Using Food As A Tool For Your Nervous System with Luis Mojica

Luis Mojica is a Somatic Educator, certified in Holistic Nutrition, and author of Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. With years of experience working at the intersection of trauma and healing, Luis has become a sought-after teacher and speaker in his field. 

He reaches thousands of students annually through his online courses and webinars, and hosts the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. Learn more at www.holisticlifenavigation.com or by following @holistic.life.navigation on Instagram. 

In This Episode, We Explore:

• How food directly impacts the nervous system, and can trigger or soothe stress responses
• The three categories of food (depressants, stimulants, and balancers) and how to use them intentionally
• The connection between emotional trauma, stress, and food cravings
• Why beans, greens, and quality proteins play a key role in gut health and overall balance
• Practical tips for building balanced meals and using food as a tool for emotional regulation and healing

Buy Luis’s book, Food Therapy: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

Learn more Luis Mojica at www.holisticlifenavigation.com

Follow Luis Mojica on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/holistic.life.navigation/

Listen to Luis Mojica on his podcast, Holistic Life Navigation: www.holisticlifenavigation.com/podcast 

Watch Luis Mojica on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@holisticlifenavigation 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the High Vibration Living Podcast. I'm your host, Chef Whitney Aronoff, health supportive chef, founder of Starsea Kitchen, and creator of nourishing food rooted in real ingredients, intuition, and intention. This podcast is a space where food, wellness, spirituality, and everyday living meet. We explore how what you eat, how you live, and what you believe all shape your energy, health, and overall sense of well-being. You have a physical body, a mental body, an emotional body, and a spiritual body. And all need to be recognized and nourished so you can feel balanced and truly thrive. Only you know what your body truly needs. Let this be your reminder that you already have the wisdom to tune in to your food, your self-care, and your spiritual practices and choose what supports you best. Through personal insights and conversations with experts across food, wellness, and spirituality, we'll explore how to nourish the physical, emotional, spiritual, and energetic layers of who you are so you can feel your best and live with clarity, vitality, and purpose. Let's get started. Hi friends, welcome back to the High Vibration Living Podcast. I am chatting with Louise Mohica today, who is just coming out with his new book that is perfectly aligned with the High Vibration Living podcast and the Starseed Kitchen philosophy, which is why I wanted to bring him and our conversation to you. His book is called Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. And it's published by Hay House. And he also has a fantastic online course that you can find at Holistic Life Navigation. Holistic Life Navigation integrates somatic practices, nutrition, and self-inquiry for a deeper understanding of the body and how to find safety within yourself for stress and trauma recovery. Perfectly aligned with what we talk about here on the High Vibration Living Podcast. Understanding that food is a tool and it nourishes all the layers of you. And you can't just change your diet or choose certain foods and all your issues go away. The reason you crave and eat certain things, it's because you have an emotional connection to it. It's because it does something to your nervous system or to your energy levels or to your brain. There's so many reasons for the choices that we eat and the cravings that we have and the way we approach a meal. It's all more than just food. And that's the conversation that I love to have with people. People, as you know, often think, oh, if I just hire the personal chef, if I just hire the nutritionist, they will make me lose weight, they will improve my health, they will change the results that I get from my blood test. And it's always more than that. You can't avoid the emotional aspect of it. And that's what we talk about in today's episode, as well as what's on Louise's plate. How did certain cravings and habits that did not serve him naturally fall away when he was able to balance his body and balance his plate? So all those types of conversations come up in today's episode. It's so well aligned for the conversations I love having, but the information you love learning about. So without further ado, here is my episode with Louise. Enjoy. Cheers. Hi Louise. Welcome to the High Vibration Living Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Thanks for having me, Whitney.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

It's a treat because I'm really excited to learn more about your online courses and your book. And one thing that I'm really excited to chat with you about is how food can regulate your nervous system. And there aren't a lot of people that are willing to have the conversation about how food affects how we're really showing up in life and how we're behaving and how we're connecting to people and how we feel. And that's what this podcast is all about is using food as a tool to support your physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental body and understanding how it's doing that. You're one of the experts out there on this topic.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

