[Ep. 340] Are You Being Traumatized By Your Food?

Stress is a short term experience that results in elevated adrenaline that often manifests with higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, muscle tension and anxiety. Certain foods can increase our fight-or-flight stress hormones, putting our body on a hormonal rollercoaster, while other foods can increase our capacity for peace. 

Luis’ book, Food Therapy, has more of the philosophy and practices around how the body is a barometer for what to eat. Look for his bestselling book in libraries, bookstores, and as an audiobook:
https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book

If you want more in person structure around the philosophy and how to eat relationally, join our Embodied Nutrition Slow Group starting July 7th 2026.
https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/slow-practice-nutrition-group

You can read more about, and register for, the upcoming 6 month "Embodied Nutrition" program here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/slow-practice-nutrition-group

You can read more about, and register for, the retreat at Broughton in the UK here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/broughton-2026

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You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

You can follow Luis on Instagram @holistic.life.navigation

Questions? You can email us at info@holisticlifenavigation.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. The same results will occur if you eat a diet that stresses you out, just as if you develop in a home that stresses you out. And those results are things like shame, insecurity, dissociation, addiction, dependency, insomnia, anxiety, panic, depression, shutdown, all of that emerges from a body that is being chronically stressed out by what it's eating. Today I just want to sit with you in my office and speak about this notion that food may have the ability to traumatize you. And I'm going to walk you through how I came to this conclusion. And I don't know if it's even a conclusion or a working theory, but it's something I've experienced in my own body and at this point, thousands of other bodies. And I talk about it a lot in my book, Food Therapy. The term I use is food-induced stress, meaning stress that doesn't come from your job or your historical traumas or even upcoming anxiety about something you have to do, but stress that impacts your body directly because of the food that you're eating. And this is such an important piece that is overlooked in nutrition, but it's also overlooked in mental health. Mental health focuses so much on the environment, relationships, financial circumstances, collective and societal conditions. And that's important. All of those things affect the body because this is what causes the body to have a stress response, right? Your nervous system, which I like to call the relationship system, is constantly responding to everything around it: temperature, light, sound, individual people, right? But there's one thing in the environment that we forget to talk about, and that's our food. That's what we eat. But if you understand how the body has stress response, so responds with stress to things that we're coming into contact with, like a deer that runs out in front of you when you're driving, or almost hitting another car, or somebody saying something that offends you, it lights you up. You feel that experience of higher, higher blood pressure, tense muscles, increased heart rate, hypervigilance, overall body tension, and anxiety, or even that feeling of activation where energy is rising up to your chest and throat and face. This is all happening because of one stress hormone, adrenaline. Adrenaline is the hormone that decides that you are going to have a stress response. When you feel stressed, when you feel overwhelmed, when you feel panic, anxiety, fear, that is all happening as a result of the production of adrenaline. Your adrenal glands release adrenaline into your bloodstream, and your whole physiology changes within seconds. Seconds. So anything that creates this stress response is called a stressor. And what makes stress different from trauma is that stress is something you metabolize either in the moment, like a couple minutes or an hour goes by and you go back to your baseline, or you sleep it off, you have a nice meal, you connect with some people later in the evening, and you wake up with kind of a new body, you're reset. That's stress. Trauma is when the same biology happens, your body produces adrenaline, you have tension, you have muscle tightness, you have higher blood pressure, increased heart rate. All of these things happen just like with stress, but it doesn't metabolize. It sustains and it builds and it compounds on itself. So each day you actually reduce your capacity for life because you are now experiencing a traumatic experience. You're having a trauma response. The body can't repair, it can't digest, it cannot rest and restore. Your brain can't even consider things because you're stuck in a survival place. So trauma is just stress that builds and never metabolizes. And stress is just your body responding to something in the environment with a hit of adrenaline. Now, if you understand this, you can very easily understand why I come to the conclusion: well, food can also induce stress, and food might be a source of being traumatized and even being re-traumatized. And that is because certain foods will actually increase your fight or flight hormones within 30 to 90 minutes of eating them. That is powerful information. So you can be experiencing circumstantial stress in your relationship, in your parenting, in caretaking at the workplace, in the world, or you could be experiencing circumstantial peace, a great relationship, financial