you. So for people to understand, they might not be comforting the way we think, like as a binge eater, like I was, but they may be using food still to power through something they have very low capacity for. So chocolate's one of those things. And this was actually my light bulb moment. It was nearly 10 years ago. I had three different women come into my private practice in the same week. They didn't know each other. And they said to me, you know, I have prediabetes, I'm gaining weight, inflammation, all that. I need help. And I said, okay, do a food journal, come back next week, I'll look at it. They come back, and every day, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m., they would eat tons of chocolate. Not just like a, you know, a little bit, like tons. And I'm saying, that's interesting. What happens at 4 p.m.? Each woman said, That's when my husband gets home from work. And I thought, that's interesting. So your husband comes home, it triggers you to eat all this chocolate. What would happen if you stopped eating chocolate? I would have to get a divorce. All three women said this. They didn't know each other, it was all different days. And I thought, this is interesting. And I started realizing in that moment, food helps us tolerate the intolerable. And that's your story with the grief as well. Their husband's presence reminded them of not being attuned to, not feeling loved, being with someone, but feeling completely separate and alone. And chocolate is a heart stimulant. The caffeine source of chocolate is called theobromine, and caffeine from coffee stimulates your brain. Theobromine stimulates your heart. So they were literally turning on their hearts with the chocolate because their heart was so depressed with their husband. That blew my mind. And that's what helped me start to understand this unconscious alchemy piece. Without even knowing a thing about nutrition or biochemistry, we are led to these foods to help us tolerate what's just intolerable in our lives.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Wow. I think maybe some divorces might be filed after people hear you.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

Well, so if one was out of those three women, the only woman that stopped eating chocolate three months later filed for divorce.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. It makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Now don't come for me, man. Don't come for me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Um, so you uh mentioned breakfast at some point in your book, and uh I have a question to ask. So I'm the type of person who when I wake up in the morning, I have to eat as soon as possible. I need to eat as soon as possible, otherwise I notice that I start feeling dizzy, I become irritable, I can't function properly. However, I know people in my environment who wake up in the morning and takes them three or four hours until they eat their first meal and they seem to be functioning fine. So, in your experience, can you tell me what is happening in those cases?