I love teaching about this because, like you said, it's so rarely spoken about. Most people have gotten to the place where they agree and will accept the concept of food, let's say, healing and creating health, which is a very important part of my work as well. But there's this whole therapeutic, interpersonal, behavioral part of my work that I'm really leaning into with this book and the last few years, the work that I teach and do around the world. And it's how it affects your nervous system. And that's very different from health, because you can even have certain foods that are healthy that can still stimulate somebody's body and affect their nervous system. So foods essentially will create a fight or flight response based on how they affect your glucose. And so the same hormones that create, let's say, stress when you're overwhelmed or when you get the news that somebody passed away or even from a car accident, that same biology of stress will happen from certain foods because of how it affects your glucose. And that's the part that gets overlooked because we're thinking mostly of health. We're not thinking of, well, what's the pathway to get to some of those uh results? You know, for example, you can have someone that goes on a certain diet and can lose a tremendous amount of weight. People assume that they're on a healthy diet, and they may be. It may, it may be supporting certain systems, but their adrenals and their nerves can be so wired that they can't sleep, they're snapping at people, they're depressed, yet they're having weight loss. So I like to look at the whole picture behind even the health outcomes.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

When and how did you get started on focusing on food with your clients and to your audience?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Yeah, so I was majoring in psychology exactly 20 years ago. And as I was majoring in psychology, I was working at a health food store to pay the bills. While I was working at this health food store, I was suffering from chronic illness. I was overweight, I had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, panic disorder, insomnia, asthma, cystic acne, like you name it. And when I was working at this store, I started incorporating things that I was reading: certain books, certain herbs, certain supplements, different diets. Within two or three months, so many of my symptoms I've had for almost 10 years at that point started to reduce and eventually disappear. And I was amazed. I didn't know that food could heal. It was nothing anyone ever told me about. And so when I was working with customers of a come to the store, they started seeing these same results. And some even started getting off their antidepressants. And that was the that was the first light bulb, you know, deeply studying psychology and the DSM and identifying people and behavior and sending them to a psychiatrist to get medicine. I thought I could do an eight-year program and that's what I'm learning, or I can teach people how to eat differently. And the the second road just felt so much more aligned with my integrity and and and my own experience. I was finding all this relief from mental health and physical health. So I went in, I then studied two years to become a nutritional counselor. And I went into private practice for about a decade, simply working with people just through the lens of healing with food. But it wasn't until kind of mid-practice I met these three women, and I can tell the story in a little bit, but that had this interesting experience around chocolate that made me realize oh, there's this whole emotional trauma, um, even unmetabolized memories that fuel a lot of our eating habits. And I was just focused on protocols for so long. I wasn't focusing on the emotions that went into the habits. Yes. They really opened my eyes to that. So I studied somatic psychology, and that's what got me into understanding this biology of trauma and stress and how food can actually fuel that.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, it's really interesting because when you work with clients and you try to dial down some of their food habits, it can be cravings. So it can be out of balance because of their diet, but it can also be this spiritual and energetic out of balance that's causing certain cravings. And then there's the emotional component. So they're continuing to go for certain foods because it brings back positive memories or experiences or it heals or is attached to different parts of them or different times in their life. It's very layered. So that's why losing weight and getting healthy isn't just a diet plan that a nutritionist can give you. There's different things that you have to add on when you work or when you have worked with clients in the past in helping them edit and improve some of the foods that they're eating, their diet. Are there other practices that you have them incorporate?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah. So before I really understood the trauma piece and the somatic piece, which is it's an embodied form of therapy where you're not talking about a situation, but you're actually locating where in your body do you store the situation still? How does it affect your posture, your behavior, and you're helping people track, you know, how the body physically holds the memories, not just talking about the memories. Once I got into that work, that's about eight, nine years ago, and I really understood it, then my whole practice transformed because I was just focused on protocols, right? So I would develop a protocol, most people would follow it and they would have incredible results. I had a very high success rate for reversing illness. And that was what my practice ran on. But then once they left my care after three months, six months, they would go right back to eating how they they were before, because not because of willpower, not because of any of these things, but because of what you said. When you said it brings back positive