security, a beautiful home, great kids, peace in the world. Yet, if your body is experiencing a stress response because of the foods you ate, you're going to feel stress regardless of your circumstances. And this is what my work, food therapy, is all about. My book, my work, my philosophy is all about teaching people how their everyday choices are impacting their stress response, which literally means your choice of snacks, what you drink, what you have for your meals, all of that impacts your capacity for life. So what you're able to do, what you're able to receive, what you're able to overcome and even metabolize or recover from is largely dependent on how much your food is increasing your stress responses or decreasing them. So what's really important, and you might have heard an ad already because they run automatically, but I have an upcoming program called Embodied Nutrition. It starts in a few weeks on July 7th. This is the last program I am doing with nutrition for two years. The next program I do is actually going to be focused on weight loss and body image. But this is the last deep dive into my whole food therapy philosophy through a six-month program. And I really want you to join it if you're following along with this idea of food-induced stress. Because my my philosophy in the way I teach is unlike any other dietary guideline. It is not about restricting foods. It is not about eating perfectly. It is not about eating clean. It is about learning how to eat relationally. And what that means is learning how to understand in your mind and then experience in your body through your senses the three different categories that I've put foods into. I invented these categories to make them to make food make sense. Because unless you study nutrition, and even if you study nutrition, there are endless scientific studies to back up or deny anyone's claims about health. So it's kind of like, where do you turn? Well, my answer is you turn to your body. You let your body become a barometer. You let your body show you what works for you. And these three food categories really help you understand food through a nervous system lens versus a health lens. So I call this eating for peace or eating for stress instead of eating for health. So these three categories are stimulants, depressants, and balancers. And the stimulating and depressing foods are the ones that tend to activate your fight or flight response way more than the balancers. Some of the balancing foods, like green vegetables and proteins and fats, they don't awaken your adrenals whatsoever. So you can eat those foods all through the day and literally just be coasting through the day without fight or flight happening in your body. But when you have the stimulants and depressants, coffee, sugar, cookies, very processed cheeses, uh refined carbohydrates like crackers and pastas and breads, these foods are putting you into a tug of war, meaning your body is having a big glucose spike, which then creates a big insulin glucose crash, and then a big fight or flight response to bring that uh glucose back up in your bloodstream. So I have looked at people's charts, glucose charts. You can get a continuous glucose monitor, stick it on your arm, and in uh an hour you'll have data about how food's affecting your stress response. And I have videos on YouTube that actually show you and teach this. And I teach this deeply in my six-month program. But when you look at this, it's profound to see how someone's body is on a roller coaster ride pretty much all day long because of the foods they're eating. Now, let's go to my early claim when I started this podcast episode about food-induced stress. And is it possible that trauma is can can occur from what you eat? Can you traumatize yourself through diet? The reason why I say yes is if I'm in a situation, a domestic situation that's stressful, and I'm developing in that situation as a child, we consider that as trauma therapist developmental trauma because your body developed in this internal state of fight or flight as your baseline. So if you're developing in a body as a child and your diet is inducing the exact same stress response as some domestic abuse situation, let's say, why are we not classifying that as a developmental trauma? Because the same results will occur if you eat a diet that stresses you out, just as if you develop in a home that stresses you out. And those results are things like shame, insecurity, dissociation, addiction, dependency, insomnia, anxiety, panic, depression, shutdown, all of that emerges from a body that is being chronically stressed out by what it's eating. And the reason why food, in my opinion, should be highlighted or at least valued as much as circumstantial stressors is because food stress continues way beyond the environment. And I'll use myself as an example here. I spend my whole childhood binge eating. I would come home from school every day being horrendously bullied from for having an intersex body. And I would go home and remediate that bullying with eating lots of food to shut down, literally repress and suppress the anxiety. That eating of that much food was what let me survive. I found a temporary feeling of calm, of groundedness, even some numbness to take off the edge of anxiety and panic and fear and shame, to be honest. However, as I graduated, as I made friends with people, I got top surgery even because I had developed breasts from being intersex. So I appeared as a typical biological male. Everything in my life had changed. My body, my friends, my circumstances. I had the best life I'd ever had when I look back on it. Yet I was still binge eating every single day because it was a habit. It was a habit I have to I had developed in order to find safety in myself, to try to create a sense of safety and ground because I didn't know how to