Episode 3
Beyond Pro-Metabolic: Breaking Down a Restrictive Attitude
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Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
All right, it is time for episode three, and today's episode is titled “Prometabolic Done Right.” Now, before you tune me out and you say, “oh, no, not another one of these.” I promise you, it's not what you think it is. Come on, I'm better than that! Today we're going to take a thorough look at the prometabolic phenomenon, why so many women are drawn to this style of eating, why so many women have flooded into this space so fast, and why so many women have found a lot of success compared to other “diets.” But also why so many women are hitting walls. Throughout this discussion, we're going to be also breaking down the type of dieting baggage that we bring into the relationship with our food and our body. So it's going to be a really complex and interesting discussion surrounding the prometabolic phenomenon.
Now, if you have no understanding of bioenergetics and you did not listen to the last episode, I highly recommend listening to episode two before you tune into this episode, because this episode really piggybacks off of some of the discussions that we had in the last episode where we discussed an energy-centered perspective of the body or viewing the body through an energy-centered lens. Because at the end of the day, what a pro metabolic diet really is is just a nutritional approach to increasing our energetic potential using nutrition. That's all it is. If we're going to simplify it down to that, and if we haven't really realized that yet, I think this discussion needs to be had. Or if we haven't really thought about it that way, I think it's really important to have this discussion because I think a lot of people are really confused right now about what the Prometabolic diet actually is.
So if you're new to the Prometabolic diet, (I even hate calling it that because I just hate the word diet I really do) but if you're new to the Prometabolic space, welcome. I'm glad this is kind of your introduction to Prometabolic versus some other introductions because I feel like a lot of people in this space are very confused about what the Prometabolic diet really is. But if you've been around this space for a long time, or you've been eating in a metabolism-centered way for a good period of time, I'm sure you see what I see. Or at least hope you see what I see and you're thinking what I'm thinking. So I'm just going to call out the elephant in the room and say that the Prometabolic space right now is kind of a mess. People are really confused.
Some people are following one thing and other people are following another thing and some people are just straight up blaming Prometabolic for all of their woes and there's just a lot of blind leading the blind going on right now. Influencer culture has really permeated the Prometabolic space and not in a good way. People have this idolic worship of influencers as their gurus. And so what happens is instead of having your own vision for your life like we've talked about a little bit and we've touched on a little bit, which we're going to really dive into in this episode, is we kind of forsake our intuition at the expense of just following someone blindly. It goes back to that authoritarian way of thinking where we forsake our own needs. We're kind of taught to forsake our own needs for the benefit of the whole and for just blindly obeying the rules. And it gets us into trouble a lot. It definitely gets us into trouble when we apply those types of principles to our health and nutrition.
We as a society are almost brainwashed in a way to not think for ourselves as much as we think we think for ourselves. We really do follow other people in an almost idol-like way. The way that marketing has shifted over the years and the way that influencers have come in to really be able to portray this “perfect life” for us with these curated images and show us only the highlight reels of their life has trained us to compare our journeys to theirs. It's only natural for us to do that. But I think where a lot of women end up finding themselves is doing what other influencers do and applying it to their own lives rather than really working out and figuring out and taking personal responsibility for their own lives and figuring out what actually works for them and their own bodies. Instead of really studying and working to understand and strengthen our own belief systems, we just kind of mimic other people or parrot what other people are doing. It leads us to having what I like to call “toothpick foundations.” We have foundations built out of toothpicks which can easily be broken down with just one little solid push with one challenge.
I really believe that a lot of people in the Prometabolic space right now have toothpick foundations. They have very little understanding, if any at all, of what bioenergetics really is. If they don't understand bioenergetics, how can they even begin to take an energy-centered approach to their nutritional strategy? They can't. It's impossible. What they're doing is they're just following this kind of arbitrary set of rules that they've come up with in their head and they really end up bringing their dieting baggage or what I like to call “dieting baggage” into the Pro Metabolic Diet. I put quotations around that every time I want to say it. So as you know, I like to go back to the beginning.
Defining Pro-Metabolic
Whenever we start to do a thorough review of something or whenever I begin my research, I always like to define what we're talking about to make sure that we're on the same page. I do this for myself too when I'm researching because again, sometimes I might think I have an intellectual understanding of something, but I haven't really grasped it fully yet. Defining something or really clearly defining something for myself can make a big difference in my understanding of something. So when we start to look at how is the Pro Metabolic Diet done right and how is it done oh so wrong, I think it's really important to understand that there are two different prometabolic diets that people are following right now.
The first diet that I like to talk about - because diet can mean two different things, right? - diet can mean like this set of rules, structure, kind of this restrictive mindset. But diet can also just be a way of saying our style of eating or the way that we eat. One is a very rule-based, restriction-based, authoritarian-based point of view where they're just looking at this diet as this arbitrary set of rules, very black and white, where you can't eat this, you can't eat this, this food is bad, this food is good, and that doesn't do anyone any good. When we think of diets in those terms, we're really just restricting our own energetic potential. That's what it comes down to.
Very few women in the prometabolic space right now see the prometabolic diet for what it is, which is really just an energy-centered approach to your nutrition choices. That's all it is. What you mean by diet is really just the style of eating or the food philosophy that allows you to have an expanded view of foods and how they interact with your own physiology. So if you're following the former where you see the “Pro Metabolic Diet” as just a set of rules where you don't eat this, you do eat this, you don't eat PUFA’s (polyunsaturated fatty acids), you do eat this, what happens is you really limit yourself. But if you start to understand bioenergetics and you really start to understand that the “Pro Metabolic Diet,” whatever that actually is (which we'll dive into a little bit more) is really just simply a style of eating that enhances your energetic potential and that can look very, very different and very complex for different individuals.
The Draw to the Pro-Metabolic Diet
Now, I'm really fascinated by the question of why do people get so attracted to the prometabolic diet? I can say for myself personally, and I think this is true for a lot of women, is it was just such a controversial point of view that I was curious. It was human nature to be curious. I was triggered by it because it was so counter to what I had previously believed about food in the body.
But at the same time, I was curious because that's just human nature. I think that's why a lot of women and people in general are really attracted to the pro metabolic diet, because it's just kind of that shiny new toy in the health and wellness space. I really do believe deep down that women are attracted to it because they are desperate to heal. They're desperate to heal whatever symptoms they're experiencing. They're desperate to heal something else, whatever it might be. There's an attraction there. There's that hunger that I like to talk about. I talked about it in the trailer for this podcast.
There's this kind of deep hunger, this deep seeking that women want something more. They know they're made for something more. They know there's something more out there, something in their intuition is driving them, something in their subconscious mind, whether they realize it or not. But I think the mistake that's being made a lot right now, and not just in the prometabolic space, but in many different dieting spaces, these kind of almost like “subcults” of the health and wellness space as a whole is people tend to look at diets to save them. They want rules. They want it to be this or that. They want simplicity because they have very low energy. They do not have the energy or the capacity to really take that personal responsibility that is required to learn your own system, learn your own physiology, figure out truly what works for your body and to do the research, to do the work.
A lot of people are struggling with their energy, like we talked about in episode two when we were talking about bioenergetics. I'm not poo-pooing diets necessarily because I think sometimes whatever drives people to a place, they can maybe get enough energy from that diet to be able to start thinking for themselves and take personal responsibility. But a lot of times their mindset, their desire to stay stuck in these very rigid structures actually ends up holding them back.
What I noticed about women in the prometabolic space is that they seem to feel betrayed by all the other diets that they followed. They've contracted their health out too many times, whether they've followed super restrictive diets. I've seen women who follow AIP and Paleo. So many women in the prometabolic space are ex Paleo or Primal followers or you see a lot of people who are ex keto or ex carnivore. You see a lot of ex vegans.
Something deep down makes them feel like the diet that they were following previously wasn't working for them and they almost feel betrayed by that because again, they contracted their health out to someone else and they followed this kind of arbitrary set of rules, hoping that it would save them like it saved someone else. But in doing those diets, those super restrictive diets, they had to sacrifice a lot. One of women's archetypes is the prostitute archetype, where we kind of sacrifice a part of ourselves in order to get what we want at our own expense. Really, at the end of the day, it's a protective mechanism. We think, “it's okay, I'll just sacrifice this part of myself so that I can survive.” I see dieting a lot of times that way, where women are sacrificing so much to restrict and to numb their intuition down to follow a diet, and yet it doesn't end up getting them the results that they want. And so they feel very, very betrayed. If a woman is coming from that background where she has felt that whether she only subconsciously feels it or she consciously feels it I think a lot of times from the outside looking in prometabolic and the prometabolic space and the “pro-metabolic diet” can look very much like this opportunity or this ticket to just have free rein, to just dive in, to eating whatever you couldn't have before with reckless abandon and approach. It just like your diets of the past, where you sacrificed a part of yourself, you numbed down your intuition to be able to follow it, and you just did things mindlessly and obeyed the “rules” at the expense of what your own body was telling you, at the expense of yourself.
I also just think women are attracted to prometabolic because they're just so damn hungry. On one side, it is very spiritual and I think it's complex, but on the other side, I think they're just so undernourished, they're so starved for nutrients, they're so starved for energy and fuel that they can easily digest and absorb that their bodies just jump on the train very quickly. It’s so desirable because they are just very, very hungry.
Understanding Diet Culture
But rewinding a little bit for a second, when we think about how diet culture and I think this idea, this fad of calling out diet culture, I'm glad it's happening. I think it's become its own type of movement, calling out diet culture. But at the same time, I feel like anytime something becomes a fad or a movement, it kind of gets oversimplified.
I think the diet culture realm doesn't really address all of what's going on. The full phenomenon of why women are so stuck in the structures of dieting, it goes so much deeper than just surface level. Why women tend to look at food and their body through a dieting lens, and why women tend to see their health through just the lens of weight loss and how much weight they have to lose. I think part of the reason why diets are so integrated into our culture is just because of how we were raised. I think a lot of us, at least if you're a millennial, your mom was a part of the low fat, low calorie phase where it was really popular to be as thin as possible. Starvation, survival, those are things that nobody cared about. It was just all about being extremely thin, no matter what the cost was or no matter how you got there. Whether it was through starvation or extreme exercise or just doing tons and tons of cardio and being a cardio bunny, whether it was through eating plastic fats like margarine and being hungry all the time, it didn't matter as long as you were skinny. That was the achievement. That was the ultimate goal.
I think a lot of us were raised with women who saw their body through that lens, and they had no other way of teaching us or modeling to us how to approach our body and food. And so, of course, we tend to think of food through the lens of diets because so many of us were just raised that way. It was what we saw from the very beginning of our life.
Sometimes I also think about a lot how our mother's habits around food while we were in the womb impacted us. We were feeling her emotions and her hormonal state whenever she interacted with food. It would make sense that we would learn to fear or worry or have certain emotions, shame or guilt around food, even possibly before we were born.Is that possible? I mean, hormonal imprinting is a thing. There is a lot of research that shows that as babies in the womb, we do sense our mother's emotions. Obviously, research has shown again and again that stress in the mother absolutely impacts the health of the child.
To me, it's not a far stretch to think that as women, especially when a woman is inside of a woman, there's a connection. There is a really strong spiritual connection. It would make sense that as women, we're communal beings, we're community based beings. We're meant to learn from each other and absorb energy and emotion from each other. That's how we kind of share the burden of being a woman, because it is sometimes so hard and difficult to be so sensitive all the time and to sense everything that's going on around you. That’s why we need to constantly share it. That's why we talk and we feel through our emotions a lot. That mother daughter bond is so powerful. I only can imagine what a mother is teaching her child about food while that child is in the womb. As much as we think that girl power and female empowerment is a thing right now, I see things very differently. I'm sure you see through the BS as well. Whereas right now there's this kind of idea that female bodies are weak, they're soft. And we're out to prove that it's different than that. That that's a bad thing, that that's innately a bad thing. That our nature, who we are, what we are is evil. It's wrong, it's taboo, it's dirty. It's out to trick us. And we couldn't possibly trust our bodies. We couldn't possibly know exactly what they want, right?
If we feel that way about our body and we feel okay with our bodies being erased then we obviously have very little respect and honor for our own system. So of course we think that a structure outside of ourselves, like a diet, like some dietary guidelines know much better than our body could possibly know about us. There's this lack of deep trust in our systems right now and it's been like that for a long, long time.
We've been trained and brainwashed over and over and over again to believe that we couldn't possibly know what's best for us. We couldn't possibly know what's best for our body. That is beyond imaginable. And when you do look around, whether that be through dieting culture, through social media, through even the medical system as a whole there's a lot of confusion on what it takes to be healthy. It feels very, very difficult. We're taught that it needs to be forced. It needs to be a struggle. It needs to be something we strive towards.
We're taught that the only way to truly reach our goals is to have a transactional relationship with our body where if I do this for you, you're going to do this for me. That is a very manipulative approach to our body, that we need to manipulate ourselves into submission or manipulate our bodies into submission and force and hustle our way into what we want rather than taking the more feminine approach. Which is connecting with our system, connecting with our body, connecting with our experience, and creating a strong vision for ourselves, holding a strong vision for what we want, for our life, for our bodies, for our health, and then understanding our power, recognizing our power, recognizing our energetic potential and magnetizing ourselves towards our goals. There's a very big difference between focusing on connection, focusing on really truly understanding your own needs and meeting those needs so that it becomes very easy to get to where you want to go.
That really goes back to our discussion on authoritarianism which is that there are different ways to think. There are different ways to look at things. A lot of people have been trained to believe that the only way to get somewhere is through punishment and the use of shame or guilt or fear or the promise of punishment. That's what we've been trained to believe.
We really do stay in that energy which is a masculine energy of punishment over that feminine need to correct. There's punishment and then there's correction and we can gently correct ourselves towards our goals. We can take the feedback, right? We can connect with our body, we can create a strong vision using our imagination. Women have such powerful imaginations to get what they want and to understand what they want, to understand what's best for them and their community and whoever is within their circle. If something's not working or doesn't feel right, we have the intuitional awareness to be able to understand that and to correct our path. We don't have to punish ourselves for doing the wrong thing. We don't have to punish ourselves using fear or shame or guilt that we didn't go in the right direction. All we have to do is just simply and gently correct our path towards the right direction.
Because so many of us have multiple layers of dieting baggage, whether it be that we saw the women in our life treat their bodies or food in a very manipulative or transactional way whether we were in the womb and our mother had a really challenging relationship with food. Whether we believe deep down that our body is not to be trusted for whatever reason, whether we believe that something deep down in us is wrong or evil or out to trick us, or whether we just believe there's no other way to get to our goals rather than force ourselves there or punish ourselves there. These are themes that we bring into the relationship with our body and the relationship with our food. This is what I like to call “dieting baggage.”
The thing about diets, the thing about an eating style that views food through the lens of restriction or restricting your food intake or restricting certain food groups is that to be successful at a diet like that you really do have to numb down your intuitional awareness. You have to numb down your body's cries for its needs to get met. You tend to have to learn to ignore your own needs and your own wants. Even worse, you start to see your body's needs as being wrong or something to be controlled or manipulated.
This is another place where women tend to completely abandon themselves. They're always ready to abandon themselves into another diet and forsake their intuition, forsake their own wisdom to again just follow this arbitrary set of rules in front of them, this other diet. You see this a lot right now in our society and our culture. Even though people say, “I'm not into diet culture” or will talk and speak up against diet culture, we can see this baggage kind of shining through their work. We can see this baggage still permeating the health and wellness space even from people that are saying they don't recommend following a diet. This becomes pretty complicated because even with all of that, even with all that baggage that we carry and I'm sure you have resonated with some parts of it in some way because I know that at some times in my life I resonated with all of it. And there's still times where that stuff just leaks through. It's only human to have that happen.
Women Are Hungry
We're kind of stuck in this conundrum because we feel all of those things and those might be things that drive our decision making and our behavior around food. Yet, on the flip side, man, women right now are just so damn hungry. We're so undernourished. We really don't understand the level of undernourishment and how far away from our energetic potential we have come. I think of just how many women right now, myself included, did not even get the nutrients that we needed when we were in the womb. I did not get the nutrients that I needed when I was developing women. As women, we really don't stop developing until the age of 25. And I can't imagine how many women right now - I think of all of the young girls that are scrolling social media that are trying to reach these extremely unrealistic bodies and trying to fit themselves into the mold of that by restricting their food intake. I think of all of the developing women that are not eating enough right now and who are over exercising. I think of high school athletes and college athletes who work out so much, exercise so much and are probably not meeting their fuel needs on a daily basis. I think of all of the women who developed in bodies. Our mothers how many of our mothers took the birth control pill for years and years before getting pregnant with us. And of course, we know the birth control pill to be very depleting of often the same nutrients needed for a developing fetus. I think of all of the environmental factors that cause us to burn through our nutrient stores quicker. I think of all of the stress factors that women are faced with right now.
How we juggle everything all of the time. We have to balance everything all of the time. Everyone's needs all of the time, including our own. That deplete us of the nutrients we need. I think we really underestimate how undernourished we are. I think we really underestimate how damn hungry our cells are for nutrition and fueling. As women, we have this unique experience of developing in our grandmother because as our grandmother nourished our mother's body and our mother's body was being formed, we were eggs in her womb. If you read Dr. Katherine Shanahan's work, for example, in her book “Deep Nutrition” she talks a lot about nutritional wealth and how the nutritional wealth of one generation impacts the next generation, so many physical aspects and mental and emotional aspects of the next generation.
Of course, we as women know. What comes to mind is there's this amazing book that I mean, I shouldn't say amazing - it's very interesting. It's fascinating and a little borderline disturbing. It's called “Rare Earth's Forbidden Cures,” and it's by Joel D. Wallach. I think he is a doctor of veterinary medicine, but he was world renowned for his study of minerals and nutrition, and specifically minerals and mineral depletion in the soil. But his work is fascinating because he takes a very historical and more almost sociological approach where he takes a look at society as a whole and looks for evidence of nutritional deficiency.
Some of his work is very disturbing, but there's a particular part of his book that comes to mind right now as we discuss just how hungry women are. He talks about the concept of both pika and cribbing. If you don't know what pika is, it's like the hunger, the cravings for things that are maybe non-food things like pregnant women have or small children have. Cribbing is pretty much binging. So pika and cribbing are kind of the official terms for having weird cravings or having interesting cravings and just straight binging.
He talks about both of these scenarios as expressions of a deeper hunger within the body, that the body is doing whatever it can to meet the nutritional needs of the system. Even if what that looks like is very strange or odd or where the body's trying to get those nutrients from looks very strange or odd, it's a sign of a deeper undernourishment. He even expands to talk about how being picky, being a picky eater is kind of a form of pica where your body is trying to eat almost non food items in order to get its nutritional needs met because it doesn't know any better.
It's very fascinating. But when I read the part about binging and binges being a sign of a deeper need for minerals, a deeper need for nutrition on a deep level, on a cellular level, it really stuck with me because I can't tell you how many people and myself I'm included in this where I implemented nourishing principles a while back. Before that, to be honest with you, I still struggled with binging. No matter what diet I followed, no matter how “nutrient dense” my diet was, I was paleo and keto and carnivore. I was doing all of the things, adding all of the extras in all of the things that you would think, “oh, man, that girl has got her diet figured out and has got her nutrition down.” Yet very regularly, I was often binging on ice cream, carbohydrates, really anything that was calorically and carbohydrate dense that I could get a lot of. It was dairy-related. I know now that that was my body's just absolute need for calcium.
Women's bodies have such a high need for calcium, but it was more than that. It was the need for calorically dense foods that provided nutrients, because if I look back now to see what the majority of my diet was made up of. It was made up of some non-food foods or foods that my body did not have an easy time extracting nutrients from. So of course, my body was overriding everything else, or my subconscious mind was overriding my conscious brain and getting what it needed at any cost.
I think of how many women have shared the same or a similar story with me, how many women who have gone through Fully Nourished and said, man, my need to binge has all but gone away or has lessened. And I've seen this happen to myself too. Whereas as soon as I started to focus on eating the nutrients and the nutrition I need and making sure my body got the fuel that it need, surprise, surprise, I had no need to binge anymore.
This is such a potent reminder that when we as women are hurting for energy, when we have blockages in our energy flow or we're just not getting enough fuel to create energy, period, we're going to have a deep, deep hunger that's going to take a lot to be satisfied and satiated until those needs are met. Our body is meant to cry out for its needs to be met at all cost. I think of a baby who knows that they need to be fed or changed or they need something, they need nurturance, they need guidance, they need love. They cry out for it. Even if we don't do that, we don't cry like a baby to get our needs met, we still have needs. Our body is going to speak up for us because like we talked about in the last episode, we are these energy converters, we're these energy re-organizers, we're these energy generators. We're made to be that.
Our bodies have this extraordinary energetic potential. And when we're not living up to that, we feel it. We cannot not feel it. It's impossible not to feel it, whether that's going to be expressed through physical symptoms we talked about, and we broke down those metabolic markers from an energetic perspective in the last episode, but also from an emotional and spiritual standpoint. We feel it deep in our bones from an emotional perspective, and it impacts how we experience life and the people around us.
So now that we've taken an expanded look at the type of baggage that we're bringing into our current style of eating, we have to kind of decipher which things apply to us. But I think so many of us can resonate with a lot of aspects of what we just talked about. And so when we look at the Prometabolic diet, I think a lot of women are just seeing it as a set of rules where you eat this, you don't eat that. You focus on eating eggs and a bioavailable protein, animal protein. You eat lots of collagen, you eat lots of gelatin, you eat lots of fruit, you eat lots of roots, you stay away from big salads, you don't eat PUFAs. There's kind of these arbitrary rules that we keep in our mind of like I eat this, I don't eat this, I eat this, I don't eat this. And we limit ourselves, we limit our energetic potential by looking at food through that lens.
When you think of prometabolic, it's just for the metabolism. It's just a dietary approach or a nutritional approach to expanding your energetic potential using nutrition. That's really what it is. And it's putting on those bioenergetic glasses and looking at the body through a lens of how energy flows through it and how food impacts that energy flow. This really requires a lot of experimentation and it really requires a lot of intuition in finding what your own unique needs are. Finding out where your own unique energy blockages are. For some people, that's going to be more emotional. For some people, that's going to be more physical.
There's many different aspects of finding what parts of your environment are impacting or degenerating your body at a faster rate, whether that's a job that you hate or maybe a food that you like to eat all the time. It's more complex than just eat this or that. It’s about really focusing on filling in the gaps as much as possible with nutrition, with either adding in the right types of foods, adding in the right nutrients, adding in the things that are going to provide you. What your body needs day in and day out and possibly removing as much from your environment or your diet as possible. That's impacting your energy flow in a negative way and also supporting your body's own system, supporting your body's own protective chemicals and things that your body can create and make to protect you and make you more resilient to your environment.
So your nutritional strategy is twofold. It's to fill in the gaps that the environment depletes from you. So your body, you want to replenish what you have lost through the environmental factors, but also supporting your body's own systems and making sure that your system is functioning optimally and you feel like you're reaching or getting closer to your energetic potential and eating in a way that makes that possible. That's all it is. And using the very popular now metabolic markers, whatever you want to call them, they're really just your physical expressions of energy flow. It allows you to look at your body as a biofeedback machine to let you know how things are working for you and how they're not. It has nothing to do with chugging orange juice and milk and pounding Parmesan cheese all day. I think that comes from our human need to practice idolatry in some way.
Influencer Culture and Stress Physiology
Like I said before, I think I said that in either the first or second episode, that we as humans are designed to worship something we really are. We will worship a style of eating, we will worship an influencer. Sometimes it can be tricky, we won't even realize we're doing it. But they have become really the model or the vision for our life versus creating a vision of our own and living out our own purpose and our own intuition and what is actually deeply important and in alignment with us and our needs.
Influencer culture has really permeated this space and has made prometabolic out to be having this perfect diet and this perfect set of supplements and everything's going to be fine. That has left women, a lot of women, feeling betrayed or feeling like they got duped a little bit. And I think in a way and this is not anybody's fault, but I hope that what we've talked about today has reminded you that it's very important for us as women to take personal responsibility for our health and to use our intuition to guide us. It's okay to take outside information, of course, and to learn. But the minute that we let that information control us is the minute that we start to kind of sell our soul and abandon ourselves at our own expense. All the diets that look at food through the lens of restriction are really survival based styles of eating, or survival based eating, you can call it. The reason why that is is because whenever you look at food through a lens of restriction or lack, like what you're lacking, it reminds me of looking at everything like the glass is half empty, right? Like everything is negative. You're looking at the glass half empty or to me it's like looking at your bank account all the time and every time you see that number you don't look at how much money you have. You look at how much money you don't have. And that's a really hard place to live. It's just a very low energy place to live. It's very draining and exhausting. But it also puts us in a state of famine or survival.
Nature of the Female Body
If we're looking at everything through the lens of lack or restriction, we are going to be automatically putting ourselves into a state of survival or famine. If you agree with me, if you see the body through a lens of bioenergetics, as I do, then you understand that energy begets structure. Energy and structure are interdependent on every single level. That where your thought goes, your energy flows. So your physical structure is going to respond to the energy of lack and restriction. You're going to feel that on a cellular level and your body, which is this really amazing vehicle that helps you live out your purpose, helps you kind of grow into the human you need to become. It has your back. It always has your back and it always says, “oh we're in a famine. Oh I got you. We're going to start storing everything up. We're going to start changing our energy flow so we can conserve energy because we know that you're an energy generator and you need sustained energy. We got to make this sustainable for the long run if we're going to be in a survival state. Let's go into a survival state.”
Our body always has our best interests in mind even sometimes at the expense of ourselves. As you've probably heard me say at least a thousand times before, the body does not run on thin air. I try to say that over and over again to women because I think that for me it's the phrase that really helps me remember how important it is for me to stay fueled. But my body does not run on thin air.
I have a complex system that requires energy and nutrients to function. I'm in this constant state of dynamic rhythm, almost like a song or a dance, where my body is constantly in motion, it's constantly cycling. It's constantly not only utilizing energy and taking so much energy to be able to create it's that creative life force it needs to sustain. But it also is this energy generator and it's pouring out. I have a very high need for energy or I should say I have a very high need for fuel. And when you really start to study female nature - I mean really truly study it - it's my opinion that women on a deep level desire to be able to eat whatever they want. At the end of the day they want to eat whatever they want whenever they want. I think if we all really admitted the truth to ourselves it would be that I want to eat whatever I want and I want to eat it whenever I want.
I'm actually playing around with the idea that this is a need of ours and the reason why is not just because women's natural and thriving state is a state of abundance, which it is, right? It really is our nature to desire the safety and stability that comes with having everything available to us at all times, to have the food, the fuel that we need to be filled to constantly stay in a state of satiation and abundance because our nature itself is really very ravenous. We have a ravenous nature. Feminine nature is ravenous because we do need a lot of fuel to be able to maintain that constant movement, that constant cycling and maintain the flow of creative energy or our life force that flows through us at all times. Feminine nature is quite hungry. It's also very wild. We have this internal radiance that is just always dying to be unleashed constantly. But we need to be filled in order to unleash it. As women, we need to be filled first before we can generate out.
What we're finding right now is how many women around you are just kind of these energy black holes. They aren't nourished, they aren't fueled, they aren't getting the fuel that they need. And so what begins to happen is it comes at the expense of their structure. Because going back to energy and structure being interdependent on every level, if energy begets structure, the energy flow is going to impact the structure of our body. And that's what we're starting to see is that women's bodies generate energy no matter what, at whatever cost, at the expense of our own structure. This kind of goes into the pro-metabolic theme of eating in a way to support our system so it doesn't have to break itself down in order to continue to generate energy. Because at the end of the day, our adrenals are our backup system. We're not going to dive too much into stress physiology today. That is for the next episode. I think it's really important to talk about, but I don't want this episode to be like 5 hours long.
So just remembering that we do have a backup system, we do have a survival system. Our body knows that we need energy even in a famine, even when there's not enough abundance. That's what the adrenals are. It goes so far as to have our adrenals in our back as our backup system. I love the humor there, but when you look at the thyroid, even its location tells us a lot. Even its shape tells us a lot, right? The thyroid is shaped like this butterfly almost, and it's located in our throat. I find it interesting that the thyroid directs the metabolism, which is the deep, like I introduced to you in the last episode, I like to call the metabolism the deep “hum” of the body. It's this resonant song or vibration or frequency.
It's the thing that allows energy to flow through our body and continue to stay in motion, to stay alive. The only time our body really wants to rely upon the hormones of the adrenal glands to make us fuel is when the thyroid is under functioning, when our butterfly shaped gland that allows us to transform energy. I love it. Love the humor there, love the irony there, love the parallels. When that main system is not allowing us to become these energy generators, our body is going to start generating heat and generating energy at our own structure's expense. That's really what happens when the adrenals start to run the show. We start to get elevated cortisol, elevated adrenaline.
Our body starts to rely on the hormone called glucagon coming from our pancreas, which is this blood sugar raising hormone. Our body starts to fuel itself at the expense of its own structure because remember, energy begets structure and this comes at the expense of the whole system, but it really comes at the expense of the fruit of our life force, which is our ovaries. Our ovaries and our reproductive function and our reproductive hormones are really the fruit of a body that is in harmony or is in harmonious balance. When it's not in harmonious balance, when the body is in this state of survival where it has to rely on its backup systems to stay alive, it really is in a fight or flight state. Once your body has entered that fight or flight state, a lot of processes go on the back burner, the body starts cutting corners or we can look at it almost as cutting off energy flow in certain areas to focus on what is needed so that we can survive. This is why we see so many women around us struggling with so many physical symptoms because the body is always going to protect itself at the expense of itself.
We might look at symptoms as annoying or frustrating or life changing or debilitating, but death is even worse and the body knows that. So it has our back when we are putting ourselves into a perpetual state of famine, which so many diets based around restriction do. When we enter a new nutritional perspective, when we enter a more energy centered approach.
Some people who follow the prometabolic diet don't even know they're doing this. They're doing it for the symptom suppression, they're doing it to maybe heal something, but they don't recognize that they are taking their previous dieting baggage into it. All of the baggage that has come with keeping their body in survival mode or I shouldn't even say keeping because it's not our choice, but staying in survival mode for longer periods of time. So it takes time to shift the body's energy to understanding that, “oh no, you're safe now. You're in a place of abundance. You now have exactly what you need to maintain your energy flow and your energetic potential.”
That's one of the hardest parts about the style of eating is there is a shift and there is a transition that the body needs to go through. And a body that is already hurting so much for energy and is already having a hard time utilizing energy maybe from not getting enough fuel or having too many demands placed on it for too long without getting the fuel to meet those demands or staying in an environment that kept it in a lot of stress. There's a lot of aspects to that and there's a lot of things that the body has to work through and work on resorting before it can focus on regeneration and rebuilding the structure. There's a lot of change in the energy flow that needs to happen before the energy can flow freely.
If we don't look at prometabolic or the prometabolic diet through this lens, we don't carry our dieting baggage into it, we recognize how much our body is hurting for energy, how hungry we are, how much of an imbalanced place we're coming from, how much of a survival state we're coming from. How do we look at the prometabolic diet? Because I think a lot of us have a really hard time looking at food outside of a dieting structure. I have a few points that I want you to remember as you embark on prometabolic, or if you have been embarking on prometabolic for a long time and maybe you've had some results, but you're still hitting some walls, or maybe you just keep hitting a wall.
Nutrition Through An Energetic Lens
I want to remind you to look outside of the typical pro metabolic foods and look at these concepts. So as a reminder, there's a lot of foods available to us right now in the grocery stores, online. We pretty much have access to any food at our fingertips.
But there are a lot of foods, I guess I loosely will call them foods that are marketed to us as foods, but they are not real foods. I think we can all agree that there's a lot of non foods out there that you look at the ingredients and you're like, how is this even food? How is this even edible? I don't understand it. But that expands beyond just these kind of “franken foods” that we want to call it, where it’s like some food scientists put them together to make them palatable and edible. There are a lot of foods out there right now that are even considered health foods that are widely available to us just because of industry, just because we went through the Industrial Revolution. Meaning without industry, without machinery, it would be nearly impossible to consume these foods on the level or the scale that we do. Certain things like almond milk and oat milk and the extreme amounts of nuts and seeds that people are consuming right now come to mind. I'm not just talking about processed foods.
And of course we live in the system. We don't need to deny the system. I think there are many conveniences to the system. But we have to remember that within the system there are a lot of conveniences available to us that would have never been available to us at any time in history. Just because they're marketed as health foods or just because people call them health foods, or just because an influencer is talking about them does not make them health foods, like get out of the group think, right?
We have to look at food from the perspective of would it be a preferred choice of a human in nature or in their natural state? That can sometimes be hard for us to comprehend because we live outside of a natural state. But is this food digestible? Is it palatable? And does it provide us the nutrients that we need without causing us to waste energy trying to digest and extract those nutrients?
When we start to look at food that way, I think it's easier to see that humans probably would have had a much simpler and less varied diet than we have available to us today. It probably would have shifted with the seasons a little bit following what was available to us. In some seasons, it was probably a little bit more meat and fat heavy. And then in some seasons, it was probably a lot more carbohydrate and fruit heavy, depending on what was available and what region you lived in.
But at the end of the day, we have to realize right now in the world that we live in, there is no perfect human diet. A lot of us have melting-pot type genetics. We have a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We live in probably a different region and speak a different language than our ancestors did. So our bodies are confused. We also have to ask ourselves the question, “just because our ancestors ate this way or just because this was the rhythm that our ancestors followed, was this the optimal way of living? Was this the optimal way of eating? Or was this just all that they had available to us? Or was this just all they had available to them to work with?”
I really do think that we as humans need to learn the lesson. We still haven't learned the lesson that just because this is how people did it a long time ago doesn't make it optimal. We can learn a lot from our past, and I think we can definitely glean a lot from our past. But it's our job to move things forward in the right direction, to build towards a vision, towards a new goal, a better goal, an improved goal. We're definitely not doing that right now. I can say that definitively and confidently. So we need to ask ourselves when we attempt to do a pro metabolic diet or a metabolism centered diet or style of eating, we have to really figure out what's available to us and then figure out the fuel that's available to us, that fuels our physiology best. That's really what we need to figure out, because how our physiology interacts with food is everything.
Humans are extremely adaptable. We can eat pretty much anything. There are a lot of things that are edible that I could survive eating that I wouldn't necessarily want to ever eat. But what you see right now, permeating our culture and our society, is that people are choosing so many foods to fill their day, to fill their nutrition with, foods that humans probably would have never eaten in bulk because it wasn't available to them and it wasn't nutritious enough for them to waste their energy digesting it or even gathering it.
When we see food in terms of energy, oftentimes you're going to see a lot of people in the Prometabolic space break down food into its macro level. Protein, carb and fat. I like to separate the three into their individual jobs within the body. So we have protein, it offers structure. Protein usually breaks down into amino acids, so that provides the body structure. And then fats, they often are what make up the cell membranes, so they provide stability. They are the things that provide the most stability to parts of our structure. We can even expand that definition to fluidity. And then we can look at carbohydrates as kind of the combustion or the fuel, that kind of quick fuel that allows our body to generate energy very quickly.
The interesting thing about all of these macronutrients, as they're usually called, is that the body can actually use all of them to generate fuel. Protein can be utilized as fuel by taking parts of our structure, breaking it down and turning it into carbohydrate. That is a very energy intensive job that puts a lot of stress on the liver. It's a process called gluconeogenesis, and it does require us to be in our backup system. Our body does not like to generate fuel through protein and breaking down protein and burning protein to create energy, but it will do so if it's necessary.
Fat is another one where everyone seems to be stuck on right now, burning fat as fuel, utilizing fat as fuel. It's not as simple as that. Fat is a very long burning fuel, I guess if you want to simplify it that way. We see people really obsessed with the idea of utilizing fat as fuel right now. I think there is a confusion there that the fat within our cells or the stored fuel for later, if we have fat on our bodies, extra fat on our bodies, we think that if we burn fat for fuel, we will utilize the stored fat. But it's not quite the easy equation that it's made out to be. And fat can be a really hard thing to use as fuel, but it will be utilized as fuel if it needs to be.
And then carbohydrates are many cells within the body that don't require kind of long burning fuels. Like the muscle cells, for example, do like to prefer fat as energy. But for the most part, most cells in our body like that very combustion fuel that carbohydrates provide, which is in the form of glucose. So our macronutrients are the main nutrients that we consume, right? Proteins. We can think of foods in terms of proteins and carbs and fats, but on a micro level, there are nutrients within those foods that actually are required and used to use those macro fuels. So it's not just about consuming enough fuel. I think that's where a lot of women got led astray in the pro metabolic space because there was all this push to eat more and more and more and more calories and just eat more calories because your body needs calories and it is important for women to be eating enough fuel.
But if they cannot utilize that fuel, they cannot utilize that energy, they have blockages in their energy flow. They're going to have a really hard time utilizing those extra calories and creating energy from them and they're going to often end up storing that energy because they are not generating energy appropriately. They're still in a very low energy state. They don't have the micronutrients needed to use that fuel appropriately. Maybe they're still stuck in an environment that is preventing them from really reaching their energetic potential. It's really keeping them in a low energy state. Maybe they're still stuck in that state of fight or flight. They've brought that baggage in with them and their body is trying to protect them in many different ways and use their newfound nutritional approach to protect itself in the ways that it thinks is necessary.
I think a lot of women who have entered the Prometabolic space and started implementing Prometabolic principles don't see it that way. They don't understand how much their environment, whether it be their internal emotional environment or what's going on in their environment is really impacting their metabolism, their cellular energy flow and their ability to create energy or is actively depleting them of those micronutrients, those minerals needed to create and generate energy from their macronutrients and from their calories.
A lot of women are spending their life kind of out of alignment with what they want to be doing. A lot of times they're working way too hard. They're being worked to the bone. They have so much on their plate that they can't even meet their basic needs of movement and getting enough sunlight and getting enough hydration. And so those things are actually impacting their ability to utilize fuel properly and to generate energy as a whole.
Then there's also, of course, the hormonal aspects of it. There are many different hormones in our body like estrogen and progesterone and thyroid hormone and the adrenal hormones and the pancreatic hormones that really do impact our body's use of energy. When we're out of our state of alignment, when we're stuck in these states of survival we often have imbalances in these chemicals. And of course, hormones have the power to redirect energy flow, to redirect how our body utilizes fuel, where fuel gets stored, how fuel gets used, if we build up muscle, if we build up fat tissue there's a lot of hormonal impact on how our body utilizes fuel.
However, I think sometimes we get really stuck in the minutiae of trying to balance our hormones and we forget to kind of zoom out a little bit, look at it from a macro level and say, okay, I'm doing what I need nutritionally, I'm fueling my body, I'm nourishing my body and something is not quite right there. We need to expand our view rather than just blame the diet, because I'm going to say something really controversial as a nutritionist, but I don't think that there is a perfect human diet. I don't think there is a perfect way to eat. I don't think that seeking out the next perfect diet, the next perfect way to eat, is really the answer for us.
A Perfect Diet Doesn’t Exist
I think the answer is really learning our bodies and our own physiological needs and tuning into our system. If we use our intuition and we hone that wisdom, we are able to assess exactly what our body needs at all times. And as long as we have a powerful context to view the body through, which I think bioenergetics is a really, really powerful perspective, we're actually able to find what the perfect diet for us is. We can trust our bodies. We can trust ourselves. We just have to remember how to do it and remind ourselves that there is this powerful force within us. Our body craves reaching its energetic potential. It craves the growth that comes with it.
As long as we understand that, we know that our body is for us, it has our back and it will guide us exactly to where we need to go to be able to expand that energetic potential. I say a lot of this stuff for some of the women that are maybe discouraged on the prometabolic diet or have been almost feeling those feelings of betrayal. I hope that some of what I talked about today resonated with you because a true pro metabolic diet or a diet that is metabolism centered is really centered around your cellular energy and that is going to be very unique to you. What your physiology needs is going to be very unique to you.
I think sometimes in some cases we really underestimate how much metabolic damage we had, or we can look at it as how many blockages in energy we had or have. We're still working through and it takes time for the body to sort through it. It can be really tough when your body is going through those phases of processing whatever it is that you stored up, whether that's the emotional aspects of it or the fat soluble toxins that we're exposed to, that if our body doesn't have the energy to work through them or break them down, it will often store it in the fat cells. And so a lot of times when we start to focus on an energy centered way of eating or a metabolically supportive diet, we start to really see how many blockages in our energy flow we have.
Our body starts to really be able to speak up to us because now we're listening, now we're fueling it, and it has the energy to do so, and it can be very tough. I think a lot of us, we want to quit when it gets tough, of course, because that's just human nature. We want to quit just before we turn the corner or just before we see the light at the end of the tunnel. We want to turn back now. But I think it really is up to us to decipher where we are at in the journey. If what we have has been working for us, we see the momentum in it. Because taking an energy centered approach to nutrition is really a diet built on momentum.
The longer that you focus on increasing your energy, when we believe that energy begets structure, and energy impacts the physical structure, the more your energy is flowing, the more you increase the energy, the better your structure gets, and then the more resilient to your environment you become.
So the environmental factors become a little less and less important because your body is not as impacted by the environment. When we're in a really low energy state, our structure is often very sensitive to our environment. We see this a lot, right? People struggle with the mold issues and the EMF issues, and they're sensitive to every single food under the sun, and they're sensitive to the sun itself. They have all these sensitivities.
What we're seeing is just this constant low energy state that we've talked about in this episode and in the last episode. As we focus on energy flow, the structure starts to improve and then we become more resilient to the environment. That is a momentum based approach, because the more resilient we become, the easier it is to create energy, right? Then the better our structure becomes, the more resilient we become. And so on it goes.
That's why I've seen some incredible results in women who take a prometabolic approach, who take an intuitive approach to a prometabolic diet, and they really focus on getting the nutrients that their bodies need. They focus on nourishing on a deep level and focusing on foods for digestibility that their body can actually extract the nutrients from on an easy level or an easier level. You just see such incredible changes in the structure. I'm talking lips, I'm talking hair, I'm talking just the general almost aging backwards in a way where their structure changes so much that they look younger than they did ten years ago. And I think that is a great example of how energy does beget structure. You're never going to convince me otherwise.
I know there are some people that don't believe that or have maybe believed that, and then they've turned away from that, but you're never going to be able to convince me otherwise because I am sold. I've seen way too many changes in people's faces and bodies and structures and their changes in their symptoms and so many different aspects of their health and their body. Their body is expressing the difference in their energy flow that I just cannot be convinced otherwise. So I think that when you take a prometabolic or an energy centered approach to nutrition, what you really should be doing is looking at it as a momentum based approach. And instead of looking at it as an arbitrary set of rules, you really want to focus on what is right for you and really hone your own intuition. That's really why I created this podcast. That's why I am committed to expanding this work, because I really think that we are living within 5% - - 10% of our energetic potential.
When we limit ourselves through the lens and just kind of take our dieting baggage with us wherever we go, we just carry it on our back and we go into new things and new beginnings with our old baggage carrying it with us, we really limit our own energetic potential. So I hope this breakdown or this review of Prometabolic and what Prometabolic really means resonated with you and helped you.
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