After the last episode on the trauma-weight connection, there were a lot of questions that came up…so this episode will dive deeper into taking last week’s knowledge and applying it to different life circumstances.
We dive into creating boundaries, regulating our nervous system and really working on changing negative self-talk. There are so many strategies to get us out of survival mode and back into thriving, and we touch on some powerful ones during this Q&A sesh.
And, with Hello Body Freedom Podcast being at its infancy, we’re throwing a giant launch party and contest where you can win gift cards, HBF swag, private coaching packages, and HBF Academy memberships. All the deets on how to participate and win can be found in our private Facebook group: Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, here we are on to episode four. I am so excited to be here. Starting this whole podcast has just been freaking fun. I don’t know another way to say it. I was, I don’t know what I was so stressed out about for so long, but this has been an absolute pleasure. It has been so much fun. We are now here on episode four and I just wanted to tell you a little bit about how we are recording not every episode, but a lot of the episodes. So, I have been going live inside of my private Facebook group for, four or five years. Like, it’s just a habit that I have. I get on and I see everybody there and, a lot of people join me live and they ask questions and it’s very interactive.
And I thought I’m not used to just hitting record and just talking into space, right? So I thought, you know what, I am going to keep recording inside of my free Facebook group. We’re going to do it every single week, but now what we’re doing is we’re really setting it up. So it’s appropriate for the podcast.
And that’s what we’ve been doing. So the way that usually starts out is if you are inside of my free Facebook group, which by the way, you can get there by going to HelloBodyFreedom. com and usually it’s me joking around and having a good time. And then I pause and then I record the episode and a ton of clients are there, a ton of people who aren’t clients are just in our Hello Body Freedom community are there.
And it’s really fun because afterward we usually do a Q and A, right? If people had questions in the moment. And sometimes the Q and A’s are really short and nothing to write home about necessarily, but sometimes the Q and A’s are amazing. And so that’s what this episode is today. We are going to dive into the Q and A questions that came up around episode three, which was all about the trauma weight connection, right?
There’s a definite connection to what’s going on in our nervous system with an overwhelmed nervous system, old past trauma response. And our relationship with food. Not everybody on the planet has the same connection, but pretty much anybody who struggles with their body, you have struggled to lose weight, and you have not been able to lose weight.
It’s a really important piece that the diet industry and diet culture completely don’t talk about. Most therapists don’t have this level of understanding and awareness unless they have very particular, special specialized training in working with disordered eating and understanding also the nervous system response to that as well.
And so, that’s what we dive into inside of episode three and the Q & A afterward I thought was amazing. And what I’m doing here in this episode, and I might do this in episodes moving forward and let me know what you think, is that it’s a much more casual conversation and where I’m just really helping people out.
They have questions based on what we were talking about. And I’m just one right after the other, one right after the other, just answering those questions. So I’m really excited. And if you haven’t listened to episode three, then I definitely recommend going back. It’s pretty awesome. , whenever we’re really able to start seeing with our eyes wider open about this connection, that’s probably happening for most of us on this planet, if we are struggling with our body if we’re struggling with weight and our relationship with food.
And so, this episode will make a lot more sense whenever we get to that part. And the last thing I just wanted to say, just because we are at the very infancy of the Hello Body Freedom podcast is that I’m having a blast for sure, but especially I want to make sure that we are doing an entire Hello Body Freedom launch party.
And of course, if you found me years later and you’re just going back to the beginning and listening, awesome. You can still do these fun things for sure. But as a part of the Hello Body Freedom launch, I’m giving away just a lot of awesome prizes. I’m giving away a ton of Hello Body Freedom swag.
We’ve got t-shirts and sweatshirts and water bottles and journals and all the good stuff. I have my entire kit on ending overeating and emotional eating. It’s a 47 value. Everybody gets it. If you end up going down this route and helping us out with this launch of the podcast. So I’m letting you all know that because if you subscribe to this podcast, or if you download an episode or even, Crazy fun
if you leave us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, really these are all ways that you could be entered in number one, just to win no matter what. So winning my bundle that I have. Also, be entered in to win some awesome HelloBody Freedom swag. We’re also giving away private coaching and entrances into my HelloBody Freedom Academy, like free memberships.
So it’s awesome. If you want to play, make sure that you go to hellobodyfreedom. com. And all of the deets are inside of my private Facebook group. So you can go check that out. And that just to be really clear, that private Facebook group, it’s called the path to Food and Body Freedom.
So it’s hello body freedom. It’s my Facebook group, but it’s called the path to Food and Body Freedom. And so you can go search that and any amount of communication, letting us know what you like, what you want more of, we’re just here for it all. Okay. So without delay, I’m really excited to go a little deeper into some amazing questions that came up after episode three.
So enjoy this Q&A session.
All right. Let me see what we have here for everybody that was here. I like this said, thanks for all the information, lots of negative self-talk. Yeah, we’ve, we learned negative self-talk, pretty people.
We learn it. Other people hand us negative self-talk. We are not born onto this planet with talking like shit to ourselves, just so we’re really clear here. Okay. But we learn it and we learn it usually from our caretakers. We learn it from society. We learn it from the people that surround us and the society that surrounds us and the culture that surrounds us and all those things.
But the cool thing, depends on what you think cool is, I think it could be cool is that when we become adults where we have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, we have a trauma body, we have all the shit that we’ve had to carry with us, right? When we become adults, we know, if we want to feel better, we can.
We literally can, okay? The problem for most of us is what we do is we think the way, the only way to feel better is I have to go on a diet plan. I need to start exercising because I’m too fat. I don’t like my body. And we just beat ourselves up that way. But that’s not it. The way that we start feeling better is by being kinder to ourselves, changing our talk.
And I want to tell you there’s a system we take our clients through step by step. Number one, do this. Number two, do that. Meaning we got to like really choose a different way to talk that negative self-talk for sure. But also an unwinding and an untangling of this kind of emotional constipation,
I like to call it, where all of a sudden like we feel a thing and it’s Oh, we can’t even tolerate it. And that’s the trauma body. So we learn how to untangle, we learn how to process, we learned how to build our capacity. It’s very powerful and very important. Okay. Yeah. So, “great session.
I really connected to what you said. Not seeing myself as an emotional eater. Yes. Because I ate before I felt the emotion.” Yeah. I did not subscribe to emotional eating, especially cause I had a fitness nutrition company. I’m like, dude, I know what to eat. But, and, we’ll get more into my story.
Maybe the next episode needs to be a little deeper. So you guys can learn a little bit more about my story in that regard. Cause it’s not that my story is your story, but we can all learn from each other’s stories for sure. But so many of us don’t associate as an emotional eater. But that’s often because the food is in our mouth before we just don’t feel a lot, right?
So there’s that dissociative quality for real that can happen. And so “in freeze mode emotional constipation, food isn’t going to fix it”. But here’s what I want to say about this piece right here. So I know I’m in freeze mode and I know the food isn’t going to fix it. And then if I eat it, I’m going to feel worse.
And this is actually a good teaching moment for the Q and a here that can help everybody. So I want to add this here. And so I want to be really clear. She’s asking questions about the membership. So we’ll talk about that later. But what I want everybody to hear is that when you are stuck in like a fight, flight, or freeze, right?
Want to be really clear is that what happened since you were a child, likely is that you learned that food is the answer. And the only way out of food being the answer, the only way out, like on this journey of how to climb out of this so food is not the answer anymore. Is that especially at the beginning of the journey and Heather who just shared is at the beginning of her journey of healing, using food to cope is going to be a part of your journey.
You’ve been doing it for a long ass time. Okay. You have strong habit loops and patterns for doing that. So the very first thing we want to do is when she said here: “Food does not fix it. And then I feel worse.” The first thing to fix is not the food behavior, that is a strong habit loop.
The first thing to fix is making a choice to change your mind to not feel bad about it. Bringing kindness into that moment that I am on a journey, that the path to that freedom includes actually using food to cope when I am in freeze mode. Full stop, period. That is a part of the game. Okay. Now I’m just trying to think, I just want to make sure that I’m just really clear here because we want to keep this very clear is that at the end of the day, it is a part of your healing journey.
You are going to get it wrong. More than you get it quote unquote right in terms of feeling your feelings instead of using Fujiko and quite frankly at the beginning of a journey, I’m getting a little overboard here, not, I’m trying to keep it towards trauma response, but ultimately if you fight, if you are living in freeze, what that is telling me is that your nervous system is high jacked over mode.
And your first consciousness, when you realize, Oh, I’m in survival mode, I can’t get out. I’m in survival mode. I can’t get out. There are two things that are going on. Number one is you are in a container, possibly an environment, if you will, that is triggering and re-triggering and re-triggering and re-triggering.
And you can’t get out of that. But this happens when we have abusive spouses. This happens when the people in our lives are part of the insanity and then it feeds off of each other and then everybody’s just living in this crazy overwhelmed state. Okay. And so one thing we have to do is make sure we can get into an environment where we are not getting triggered all the time, and so that can mean a lot of things.
That can mean getting out of that environment. That can mean creating your own safe space where nobody gets to cross it. And quite frankly, In a lot of ways that often means creating better boundaries around other people who are creating that triggered piece.
So that’s one aspect of it. It’s not the same for everybody. That’s one aspect. The other aspect of it is that we have to… Work with our own selves to do the things that regulate us out of frozen. So we have to actually do things that help us move out of survival mode. So freeze response. This, like, frozen space we often need to get moving, right?
Frozen is really I can’t move. I’m stuck. I can’t move. I’m stuck. I can’t move. I’m stuck. A lot of times we need to like actually use the body to get the body moving. Going for a walk, getting outdoors, getting in nature, doing something to get unstuck. The other thing that we need to do is actually make sure we are self-caring in a way that is giving our actual body what we need.
So for instance, if I’m getting no sleep and my stress levels are so high because the people in my life, because the circumstances of my life and I’m exhausted all the time. And I’m eating like high sugar, I’m just, I’m eating sugar on top of sugar, on top of sugar, on top of like fast food on top of sugar.
So I’m not nourishing my body. I’m not giving my body what I need, which is sleep. There’s some practicalities that we want to be practicing as best we can. What do I need to do to create space in my life to actually let me, let my nervous system come down, right?
Am I getting the sleep I need? If not, how do I boundary that in order to do that? Am I giving myself nourishing foods? So that huge research on Omega, Omega three oil, fish oil. Like eating a whole lot of fish and or taking like fish supplements, like EPA, DHA supplements more on the EPA than the DHA I just learned recently, but like high levels of omega 3, which means eating like fatty fish, omega 3 fish, like regularly is profound for calming the nervous system for getting out of anxiety states, right?
And so, these are actual practical things that we want to be able to do because the truth of the matter is if our nervous system is just always chronically overwhelmed, there’s not a lot of work that we can do like real work.
In terms of working with emotional eating and learning how to not use food in those moments. If we are just super hijacked, our nervous system is hijacked all the time. So we want to be able to get down into this place. So there are other things like, for instance, for me to take a yoga class, for me to get out of my house and go take a yoga class where I have to, can’t leave my mat for an entire hour.
And I’m sweaty at the end of it. And I’ve been breathing and I had to do this meditation and Shavasana. By the time I leave there, I am more regulated than when I got there. Other ways to regulate going for a walk, listening to a podcast, or listening to something in your ears that makes you feel better, right?
You do that in nature while you’re walking. That can also help get you more regulated. Okay. Other things, yoga Nidra. So yoga Nidra hypnosis is a, is another one like ways that you can literally take yourself and say, I am choosing to do this thing in order to put myself into a different state.
Going for a walk, listening to a podcast, being in nature will put you in a different state. Yoga Nidra will put you in a different state. Power yoga does it for me. Put me in a totally different state. Hypnosis DM me and I’ll send you a great. App that’s free, we’re going to start using it inside of HelloBodyFreedom.
It’s called Reverie, R E V E R I, Reverie is the app. It’s like self-hypnosis. You can like do these practices to regulate your nervous system. So anything that you can think of to get yourself out of that state that’s the work, like for us to think that we can have our nervous system completely hijacked and not use food as the answer, when we’ve done it for so long, we’re setting expectations for ourselves that are not actually, it’s not helpful. We actually need to get that nervous system down and that is practical tips of what we just talked about. Okay. Woo. That was a long Q and A, but it was fun.
Yay, everybody. So thank you so much for being here. That was super fun. I had a blast going through this and doing this with you guys. Thank you all for showing up and being here. It’s so beautiful and fun.
If you guys have any questions at all hellobodyfreedom.com is all the information you need. And that is all I have for you today. If this resonated with you and you want to learn a little bit more and you feel like, gosh, this is pretty powerful, I’ve never thought about this, you wanna go to hello body freedom.com.
You can actually just go to hellobodyfreedom.com, and if you click on hellobodyfreedom.com, then you will see at the very top, it’s my five-day path to Food and Body Freedom Challenge. It is a free challenge. Anybody can take it. And it will start to really walk through the missing links from emotional eating to trauma resolution, to getting out of diet culture, to self-sabotage, all of these big things that really keep us stuck.
And it could be really helpful. So for anybody that wants it, it’s yours for the taking. And that is all I have. Everybody have a great week. I’ll see you next week. Bye, everybody.
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