memories, food becomes our greatest tool for nervous system regulation. So if we are really sad or we're really upset, you can eat a food that will stimulate your adrenals and create dopamine and even boost serotonin temporarily, and it will transform your entire uh outlook on life and how you feel in that moment. So we're using these foods to literally change our states, but we're also using these foods to guide to gain access to these unmet relational needs. So, like ice cream reminds me of my father, and I miss my father. So when I eat ice cream, I feel this kind of paternal love. This is all subconscious for most people. They don't consciously know they're doing that, but that's what's driving them to the ice cream, or that's what's driving them to the potato chips. To either trying to change their emotional state or trying to get this emotion, positive even emotion to come back up. So once I started understanding that, I really started teaching people two main things. One was how to categorize foods. So in my book, I categorize foods as depressants, stimulants, and balancers. And these three categories teach you how food affects your nervous system. It's not if it's healthy or not, it's how it affects your nervous system. And we can get into all that in a little bit. So I teach them that first they understand, oh, this food's actually depressing me. That means I must be quite activated. Or this food stimulates me. That must mean I'm quite depressed because the body's always trying to counterbalance where it is, right? And the balancers are the foods that no one goes to when they're stressed out because they keep you neutral. They don't suddenly change your state. So once people get that, then they really start to understand why they're moving toward these foods. And then they gain what I call conscious alchemy. They get to actually learn, oh, if I combine this with this for lunch, I'll have energy. I'm not gonna crash because I'm not stimulating my body. I'm balancing it. Or I'm exhausted, I have a long work day, I do need to stimulate my body. I'm gonna use this stimulant. Later, I'm gonna balance. They get choice because they understand how these foods uh metabolize and affect them. So part one is understanding those categories and how it actually affects the nervous system and tracking that. Part two is then how do we um let's say sense into the energy, like you said, energy earlier, behind the impulse to eat something. So if I have a craving, cravings are these beautiful, they are beautiful compass for unmet needs. And they show you your nutritional, your relational, and your emotional unmet needs. Every time you crave something, there's all that information in there. So even pausing someone around a craving to sense into what's underneath it, all this information emerges. So it's not enough for me anymore just to give people protocols. I like to teach them how to really let the body guide them.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Yeah, and I think that's the most challenging thing for people is pausing and feeling. Uh, in and I think that's a big driver for how people are choosing food, is they want to keep numbing out, right? So, like that I would say is number one thing that we're seeing in society right now with all these tools, gadget, tech, you know, all the ways that you can eat and get food on the go. They're numbers. And so instead, you're inviting us to like pause and figure out why we want to eat that and then make a better choice so we can stay calm and balanced and have, you know, a healthy nervous system.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yes, even when you said numbers, it's if we all consider I'm eating something to numb, the question is what? What am I trying to numb? And when you have this sudden craving or this impulse to eat something, and you sit, and I have a practice in the book about this, we can even do it later if you want, but you sit and you feel the energy that comes up in the pause, you actually get to get in touch with the state that we're trying to numb. And these states have a lot of information. So it can be unmetabolized traumatic experiences, you know, it could be grief, it could be joy. Some people actually numb their joy because they don't know how to be happy or be with that. There's so much that starts emerging that you realize, oh, this is what I try to suppress. And those three food categories are interesting because the depressants literally repress it. When you hear that phrase stuffing down your emotions with food, depressants are the really heavy foods, like the fried foods, the potato chips, the really processed dairy foods. Wow. Because they not just stuff it down like physically, because they're very rich and heavy, but they actually initiate this thing called postprangial blood flow. So when you're eating a big thing of chips, let's say, uh, and I'm not just a handful, but several handfuls, or like a big, you know, dripping sandwich with lots of fried chicken inside of it or something. The blood from your brain has to travel to your gut to digest it because it's so much, it's so dense. There's so much caloric energy there, that when it does that, it lowers anxiety in the brain. So for a couple hours, your energy literally goes from your head, which is where it's stored when you're anxious, down to your gut. So you feel this temporary feeling of being centered, at having peace, at slowing down. And that's why it's so compulsive. Because then once it digests, you actually go right back to that baseline anxiety, even more so than you were at before, and then require more of that food. Whereas the stimulants, they activate your nervous system, they stimulate your brain so fiercely that it takes you up out of your body. So these depressants kind of push you into your body when you're really high, and these stimulants make you really high when you're low, but both are numbing out and blocking this ability to sense these parts of you.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