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Oh, yeah. So, this this all comes down to blood sugar for most of us. So when you wake up and very quickly you must eat, or else, like you said, I'm dizzy, I'm irritable. Dizzy and irritable is how your brain is telling you that you have low glucose and glucose. Fuels your brain. So whenever you eat a carbohydrate, uh rice, beans, fruits, uh uh sweet, sweet potatoes, root vegetables, any kind of carb, it's turning into glucose. Each one turns into glucose more quickly than another. That glucose fuels your cells and your muscles in your brain. Your brain runs on it. So that when you have that feeling where you can't really think straight and everything, your vision feels like it's even narrowing, and you just kind of scream if someone looks at you the wrong way. That's because your glucose is low and it's actually causing you to have an adrenal response. So this is what I said earlier about glucose spiking, will do that. The reason that happens is because when it spikes, you then will have a dip. So anytime you have a glucose dip, you will have an adrenal response, a fight or flight. So you are waking up in the morning, like many people, I'm assuming, like I can't know unless I saw your chart, but you're waking up in the morning probably in a low glucose state. Some people burn through glucose while they sleep, others don't. So they wake up in a lower glucose state, which means they wake up with more stress hormones. What interrupts that is eating. When you eat some food, you're you're now supplying your body nourishment and glucose. The adrenals can stop working so hard to fuel you and you get fueled by the food. Other people have what we call metabolic flexibility, where they they wake up and in the state of kind of being fasted, their body is already switched over to burning fat for fuel. So some people take longer. I'm I'm I'm more like you. I take longer to get to the burning fat place. My body runs on glucose pretty quickly and depends on it. So when my glucose is low, I really feel it. Other people, their body will switch to fat, and just like you said, three, four, even five hours can go by until the body will say you need to eat. So those are the two prominent reasons that tends to happen.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Thank you for clarifying this. Now, something else that comes to mind is this um shame and guilt that's often related to food. I think that because we use food for self-soothing, but also I think food is coupled with our body image and often with our worthiness to feel loved by someone or worthy or uh for attachment and connection. There's so many layers that are intertwined. How can we deal with the shame of guilt and with the shame and guilt that comes with consuming food for self-soothing? And maybe that this has impacted our body weight and the way we see ourselves, and so many other things that impact our self-esteem and well-being.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Yeah, there's a few things to consider. The first is kind of a practical piece, which is that shame is harder to metabolize than any other food. I can eat a whole birthday cake, and the next day it will be metabolized. The shame I feel for that can last decades. And the shame just keeps creating a stress response. So that same uh fight or flight response we have from the sugar dip, we have the same thing to self-shame or self-judgment for these foods. And that will keep us then in this cycle of needing food to soothe because we're shaming and we're trying to then soothe the activation that comes up from the shaming. So the shame itself keeps you in a spiral, and it like I said, it's way harder to break down than food. When you start to understand these food categories, I find most people start to have a massive reduction in shame because it goes from what's wrong with me, I know better, to oh, of course I'm craving chips. I'm really anxious and they depress me. Or of course I'm craving a coffee. I have no energy and I have six hours left to my shift. So it turns into this really practical understanding of my body's just looking for support. And then when you understand the balancing foods and you understand the practice I was talking about with interrupting cravings, you start to connect to those way deeper places inside of you that are actually motivating you to eat these foods, and you start to realize it's not you. You're witnessing this biochemistry and these repressed emotions and memories and attachment ruptures, and you realize that's what the cravings are feeding. It's not me. I'm not choosing this. It inside of me is choosing it. It's like parts work. The part is choosing it. So when people really get that, not just think it, but they start witnessing it in real time, the shame pretty much slips away because they're not feeling personally responsible or taking it personally that it's happening.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

I feel that this approach uh is very compassionate and doesn't feel punishing at all to me.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Now, the next thing I would like to ask you is when someone is experiencing food cravings or when someone is experiencing an eating disorder. And I don't know if, for example, you would like to touch on this um in a different way compared to food cravings. But my question is if you take a step back and think about your um big picture approach when it comes to food, what would you say this is? What kind of what do people think can understand about your approach to really feel into your guidance and what you wish them to see differently about food and how they approach it?

SPEAKER_02 27:31

Yeah, you know, that question's a good one because it makes me think or makes me want to say in response to it, it's not actually about the food. There's uh the focus is so much on food, right? That we make it about the food, we make it about the ice cream, we make it about the withholding. If you are a bulimic or you have binge disorder, which I used to have, we make it about the purging. The behaviors aren't actually the issue. There's a state from which they emerge. So if there's someone withholding food, you know, for days they eat nothing or they eat like 200 calories in three or four days. I would want to ask them when you imagine not eating, what does that feel like? Where is their safety created? How does that somehow support you to not eat? And you know, I've done this with many people, and they'll say, I just feel like I finally have agency, or I feel like I finally have control over my body. This is prevalent in people who were sexually traumatized as kids or physically abused because they had no agency over the boundary violations, and now they literally get to say nothing comes inside my body, including food. So there's this really specific uh support, this almost like medicine that comes from these maladaptive behaviors that are essentially they're leading you back to a place you still carry inside of yourself. So, someone I've worked with, for example, that had anorexia, the fear was loss of control because before, when something was in me, something bad happened. Whether it was a person, whether it was a food that made her sick, you know, whatever the situation was. So now I know predictably this can't happen if I don't eat. So that predictable knowing created a sense of safety for her, even though it actually impacted her health in a really detrimental way. There was a sense of safety. And safety is so different from comfort. They're not the same. Safety is something I know, something I have control of, something I have agency with. And for most people, food and these food habits, these eating disorders, it's the only way they know how to find safety. They don't know another way yet. So it's really understanding it's more about the state from which the behavior emerges from, and then it's identifying other ways to find safety so we can start titrating in some new options.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

