Episode 40
Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast, a place to explore where female physiology and feminine energy dance together to shape our life experience. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, functional nutritionist and integrative health coach and I'm inviting you to journey with me through both the scientific and spiritual facets of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance and become deeply and fully nourished despite living in a society that is increasingly desperate to erase our female set-apartness. 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.
So I think one of the number one questions that I get is, do I still follow a pro metabolic diet? And if I was going to recreate Fully Nourished today, is there anything that I would do differently? And because this is our last episode in this small series, we've been doing Heresy Heals the past couple of weeks, we've been talking about how in different areas of our lives, it's important to to have a little bit of a heretic inside of us and ask questions and challenge our own belief systems, or these things that we think are our own belief systems, but are possibly somebody else's belief systems. And part one, we covered religion. And this idea of it's okay to ask questions, it's okay to look at what's around you to listen to the truth that is already within you. And if something doesn't feel right to question if it is right, and if something doesn't make sense to explore that. In part two, we talked about this kind of religious and dogmatic approach to the divine feminine, and how as this becomes more and more popular, there's a rigidity and a dogmatic doctrine that's starting to emerge. And to not fall into that this idea of getting into your feminine energy can quickly become its own dogmatic or doctrinal approach. In part three, we talked about being a heretic or being heretical when it comes to making female friends and forming the community around us and asking questions and challenging our own belief systems and making friends differently. And today, I really want to finish off this series by talking about the dogma of dietary cults, and explore the reasons why we as women can easily fall into this kind of dogmatic and religious thinking around food.
Patterns In the Health and Wellness World
So I have had this really unique opportunity to be a part of the health space for more than a decade now. And even before I worked in health and wellness, I was super interested and very involved in health and wellness in various aspects, from fitness to nutrition to being involved in my local health community, which was much different and more underground back in the day. And when you have that amount of time to observe the patterns, and even more so if you're doing research, you're reading older health books, like I love, I used to love to read older health books, even when I was a young teenager. And so I had read a lot of health books from like the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. Now I can look back and say a lot of these were just like dietary fad books. But it's been really interesting to observe how there is a pattern of things that come and go. It's something that I've explained to my students as the pendulum of extremes, where you'll often see that one extreme is super popular, and everyone's touting it as like the best way, being super religious about it super dogmatic about it and saying, Oh, my gosh, it's solved all my problems, all my health issues, all my this, all my that. And then all of a sudden, because that extreme didn't work right or something's wrong with that extreme, you'll see people just start to swing in the opposite direction, eventually, they'll end up at the total opposite side of the extreme.
We touched on in the past couple episodes, some of these laws of the universe, and one of the laws is this idea of polarity, there's always two opposite poles of the same thing. And there's also the law of rhythm, this idea of everything is always swinging back and forth, ebbing and flowing, constantly moving. All of us are constantly moving. Society as a collective is constantly swinging back and forth between these extremes. It's just the law of the universe, it's always going to happen, we cannot stop it from happening. However, within the hermetic laws, there's also this idea or this principle of what's called neutralization, this idea that if you can stop being so influenced by the ebbs and flows and the back and forth, knowing that this is just a part of life, this is a part of our reality on every plane, not just the physical plane, but the mental plane the spiritual plane, we all go through these ebbs and flows in various forms, society is going to do it, the earth is going to do it, everything that's alive within creation is going to do this, this is part of one of the laws of the universe. If we understand this, we can, in a way overcome this by rising above it, and training our minds, especially our subconscious minds to stop getting so, I guess it would be, emotional about it, where we stop getting so caught up in the current and rise above, and can take a bird's eye view, and start to understand that there's nuance to everything, very rarely does the answer lie on one side of the extreme or the other side of the extreme, our mind doesn't need to get caught up in these extremes, these rhythms, these ebbs and flows and rise above it. And this is the principle of neutralization.
But this is something that requires immense practice, and also a strong sense of self. And it does require energy, right, because it's easy to be in a state of learned helplessness, especially if you're in a poor state of health, we're depressed, we, you know, are working a job that we hate, we're overworked, we’re under fed, we're disconnected. It's much easier to go with the status quo and be “sheeple,” if we want to call it that, where everyone just follows in step or in line with the person in front of them. And just doesn't give it a second thought. And specifically, when we're in this place of soul-deep burnout, and cell-deep burnout, where we just feel utterly depleted, utterly emptied, we've lost our sense of self in a way, or we never gained it, we have wrapped up our identity, and all these things, these layers, these belief systems, all these things that actually are not our own, our psyche has become completely foreign to us, we're so disconnected to the deeper parts of ourselves, we're just carrying a bunch of layers of other people's crap, whether that be like religion, or the people in our lives, the adults in our lives that raised us or what we were influenced by growing up whatever it might be. We've put these layers of identities on ourselves, which are not actually ours, they don't come from us, they don't come from the wisdom within us, the truth within us. They're just something else that we carry. And we become attached to, when we got to this place, it's often very difficult to take any type of personal responsibility for ourselves.
And so we often will contract out the most important things to somebody else and just say, tell us what to do. I don't know what to do, just tell me what to do. And I'll do it. And we always get ourselves into hot water doing this. It never, very never works out when we hand our sovereignty away. But even though we know this, it doesn't stop us from doing it anyways. Because to be honest, true behavior, change and true change the things that we really crave, the nourishment that we crave, the vitality that we crave, the life that we crave, all of that stuff, does require us to take personal responsibility, and that that can be terrifying. When we do not have any control over our mind, our thoughts, our psyche, we don't have a strong sense of self. And honestly, we don't have a connection to the spiritual realm. We don't have a connection to our spiritual selves, we don't have a connection to God, our higher power, we think everything that exists ever is just material. We're invested in the material world, and we think the material world is our reality, is the only reality that exists. We really begin to get sucked into the black hole. And this is the disconnect that really drives women into a state of severe imbalance physically, yes, of course. But it goes deeper than that.
When we start to separate the body, from the mind or the psyche, and then the Spirit, and we think that they're all separate, or we think that just the physical is important, and just the physical is going to influence what's being driven by the mental or in mind, or what's being driven by the Spirit, and it's just not the case. Of course, the body has influence, the physical has influence over the mind and the spirit. But we often forget the power of the mind and the spirit over the body. The body is a material representation of what's going on in the psyche, or the subconscious mind. It's all very interconnected. It's all one in a way.
What I Would Do Differently
So going back to the question of, “Do I still follow a pro metabolic diet?” I put quotes around it for those of you that are not watching on YouTube. And if I was going to make Fully Nourished today, what would I do differently? To answer the first question, as the pro metabolic diet is today this kind of very rigid dogmatic approach of you have to eat these animal foods and very little plant foods, lots of starches, everyone has a different interpretation of what the pro metabolic diet is. I've never actually followed that pro metabolic diet. It's really interesting because when I originally created Fully Nourished and started talking about these principles, my original intention for creating Fully Nourished was I was implementing these kind of metabolic principles, these more esoteric health principles with clients before I actually created Fully Nourished and came out with Fully Nourished and it was born out of a need, for at the time because now animal based nutrition and carnivores and people eating this - eating dairy and meats and sourdough it's such the norm now that I think some people have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that back then, in 2017, 2018, 2019, women were being told to eat lots of nuts and seeds to restrict dairy to never eat gluten to not eat grains.
The Paleo diet and the Autoimmune Paleo diet and kind of the GAPS, Whole30, that kind of era was still very much strong in the health space, specifically the hormone space specifically, in regards to women. This is when cycle syncing was just starting to take off. So women were being told to eat like, primarily a vegetarian diet with a little bit of meat. It was always like eat mostly vegetables, and omega threes, and a little bit of carbs and a little bit of protein. We had this very weird hodgepodge of like Paleo diets being mixed with the faux Mediterranean diet. Influencer marketing was still relatively new. And so you had women following these influencers that would hype up specific products, whether that be like meat from the certain company, or the certain types of crackers, or these certain types of snacks or whatever it might be, hyped up these products as if they're like a staple product in their life, show it on social as if they are using these as staple products.
One of the ones that I can think about is, I don't know, Simple Mills almond flour crackers. I am sure if you've been in the health and wellness industry, in some way, shape, or form or just health enthusiast for many years, you remember these days. And when I was working with women, one on one, and I was working with so many women one on one. They were like, What do I eat? They're so hungry. They're constantly binging, and binging on nut butters, because that's one of the only things that they're allowed to eat that's calorically dense, and it was just this, what am I allowed to eat? Because they're telling me not to eat carbs, not to eat this, not to eat that. Don't eat this, don't eat that. So what do I eat, and they were right. Everywhere you looked within the health industry, it was like either be vegan, or be paleo, or do this like weird kind of faux Mediterranean vegetarian diet. And people are making all of these like monstrous creations, like women are just starving for sugar. And you see all these influencers making these weird monstrous desserts out of nuts and almond flour and nut butters and maple syrup, because they're also starving for sugar. And I just started to notice this pattern of I don't think any of these women are okay.
I still have a theory that a majority of people that work in the health and wellness space are completely disordered. They have disordered eating habits. They have disordered exercise habits, they have dysmorphic views of their own body. And they figured out a way to get validated for it and also paid for it. And because we know vibrational theory, like will attract like, it's attracting droves of women who also are struggling with these same things and looking for guidance to other women that are actually secretly struggling with the same things that they are. And that's not to say that we don't all struggle and we're not all human and most people that are in the health and wellness space and leaders and experts have their own really deep issues that drove them to this space, myself included. And we all are in a way actively healing, if you see healing as I do, which is returning to who we really are and remembering who we really are. So when I originally created Fully Nourished it was because I was working with so many women struggling with the same things. And I wanted to create something that was almost like a primer or a precursor to working with me because I just felt that every session was, you know women were jumping from functional practitioner to functional practitioner, nutritionist to nutritionist dietician to dietitian and most of the women that I was working with they were coming to me as a last resort. They're just like, you seem to think outside of the box. And I've already done all of these XYZ things. And for me, I had been trained the same way that these functional practitioners had been trained. It wasn't like I knew something special that they didn't know. It was just I had these clients that were really needing help. And all the things that I had been taught to do had already been done. And I had to ask, Why is this not working? What's actually going on?
That's what really led me to diving into many different people's research. Ray Peat's research was one of them. Gilbert Ling, Katherina Dalton, Broda Barnes some of those just scratched the surface. And I wanted to try to make nourishing principles as simple as possible in a way, but I never intended to like protocolize them. And when I started sharing about it on social media, I was one of the first people talking about it, it just exploded. And because I was one of the first people talking about it, and bringing it to the space in such a way, it led to a lot of what I call the sick game of telephone, where because people are not actually going directly to the research and reading it and integrating it into themselves with the experience and with wisdom and with nuance, they're just going to hear someone say something and then share it in a different way, and then share it. And eventually it becomes this game of telephone where people are sharing something that is not true. It's actually not true, because they took somebody else's work that was already gross simplification, which is what social media often is, it's it has to be a gross simplification or generalization to be able to fit something that is worthy of a whole book or where we have a whole multiple books and package it into a small digestible piece of content. And so unfortunately, metabolic principles, this idea of lowering stress on the system, building metabolic resilience, which is really all it is, but when I say all it is, of course, that is so complex, it's much more esoteric. People take Ray Peat’s research and they make it so literal. And they take a lot of bioenergetic principles from many different researchers and try to turn it into something that's very literal and irrational. And what they often forget is that a lot of this is energetic. This is a little bit esoteric. It's more like art than science. Of course, there's science behind it, because science proves the art and the math that is written within creation, it proves the vibrational frequencies and the music that we see all around us. That's all science is doing. It's attempting to explain the mysteries of reality.
So when I originally created Fully Nourished, it was what was needed at the time. I originally created it in 2019. And then I revamped it in 2020. And then, of course, we all know what happened in 2020. I really feel like the collective changed over the course of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. And you'll notice that I backed off of educating the way that I always did, because I started to just feel a shift and the needs of the collective change. I started to recognize and realize that what I brought to the space at the time, it was what the world needed. It was what women needed. It was taught in the best way. I knew how to at the time, of course with any creative work. But I started to realize that now this work has expanded. It's changed and shifted, because we've changed.
Personally, I've never taken a super rigid approach to what is considered pro-metabolic nutrition. I have always taken a more nuanced approach, as probably a lot of my students have seen I continue to feed into my community. We do live q&a days. And I'm always trying to add nuance to the conversation. I've always done that and I've tried to expand that over time. I am always trying to soften into my instincts. I feel like most of us as women have unlearned our instincts the first 20 to 30 years of our lives and then we have to relearn our instincts. But when we do start to meet our body's basic needs, instead of ignore or neglect or manipulate, we do start to shift and we are able to start to return to instinct, sensation and connection we're able to start to feel all again, feel who we really are, underneath all the layers of, dare I say bullshit.
And so my journey has always been about instinctually getting back to being very aware and connected to what my body's needs are, and provide those needs to my body. And that's really what a metabolic approach is. It's, what do I need, right now, to expand my metabolic potential, my resilience, my cellular resilience. What do I need to become nourished? What is missing? What is needed for true nourishment? And that goes so far beyond just food, just minerals, just nutrition, just macros. And no protocol, no generalization is ever going to tell you that. No one can teach you that. They can, sure, teach you about your physiology, and give you tips and tricks and hacks and things to try. But you have to see them as, you're not God, they're not Bible, they're not doctrine, and not dogma. And as long as you keep getting caught up in that you will never quote unquote, heal, because healing is getting back to who you really are. And you just keep layering a bunch of bullshit on top of who you really are.
So it is important to learn how different foods interact with your physiology. But science only goes so far. And then you have to actually assess instinctually what your reality is. You have genetics that are very unique, right, you probably have different ancestors that hail from different regions of the earth, you probably live in a very specific environment with specific sun exposure, with specific access to things, you also probably live a pretty unique existence, you have unique stressors, right? You work a specific job, or you have specific responsibilities and duties, like all of those things need to be put together to say, Okay, this is my reality right now. What is needed to support my reality in the here and now? And because your body is dynamic and changing, and your needs are changing, the seasons change, rhythms change, that is going to shift. And so the only route is actually going to be returning back to your physiology and returning back to your instinct, your sensation, and the connection to your body. No rigid approach, no dogma, no doctrine, no numbers, no data, no science can ever trump that. And so what I have recognized in the past couple of years, as the collective has shifted, is that as long as a woman thinks in terms of dogma, in terms of rigidity, is stuck in a very black and white approach to life and everything very perfectionist approach, treats everything doctrine as theological, right? Everything is theology, right? There's no philosophy, there's no room for nuance. There's a mental inflexibility. And a lot of people right now, they're going to approach anything that way. You could share anything, and they're just going to look at it as doctrine or dogma, because they are stuck in a specific vibrational pattern.
My Work Is Changing
And so this is why my work is changing, because I started to realize that, wow, women are using food, nutrition, crunchiness, pathologizing every problem, right? Oh, my gosh, there's a homeopathic remedy for life. We're using that as women to focus so much on the physical, because we want to distract ourselves from what's happening on the mental, on the spiritual. We're too afraid. There's fear there. And even though we're in a constant state of fear, and it's not fun, we are addicted to it. In a way we're addicted to this physiological stress. Because it's scary to change. It's scary to shift, it also takes energy, right? It does take nourishment, it does take minerals, it does take changing the physical. But until we actually change our minds, our patterns, our behaviors, our thoughts, we will take the same patterns and behaviors that we've always had into any approach, the protocol doesn't matter. The diet we choose doesn't matter. And so I think that people do seek out restriction because that's what is safe. They don't necessarily trust themselves to know what's best for themselves, because they're not connected to their mind or not connected to their psyche. But there's a lot of deep things that we have to work through. We often have flawed thoughts about ourselves and our own bodies. And so we tend to choose an approach that's going to confirm this belief.
We also are really addicted to stress as a culture. And so we are going to constantly be drawn to something that keeps us in this stress state or in this reactive kind of state, because we don't know anything different, and anything different actually feels foreign, and so anything that feels uncomfortable or foreign to us often we consider as bad because any change is going to require some type of energetic shift, some type of flexibility. And so going back to vibrational theory, like attracts like – if you have a low vibration, you are going to be attracted to similar people who have similar vibrations, you're going to be attracted to things that keep you in that similar vibration until you start to shift your mindset. And still until you start to expand beyond that and allow for that expansion. And also, if you think in terms of extremes as most people do, you're going to see through the lens of extremes, it's going to be very difficult for you to see any other way because of all these extremes. This either or mentality is so prevalent amongst the health and wellness space. And if you're sucked into that really weird vibrational frequency, and your feed is full of it, it's going to become your reality. You're going to think that's the only option.
Going back to that pendulum swing, we really see where people swing from one extreme to the other extreme. If you're either high carb and you eat just crazy amounts of carbohydrates, or you're zero carb, you're low carb, it can't be something in between, or you either follow a westernized standard American diet, or you never have any processed foods ever. It's like it's one or the other. You're either animal based or plant based, right? Like we went from plant based, now we're like animal based, and I'll bet you anything. We're gonna swing right back in the opposite direction at some point because there's gonna be people that are like, animal based made me sick, I needed to eat more plants. There's either intermittent fasting all of the time, regularly doing extreme water fasting, or you just eat all the time every two hours without ever stopping. You have snacks all the time. There's no nuance no in between. We constantly see things through the lens of extremes, there couldn't possibly be something in the middle.
I tend to really hate the word balance. Because this idea of balance has turned into there's this specific point where you become balanced. I really see balance or equilibrium as more of a practice. You are going to swing a little bit, you're going to need to move in rhythm, you're going to need to be a little dynamic, you've got to be flexible. There's a time and a place where your body's asking for you to expand or to change in your mental rigidity. Being stuck on something specific is going to keep you from growing, from expanding. There does come a point where your own mind can actually prevent you from expanding. But until we get out of this pendulum swing from extreme to extreme and find a more nuanced approach, that principle of neutralization where we mentally rise above the swings, and we say okay, where's the nuance? And what actually works for me? What actually works for me? I think most people when they ask that question they do not know. They'll say, oh, low carb works for me. keto, carnivore. These are all identities. These are all generalizations, right? For people that are stuck in extremes and dogmatic thinking about nutrition, they often haven't taken the leap of faith or the surrender that it takes, the trust that it takes to step outside of the dogmatic and rigid religious approaches to food. And even though we see these extremes being disproven again and again, right, the carnivore eventually loosens up and says Oh, actually. vegetables. Actually I allow this into my diet. Actually, I allowed this, the plant-based eater often says, I need to loosen up a little bit because I was getting super weak and I needed some animal foods, or the person that is fasting for 23 hours a day and is doing, you know, one meal a day, all of a sudden says well that ruined my life, and I lost all my hair, and I need to loosen up a little bit.
Whatever the specific approach is, the person who is all in or extreme on it, is going to keep swinging, because for most people extremes do not work. And that's not for me to say that I'm not for people doing what works for them are some people who are incredibly overweight or are struggling with really severe health issues. And they may need to take a little bit of a more, I don't want to say a rigid approach. That's not the right word. But they do need to be a little bit more careful in what they're consuming for a period of time. However, it's all mental, it's all how you're looking at it, if you're just looking through the lens of what you're not allowed to eat and what you don't eat, that is the problem. If you're in that vibration of this is what I can and cannot eat, you've totally missed the point. And most of us are struggling with health issues because of certain thoughts and behaviors and what we've accepted for ourselves, right, the people in our lives that we've accepted into our lives or the jobs that we've taken, or the food behaviors, and the lifestyle behaviors are just a fruit of what we believe, and we think about ourselves. And so it is important to see the nuance there and to understand that until we step out of these identities, until we step out of these dogmatic approaches, whenever we're actually going to truly find what works for us or what doesn't work for us, we're just going to keep looking over there and say, Oh, that works for that person.
So I'm going to add that on another layer on top, keeping in mind that because of our feminine nature, we also are a little bit more susceptible to dieting frameworks than men are. Although I definitely see an uptick in men falling down dieting rabbit holes as well. I think women are definitely more susceptible to seeking out these frameworks: tell me what to eat, tell me what to do. Because it's part of our nature, we really crave structure, and we crave energy, and we crave someone to take that structure building and that framework building off of our shoulders. And so because of our part of the feminine is that vast primordial nature, I mentioned in the in two episodes ago, how we're both the blank page, and then the spaces between the words, we are ripe and vast with potential for life, but we crave someone to come in or we crave something to come in, the masculine to come in, and provide the energy and provide the structure for us than to take it and turn it into something. I described it as we look at the sun shining its beams of light onto the earth. And then Mother Nature takes that energy and starts to become, and expand into what she is. And that's just one of many examples. But we are a blank page waiting for framework, waiting for structure, waiting for energy, waiting for the provisions and the resources to become our full potential. And so if we're not aware of that, we're not aware of our desire and our need for that kind of masculine structure to come in, we do crave it, we're going to find it somewhere. We're going to meet that need somewhere, it's a need to feel safe, right, it's a need to feel protected.
And this overflows into many different aspects of our life. This can overflow into a relational masculine and feminine, right, between men and women. But it also is within us as well, where although we carry mostly feminine energy, and that's where we thrive, that's where we are biologically meant to stay within our feminine energy, we do need parts of our energetics is our masculine energy to come in and create some framework for us to feel like we're not just like this vast primordial blob that's just falling apart, and has so many directions that it can go but doesn't know where it's gonna go. A natural part of our need is to crave structure, because a part of our nature, not our whole nature, but a part of our nature does feel completely wild and out of control. It feels almost mysterious to us. And so part of our basic underlying biological need is to hand some of that over to the masculine, say, here is my backbone, hold me up so that I can flow within this framework. And so of course, we're going to be attracted to frameworks to tell us what to eat.
But unfortunately, what happens is this has come at the expense of our instincts. We have put these layers on top of ourselves and suppressed our own instincts. In today's day and age, if we want to be healthy, if we want to keep a healthy weight, if we want to remain lean or get fit, we either need to follow a diet, count our macros or follow intuitive eating. And I want to remind you that these are just belief systems, a deep subconscious belief that we couldn't possibly know how to feed ourselves. Without science, without data, without quantifying, without pathologizing, without devices, it's us being so afraid that we're now leaning into our masculine or using masculine frameworks to almost cover up or suppress our own instincts. That's very different than giving ourselves the structure and support we need to really meet our own needs. There's a big difference there. I hope you've seen it.
A lot of us are so afraid to lean into our instincts and soften into our instincts. And we don't trust our instincts, we don't trust our bodily sensations, we don't trust our connections with our body, that we just just leaned so heavily into the masculine because we're afraid of the feminine. And that's very different than providing ourselves some type of structure, some type of framework to have a lot of freedom within. And it also doesn't help that we're so confused and overwhelmed about what to eat. And we're so burned out that we just really want to hand it over to someone else and say, Tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do. Give me some steps, give me some advice, and I'm just going to do it, I'm just going to follow your lead. And sometimes that is helpful. If we find the right person and we say here, I need help, I need to lean into you a little bit, I need you to provide me some masculine framework, so that I can relax into my feminine. Absolutely, sometimes that's a really important thing to do. But it doesn't take away our need for our own personal responsibility to acknowledge that we've become so far removed from nature, we become super disoriented from our environment. And we've also become completely disconnected from what food actually is, where it comes from, the work and effort and thought that goes into it. And then we've of course become very disconnected from knowledge of our own body and disconnection from our body's needs and the rhythms that we follow.
All of this disconnection from nature, disconnection from our environment, disconnection from ourselves, has really just led to loss of instinct. I dislike the idea of intuitive eating, because I find intuition to be much more masculine. It's like this very logical kind of brain work that's required. Really, what do we feel like eating? You're trying to rationalize instinct, and sensation and connection with your body. And you're trying to use your brain to say, Okay, what is it that I want to eat. That's why intuitive eating is thrown in there where I said, either follow a diet, you have to count your macros, or you've got to follow some type of intuitive eating, because that's all the rage right now. I don't think any of that is really a return to true feminine nourishment. Now there are tools that can help us almost provide us like a stepping stone to get to the place where we can be much more tapped into our instinct and our sensation and our connection with our body and really recognizing our body's needs almost instinctively as a mother recognizes her child's needs. I'm not saying that any of those things are bad necessarily, but we often use them as a distraction, and never actually get to the root of it. Until we acknowledge as women that we're going to be attracted to any type of framework or rigidity, because that's our nature. It doesn't matter if it's keto doesn't matter if it's carnivore, doesn't matter if it's plant based, animal based, pro metabolic intermittent fasting, whatever, is trending these days, rise above it, practice the principle of neutralization and say, Okay, I don't want to be just pushed back and forth by this ebb and flow, constantly swinging from extreme to extreme, constantly swinging from thing to thing. I'm done with it, it is exhausting me. I am so exhausted at trying to rationalize. This person is teaching, this person seems to be teaching this complete opposite thing. Oh, my gosh, it feels like my brain splitting in half. What do I even do?
The Path Out of Dogma
Until you can separate reaching outcomes from your nutrition, just temporarily, it doesn't mean you're not going to get results or reach your quote unquote, goals. It's more of you need to learn how to reshape the relationship between your body, your nutrition, and your mind. Most of us have never approached nutrition in a way that is non dogmatic, in a way that is not doctrinal or being assessed or attached to some type of outcome, right, eradication of some type of health issue or some type of body goal or aesthetic goal. Most of us have acquired so much information, I wouldn't necessarily qualify it as knowledge, I would qualify it as information, that true physiological nourishment that is appropriate for our physiological needs. And our biology is actually probably more of a lot of unlearning, at this point, than actually learning what to do. A lot of us think that we need to learn more, we need to acquire more information. I actually think that a lot of us need to unlearn certain patterns, unlearn certain things that we've accepted as true to instead of continually seeking and searching out for the next best thing, or the next best answer the next best diet or the next best tip, or trick or dogma, or whatever it might be, way to actually seriously assess what we're currently doing. And if it's not working for us, what are we continually doing or continually believing about ourselves, or nutrition or fitness or whatever it might be, that is actually holding us back? Where can we drop that baggage? Where can we wipe our slate clean, and build something that really works for ourselves, build a framework or a structure that really actually works for us and serves us, rather than just collecting all of these random things that are other people's frameworks, and creating this kind of botched framework for ourselves, that keeps us so restrictive and doesn't fit. It's like a box that we're trying to fit ourselves in, that wasn't made for our bodies, wasn't made for us.
A lot of us still take such a fear based approach to nutrition. “This person said this thing is gonna give me cancer. And this person said, this is gonna give me diabetes. And this person said, this is going to cause stress in my body.” And so we keep looking outward and almost blaming outward, instead of taking personal responsibility for ourselves and looking all around to saying all this information that's available to us, what an abundance of information that we have at our fingertips. But what's the kind of wisdom that we want to view this through? What's the lens and the perspective we want to view this through, because we've got to really create that first, we have to create a sense of safety within ourselves, or we're just going to keep running. Because we're almost in a sense stuck in this fight or flight or we're stuck in freeze, we're stuck in a state of survival. I'm reviewing everything through the lens of what does this mean for me, oh, my gosh, we're applying this to essence, collecting things just in case, because we're so afraid of this possible outcome. And we're really approaching our wellness journey, even if we don't admit it to ourselves, through a lens of just absolute fear.
Nutrition and food because of our unlimited access these days and because we have access to every single food and “food,” which is not really food, under the sun, we have access to all types of things all the time, all year long, we do need to learn how to view nutrition through a physiological, need-based lens, a return to ourselves, mind, body and spirit. What are my needs? And how do I need them. And there's no right way to do this. There's gonna there's many tools that we have access to do this. But I do think there's a few things to keep in mind. And the first one is learning our physiology. If we don't really understand our physiology, we don't understand how it works, we don't understand the shifts and the rhythms that we're going through as females, as biological females, it's very difficult to actually meet our physiological needs. And it's also really important for us to understand our feminine nature. Most nutrition advice, behavior, change advice, fitness advice, health and wellness advice out there is based on biological males, who have completely different physiologies. And if you want to follow those frameworks, that's fine, it can totally get you the really hard physique, the very lean physique, it can get you to a place where you are very physiologically fit. I'm not downplaying that.
However, I noticed that a lot of women that do follow those frameworks are very much stuck in this type of masculine, hardened energy. I totally understand that's where some women feel very safe and some women feel that they need to stay and that's absolutely okay. But for a lot of women, it's not going to feel like it's working and it's going to feel like they keep just trying and striving and striving and striving, it's that kind of striving mentality, you're always striving for better, bigger, this that the other. And it's never enough, because it does not fulfill the feminine nature, it will never ever feel like enough and you'll constantly be striving for something else. And honestly, even some cycle syncing approaches out there, which we could probably spend a whole episode on, are very masculine in approach, it's very rigid, it's very like you do this during this part of the cycle, this during this part of the cycle, this during this part of the cycle, and that to me doesn't feel very feminine at all. Of course, there should be an acknowledgment to our shifts and our needs and our rhythms. But there also doesn't need to be like this rigid, rule-based, dogmatic approach, either. It's about understanding our physiology and understanding our nature. And then really figuring out what we need based on that knowledge, getting back into our instincts, those things help us get back into our bodily sensations, back into our instincts back into connection with ourselves. And then that's what allows us to make the right decisions for ourselves moving forward, it's not that we're looking outside of ourselves to tell us what the best thing is.
A really important aspect to health is to reorient ourselves to our environment, to our mother. A lot of us are so out of sync with our environment, so out of sync with the sun, so out of sync with our appetites, our circadian rhythms, our are infradian rhythms, we are just we feel completely discombobulated. And honestly, if a lot of us aligned our eating to the circadian rhythm, a lot of us got outside, got our feet on the grass, or our feet on the soil or feet on the ground, spent more time outside, less time on screens, most of our issues would really be eradicated. To be honest, I think a lot of us it's more simple than we think it is. We often make it so complicated that it makes it very difficult to take the first step and actually do something. And when we can just on a day to day basis, look at each day on its own, and say what did I really, really need? For most of us, at least I know for myself, it's Yes, I definitely need to be eating enough calories. What that looks like is gonna look different for everyone, right? For me, that looks like I do much better on three bigger meals a day, maybe a small snack, if I'm working out and I haven't eaten in a little while. And I do better with what I call front loading my calories, which is eating most of my food while the sun is out. That's just what works really well for me. And it's taken me a lot of trial and error to figure that out. I've experimented with fasting, I've experimented with more frequent eating. And there's been times and places where both of that actually probably supported my physiology with where I was at. But now I know that my body thrives on consistency. And I believe that's where most women's bodies thrive.
Consistency is the overarching principle there, and not so much about what that consistency looks like, every single woman needs to figure out what that consistency needs to be for them. Safety and not security as usually what that consistency will translate to the body and what that consistency looks like for you. That's going to be completely different. But I know for me that's really helpful in reorienting my body with my environment. I absolutely believe that eating our breakfast within an hour of waking is such a huge anchoring factor for so many women. Again, not super rigid, so oh my gosh, if I don't eat within 60 minutes of waking I failed, I failed the test, I got an A minus or b minus. It's just this idea of making breakfast a priority as quickly as possible in the morning. And that might look like most days I'm getting it in within an hour of waking. Sundays, it's two hours or whatever. It's not this like super dogmatic, rigid approach that if I don't do it, I'm gonna fail. Getting outside, getting enough sunlight, getting sunlight in the morning when I wake up for a couple of minutes at least. And then getting some sun during the day on most of my body parts like my stomach and my back. And then also being outside during sunset or dusk, just making it a priority to get outside even for a few moments.
And then exercise. Movement is so important. And when I'm in tune with my own instincts, and I'm in tune with my own physiology, I don't have to like actively cycle sync and be like, okay, oh my gosh, I'm in my follicular phase. So I can only do this, I'm ovulating. I can only do this. It's more just like I make it a priority to move almost every single day. I like to carve it into my life. And even if I only move for three minutes and then I'm like you know what, I just cannot do this today for whatever reason, like my body cannot overcome the physical hurdle because movement is most likely a mental hurdle. It's not a physical hurdle. No, but a majority of us if we just start, we'll finish. But some of us are truly facing a physical hurdle with exercise. And I totally understand that. But I think a lot of us, it's a mental hurdle more than anything else. And a lot of us do need to be moving, especially because a lot of us our lives have changed over the past couple of years. And the hustle and bustle of life before there's been time to slow down. And now it's actually time to get moving again. I think, for most women, if they're not exercising, that's one of their biggest health hurdles, is exercise is very important for health just in general, right. Of course, there's longevity reasons and metabolic reasons and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, exercise makes you feel very good once you've completed it. And the results last all day long. And if you do that every single day, or most days, you find that, wow, you're feeling really good, and you're vibrating higher, your energy production is higher, sure that all the physical benefits are there, sure. But you have energetic benefits, vibrational benefits, and as you start to vibrate differently, as your frequency changes, you will change, your mind will change, your cells will change, your body will change, your ability to structure water will change, all of that will change.
But again, just like nutrition, your exercise doesn't need to look a specific way. If you feel like you only can exercise this way, and this is the only way that women should exercise, you've got it wrong, right? Women should exercise in a way that's going to be able to keep them consistent. You're not always going to feel like working out or you're not always going to feel like exercising. But if you do choose something that you enjoy, that brings you joy, you're going to be more likely to follow through with it even on the days where you don't necessarily feel like it. But if you are doing something that you constantly dread, or you constantly hate, what are you doing?
So I'll wrap up with this, is that as the collective needs shift, so does my work. I'm always trying to be in tune with where women are at and what they're needing. And right now I feel like the needs have completely changed from when I first created Fully Nourished. And so that's why I closed it up temporarily at the end of last year. And it's expanding, being expanded upon and changing, just as we do as women, the bones are still there, the core of us is still there, but we're growing. My work is changing and what's coming out is changing and shifting, because it has to. And I think if more people in the health and wellness space, more coaches more nutritionists, more dieticians, even more doctors really started to listen, and to watch and to observe, they would realize that wow, the needs are shifting, and what people once needed and the way that they needed it might have shifted a little bit and I should adjust accordingly. So this is your full permission to finally let go of dogma, to finally let go of doctrine, to finally let go of fear in regards to your nutrition and to pave your own way. Clear the slate, unlearn what you need to unlearn and figure out a framework that actually works for you, that actually nourishes you. There are physiological principles, yes, that we can accumulate things like eating enough protein and eating within an hour of waking, and eating consistently and frequently enough for our bodies, and doing basic things to support our metabolism. But we need to make them our own. They're never meant to be followed in this like doctrinal, rigid way. And if something feels instinctually that it's not working, your instincts trump all. I'm gonna say it again, your instincts and your sensations and your connection to your body. Listen to it, because it trumps all.
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