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SPEAKER_00 16:59

Yes, I'm gonna have one preface to this because I like the way you said that how we want to come down from the day we don't want to stimulate. The one thing for people to consider when they're listening to this, the top three stimulants, first of all, are caffeine, sugar, and skipping meals. So those three things will stimulate your nervous system and your adrenals more than anything else. So most people are feeling their whole day with those foods or those practices. They're skipping meals, they're reaching for sugar, they're drinking a lot of coffee, maybe even eating a lot of chocolate. They're getting stimulation this way. When your whole day is fueled from stimulation, you're actually running on stress hormones. You're not running on nutrients. So your body's highly stressed, which is activating you and allowing you to get through. And now here's dinner time. Most people actually build their dinners or their meals or impulsively buy things that are depressants because all day they've been running high and active, and now they're depressing in the evening. And I call this seesaw regulation, like you're going really high all day, then you're dampening it down. That's why we crave so many comfort foods and wine and cannabis in the evenings. But your question's important. When you actually understand the balancing foods, and that's what's on your plate when you get home, you actually start repairing from the stress of the day. You don't add to more stress of the day. And then by the time you're sleeping, your sleep is actually reparative. Because these depressants before sleep, you're digesting them even while you're sleeping. And then they're contributing to more stress response while you're sleeping. So you have a big thing of pasta and wine and cheese before bed. Four or five hours of your sleep is actually being interrupted with fight or flight response. So you can get eight or nine hours of sleep but wake up completely exhausted. So the the balancers are important. There's only there's three, there's a bunch of different ones. They're essentially all the whole foods, but the top three that are most important are greens, beans, and proteins. These three together are the best combination for balancing the nervous system, the glucose, and your adrenals. So if you're imagining looking at a plate, you'd have one or two handfuls of any green vegetable of your choice. Steamed is my favorite, but it can be any form, even sauteed, raw, however you want to do it, but green. And then you'd have about a half of a cup of some kind of bean. That can be lentil, that can be chickpea, black beans, refried beans. It doesn't matter the form as long as they're whole beans. And then you'd have some kind of protein. If you're vegan, you would want to have some kind of a grain with your bean to make it a whole protein. And then you would add some kind of fat to it. It could be nuts, avocado, hem seeds, or grapes or loaded in protein. If you're an omnivore, you could have eggs, even if you don't want to have animal flesh itself. Or if you eat uh meat, you can have a little, I always say a palm size. If you look at your hand and you remove your fingers, that much meat is what most people can handle. So when you have that on your plate, you have this incredible, uh, incredible symbiosis of food that feeds your microbiome, increases your production of dopamine and serotonin, which is super important for mental health. The soluble fiber from the beans are really key here because the soluble fibers actually lower your how quickly carbs trans transform into glucose. So it lowers the rate at which you convert into glucose, which means you avoid spikes. And avoiding spikes means you avoid stress response because it's glucose spikes that create an activation in the nervous system and the adrenals. But the soluble fiber also does something really cool. It flushes out these little compounds called bile acids. And these little compounds are like magnets, and they're magnets to things like uh microplastics, uh, forever chemicals, sex hormones, and stress hormones. So when you're eating these beans with your meal three times a day, every couple hours it's like this sponge is moving through your gut and it's just pulling those bile acids out and then pulling all those chemicals and stress hormones out with them. So it beans are actually a hormone-balancing food, and no one sees them that way. They see them as a protein, which they are, but they have so much soluble fiber that they balance your hormones, sex hormones, and stress hormones. Uh, so that that meal is my favorite because it's so balancing, so settling, so neutralizing, easy to digest. If you eat it four hours before bed at the latest, then you're going to bed with a body that's highly nourished, you can actually go into a repair state.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

That reminds me of some, you know, books and educators that I've seen talk about the bean protocol. That when you're struggling with gut issues and, you know, bloating and just not having, you know, a healthy digestive system, people suggest a beans protocol, eating, making beans from scratch and eating a little bit with every meal. Um, when did you first learn about incorporating beans to improve your digestive system, but also using it as a tool for calming the nervous system?

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yes. So I just want to drop two names Unique Hammond and Karen Hurd. They are the OG bean queens. So they are the ones that actually invented the bean protocol. Um Unique is the inventor of it. She had she made it a protocol. Karen was incorporating it as a nutritionist and teaching about it. And they kind of together, you know, developed this way of teaching people. And then I got to meet them and they're friends of mine, and I've mentored with them for years now. But uh I actually first got my introduction to beans way back in 2010, 2009, 2010. I mean, I knew about beans before, but in this case, uh, in the macrobiotic diet, I was very, very into macrobiotics, and I was a passionate cigarette smoker at the time. And I was, which is funny, you know, like these things do. Um, and I mean passionate, I smoke up to four packs a day. It was an insane amount of cigarettes. And I started incorporating macrobiotics, which are very bean-based, very balancing food-based. And I started noticing as I was incorporating these foods that I didn't like the way it felt when I was smoking because I never knew what calm felt like before then. My body was starting to settle. And actually, maybe two or three months into that diet, I lost my interest in smoking and just quit overnight one day and never smoked again. And never had any desire to quit. It just my body didn't need that stimulus the same way because it was liking the piece. And then for many years, I would prescribe this for my clients because I understood a lot about beans. It wasn't until I met Karen Hurd, she's a biochemist and a nutritionist, and she explained to me the connection between glucose and adrenaline and how beans help lower the adrenaline response and glucose. That's when I really understood, oh, beans should be part of every single meal because of how they affect the body. I was incorporating them in two meals at the time, but now I started bringing them into each meal with myself and my clients. And I mean, the results were incredible because there's always physical health benefits, but there's this massive amount of mental health benefits you get when you're incorporating that much soluble fiber into your diet.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Well, it's amazing that adding the beans into your diet and creating a healthy plate helped you easily release habits that weren't serving you anymore. Really doesn't serve anybody. Are there other things that changing a diet has helped your clients let go of that weren't serving them?