And as I'm hearing you talking about this, to me, it feels as if food becomes uh like a symbol in our unconscious.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

For all of us, it symbolizes something, and that something for some reason is very important to us because we cannot find another way to have it in our lives in more tangible ways or more meaningful ways.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

That's a beautiful way to put it. And that's why I don't when people come into this work, or I should say a lot of people initially wouldn't come into this work is they'd say, I don't have an eating disorder, or they would say, I don't soothe for I don't eat eat to soothe, like you said, even. But it's it's exactly what you said is more appropriate. Everyone has a symbol. Everyone has a symbol attached to their food, everyone. And so getting to know that symbol teaches you what your body is still holding, what unmet needs are living inside of you, what in your life is intolerable. Because if you notice, well, Monday through Friday, I eat a candy bar, on the weekends I don't. We are learning what happens when you eat the candy bar. How is that a response to your environment? There's so much it has to teach us, it's not about the food.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Is there any type of uh food that you keep recommending to people? And when they read your book, they might be surprised.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Yes, beans. I obsessively recommend beans, and most people are very surprised because I mean it's interesting if they're actually trending right now this year. I I don't know how that happened. It happens to be paralleling this book coming out, but beans are the most humble, easily overlooked food. I mean, you're in the UK, so they're everywhere, but in America, they're very overlooked. We don't think about beans. Maybe someone eats them once once a year at a picnic or something if they're baked beans. But beans are this incredible source of soluble fiber. And soluble fiber is not typical. When you say fiber, you're talking about insoluble and soluble. Soluble fiber is gel-like. So when it goes into your intestinal tract, it becomes like a sponge, like a gel sponge. And it sweeps up all these different compounds that actually increase your stress response. So soluble fiber from beans lowers your stress response. And then on top of that, it whisks away these other compounds that adrenaline, sex hormones, even microplastics get stuck inside. So it naturally detoxifies your gut and your liver. And this is the interesting thing about trauma and stress. Trauma and stress are biological. So the events take place, but the trauma we're actually working with is what's happening in the person's body because of the event. Or when you say, I'm so stressed from work, I'm so stressed because my body is having a response to work. One thing that allows people to recover from trauma very quickly and stress is a functioning liver because your liver is actually filtering out your stress hormones as they're being released into your bloodstream. If your liver is backed up or very sluggish, those stress hormones just keep going through because nothing's taking them out and you keep feeling anxious. So people who come down pretty quick from getting triggered or having a shocking moment, that's often due to your liver health and soluble fiber increases that. So these extremely accessible, inexpensive beans that exist anywhere and are really easy to buy, easy to make, easy to buy in a can, they are one of the best additions you can make to your life.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

And do you recommend, for example, people having them once a day or with every meal? How do you usually have them?

SPEAKER_02 33:24

Well, so I want to bow to the bean lineage because this all started with this wonderful biochemist named Karen Hurd. She's a biochemist and nutritionist. She made this discovery in an attempt to save her daughter's life, her newborn daughter, who is dying from being intoxicated from a pesticide that was used in her bedroom. And she discovered soluble fiber removed this toxin because of this detoxification ability it has. She went on to practice nutrition and bring in soluble fiber to help people reduce, I mean, and so many different illnesses and diseases. And then Unique Hammond, a friend of mine who's also a nutritionist, learned from uh Karen Heard and developed the bean protocol. So the bean protocol is half of a cup of beans with three meals a day. That's the general guidelines. You have three half cups a day. Three half cups of beans a day gives you way more soluble fiber than you need to detoxify all the things I was talking about. And in the modern world with a lot of ultra-processed food and stress, those three half cups seem to do the trick for most people. So that's what I'd like to recommend as well.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Thank you. Now, I would love to get your thoughts on whatever you wish to share. Nothing specific that comes to mind, but overall. What are your thoughts on the food industry? So when people go to the grocery store and they shop for the week or for the day and they look around and there are all these packaged foods. What are your thoughts about that in terms of what we're um what our options are?

