Ep. 29 The Emotional Patterns You Need to Know Before You Start GLP-1 | Somatic Awareness for Weight Loss

Every woman I've worked with has tried something that worked - until it didn't. 
A diet, a program, a medication. The number moved. The clothes fit differently. And then it plateaued, or she stopped, and within weeks she was back where she started wondering what was wrong with her. 

Nothing was wrong with her. The pattern that was driving the behaviour was never part of the conversation. 

In this episode I'm talking about what the GLP-1 conversation is missing - and its not a supplement protocol or a meal plan. It's the pattern underneath the noise. Where it came from, and why discipline alone will never be strong than something that's been running since you were 7 years old. 

This isn't an episode against GLP-1. It's the conversation that needs to happen alongside it. 

Book 1:1 www.lesleyturner.ca/services

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Intuitive Drop. Okay, I want to tell you why I made this episode. So, as most of you maybe know, I'm a former naturopathic doctor, 11 years of clinical practice, and something in me has always had complicated feelings about a medication whose primary cultural conversation has become weight loss. Like this wasn't what it was designed for, and we're just fine with that now. And then perimetapause happened for me, and I watched my waistline change in ways I didn't expect and honestly didn't love. And I'd be lying if I said that the thought didn't cross my mind to try a GLP one. Now I haven't done anything about it, but the thought was there. And I get how that sounds. 11 years in a naturopathic medical practice, and here I am telling you to consider it. No, no, no, no. That's not where I'm going with this. But that moment, that moment of even considering it, is actually what sparked this episode for me. Because I'm thinking about it. With everything I know, I can only imagine the conversation happening for the women listening to this. So this isn't an episode against or for GLP1, actually. It's the conversation that isn't happening alongside it. So let me show you what I mean. Picture this. You are seven years old. Your parents are fighting again. Or maybe they're not, maybe they're not talking at all, and that actually feels worse. Somebody puts a plate of food in front of you. Or maybe you grab one yourself, and for a few minutes, everything else just quiets down. You're not listening for the next thing to go wrong. You're just here with this food, and it feels good. Or you didn't decide that, it just happened, and your nervous system filed that away as a solution. Or maybe your house was fine. Maybe your childhood was genuinely good, and food was still the thing because food was celebration. Your birthday in your grandmother's kitchen. It was the thing that your mom made when she wanted to show you that she loved you, the centerpiece of every good memory you have. And not as an escape, but as joy, as connection, as community. Fast forward 30 years. You've just finished a stressful day or a hard conversation or nothing particularly stressful happened. And you're standing in your kitchen at 11 p.m. and you're not hungry. You know you're not hungry, but you reach for food anyway. And that reach isn't random and it's not a willpower weakness. It's a nervous system running a program it learned a long time ago. So as you know, the conversation around GLP ones are everywhere right now. Celebrities are endorsing it. Maybe you have some friends who are on it, and some of them genuinely need it for pre-diabetes or diabetes management. And then there's some, let's be honest, because it works and they wanted it too, and so they're on it. Now I'm not here to judge any of that. I just told you I thought about it myself. But the conversations around GLP1 miss a fundamental thing that needs to be addressed before that prescription gets filled. And it's not a supplement protocol alongside it or a meal plan. It's not anything that comes in a package. It applies to every strict diet you've ever started, or every hardcore wellness habit, every program you've committed to completely, and then forgot about or let go of three months later. GLP1 medications will reduce the noise, the food noise, the hunger signals, the cravings, the compulsive reaching that has nothing to do with hunger. And for a lot of women, that quieting feels like immense relief. Like finally, finally, the body is cooperating. But that noise wasn't random. That's information. It was a nervous system that learned that food meant comfort. Food meant calm, the one thing in a chaotic house you could actually look forward to. Or food was the one thing you could control when everything else felt completely out of your hands, when your body didn't feel like yours, when your environment didn't feel safe, when the only power you had was saying yes or no to what went in your mouth. That's not a body weakness. That's your nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do, finding what works and holding on to it. And then, of course, there's the straight up kind of chemistry of it, dopamine, serotonin. Your brain rewards you for eating, especially certain foods. And over time, that reward loop becomes the default response you have to stress or boredom or loneliness or celebration. It's not all bad. And again, not a willpower issue. This is how you're wired because your body found something that worked years ago and has held onto it for decades. The medication will quiet the signal, but it does not touch where the signal came from. So when the dose of the medication levels out, or when you eventually come off of it, the pattern is still there, intact, waiting. And you haven't failed at weight loss, but you never considered that the pattern needed to be part of the conversation. So before we reach, before your hand moves towards something, before you've made even a conscious decision, something happens in your body first. For some women, it's a tightening of the chest or this anxiety in the shoulders, low hum in the belly, and it's been managed all day. But then at some point, the body just goes, I've had enough. Now for others, it's more of an emptiness that has nothing to do with their stomach, a hollowness that somewhere in the middle of your body, food temporarily fills that feeling. And then I've noticed that for others, it's actually the absence of a feeling. It's a flatness or a numbness. And eating briefly interrupts that. It makes them feel something. Most women, most humans, have never slowed down inside that moment because it moves so fast, we're barely aware of it. So the signal fires, the behavior follows, and by the time there's any awareness whatsoever, it's already happened. GLP1s will interrupt that cycle at the behavior level. It turns down the volume on the signal, but the signal is still being generated. That tightness or the anxiety or the hollowness is still there. The nervous system is still doing exactly what it learned to do. It just has less of a way to express it right now. And this is why women describe feeling like something is missing on the medication, even when it's working. But they're not missing the food exactly. They're missing what food was doing for them, that brief level of regulation, the momentary comfort that they were getting, or the dopamine hit that said, You're okay, you're okay, you're okay. The body doesn't forget what worked for them, even when you take the behavior away. Now, when you think about, say, like whole 30 or 75 hard, the 5 a.m. running habit that lasted for four months that you tried, the eating protocol that worked perfectly until you had a work trip or a hard week, or the moment that life happened and your discipline on it ran out. That version of you that tries things and then stops, she's just tired. She's not lazy or unmotivated. She's tired. She has woken up on a Monday with a plan more times than she can count and meant it every single time. It worked for a while and then it stopped working. And she looked at herself and wondered, what the hell was wrong with her? But nothing's wrong with her. Nothing's wrong with you. Discipline can override a pattern for a while, for weeks even. But discipline is a resource and it can deplete. And the moment it does, that pattern has more energy, more fuel than the intervention ever did. Because the pattern has been there since you were seven. And the intervention has been there since what, January? The pattern wins every time until you go underneath it. And this is the conversation that isn't happening alongside GLP1. It's not in the prescription, doctors are not talking about it, influencers are not talking about it, and not even in the wellness support that you should have around it. Because pattern work isn't a product that you can bottle or prescribe. It requires someone to sit with you and look at what's been running the show. What are you reaching for when you reach and you're not hungry? What does that plateau feel like? Not on the scale, but in your chest, in your gut, in the back of your throat? What is the part of you that says, more, increase, push harder? Where did she learn that? How old was she? In my one-on-one work, those are the questions we go into. That's where the actual shift lives, not in a more disciplined morning routine or in a higher dose of a medication. It's in understanding what the pattern was built to protect you from and giving then your nervous system a different way to feel safe. Now I work with women who are on GLP ones, and I want to tell you what I actually see. The weight loss is happening. And that's not really the part that's remarkable to me. What I see is a woman who used to grip so tightly her way through a stressful week and end up in the kitchen at the end of it. And now she notices the stress coming. She feels it in her body before it becomes a behavior. Life is still chaotic sometimes. That hasn't changed because that's hard to control. But she's regulated inside it in a way she wasn't before. Food doesn't have the same grip. She feels happier in her body. And I don't just mean the number on the scale. There's a genuine confidence there that has nothing to do with the medications. The medication maybe created the window of quiet enough that the pattern work is what she did inside that window. She started asking questions. What am I actually feeling right now? What does this tightness in my chest need? Where did this pattern come from? And what is it protecting? And her nervous system, quite slowly, started finding different answers for that. That's the conversation that needs to happen, the combination that actually works. It's not medication alone. It's not hardcore workouts alone. It's not even pattern work alone. It's the willingness to actually look at all of it. And so in my sessions, that's exactly what we do. We go back to find where the pattern started, what it was protecting, what your nervous system needs now instead. We look at it somatically, intuitively, and pattern-based, not as a protocol, but as a process of actually finding what's underneath it all. If this episode landed somewhere real for you, the link to work with me will always be in the show notes. Now, if you're not ready for that yet, come find me on Instagram. Tell me what landed. I read everything. The pattern inside you is not a flaw that you developed. It's not evidence that you have done something wrong. It's a nervous system that built something very intelligent out of what it had at the time. It kept you regulated when you didn't have other tools. It gave you comfort when comfort wasn't available in any other way. It gave you control when nothing else was in your hands. It gave you joy and celebration and connection through the one language that was always available. It was never the enemy. But you're not seven anymore. And now you have access to something that wasn't available then, the inner work. So before you increase the dose, before you add another layer of discipline on top of an already exhausted system, before you decide that a GLP1 is the answer to what's going on, I want you to sit in that gap between the impulse and the behavior. Because what your body has been trying to tell you for a very long time lives there. I'll see you next week.