SPEAKER_00 24:12

My gosh, I got chills just thinking about it. Um, so I'll go back to that story I was referring to about the women with chocolate. Yeah. And that was when I first really got this. So these three women came into my office eight, eight years ago or so now, and they didn't know each other, and they all came in with the same issue. They were gaining weight, they were prediabetic, and they had high cholesterol. And so I understood as a nutritionist at this time that, you know, carbohydrates, especially sugars, feed triglycerides, which increases cholesterol. It's not actually cholesterol that does it, it's sugar that does it. So I said, we have to drastically lower your sugar intake for six weeks, then you get a blood test and we'll see how it looks. And I looked at their food journal to see what was the source of sugar, and it was chocolate. They were all eating lots of chocolate, and they were all eating lots of chocolate at 4 p.m. And so I said, uh, what happens at 4 p.m.? All three said, My husband comes home. And then I said, Okay, interesting. What would happen if you didn't eat the chocolate? I would have to get a divorce. All three said this, and that was the first, yeah, exactly. And your hand goes right over your heart, which is that's the instinct because they were in these really painful marriages, and chocolate stimulates serotonin and oxytocin, and it's a heart stimulant, right? So the way coffee is a brain stimulant, chocolate's a heart stimulant. So these amazing bodies instinctively knew I'm not getting my heart stimulated in this relationship, I'll do it with the chocolate. That was the moment I had this light bulb based on the question you just asked of what else changed. Because out of the three women, the only one that was able to stop eating chocolate was also the only one that filed for divorce and changed her life completely. The other two women stayed with their partners and had to continue eating chocolate because their life was so intolerable that chocolate made it tolerable.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

So I say that to answer your question because when you start removing the stimulants and depressants, and I'm not suggesting chocolate's bad, there's a beautiful, beautiful ways to relate to chocolate and use it in your body and your in your life. But when you're relying on it like they were to get through, that's very different from enjoying the pleasure of chocolate sometimes. When you reduce the stimulants and depressants you require to get through, you increase how you actually feel about your world. You don't have to feel that when you're relying on these stimulants and depressants. Their job is to kind of soften the blow so you don't have to deal with these things. They make life tolerable when it's intolerable. So as you're decreasing them, guess what happens? Life becomes intolerable. And this is why most people get off their diet, right? Because their life is hard to actually experience without these stimulants and depressants. So in short, everything changes. Everything, their sleep habits, how they dress, the music they listen to, the news they watch, the friends they hang out with, their whole life starts to transform because they can actually feel how they feel about their life for the first time.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

Yeah, there's a saying I love is digest your food, digest your life. Right? So if we're eating foods that we can't digest, then life is hard for us to get through. But when we can come into balance with the foods that we're putting into our body and we digest it with ease and grace, we can move through life with more ease and grace, and most importantly, joy and pleasure, you know?

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Yeah, especially once you get through that threshold. Because when you're relying on coffee, let's say, to get through the day, and then you start reducing the amount of caffeine you take in, at first, during that kind of shift, that liminal period, life is horribly intolerable. Once you shift, and then you get to the place you just referred to where the food is nourishing you and balancing you. Oh my god, life is like a brilliant masterpiece that you cannot wait to live. But that initial shift is where most people fall off their diet because it's really sensationally uncomfortable at first when you've been numbing for so long.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Know what it reminds me of is a bowl of kitchery. For those that aren't familiar with kitchery, it's a classic Ayurvedic dish and it's made with rice and lentils and a variety of vegetables. And usually you prepare it seasonally with the vegetables that are in season, and then a lot of spices are involved. So usually a little garlic, a little ginger, a little fenugreek, uh maybe some phenol, turmeric, all these great spices for digestion and stimulating the digestifier, the gut. But when you have a bowl of kitri, it's a bowl, and uh you feel so balanced and complete afterwards. You know, you aren't, as you know, with macrobiotics, you aren't looking to eat more, nibble later. Uh you just sit down for a meal and you're fully satisfied. And it I think is a weird feeling for people who aren't used to sitting down to a meal and and being satisfied and not going back to the fridge or back to the kitchen or back to the pantry to look for more. It's just you sit down for a meal and you are complete. And it is such a unique sensation for those that aren't used to that or don't know that life can be that way.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Yes, kitchery is such a good example. I was on a seven-month kitchery cleanse in two right around the time I was doing the macrobiotic work, because when I stopped smoking, my lungs started toxifying. I got this major rash on my face. It looked like uh a lung. It was interesting. It was right on the sides of my nose, big butterfly rash. And I went to this autoimmune disorder because of the detox and all these other things I was dealing with. And I did a kitchery cleanse. And what's fascinating about kitchery is when it's it's also known as a mono diet, where that's all you eat. So you, I mean, you can have a bowl of it for pleasure, but when you do the cleanse, it's all you eat for weeks to months, depending on you know your condition. But what's really interesting about it is what you said, it's not a dopamine-inducing food. So when you eat a food like kitchery or any macrobiotic food or the balancers that I teach about in the book, you can't really overeat them. You can try. And I suffered from a binge eating disorder, so there were times where I still forced it, but it's not like you don't lose your body the way you lose it with dopamine foods, like ice creams and pizza and pasta and fries. So your body gets the cues because you're so embodied to what you're eating. It's not dopamine-inducing. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