SPEAKER_02 35:04

Yeah. So when you think of packaged food or processed food, there's also the term ultra-processed food. What that essentially means is a carbohydrate that was once whole. So let's say a whole grain of brown rice that's been reduced to a flour and it has no fiber, it has no protein, it has no nutrients left. So it's it's what we call a starch. So when you're looking at food, you're looking at crackers, you're looking at bread, you're looking at pasta, and you look at the back and you look at the nutrition label, it will often boast no added sugars. But if you look at the carbohydrates, the total carbs, it might say 50, right? 50 grams. And then right under that is fiber. If you subtract fiber from carbohydrates, you get what's called net carbs. And in this case, those are starches. So if you look at spaghetti and it has 50 grams of carbohydrate, zero grams of fiber, which most pasta has no fiber, you're getting 50 grams of starch. That's equivalent to 50 grams of added sugar. So what this is important because the food industry knows exactly how to market things to us. So it will say things like low sugar, no sugar, no added sugar, and you'll think this is a savory food. But the effect it has in your body is similar to if you sat and had a coke, a soda, and it's giving you this massive glucose spike, it's giving you this stress response, but it also subsequently is soothing and comforting you, especially the packaged food that has a lot of additives. So the companies have, I mean, they these foods are biochemically engineered. It's not like someone just fried a chip and said this is delicious. It's years and years of laboratory experiments to make something that's so exciting to your brain. And it confuses your animal body because these bodies are still in this kind of old evolutionary pattern of assuming they're going to starve. Because only very recently, usually within one or two generations from now, where we have food security, most people before us did not. So when you walk into a grocery store and all these shelves are loaded with starches, your animal body has this massive dopamine response. It's like this reward bell is ringing. We're gonna survive, we're gonna live, there's all this sustenance, even though you have plenty at home. The body's not registering that. So one of my kind of interventions with this is whenever you're going out to eat, whenever you're going shopping at the grocery store, always have some kind of a fat and protein before you go. And the easiest one are nuts or seeds. Get salted roasted nuts and seeds, have a handful or two, literally as you're driving to the grocery store, and that's going to balance your glucose. So when you go into the aisles, you don't have this massive dopamine hit that makes you buy all this food and feel like you need it. You can actually feel a security and from there decide what you want to buy.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

I think many people will relate to that feeling. I definitely do.

SPEAKER_02 37:53

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Now, how can someone who might be experiencing food cravings and have a hard time changing that can start making tiny, tiny changes right now, in the next few days? Of course, first step is to buy your book, and then after that, something that will feel tight trading, something that will not feel overwhelming.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

Yes, love the word tightrading here. Well, first thing, everyone that buys the book today or this week, within the next couple days, you will be eligible for a two-month program with me for free. I'm doing this two-month virtual book club, and that's one of the best ways because I will teach you, I will walk through this book with a whole group of people how to incorporate these. So that's important. So I think it's by May 3rd or 4th, if you buy it by then, you'll be eligible. So reach out to us if you if you need help with that. Um, the titration is key. So in the book, I have a protocol I developed years ago called the quiet diet. And I call it the quiet diet, not because it's a strict diet, but because it actually softens that angst in the body because you're integrating more of the balancing foods. So it's not an elimination diet, it's a titration diet of more balancing foods. So the top balancers are the green leafy vegetables, animal or plant protein, and beans. Those are the three foods I ask people to focus on. There's a bunch of other ones, the book goes through it in detail, but those three are easy enough to remember, easy enough to purchase. Even frozen vegetables work as long as they're green. And I just ask people to start incorporating them into your meals along with what you'd already eat. So if someone says, I want mac and cheese for dinner, I say, Great, have some broccoli, have uh two spoonfuls of beans, and then enjoy your mac and cheese. Or I want to go out for pizza with a friend. Awesome. Have a piece of salmon, have some broccoli, go get the pizza. And by doing that, you're integrating balancers instead of just jumping off the deep end into this, what I call food sobriety, when you're no longer having the depressants or stimulants and you're suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion, sensation, irritability, whatever these foods have been, you know, quelling or comforting, all that's going to rush up. So slowly integrating the balancers are the best way I've seen people successfully be able to do this.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

Wonderful. Now, if someone is going to incorporate changes you're suggesting in your book into their lives, is this budget friendly? Because of course, um, for someone to continue doing something that's helpful for them, it needs to be something that they can sustain financially. What can you say about this?

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Oh my gosh, this is money saving. That's the best thing about this one. Because this is not nowhere in the book do I prescribe superfoods or organic or um any kind of high-end appliances or biohacking techn technology. There's nothing of none of that. It's really simple, humble foods. We're talking beans and proteins and nuts and vegetables. And there's been a lot of misinformation where people think those are expensive foods. I even break this down in the book. I break down actually high-end, two high-end organic things, a specific bread and nut butter, and I compare it to Cheez-Its, which are very affordable. And when you look at the nutritional value and the serving size in both of these, you actually save money with the high-end bread and almond butter because of how much it offers you, how much fat you get, how much protein you get, how many nutrients you get. So these whole foods, even though they seem more expensive, they give you way more nutrition. They take away your addictive uh you know potential or expression toward these foods because of the biochemical change. Uh, but they're they're really so simple to work with in terms of budget. The most expensive thing on uh a balancing diet is animal protein. That's the most expensive depending on where you live. Like in America, if you're going to eat organic uh meat, it's going to be highly expensive. So the loophole over here is you look for pasture-raised, you look for chemical free, you look for antibiotic free. Those are all dog whistles to say it's organic, but we didn't certify it organic, so then it's affordable. So there's ways to even get around that. But that's the most expensive. But even a low-quality animal protein, which I don't recommend, but sometimes that's all you can do, that's still gonna have balancing properties, even though it might be low quality and treated with antibiotics.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Fantastic. That's very good news for people.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Now, uh, the other thing I would like to ask you, has your relationship with food, as it has changed, also changed your relationship with your own body?

SPEAKER_02 42:40

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, it's I've been thinking about this a lot the last year. So, because of growing up intersex and being completely confused about what am I, what's wrong with this body, why, why is this happening to me? When I was 23, I ended up getting top surgery because I had full-on breasts, and doctors said they would go away one day. They didn't. So I got top surgery, and I, you know, I present male, I feel very masculine, I enjoy being male. Uh, but I came to learn how much glucose affects your sex hormones and how it can increase or decrease estrogen, it can increase or decrease testosterone. So a lot of my dysphoria I would feel with my body, because the way it looked and the way it was developing, part of it was being born intersex. The other part of it was how food was affecting my chemistry. So, over the last 10 years, the more I've really understood my unique chemistry in particular, but even other people's, when you get the balancing, when whoever, whoever's body we're talking about, but I guess talk about mine, when you when I got balanced and my testosterone started to increase and my estrogen started to go down and my body felt settled, my entire ability to perceive myself transformed. Because in addition to these amazing nervous system responses, we don't want to forget that the brain is part of the nervous system. So when your body's balanced, your brain chemistry starts getting balanced, meaning you have a good amount of dopamine, you have a good amount of serotonin, you have these brain chemicals that actually help you feel alive and hopeful. So the way I see my body and the way I'm with my body is so much more, so much kinder, so much more compassionate, so much more thrilling, even. Like I love my body. The more balanced it's become, not because of a condition I've lost weight and now I like it, it's because I can perceive it differently because my mind's more balanced because of it. And then not shaming myself when I'm, you know, craving a slice of cake, but feeling, okay, what's the cake giving me? Comfort. How else can I get comfort? I can ask for a hug, I can listen to some music, I can take a bath, or I can just enjoy cake. And so it just becomes this really simple thing that doesn't have a lot of weight to it. And that's really repaired my relationship between me and my body.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

This sounds very hopeful. Thank you for sharing your experience. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about a recent experience I had related to fertility because you're talking about food and also how it affects hormones as well. And I remember last year I decided to do to freeze my eggs. And I did the first round, and it went well. However, I realized afterwards that I didn't think about any lifestyle changes or any food-related changes in the preparation of that. And then I started reading about it, and I started reading how food impacts quality, and I decided as a result to do a second round, but give myself enough time to change some things in my diet and gave myself six months. And the results I received as a result in the second round were so much better. And of course, I cannot say exactly if food was 100% the reason, but the main difference was the food. And it's interesting because as I was doing some research and I was uh reading books and watching YouTube videos and all the things that we do as we research, um, I came across um some doctors who were recommending uh changes in the diet, and some other doctors who were saying diet is not gonna make any difference. And to me, this sounded crazy because how is it possible what I eat is not going to affect what is happening in my body in terms of all processes.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

I mentioned in the book something along the lines of I don't know anything more intimate than eating, because you put food into your mouth, you swallow it, it becomes your body. And so our bodies are literally every day being built from the food we're eating. There's nothing else to build them. So when you think of your eggs, which are already there, they're being very influenced by the hormones swimming around in your bloodstream and the amount of glucose, the amount of insulin. Insulin is really interesting. I haven't really said much about it. I said much about it in the book, but not with you. Insulin is this natural, healthy response the body has when your glucose starts to rise, especially when it spikes. And the difference between a rise and a spike is a rise is kind of a slow increase. A spike is a drastic sharp increase in glucose. Whenever that happens, your body will have a almost like a defense, not fully a trauma response, but a defensive response of too much glucose is going to kill me. This is what the body's saying. We need the pancreas to make insulin now. Insulin comes in and quickly drives it down. I mean, we're talking like in minutes, it starts to drive down your glucose. This is when the feeling we get when we eat something and then we're just exhausted. Like there's no energy. We are tanking, we can't even focus on anything, like a like a food hangover. That's what when the insulin's coming in. What's important about insulin is it is a hormone. So when you have a lot of insulin being produced and a lot of a hormone in your blood, it starts dominating out of other hormones. This starts affecting your sex hormones. This affects the health of your ovaries, which affects the health of your eggs. In men, it affects the health of their testes, which affects the health of their sperm. So your reproductive organs are directly impacted by how much insulin your body's creating, which is a response to glucose and carbohydrates and refined foods.

SPEAKER_01 48:36

Thank you. I'm glad you're saying this because I thought I was going crazy.

SPEAKER_02 48:39

I know. It's very inspiring to hear your story. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

Thank you. Now, one last question that I ask all guests who come on the podcast. So, if you could look back on some of your hardest moments in life, what would you like to say to your younger self to reassure them given what you now know and experience in your current life?

SPEAKER_02 49:04

I think I would say to him, everything you're going through makes sense. You're not overreacting, you're properly responding to what you've experienced, and you can't imagine how incredible life is going to become. You can't even begin to imagine it.

SPEAKER_01 49:19

Beautiful. Now, where can people find you, your work, and also your book?

SPEAKER_02 49:26

My book is available everywhere as of today. So if you go online, you type in food therapy, you will find it. Um, you can also go to my website, holisticlifenavigation.com. Everything is there, including the book, including the book club. When you when you order the book, you just copy and paste your order number into the book club form and you'll get an email within 24 hours or so inviting you in. But I have events, I have a six-month group coming up. That's a deep dive into nutrition, retreats. I have a retreat in the UK I'm doing. There's lots coming. So if you go to the website, you can see all that there.

SPEAKER_01 50:00

Thank you for coming on the podcast and for writing this book, Luis. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 50:04

Oh, thank you, my friend. This is excellent.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

And you guys, thank you for tuning in. And if this episode spoke to you, please follow, subscribe, rate, and share because it helps bring trauma informed conversations and education to people who need them the most. I'll see you soon. Goodbye, guys.