do it otherwise. I didn't know how to sit with my own body and speak to it kindly or look at a plant and attune to it or breathe or move my body somatically. I didn't know any of that. So all I have is food. So I took the habit of binge eating into my 20s and early 30s. Even when I didn't need it, sometimes I did, I'd be stressed and I would eat out of stress. But often I would eat be out of out of habit. My body knew that as a baseline now. It developed this understanding of this is how it feels to be in this body. If you're a little too hungry, if you're a little too balanced and grounded, that's odd. We don't usually feel that way. I'm used to feeling stuffed. I'm used to feeling disgusted. I'm used to passing out from eating because I'm so tired. So I had to maintain that, even with quote, healthy foods. So my food choices even changed. My diet even changed. I became vegan from eating a standard American diet, a whole food organic vegan. And I brought the same habit of relating to food through a depressing, numbing, dissociative pattern to healthier food options, even. I say this because the same biology emerged. Even though the food was healthier, even though I was living a better life, even though I wasn't dealing with anything in real time that I had experienced as a child, my habit of binging told my body there must be something really threatening out there. Because in the past, we used this in response to threat. So binging itself was triggering up the memories of being bullied and being threatened and feeling unsafe and hating my body. But then the foods I binged on were creating the glucose spikes, which made me have my fight or flight response. So not only was the habit of binging reminding and triggering my body into the past, but the actual biological breakdown, what was happening in my blood, was similar to moments that were traumatic. So my PTSD from my childhood experiences just extended into my 20s and early 30s because my food choices were increasing that biology. When I finally started understanding this and playing with it, just oh my gosh, maybe nine years ago or so, I hit this place of really finding a safety in myself, a sense of quiet. It's why I call my protocol the quiet diet. It's not a restrictive diet at all, it's a protocol for integrating balancing foods that help your body settle that trauma response that you're used to being in from your diet. And as that started settling, I found a new capacity emerging in me. I was borderline agoraphobic and now it could go out. I was terrified of passing out in public because I used to, because I would have such massive anxiety attacks. My anxiety attacks went away. My insomnia went away. I was able to socialize with people and not feel anxious or panicked. This was happening in conjunction with going to trauma therapy, right? Therapy for my trauma. But I wasn't experiencing much movement from my therapy. I was experiencing a lot of understanding. I was getting new identities. I was being validated for how I felt and what I went through. But I wasn't feeling a new sense of self. I wasn't feeling like something emerging from my body that let me have more capacity to go into the world until I started bringing in this dietary piece. And then I realized from my own experience and then thousands of experiences of other people, when we bring diet in as just as equally important as a cause for stress, but also a cause for peace, a way to remediate the stress, we have a whole new modality to work with. And that is a good thing because we're eating anyway. We have to eat to survive. So if you learn how to eat in a way that creates calm and safety versus stress, then you have this incredible resource for life where every day, just by habit, you're eating in a way to reduce stress hormones, reduce your stress load, and actually aid in your body's daily recovery from stress and trauma. So I invite you and really urge you, because it's the last one for two years, to join me in my upcoming six-month nutrition program. It's called Embodied Nutrition. You can go to the link in the episode details and find out all the information you need on it. Everyone gets replays. Everyone gets one-on-one support from my team throughout the entire six months to custom tailor this practice for you based on your life, your health, your medication, your circumstances, whatever it is you're going through. And you will have plenty of audio exercises, monthly prompts, and two live 90-minute sessions from me every month, in addition to an integration session with Camille. Camille, by the way, is autistic, raising an autistic child and a child with Down syndrome, and has a lot of experience with not just my food therapy philosophy, but how to put it through the lens of a neurodivergent individual. So we have a lot to offer. I hope you join me. Um, like I said, the next one won't be until 2028. Even if you don't join me, but even if you're going to, actually, I strongly recommend you get my book. You can get it at your local library, you can get it as an audiobook very inexpensively and listen to it now, or you can buy it online or wherever you want to buy it. Because the book is going to walk you through the general food therapy philosophy. So you'll have so much insight and understanding. And then you can dive into letting me take you even deeper for the six months. So I hope this episode was helpful. I hope you're considering this for your own body, and I also hope it kind of speaks to some mystery you might have of why you feel the way you feel, even though you're doing all this good work and your life's pretty lovely. It could be what you ate for breakfast. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place, maybe even put your hand over it, and let whatever wants to come up come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.