That's an important part of it. The foods that are boring, those are usually the balancers. And that's why I said earlier, when you're coming home from a really hard work day, most people aren't thinking, can't wait to steam broccoli and have some salmon and beans. Like it's like the last thing you're thinking about.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

But that's except for you, except for you and me.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

You and me are thinking that. But most people are not thinking that when they come home.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Absolutely. Um, but it has totally made me kind of rethink about some meals that I want to prep for the week ahead. So thank you. Um, but I do want to know when you do a kitchery cleanse, because it's been a while since I've looked at that. Uh, for a traditional kitchery cleanse, are you just doing the rice and lentils and spices, or are you adding in veggies?

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Yes, exactly. So a tr a traditional kitchery cleanse is actually just the lentils, the rice, and the spices. There's no other vegetables involved. Uh, the one I was doing was the traditional idea where it's just the lentils, rice vegetables. Um, but I was adding steamed greens and steamed sweet potatoes because I couldn't, my metabolism was too quick. I couldn't uh survive that long on just that health in a healthy way. Yeah. But I also shifted mine. I did short grain brown rice and green mung beans instead of the yellow doll and the basmati white rice because I did want the spike.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Yes. I have um I have two different versions of kitschery on my Starseed kitchen website for anyone listening that want to explore making it. So I have a mung bean version and I have a lentil version. If you know you guys are listening, you want to explore, I highly recommend. And it works really well just for making once and enjoying, you know, three nights in a row for dinner. It's lovely.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

That was my favorite thing about it. You make a pot of it and you're good for days.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Yeah, it's really lovely. And I would like to know uh for those that are listening that are still struggling with binging on food or just overeating, what are some tips that you can share with them to combat that? Because I suffered from that as well. And sometimes people gave me books, but I knew reading about it wasn't gonna fix it. Um, I knew that there was something else going on that I couldn't see. For me, it was um having kind of hands-on healing, energy work, shaman work done is what brought me back into balance and eliminated that from my life. I'd love to know from you what worked for you and what maybe has worked for clients suffering with overeating. I want to take a moment to share how Team Starseed Kitchen can support you beyond the podcast. I'm Chef Whitney Aronoff, founder of Team Starseed Kitchen, my personal chef and custom meal prep service. This is for people who want to eat well, feel better, and be supportive of nourishing food without the stress of planning, shopping, or cooking. Through Team Starseed Kitchen, I work with a trusted team of health-supportive chefs who prepare fully customized meals based on your needs, preferences, and lifestyle. Whether you're focused on clean eating, hormone balance, digestion, energy, or simply having high-quality food, ready for your week, we meet you where you are. All meals are made with real, whole ingredients, no seed oils, no refined sugar, and no shortcuts. Just thoughtfully prepared food designed to support your body and make your life easier. This service is deeply personal. It's about having food in your fridge that you can trust. Food that supports your health, saves you time, and helps you feel grounded and cared for. If you're ready for consistent nourishing meals made just for you, you can learn more about our service and apply to work with us on starseedkitchen.com or follow the link in the show notes. We have chefs ready and available across the country, and we so look forward to nourishing you. Now let's return to the episode.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Yeah, so there's two answers I'll give. The one answer will be the somatic, which is what's happening inside of you, and the other will be the practical, what kind of foods can help. Um, we'll start with the somatic. So with binge eating, which 25 years I had that, and it was really, really intense. I was super sick because of it, because the amount of food I would eat and how it would affect my body. Even health foods, this is why in the book, when I talk about depressants and stimulants, it's not always unhealthy food. You know, I was I was getting local honey, raw honey, and like really expensive organic almond butter and just downing them together. It's right. So I was still using them as a depressant, even though they could be a really healthy, balancing food. Um, but what's happening inside of us, uh, this is specific for binging. Think about earlier when I was saying that blood flow that redirects from the brain to the to the uh guts, to the stomach. That blood flow redirection is what we're actually going after. We're going after a food when we're when we're binging, we're going after food that lowers the amount of anxiety that's coming up. Because when you feel that activation coming up inside of your body, and there's pressure and there's tension and there's overwhelm, that's the quickest way to pause happening. So the long-term work is actually creating a relationship to that energy that's moving up because we fear it. So subconsciously, we feel a little inkling of it, we run to the food. Once you can sit and hold it, my favorite way to do it is literally sitting down, letting your head be held, holding a pillow, hugging a pillow, and breathing into the energy and literally giving it the support to see what it does. Does it turn into anger? Do you cry? Do you move your body? Do you get an instruction like I'm gonna say no tomorrow to something I said yes to yesterday? There's so much information in the activation and it wants to move you, it wants to have some kind of expression, but we pause that with the eating. So it never really gets to do its thing. So it's this constant attempt the body has to try to express something is holding and it gets stuffed down. So that's the somatic element. The nutritional element is pretty simple, um, not always easy, but simple. If you can remember those three balancers I said beans, greens, and whatever protein works for you. And just the it's the simplest thing. When you notice yourself craving a depressant or you notice yourself craving a food that's really uh, let's say activates your binging cycle, don't think of not eating it. Start by eating these other ones and then eat it. So if I'm craving chips, instead of going to the chips, I'll get a can of beans and some celery. And I'll snack on a stalk or two of celery, have a couple spoonfuls of beans, then I'll go to the chips. And it's an entirely different situation when you have some balancers in your stomach first because you're more settled, you're getting more nutrients, there's less room because there's more fiber. So you can enjoy some chips, but you're not gonna be able to binge them the way you normally do. So the the blend of the both, interrupting the binge with balancing foods, and then also interrupting the binge by attending to what's inside of you, it tends to be very successful for people.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

