Wait…I struggle with my weight because of trauma?

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Wait… I struggle with my weight because of trauma? ?

Here’s the deal:

  • If you’ve lost weight and gained it back like it’s your job…
  • If you feel like food is in control and you’re not…
  • If you identify as someone who self-sabotages yourself every time you make progress with your health and weight…
  • If you’ve literally tried everything…and none of it worked (or it worked for a while until food sabotage reared its ugly head)…

This episode is for you!!

I totally get it…This might be the hardest pill to swallow.

OR…

It might be the missing piece of the magical puzzle for you to finally go on a sustainable weight loss journey…and it actually works! There’s only one way to know… listen and let me know what you think!

And if you want a no-cost way to go even deeper into this topic, then make sure you join the totally free PATH TO FOOD AND BODY FREEDOM CHALLENGE and let my team and I help get you out of this icky cycle.

Resources and Links:

TIMESTAMPS:
[00:01:47] Weight and Trauma.
[00:03:09] Weight loss and self-sabotage.
[00:07:15] Changing thinking patterns.
[00:09:42] Coping mechanisms and emotions.
[00:13:41] Trauma response and food.
[00:15:49] Moving from survival to thriving.
[00:19:01] Processing hurt and anger.

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Full Episode Transcript:

All right, my friends, let’s go ahead and dive in today. Wait, I struggle with weight because of trauma?

Okay. So before we dive in, let’s back up just a little bit so we can understand what I mean by weight. You mean trauma? I don’t even get this. So the very first thing I want to say is that you can see this thing scrolling down here. It says, hello, body freedom forward slash. HelloBodyFreedom. com forward slash five-day path.

You can click on that. You also could just go to HelloBodyFreedom. com and then what you want to do is you want to register for the five-day challenge. It starts this Saturday people. It starts this Saturday. So very excited to rock this out with you guys. But it’s really important that you understand that today’s training is a special training that is a pre.

Challenge bonus training. So anybody that’s already here that’s registered for the challenge, this is going to help you a lot and it’s going to help guide you with the actual challenge that you were signed up for. And if you’re not signed up, yo, register right here. You can see it. Where’d it go? Right down there.

There it goes. Okay. All right. And so if you were new to my world, I’m Audra. So just really quick. I help women get out of food, hell and body jail. That’s what I did. I was in it for years. I was in it for decades. I started emotionally eating it. I was six years old. I didn’t even understand it until I was in my mid-thirties and that my friends is a legitimate food, hell and body jail.

And it took me a while to dig out and it’s not the answer that you think. And we’re going to dig into that today as well. But understanding that there is a path out and the path out is actually to work with and heal the deeper reasons why you struggle with body and especially food in the first place.

Okay. Whenever you can start to unwind and untangle that things will change in your life. Guaranteed promise. All right. So let’s dig in. So the topic of today is “Wait, I struggle with my weight because of trauma.” And so let’s talk about this. So what normally happens is that we put on a few pounds or maybe you’ve struggled with your weight your whole life, or you go through a stressful situation or maybe you’ve never struggled with your weight until before COVID.

Like I’ve had a couple of clients coming to me in the last two years that way, right? Or those of you who have struggled with emotional eating or overeating or just being in a body that doesn’t feel comfortable for you and the COVID just made it worse. That’s a more common story that I hear.

But what ends up happening is that we when that happens,  we’re uncomfortable. We go, damn it, something needs to change. Something’s not okay for me. And what do we normally do? I used to do it all the time. It took a long time to unravel myself out of it. But we go on a diet, right?

Or we decide to join a gym. We go I just need to start exercising. So you figure out an exercise path or something, or you go I just need to eat clean, or I need to try that new latest diet, or maybe it’s keto, or maybe it’s paleo, or maybe it’s vegan, or maybe it’s like all things that people do to go on some specific diet in order to lose weight.

All right. And the problem with that is that it’s actually not the solution. It’s mainly more like a Band-Aid that you’re

 And I’ll talk about this in the challenge, but this is a good thing to give a little shout-out to if you have lost weight and gained it back again, if you have tried and failed, tried and succeeded, and then failed again. Okay, if you feel like you have gotten some success and then self-sabotage yourself, right?

And again, I think one of the best ways to decipher that is a I’ve lost the weight and now I’ve gained it back. Okay. If that has happened to you, then a diet is not the answer. Then joining a gym is not the answer. is eating healthy a great idea? Yeah, like good nutrition is great, but I’m telling you the diet is not the answer.

Is moving your body a good idea? Yeah, moving your body, our bodies are meant to move, but when you make those two things the actual answers to fix your body problem, to lose weight so you can just check mark it off your to-do list and move on with your life. Usually almost always.

It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s not the answer. And I’ll explain all of this starting Saturday on my free challenge, the five-day path to freedom. Look down here, look down. HelloBodyFreedom. com. Go ahead and click that link. Make it happen, my friends. Let’s go ahead. If you’re not registered yet, get your ass registered.

Okay, so whenever you choose over and over again a diet or exercise as the answer to fixing your problem over and over again when do you finally come to the realization that this must not be the answer? And I’m literally asking you this on purpose. Just hear me out. It took me getting a degree in exercise physiology, going to Bowman College, studying holistic nutrition, owning a pretty awesome fitness company in Silicon Valley Fitness and Nutrition Company because I would help out on both ends with the thousands of clients that came through our doors.

And yet, I couldn’t stop binging and then restricting. I couldn’t stop dieting and then eating tons of food. I couldn’t stop trying to lose weight and then gaining even more weight. Okay, there came a point where I realized this clearly isn’t the answer because if it was the answer, it would have worked already.

So I also hear clients a lot of times go, Oh, but you don’t understand, Audra. It does work. I know it worked cause I tried so hard and I lost 50 pounds. And I’m like what’s going on right now in your life? I gained it back plus 10 pounds and I’m totally defeated. But that’s, but my point is I know it worked and I’m like if it weren’t clearly, it didn’t like really work.

Cause you wouldn’t be back where you started. Something else is getting in the way. And I think when you can understand that more than anything, you’re on the right path. Now,  does joining a gym and maybe, few less drive-thrus work for some people? It works for some people. But if you have found me, it probably hasn’t worked for you.

Okay? And I will say that it doesn’t work for very many people. And I will give you all the stats on dieting in general. All of us would be better off if we just never would have dieted in the first place, honestly, in terms of being on a sustainable weight loss journey or coming into a body that you feel comfortable with and a body that feels like you’re at your happy weight and a place that you can feel really good in, in your life that you’re living.

 If I can just like nail the nail, the coffin shut. It’s that there’s another reason why you’re struggling. Okay. So let’s not let the diet or the latest diet for the latest diet craze or the latest fitness plan or the latest fitness guru be the answer to a problem that’s a little bit deeper.

Okay. So that’s the first thing. So now here’s what we want to do. We’re going to go over three different things right now. Here’s what we want to do. This is the way. I’m giving you like an overarching idea of what will go in really deep into the challenge. Number one is we have to change our thinking pattern.

So first things first, we think the thoughts that are unhelpful so like when we’re really tired for say, like at the end of a long, stressful day, the thoughts might be gosh, man a pitcher of margarita sounds good, or man, I’m just hungry. I want to eat or, oh my God, just get me home.

All I want to do is sit in front of the couch and veg out and just eat meat, right? These are thoughts that we have in our head. And so while. This is a big piece. This is a, a lot of coaches out there teach us working with mindset. It matters because there are certain thinking patterns that you have that have gotten you to where you are today.

And so if we’re unwilling to look at our thinking and start to untangle and peel apart the thought process, then we will likely stay stuck. So it’s one piece of the puzzle, but it is a piece. One of the first pieces is the thinking patterns that you’ve had that got you to where you’re at. We have to work with and change those thinking patterns.

Okay. That’s the first piece. Like when we’re talking deeper, we’re not talking about just like the behavior of I’m going to go to the gym or I’m going to go for a walk or I’m going to get more sleep. Like those are great behaviors. I’m talking about the first piece. We need to like, look at what we’re thinking.

We need to be willing to change it. The second piece is that you likely have a lot of what I call emotional constipation. Or emotional blockage, if you will. And there’s nothing wrong about that. There’s nothing shameful about that. We live in a culture that’s a bit emotionally unintelligent if you will. Feeling our feelings.

The second we think about feeling a feeling, we often roll our eyes and go, Who wants to do that? There’s a lot of I don’t know what it is, a lot of drama around wanting to actually feel what we’re feeling. And the problem with that is that we have an emotional compass, and emotions are a part of the human experience.

And if we don’t know how to work with our emotions, how to move them through our body, how to process them, and, in a sense, how to flush them out, you’re gonna stay constipated, okay? When you have an inability… To tolerate feelings, like the reason why we’re, Emotionally unintelligent.

We can’t feel our feelings. But the truth is that you might not want to feel your feelings. That doesn’t mean that the feelings don’t come. That doesn’t mean that the stress doesn’t load up. It doesn’t mean that the anxiety doesn’t pile on. It doesn’t mean that the sadness doesn’t well up. It doesn’t mean that the insane elation or excitement like a puppy dog, it’s all intensity of emotion. And what happens is when we haven’t learned how to be in right relationship with our emotions. If we haven’t learned how to work with them, recognize them, process them, flush them, like all the things. What we did learn, likely as a child, is whenever we felt these big things, That when we ate food, it made us feel better, right?

Food became a coping mechanism. So if you happen to be an overeater, a binge eater a compulsive eater, a mindless eater, a stress eater, a comfort eater, a bored eater, a happy eater, a sad eater, a rebellious eater. And I just had a session with a client.  It was like, Oh my gosh, of course.

 Like a way to control. So like a controlled eater, meaning like I will eat or I won’t eat. And there’s control and rebellion are very similar. They’re like intricately linked there. But if you’re eating for any of those reasons, that has nothing to do with physical hunger, that has to do with eating because of whatever emotional state you don’t want to feel right now.

And so food becomes the fix for that. It becomes the way to numb out and to not feel those feelings. Again. There is zero shame. There is zero judge, right? This was my life for 35 fucking years. It took me a while to untangle myself, but it doesn’t have to take you as long as it took me.

We’ll talk about that starting in the challenge. That if you are not registered for it yet, go there. Go there. Go to HelloBodyFreedom.com. Get on it. Get on that five-day path to freedom. It will Frickin change your life. So these two pieces are very important. Okay. Your inability to tolerate these bigger feelings and motions make it so you use food or alcohol to cope, right?

And so we have to work on untangling our thoughts. We also have to work on untangling our emotions and then our habits and our actions that we take that are intricately aligned with our inability to truly be with and feel our emotions. So this is a huge part of what we’ll be talking about during the challenge.

Now, the last piece, because I’ll leave, save it, save the best for last. Wait, I struggle with my weight because of trauma? What? Let me just describe trauma. And just, again, so we’re really clear, I’m giving us a nice overview here. We’re going to go into like depths and depths of detail into this inside of the five-day Path to Freedom Challenge.

It’s free. All you got to do is register and sign up. Get over there and sign up. But at the end of the day, The way that you can think about trauma is at some point in your life, your nervous system got really overwhelmed. So your fight and flight part of your nervous system, your stress response, it’s called your autonomic nervous system.

The sympathetic part of your nervous system got really effing freaked out. Like whether it’s a real event that happened or whether it was a perceived event that happened, this is super important that you understand this because what, ultimately what matters in terms of what we’re talking about here is that your nervous system got incredibly frazzled and incredibly overwhelmed.

Okay. And whenever that happens, that’s just a trauma response. That’s what it is. All right. Without going into the past, without going into a story, without having to relive the shit that cause let’s all just be honest. Nobody escapes childhood without trauma. You didn’t. I didn’t, our kids didn’t, their kids won’t, like whether real or perceived, no matter how great of a childhood we maybe had or our kids have or whatever, nobody escapes without some level of trauma, right?

And sometimes trauma is just as simple as one of my clients grew up really poor and she had a single mom and she had a ton of siblings. I can’t remember how many siblings she had. I want to say like maybe four or five. That seems like a ton to me. So maybe that’s not a ton to you. But my point is that she remembers.

That like not being able to eat was a reality in her childhood. And so whenever there was food, especially with four kids, you didn’t think about it. You weren’t connected to hunger. You weren’t connected to anything. You weren’t even connected at the taste good. You ate what was there and you ate it fast to make sure if there was the opportunity to get seconds, you would get them.

But it was a learned behavior based on the trauma of not having your needs met of not having enough food. That’s so when you don’t get your needs met, that’s a trauma response. Okay. And then the behavior, right? The overwhelm of that nervous system is Oh my God, in order to stay safe and alive, I got to eat all the food I can.

This client came to me as a, as that’s the problem. But she came to me as that was the set belief system that’s just the way that I am because that’s the way that I was raised. And so I was able to help her challenge that belief system of what if you change your belief to actually I can heal this trauma and I can heal my nervous system and I can do that with every meal that I eat from here forward because I can actually retrain myself to know that I’m safe and know that there will always be plenty of food and I can actually train myself into new habits, new thinking habits, new emotional regulation habits.

And the new actual habits of being in a totally different relationship with food. And so she’s totally on board now. And like life is changing. So that’s my point is that when I say, wait,  I struggle with my weight because of trauma. A lot of us do. Okay. A lot of us do. A lot of us have patterns that we learned a long time ago back when our nervous system got really overwhelmed.

And an overwhelmed nervous system is a nervous system that is scared. That is frightened, that is on the defense, that is trying to stay safe and alive in whatever way it can stay safe and alive. All right. And if you learn that food is the fix to fix that feeling in your body, then you have now learned a super strong pattern that definitely connects an overwhelmed traumatic system.

Cause this is the thing, trauma isn’t the thing that happened in the past. Yes, is the thing that happened in the past. We don’t have to relive that. The problem is that it shows up every day. It shows up when you have a bad day at work, a stressful day. It shows up when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

It shows up when you get ultimately triggered that in that same intensity gets triggered in present moment today. And you have the same coping mechanism that you had back then, which is I’m going to go eat to fix this, or I’m going to go drink to fix this or something like that. So that’s called unresolved trauma.

Okay. And that is the survival state of your nervous system. And I just want you to think about this or do you find yourself more in survival mode in your life or thriving? Because those are two totally different parts of your autonomic nervous system. One part is the parasympathetic, which is really tuned into thriving and creativity and feeling safe and that you belong and love and connection, right?

That is thriving mode, right? Versus survival mode. Looking out for me. When is somebody gonna attack me? What does that person say? Oh my god, I’m scared. I’m not getting my needs met, right? So that’s survival mode. And so ultimately, What we want to look at is moving our nervous system, resolving the trauma response, resolving a nervous system that’s frazzled, moving it into more of a window of tolerance, being able to actual, and when I say nervous system, I’m talking about like at the body level, because this trauma is not some memory from the past that lives in the tissues of your body today, right now.

So we learn how to work with that. We learned how to get out of that stress response and into that, that sort of out of that survival state and into that thriving state. And if that interests you, then you need to sign up for the freaking five-day Path to freedom challenge. Cause this is what we’re going to be going over.

 I wanted to give you this kind of overview. So you understood what we were getting into here, right? Because if you are here thinking I’m going to hand you a fucking diet plan, you’re definitely in the wrong place. Okay. If you are here knowing that you have self-sabotaged and you’ve lost weight and gained weight and you keep getting in your own way or the diet just don’t seem to be working or you just keep struggling or you’re an emotional eater.

I didn’t know until I was 35. Maybe you already know, man, I eat for all sorts of other reasons besides physical hunger. Then you are definitely not going to miss this challenge. It is going to be life-altering and literally change your life. I’m telling you, it is the bomb. com. And we’re going to, oh my God, I want to give like more detail.

I’m going to hand you the path. I’m going to hand you one day at a time, the deepest part of this path. And I’m going to give you little baby step homework every single day. You are going to notice even after this challenge, as you’re going through in it and inside of these five days, you are going to notice.

Moving yourself out of survival state into thriving more and more. I’m telling you it is going to be the bomb. And don’t just keep this to yourself. Y’all tell your friends, get your friends there. Get your family there. Who do you know needs a better way to stop losing weight and gaining weight to start coming into right relationship with food where you feel at peace with food instead of at war with food where you feel at peace with your body and comfortable in your body instead of at war with your body all the time I’m telling you I have been where you are and it is way better on the side like way Fucking better on the side.

And so the only way out is through though. I’ll tell you that the only way out is through and I want you to get through my friends. I want you to get through. All right. So super excited to be here. So glad you guys are here.

Let me see. Good. Yes. Body jail. Food hell and body jail. Yes, Cassie. Totally. And what is this? Hold on. Let me see. Something I’ve been working on. I used to turn hurt to anger. Yeah. But that makes sense though. Like hurt hurts. And so it makes sense to get angry. Whenever you are hurt, then the work is to work with anger and to not be scared of it.

And to not like you want a safe place to process, we talking about how do we process that emotion, how do we flush it out so we don’t let anger constipate us. So yeah, this is what we do. So thank you guys so much for being here. It’s going to be the best effing challenge ever.

Get your friends there. Cannot wait to see you. We start on Saturday and you might wonder why are we starting on a Saturday? And I will tell you right now because you start diets on Monday and you know it you spend all weekend Eating whatever you want having the best time ever and then you start your diet on Monday And I’m here to teach you food freedom as one of the first things that we’re gonna learn and getting out of diet culture means that you get to feel good about whatever you’re eating every single day of the week, including a Saturday.

So you get to be doing it right, even on a Saturday. And by right, I don’t mean, Oh, Audra’s going to make me eat salad on a Saturday and pretend like it’s a Monday or whatever you do in your diet culture brain. I’m telling you, you’re going to learn a way that is going to blow your mind to be in right relationship with food in a way that starts to just create this peace and relaxation response, which Can help alleviate the overeating and emotional eating like inside of one day.

Y’all, I don’t know about you. This is gonna be the best thing ever. Thank you for coming.  I cannot wait to see you inside of the five-day path to freedom again, it’s called hello body freedom.com. You can go to hello body freedom.com and sign up.

There’s the whole entire link, but you could just get there by Hello Body Freedom, and I will see you there. Bye everybody. Thanks for coming.

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