What I love about this, what this made me think of, is how nice it is if you're throwing a party or a gathering to offer a homemade bean dip and cru d'é. It's really a great item to help people before the main entree comes out.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Because it's gonna give them the balancers that they need to go with whatever the main entree is to make sure that everyone is feeling good. Um, and if everyone's feeling good, you know, everyone's attitude is gonna be more calm and steady and peaceful, and you're more likely to have a joyous outcome from your gathering.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

You're right. I just taught a six-month program with 200 couples. Um they were individuals and couples, so 200 people. And one of the number one rules I taught these people is never have a conversation until you've eaten something. And it's exactly what you just said: like get some get some crude de tay and dip it in a bean dip before you have a talk about finances, or before you're talking about vacation, or before you're confronting somebody with something, because your adrenaline will lower. You will literally have less of a stress response and you can handle something that's pretty confrontational or overwhelming. And I love having this conversation with you because you have the mind, the artist mind of a chef where you can hear these simple, boring ingredients and find these really accessible, delicious ways to make that work. Uh that's what people need to hear more of, how to make this uh accessible and exciting.

SPEAKER_01 38:39

Well, and it's so interesting. This week for one of my personal chef clients, we made a beautiful bean salad. So those lovely, gigantic beans, you know, from the Mediterranean, I soak them overnight and uh they take a long time to cook, but then you marinate them with olive oil and lemon juice and lemon zest and Greek olives and parsley and red onion and kind of anything else that you want to throw in there, some red bell pepper, and then it goes into the fridge, and every day they get better and better because they're absorbing the flavor. And then now you're getting homemade beans from scratch, and it's just a little thing that you add to your salad or add on the side of your dinner with your protein and your veggie. My client just likes to use it as um like an add-on dish, you know, something that she can mix and match throughout the week. It doesn't just have to be the entree.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

So that's the key right there. I literally in my book I have an example where I say have uh a can of beans always on hand and some frozen vegetables for people that don't want to prepare, and steam or heat up the vegetables, have some spoonfuls of the beans, then go out and get pizza with your friends. Because for some people, it's not realistic to stop eating pizza, they're just not gonna do it. So don't try to stop. Bring the balancers into a depressant like pizza, for example. And then you're doing this beautiful titration.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

Yeah, and then my other suggestion for those that are listening that want to try and apply this method of adding more beans into their life, I love black lentils. The texture is lovely, they cook very quickly, um, then they work with everything. Whether you want to do a piece of fish, a piece of chicken, a piece of steak, uh, it's just the perfect texture with any protein and veggie. So I highly suggest if you haven't explored black lentils, also known as beluga lentils, or you'll see it as like, you know, um like bean caviar or lentil caviar, it works really well. And when in doubt, look at restaurant menus. Restaurant menus will will give you clues on how to use lentils and beans.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Yeah, excellent. Great advice.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

Can I do some rapid fire questions before we wrap up?

SPEAKER_00 40:50

Yeah, let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

Okay. What's your favorite superfood?

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Beans.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

What do you think is the most underrated food people should be eating for their health?

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Beans.

SPEAKER_01 41:02

It's great. I love it. What's one food everyone should avoid?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Sugar.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

One supplement everyone should consider.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

DHA.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Ooh, the DHA supplement. Is there a brand you recommend?

SPEAKER_00 41:15

Flora has a good algae DHA for people who are vegan. Um, but most other companies, like Carlson's, I mean, really simple uh fish fish oil uh extracted DHA. Um really incredible for your brain and your eyes and your nervous system.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Oh, thank you. Best health habit you've added this year?

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Getting rid of my iPhone on the weekends.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Ooh, well done. Do you leave it at home?

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Yeah, I have this backup phone. It's called a like a dumb phone, and I use that Thursday through Sunday.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Oh, that's great. A food tr a food trend you think is wrong or we should avoid?

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Um, any kind of extremism.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Coffee, tea, or neither?

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Tea.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

Do you have a preference?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Progray.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

Ooh, lovely. Really beautiful. And last question: if someone listening wants to radically improve their health through food, what are one of the changes you suggest they make?

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Do I have to say it again? Beans.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Beans. Beans are just to me, beans are like the gateway because they're a superfood. The amount of things they do in your body that we can't even begin to understand yet. And one of the most important things, they they they heal and they feed your microbiome. So that means all the food you eat that day is going to be more nutritious because you ate those beans. So they're really like they're accessible, they're cheap, that you can get them in cans. I mean, there's so much you can do with them. I just love them.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

I have two more questions because I can't resist because I just love your knowledge and your wisdom. You are in New York. What is one restaurant you love to eat out at that we should all consider next time we're visiting your area?

SPEAKER_00 42:57

God, next time you go to New York City, go to Sueen. It's in the East Village. It's a macrobiotic restaurant. It's on East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue. It is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

Perfect. I love macrobiotic restaurants. And lastly, what are your plans for dinner tonight and what are you going to be putting on your plate?

SPEAKER_00 43:18

I am going to be having, actually, I already had it, so I can say what I ate. Um, steamed broccoli with mung beans. I had, I just took a can of sardines, put the sardines right on the plate, and I had these lovely little personal pizzas my wife and daughter made. Um the crust was one of those lovely kind of almond flour, coconut flour crusts. So it's really high in fat and protein and low in carbs with little marinara sauce, a little bit of uh coconut cashew based cheese, and some artichoke carts and olives.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Well, I know you're gonna be busy on your book tour this spring and summer, but I would love for you to keep posting what you're having for lunch or dinner on social media because I love how. You balance your plate and that you eat intentionally to make sure you feel good and so you can thrive and so you can show up for you know all the fun activities that you've created for yourself with your career. So uh please keep posting that because I I love knowing what people like you are eating because I know it's nutrient dense and it gives you know people like me, chefs that are thinking about food all the time but get into ruts. It helps us break up the rut in really simple ways.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Oh, I love that. You you just inspire me to keep doing that now.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

Yeah, please, please do. I've saw that you've done that, but I I love more of it. And we'll do for those that tuned in today and and they know that this is the next health book that they need to dive into, where can they find your book and how can they keep learning from you?

SPEAKER_00 44:46

So if you go to holisticlifenavigation.com, that's my website. I have all my classes there, my courses. I actually have a deep dive into nutrition that starts in July. It's a six-month program and it teaches you the somatics and the practical nutritional philosophy to do this work that we're talking about. Um, but the book is there, all the information is there for everything I'm doing this year, and the book's available everywhere. So if anyone goes to their local bookstore or Barnes and Noble or anywhere online, they can just ask for it. It's called food therapy, and that's all they need to know.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

Perfect. Well, congratulations on your book, and it's such a pleasure to connect with you. Anytime you have information that you want to share or a new course that you're launching, please reach out and let's chat again.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Oh, thank you, Wendy. It was a pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

You too. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the High Vibration Living Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd love for you to leave a five-star rating and a written review wherever you're listening. It truly helps this podcast reach more people who are looking for this kind of support. And if something resonated with you, please pay it forward and share this episode with a friend or loved one who could benefit from it. To learn more about Starseed Kitchen in my organic spice blends, you can visit starseedkitchen.com. You can also follow along with me on social media at Whitney Arranoff, where I share recipes, behind the scenes, chef life, and everyday inspiration. You can also follow Starseed Kitchen and Team Starseed Kitchen on Instagram as well. Thanks again for being here, wishing you nourishment, balance, and a vibrant life experience. I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers.