Episode 4
Reclaiming Your Appetite After Survival Based Eating
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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.
Okay, I know I can't be the only one that feels this way, and maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but who else is sick of having Barbie shoved down their throat from every possible direction? I feel like all I've seen for weeks is just Barbie, Barbie, Barbie. And I know the branding is fun, it's pink. I understand the nostalgia behind it. I know Barbie is nostalgic for us women that grew up in the 80s and 90s, but I don't know, I feel like it's nostalgic in not a good way.
Like, to me, Barbie brings back just the memory of young girls who knew nothing about their bodies playing with these dolls that were a super inaccurate representation of what the female form looks like. And that was being ingrained in our psyches. All the while, growing up in a society where a lot of the women around us, our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, a lot of the women around us were stuck in this very disordered relationship with their bodies, very disordered relationship with food. It was all about the low fat, low calorie, and so many women who couldn't fit into the very lean aesthetic at the time. I'm not talking about the women who are naturally that kind of thin, kind of just tall and long limbed and very lean, just all around, not a lot of muscle. Most women didn't fit that form, and so they had to starve themselves to be able to fit the aesthetic that was so popular in that day. There was a lot of starvation going on. There was a lot of low calorie eating going on, there was a lot of fat free going on, there was a lot of jazzer size and aerobics going on.
It was just a really weird time for women and women were so disassociated from their own bodies. So it just gives me the heebie jeebies a little bit. Then you add in just this. I'm not super into celebrities, but I know a lot of women are, and I like to pay attention to what's going on in pop culture. And you've seen the rise in the past year of the very famous weight loss drug Ozempic. A lot of celebrities who previously were very about celebrating their curves and about strength are now appearing publicly very thin, very lean, to the point where they don't look healthy and they don't look like they lost that weight in a healthy way.
There is this push right now. I've even noticed in the fitness industry where previously it was about strength, it was about building strength, the building our natural feminine curves. And now it's kind of reverting back to that early 2000s need to just be as skinny as possible and thin. Thin is starting to come back in. And I'm like, no, I don't want any part of this. Why do we have to keep repeating cycles and repeating history? Why can't we just talk about nourishing ourselves and being the best we can be, being as strong as we can, feeling as good as we can? These are the themes we need. We do not need another aesthetic shoved down our throat yet again.
I also noticed that styles tend to follow whatever body type is in, which is horrible for people who like myself, at least where I am very short, I'm a lot more curvy. I have a little bit more of an athletic body type, bigger breasts. And so a lot of the things that are popular for the very thin aesthetic don't look good on me. In fact, they look so bad on me, it's almost laughable. And it makes it harder to find clothing that you feel good in and that you look good in.
It's just a tragedy all around for a lot of us, especially us ladies who are nourished. We lift weights, we're curvy, and we're proud of it, you know? But not to poo poo on anyone's love of Barbie. If you love Barbie and you're enjoying it, more power to you. I'm curious what your thoughts are as a woman and as you see what's going on, please leave a comment below letting me know what you think about the Barbie obsession right now and what it's doing to the female psyche as a whole.
But diving into today's episode, which is all about really reclaiming your appetite and overcoming survival based eating patterns, we're going to talk about what is so important about appetite and kind of some themes that I've seen over the past decade or so, how appetite has seemed to make a comeback within the human consciousness. For some of us, it feels like we've come so far, but for a lot of people, they still have a long way to go.
The Female Appetite
There's a lot of stigma wrapped up in appetite, especially the female appetite. And as a woman, I don't know about you, and I know not all women's experiences are the same so I'm not trying to project onto all women, but I will say that there's kind of this underlying whenever we talk about hunger and appetite, I feel like one of the themes we're exploring in this season is the ravenous nature of our physiology. I was thinking about that word for a while, that descriptive word, “ravenous.” Because for a long time I was sitting with these ideas of what is an accurate depiction of the feminine nature. I thought of words like insatiable and I'm like, no, that's not quite it. I'm a big believer that words are really important and how we describe things are really important, so when I came across the word ravenous, I was like, yes, that's it.
It's a representation of how on a spiritual level or a part of our essence is to really need to be fed, need to be nourished. And we're ravenous for it. We need it. We absolutely crave it. We yearn for it. It's a part of us. But how many of us women still when we hear the word ravenous or we hear a big appetite, we get that little check in our consciousness where we feel like, oh no, this is too much. I feel like a lot of women, at least myself growing up, there was this underlying, almost unspoken word that you never be too much of something, you never be too hungry or you never be too excited or you never be too loud or you never get too many portions or you never get too many servings.
It's almost like that's not what ladies do, that's not what women do. How many of us, against our deepest desires or against what we actually wanted to do would kind of give into that where, oh, I can't be too this, I can't be too hungry, I can't be too this. How many of us have gone on dates or been in social settings where we don't fulfill our appetite? We just eat to be ladylike and then when we get home, we just unleash and we eat all that we need to until we feel completely satiated. I know I've done that a time or two and I'm guessing you have done it at least once before as well.
And what is this? What is the stigma surrounding appetite? Why can't we as women just claim our appetite as a part of us and be proud of it? There's a lot to unpack here and even more. I want to talk to you today about how important having an appetite is. Not just as a representation for what's going on metabolically on an energetic level, but actually the physical hormones that play a role in appetite, how they actually have a larger impact on our physiology and on our reproductive system. It's actually crazy and I can't wait to share what I have written down in my notes for you.
So although I feel like we've come a long way from the early 2000s where it was celebrated, I remember having friends that would always tell me kind of cheekily like, “I forgot to eat today. Oh, I'm starving, I forgot to eat.” And I remember feeling so insecure about my appetite because I'd always been a girl who was hungry. Like I always had a really strong and healthy appetite. I liked to eat. I enjoyed eating and I enjoyed eating things that were not salad. I remember feeling so out of place about how women would kind of wear their lack of appetite as a badge of honor. And as far as we've come from there, I feel like we've really broken - well, I hope I feel like there's been some progress made in breaking down the stigma around appetite and that it's good and it's healthy to have an appetite. I feel like there's a lot more work to do.
I've also seen this reemergence of the theme of demonizing the appetite kind of come up within the health and wellness industry, specifically within the carnivore and keto and intermittent fasting space. You see, a lot of people are “experts” in those spaces talking about how you don't need to eat breakfast. It's become this conspiracy, like big agriculture or whatever big whatever has come out and convinced us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But in fact, that's a conspiracy. And breakfast is not needed. It's not the most important meal of the day.
I feel like I've heard that so many times within that space and as if the reason why Americans are so overweight and fat is because they eat breakfast. It's just such a bizarre belief system that, again, has swung. We tend to, as humans move to extremes, where we go from one extreme to another extreme and then back, we have a hard time finding nuance within situations. And in the health and wellness space as a whole, there's still this really huge gap between male physiology and female physiology. Women are being treated like they just have small male bodies and they need to approach health in that way. And that's just so far from the truth. That's so far away from science, because our physiology operates so differently regarding food, specifically around the hormones of satiation and hunger, because our biology is centered around something completely different than the male physiology.
Although there are many health experts, I don't care how many letters they have behind their name, that are going to convince you otherwise or are going to disagree with what I have to say here, don't care, because I'm really passionate about us working through the nuances of female physiology and understanding that there is more to the story. And if we do look at appetite as a representation of cellular metabolism, of what's going on and how our body's actually utilizing energy, and we should be able to see appetite as a gauge, it's almost like an indication of where our energy is at and if our system is able to utilize energy well.
Why do we have so many people that get their panties in a bunch and get their feathers so ruffled about appetite and eating breakfast? Well, I think in a lot of ways we have people that are still living in a society that is largely still stuck in a physiological state of stress. They're stuck in a physiological state of survival. It's all they know, and that's where they're comfortable. They don't want to change it, and they don't want to question it. But I like to question it, and I want to question it. The way I think about appetite is really actually quite simple and commonsensical.
I have a dog. But if you don't have a dog, if you have a pet, if you have a beloved pet, whatever it is, a dog, a cat, a parrot I want you to think of them. I want you to think that if your beloved pet had no appetite ever, or was never hungry, you would be worried about them. Like, I know if my dog wasn't hungry for even a day, I would be worried about him, let alone days on end. I would also be worried if he was forcing himself to eat all the time, overriding his appetite. He wasn't hungry. He just kind of forced himself to eat all the time. Again, I would be worried for his health.
I would be wondering if he was okay, and I'd be watching him like a hawk. I would be aware and mindful of it or even a pattern of eating barely anything for multiple days at a time, and then all of a sudden just binging and just eating a bunch of food, many more servings of food. Again, I would be worried for his health. Yet how many humans are participating in this type of behavior? And we're not batting an eye. We're actually accepting it as healthy and normal. It's bizarre behavior. And even more, I kind of think about my dog, if I put food in front of my dog, and he was like, no, I can't eat, mom, I'm on a 16-8 fast.
I only eat between the hours of 01:00 p.m. and 08:00 p.m.. Or, oh, mom, no, I'm on my 24 fast. I only eat between the hours of 05:00 p.m. and 09:00 p.m.. I would be like, are you okay? Are you all right? Again, this is behavior that is not only accepted - we don't really bat an eye at this behavior, but we also celebrate it, and it's very bizarre behavior. What spurred this conversation on was a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling TikTok (I think it was on TikTok) and I came across this guy.
I always get shown the most bizarre videos on TikTok. I don't know why. I think probably the algorithm knows that I need to be shown the most bizarre dieting behavior possible because I need content. I don't know, but I can't remember the guy's name. He had an account that had OMAD in it, one meal a day. So I know he was all about his one meal a day. Let's call him OMAD Dave, One Meal a Day Dave. He was doing this Vlog style TikTok video where he was showing his day of eating, which was really just one big meal.
He was saying he starts recording at 03:00 P.M., and he's like, “oh, 22 hours into my fast. I'm starting to get really hungry, so I'm just going to drink some water and see if the hunger will pass. That hunger, it really gets to you sometimes.” And I'm like, yeah, it does. Your body lets you know when you're starving. Dave’s recording, and then he's like, “yeah, I drank some water 30 minutes ago, and I've been able to push through for about 30 more minutes. So I'm going to push through the hunger for about 30 more minutes, and then I'm going to have my meal.” And I'm just thinking in my head, what is going on? As a society, we are so our patterns around food and the way that we view our appetite is so twisted. It's so twisted.
From a Biological Perspective
The most interesting thing to me is when you look at traditional diets, traditional cultures, and I'm not talking about hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago. I'm talking about people right now that live in this time that are maybe in more rural areas where they don't have as much exposure to technology and therefore not as much confusion around listening to their biological urges. You watch women in rural areas of Russia or rural areas of China or some of these Eastern European countries where they're cooking outside, they are preparing food from scratch all day long. You look at them and they eat three meals a day. It's understood that you're going to wake up, you're going to start cooking, you're going to start working, and you're going to get a meal on the table for your family. Your life is full of a lot of physical labor, a lot of cooking, a lot of cleaning. The men are out in the field working, and they need fuel, and they understand the need for fuel.
When you look at traditional cuisine around the world, very often women are eating at least three meals a day, and they're also spending a lot of time around food. You know, when you study some different traditional cultures, where you look at, let's say, Central America and South America, where the women are still very much eating and practicing their traditional diet, making tortillas all day, grinding the corn by hand spending time together outside, or when you look at rural Asian communities where they're having to actually hold the rice themselves and prepare the rice, it's an all day affair.
From a biological perspective, it seems to me that women have always been the nurturers, the nourishers, the gatherers, they've always had their life centered around nourishing their community. They've always been the cultivators of the home and the cultivators of the community, therefore the literal backbones of society, right? And you see how in traditional diets they consume food that often requires a long preparation, requires kind of an all day affair of preparation. The women are always around food constantly. They're always cooking, they're always preparing to make sure people are nourished and fed.
Not only is their kind of life revolving around nourishing their community, but they also get to spend the day together. They get to hang out, they get to talk, they get to laugh, they get to vent, they get to work through their emotions and work through their issues. They get to trade off child duties. They're all kind of taking turns taking care of the children. It's a team effort. And they're always working around food. You see how food and emotion, we can't separate it because it's always been intertwined and it always will be intertwined.
As women, from a biological perspective, our lives have always been centered around that provision and the nourishing. That would give women a lot more fluidity and flexibility in being in her intuition and eating when necessary, picking off some foods, having small bites of food throughout the day, being around food a majority of the day. This probably shifted throughout a woman's cycle, right? Based on her needs, pregnant women, breastfeeding women probably would eat a little bit more, whereas women that were not in that state probably ate a little bit less. But the point is, during times of plenty, during times of abundance, when there was no famine, women would be around food constantly because they would be preparing food constantly. It was one of their main jobs.
Whereas if you look at men or the male physiology from that perspective, a traditional perspective or a biological perspective, men were often out. They were working in the field, they were taking care of the animals, they were maybe hunting, maybe going out for various reasons for provision, going out and bringing it back to the community. So their access to food would be completely different. Therefore their physiology is much more prepared and resilient to a little bit more lack of food. This is why I often say men are gorgers, women are grazers.
It's because we're biologically designed very differently and we have historically played different roles in the survival of humanity based on our strengths. And women, our strength is the community. Therefore, nourishment of the community falls under that job description. So I just find it very interesting that still in this day and age we're all messed up around food. Of course, right? It makes total sense as women, we're not moving as regularly. A lot of us are stuck in sedentary jobs. We are stuck inside all day. We're not constantly moving, constantly doing that kind of hard, slow, steady labor that our bodies are meant to have and to take part in.
This of course, has its own impacts on metabolism as a whole and lymph movement and detoxification and things like that, but it also has huge impacts on our ability to work through stress. We are very isolated. Oftentimes we're not working through our stress the same way. And then you add in just all of the stressors of modern life. We're stuck in a state of survival, physiology. We are not in a state of thriving and abundance. And our hormones are reflecting that. Then of course, our body and our symptoms and our urges are also reflecting that. Appetite being one of the biggest.
I can't tell you how many women I've worked with or I've talked to, thousands, thousands who tell me that they're just never hungry or if they're hungry, they're not really that hungry until later on in the day. I think this is something to be mindful of, that this is something we should pay attention to, this is a message from deep within. We are kind of being preyed upon in a way by some of the messaging coming at us from these outside sources saying that breakfast is not as important as you think it is. It's okay to start the day with no fuel. Just jump into your day with a black coffee or just water. And we kind of think, okay, I'm just going to cater to this. I don't have an appetite in the morning. What's the big deal?
But if we look at appetite as a deeper message from within and we see it as an indication of how our body is using energy or how our body is taking energy and converting it, you can see how appetite might actually be something to pay attention to. So if you're familiar with my work, you've probably heard me say things like, “you want to eat breakfast in the morning within about 30 minutes to an hour of waking, you want to be hungry. Upon waking, you want to maybe think about, especially if you're recovering from burnout or a state of stress, to think about eating a little bit more frequently, like every three to 5 hours. You may have heard me say that hunger and your appetite is an indication of how your metabolism is functioning or should be considered a metabolic marker. But as human nature tends to do, I see these benign suggestions, these kind of gentle guides or guidelines being turned into or being very quickly turned into rules, places to judge ourselves, places to attach stories. So if I'm not hungry, oh no, it's something I need to fix really quickly, there's something wrong with me. And we quickly go from being mindful and using appetite as a way to mindfully check in and tune into our body and reconnect to our system, which we're often so disassociated from, and we turn it quickly into force.
We're trying to force change, we're trying to force the problem to be solved or the issue to be fixed when in reality it's not something that you need to fix it's something you should tune into. You should start being more mindful of and use it as a gauge or a guide because I'm here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with you. There's everything right with you. If you're looking at your body as a biofeedback system to how the energy is flowing and the energy is converting on a deeper level then our appetite or lack thereof tells us a lot.
I'll remind you of the concept of us being energy generators or energy converters that we talked about in the last couple of episodes. We have to remember that. You've probably heard me say this a million times but women do not run off of thin air. I'm sorry that that's the case, but we just don't, we cannot create energy out of thin air. And the first law of thermodynamics, something that people learn in the most basics of basic science, is that nothing can be created or destroyed, right? Energy can only be changed or converted.
So when we're channeling, because our bodies constantly channel creative energy through us we're constantly taking in fuel sources like food and sunlight and nature and the vibrations and frequencies found within nature and we're converting them into energy that our bodies can utilize and therefore produce. Our body is in consistent consumption of these things whether we like it or not. It's ravenous for its needs to be met and it has an appetite and cravings for the things that it's needing, it's yearning for, and it needs to create this energy.
When we are not experiencing that appetite or that craving or that deeper yearning for fuel, there's some sort of blockage or we're just not generating that much energy. That is something that we should start paying attention to.
Women Are Sensitive to Starvation
So switching gears a little bit, let's look at it from a physiological level or a hormonal level because at the end of the day women's bodies are very sensitive to starvation, really sensitive to a lack of safety and very, very sensitive to a state of undernourishment. Whether they're not getting the macronutrients, the proteins, carbs and fats it needs to function or it's not getting those micronutrients like fat soluble vitamins, water soluble vitamins, minerals.
When we're not getting enough of what our body needs, our bodies shift gears or our brains will sense danger and start sending signals to our hormonal glands to start changing the chemical messages going on within the body. And so that's what hormones are, right? They're chemical messages so that the cells can communicate to one another. They're all being directed by the brain, specifically the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland which really direct and communicate to the adrenals, to the thyroid, to the gonads.
All of these glands are constantly getting communications from the brain and the brain is actually intaking and scanning the energy and the environment. If we're looking at states of survival or survival based eating, there's really two distinct states that the body goes into. There's kind of that acute state where you're stuck in this state of fight or flight. You're constantly in this reaction mode where you are in this stressor. Maybe you're in a really stressful situation and you're just kind of forgetting to eat and you're just drinking a bunch of black coffee and you're just go-go, kind of a jittery mess. We can simplify that to look at as the body is running from an angry bear, there is an acute danger going on and the body is just trying to survive and get through.
When you're in a situation like that, your body is going to rely primarily on adrenaline. Adrenaline is one of the main hormones that our body uses to direct glucose so that the body has enough fuel. And in an acute stress state like that, you're going to see the body directing blood flow away from many of the organs to focus only on the organs needed for survival. So this is primarily the digestive organs, which is why a lot of people immediately lose their appetite in a state of acute stress - it's because blood flow is going away from the digestive system, away from creation of digestive juices and going to our organs like our lungs and our muscles and our heart, which is needed to fight or flee, right? We need those organs functioning to be able to survive.
But there's another type of state where it's a little bit more chronic, it's a little bit more of a long term survival. It's a little bit more of a well, let's look at it as a famine. When we first go into a famine, our body is in that fight or flight state. It's in that survival state. It's trying to acutely react to the situation. But over time, you're going to see the body pull back and start to really conserve energy and it's going to slow everything down. This is the state of famine, or I guess in polyvagal theory it's considered the state of freeze. But our body again shifts the chemical messengers to tell the cells, hey, hey, slow down. It's time to start conserving. It's time to start utilizing only what you need and putting the rest into storage for later because we don't know when we're going to get our next meal.
And women, because we have quite the variable with our hormones, we are directed, or our hormones are directed by this larger infradian rhythm where our hormones are continuously cycling and at different phases of the cycle, our hormones are very, very different. With these hormonal fluctuations, we see a big variable in how our body responds to blood sugar, how our body is able to manage and keep its own blood sugar balanced. The more pressure or stress that is placed on the female body, the harder and harder it becomes for the female body to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. That is heightened at certain parts of the cycle. So there's a few hormones and neuropeptides I want to bring your attention to that play a role in stress physiology. I think they're important to understand for women because how many of us are stuck in either these acute situations where we're constantly stuck in this fight or flight state where we're jumping into a reaction mode and we're constantly reacting to the stressors around us. Or we have been yoyo dieting and undereating and over exercising for such a long time that our body now just operates as if it's in a famine and tries to conserve as much as possible.
Our bodies, especially as women, are very sensitive to a neuropeptide called Kisspeptin. And Kisspeptin is a neuropeptide that's produced in the brain and we are very sensitive, our Kisspeptin production is very, very sensitive to signals of starvation. So things like low carbohydrate diets, intermittent fasting, long fasts, all can really disrupt our production of Kisspeptin.
Now, this has long term effects. It can mess with our appetite. It can increase our appetite. So it can mess with the hormones that direct our appetite. But it can also decrease our insulin sensitivity and encourage our body to store more fuel as fat instead of utilizing energy appropriately. This is one of the main reasons I'm not going to dive into intermittent fasting today. I know I've had many requests to do a whole episode on intermittent fasting and I promise you it's coming. I want to put together something really great. A lot of you requested something to be able to send specifically to the men in your life because everyone, a lot of men are all about intermittent fasting. And you want something that is an easy little envelope or package to send them. I promise you I'm working on it.
But Kisspeptin is one of the reasons why intermittent fasting and doing these regular long fasts or these regular set fasts can be so problematic for women, especially cycling women and then looking at so bringing your attention to another hormone called ghrelin. So ghrelin, you may have heard of it. I always think of the ghrelin growl. It's often referred to as the hunger hormone. It's made in the gut.
The interesting thing is it's not just a hormone that makes us hungry. It can also help us regulate glucose homeostasis so our blood sugar balances, it can help reduce sympathetic nervous system activity so that fight or flight response that the nervous system jumps into that sympathetic state ghrelin actually acts as an antagonist against it or calms the nervous system down. It plays a role in muscle growth and bone formation. This is why often times you're going to see activity levels really play a role on ghrelin.
Because the body, when it's getting appropriate levels of movement and when it's moving regularly and doing the kind of labor and the kind of physical work that it's made for and it likes to do, you're going to see your appetite respond to that. Too much exercise is going to throw you into that I'm-never-hungry state because you're constantly putting your body into a state of acute stress and you're putting too much pressure on your nervous system. And then obviously too little activity is also going to affect ghrelin because you're going to just never be very hungry all the time. But another interesting thing about ghrelin, and another interesting thing about the body is when you think of hormones as chemical messengers, the cells trying to communicate to other cells or let us know, hey, we need something - the more you deny it, the more that you suppress it. The body tries to circumvent that. So you sometimes start to see that your signals start to get messed up. And how many of us women have experienced this?
I know for me, I used to have the strongest appetite ever growing up and I never really had a problem with being hungry. The only time I ever really lost my appetite was when I was doing intermittent fasting or keto. My hunger signals were all messed up. I would jump into a low blood sugar state, I would feel irritable, hangry, but I would never feel hunger anymore.
The interesting thing about ghrelin is the more you deny your hunger, the more the body tries to circumvent that and tell you it's hungry in other ways. Having balanced ghrelin levels is our friend. As women, we want a strong appetite. We want an appetite that tells us when we need fuel and we want to be able to honor that and respond to that and then move on. Obviously, if we have an appetite where we're never satiated, then that is another thing to be mindful of and to tune into. And that brings us to the hormone leptin.
Leptin right now is getting all the rage. We love to see insulin and leptin in the limelight over and over and over again. I feel like I hear insulin resistance and leptin resistance - just make it stop. But leptin is a very important hormone for women. And leptin is a hormone that's produced by the fat cells or the adipose tissue of the body and it really reflects the energy stores within the body. So it is the connection between our nutritional status and our nutrition and our nourishment and the reproductive system.
There is just too much evidence. There's been a lot of studies done. They're trying to really find a connection between the menstrual cycle and the hormones on the menstrual cycle and the shifts in the cycle and leptin production. But what an interesting thing that stood out to me was that the fat cells are not the only thing that produce leptin for women. Our corpus luteum, which is the gland that's made after we ovulate, right? We ovulate, the emptied egg sac becomes a hormone-producing gland called the corpus luteum. And that gland produces us progesterone during the luteal phase until we either menstruate or the egg implants and we become pregnant and then the corpus luteum will produce progesterone until the placenta can take over. So the corpus luteum plays a really important role in women's health and making sure that we have robust progesterone levels. But it also produces leptin, interestingly enough. And so leptin is more of the hormone of satiation.
It's the hormone that lets us know that we're satiated. Our nourishment is met, our nutrient needs are met. We don't need as much energy right now at this moment. And it fluctuates. It fluctuates a lot throughout the cycle. Obviously, our leptin levels are going to increase after we ovulate because our body is preparing for a potential pregnancy every luteal phase. I did link all the studies below. I mean, I could spend a whole episode talking about leptin.
But you see leptin playing a huge role in sex hormone production and the reproductive system as a whole. And when leptin production is off, that's when you really start to see this kind of disconnect between the body demanding what it needs, the body getting what it needs, hunger and sex hormone production and our actual reproductive potential. They're all very much interplayed and interwoven within one another.
How many women right now are we seeing that have denied their hunger for so long or had such rocky relationships with their appetite that they suppressed their hunger or they used appetite suppressants or drink black coffee on an empty stomach all day long or at least start the day doing that, suppressing their appetite. They're kind of stuck in this vicious cycle of having imbalanced ghrelin and leptin levels and the body is becoming more and more confused. And then the signaling, the appetite is now a little bit confusing. It's either gone or it kicks up at certain times. It's not balanced, it's not harmonious, it's not a reflection of what the body's actually needing at the appropriate time. This really interplays with the hormones of survival.
The Hormones of Survival
I like to highlight the three main hormones that are secreted when you are in a state of survival. When you're in a constantly undernourished state, when you're in an acute survival mode and your body's not getting the fuel it needs, your body's going to produce three main hormones. First is glucagon, which comes from your pancreas, second is adrenaline, which comes from your adrenal glands, and the third is cortisol, which, of course, also comes from your adrenal glands. I feel like insulin gets the spotlight a lot, but glucagon is this very interesting hormone that is the hormone that stimulates gluconeogenesis.
If you're not familiar with gluconeogenesis, it is the process of the body either having the body release stored glucose that it's stored up into the bloodstream to keep blood sugar balanced. Because when we're in an acute stress situation or a chronic stress situation where our body is under stress and it's not getting its demands met, what's going to happen is the body needs sugar, the body needs fuel. And so the liver is going to let go of its sugar to prevent us from dropping too far into hypoglycemia. That's the first thing that's going to happen.
Once our liver stores are gone, then our body can sometimes pull from our muscle stores depending on how much stored glycogen we have. But then our body has to actually start breaking down our structure in order to produce energy. And that's really where that energy and structure being interdependent starts to play in where our body, especially the female body, is going to produce energy at all costs, even at the cost of its own structure. That's what gluconeogenesis is. It's the body taking proteins or lipids, so proteins or fats, amino acids, fatty acids, sending them to the liver to be converted into quick acting fuel to prevent hypoglycemia. It's very much a catabolic hormone or a hormone where we break our body down in order to survive. And it is at play in a lot of people's metabolic issues right now.
Adrenaline is another hormone that is often used. And you see this. I mean, you can look around in society right now and see how people are running off of adrenaline, especially women, right? They're cagey and ragey and they're always assuming the worst of everyone. They're negative, they're stuck in the drama. Any type of stimulus, just they go from zero to 100. Adrenaline is a hormone that's main role is to just move energy stores very quickly. It will move free fatty acids really quickly, it will move glucose really quickly to make sure the body's getting the fuel that it needs. It also activates glucagon, that hormone from the pancreas. It's all about breaking down the body very, very quickly so that we can survive this threat.
Finally, we have cortisol, which everybody is very into cortisol and into the adrenals right now. We see a lot of people focusing so heavily on cortisol and the belly fat that cortisol encourages and all of this. But cortisol’s job is to also move glucose and to move fuel stores. But it takes a little bit of time for it to respond. The adrenals don't always produce it right away. It's more of an acute stress response. It will often be produced within 30 minutes to a couple of hours of the stress.
This is where you see a lot of people stuck in chronic stress, who have adrenal dysregulation where their cortisol is high, their cortisol is low. They're having a really hard time maintaining their circadian rhythm and their circadian rhythm is all messed up. It's because their body's going long term, relying on its backup system, the adrenals, to prevent hypoglycemia because the body's not getting enough fuel. And this is really what we're seeing.
A lot of people who are stuck in survival based eating patterns, a lot of women specifically, who are not eating well, they're not nourishing regularly, they're not making sure that their fueling needs are met. They're relying on one of these three hormones or a mixture or all of these hormones to just get them through the day and to prevent their body from dropping into extreme levels of hypoglycemia. These hormones are very capable of raising blood sugar very rapidly by pulling from the body stores or by forcing production of glucose. And so, of course, we're experiencing a myriad of blood sugar regulation problems.
This kind of hyperinsulinemia and these high, low, high, low, high, low blood sugar patterns, those are symptoms of the bigger problem of being stuck in survival physiology. These hormones can actually feel really good, especially when you first start using them or you first start relying on them. You feel like, I never have to eat. I'm super alert, I'm super sharp. I have so much energy, I'm ready to fight, I'm ready to go. I can get so much done. I'm ready to fawn, I'm ready to please. I can people please to the moon and back.
They give you that survival type drive, that hustle, that deep grind, that like, who cares about needs? I'm going to just push through. But the dark side of that, especially for women, is adrenaline. And overproduction of the adrenal hormones really does lead to overproduction of DHEA oftentimes. And DHEA can convert into both estrogen and testosterone. Then we also see adrenaline itself really causing hyperinsulinemia, which can put the ovaries into overdrive and produce testosterone.
Of course, we see this in cases of PCOS, but it goes farther beyond that. We tend to have women now operating out of their masculine and that's kind of their natural survival state is to form these really thick walls and to be really aggressive and to be jumpy and anxious and have kind of poor sleep and be very judgmental and negative. They're always waiting for the other shoe to drop and everything is a threat. Everything appears as a threat. Everything is a threat. And this can be a very addictive state, not just for women, but for all people. Because coming down from it feels awful. It's like if you're running from an angry bear and you step on a rock and you break your foot, the adrenaline is going to keep you going, right? You're not going to really feel that pain. You're just going to keep going until you're out of that survival situation. But once you are out and you're safe and that adrenaline starts coming down, your foot's really going to start to throb.
You're really going to start to feel the hurt. You're going to be really sore. You're going to be really tired, and you're kind of paying. What you did was you stole from your future, right? You stole from your future to be able to survive in the present moment. And that's what we have. We have people that are stealing from their future to live and be able to survive in the present moment. So, when they start to take action to get out of the survival state, it doesn't feel really good. And they blame those symptoms.
They start to get more inflamed. They start to feel really tired and exhausted, and they blame those symptoms on what they're doing, when in reality, it's actually from what they did. And so this is where we see a lot of the people that are in the Keto space or the Carnivore space or the intermittent fasting space who are kind of addicted to these physiological states, these stress hormones. They're so used to relying on them. It's all they know. And this is really the energy that they become attracted to. Then they have a really hard time getting out of it. They seek it. It's almost like a thrill. Or I would go so far as to say that these hormones can be very addicting in nature.
This is where a lot of us find ourselves. I wrote in a Sunday newsletter a couple of weeks back where we as women have been lulled into a physiological state of sleep without even realizing it. It's called the “hypometabolic state.” And that's really what it is. We have this metabolism that is generating heat using stress hormones, using hormones of survival, because we cannot generate the heat or the energy using our body's main systems, our thyroid and our sex hormones, so we have a hard time functioning metabolically.
So our bodies are utilizing whatever means necessary to generate heat at our structure's expense, right? All these hormones are catabolic in nature. They break our structure down in order to generate energy. And so many of the systems in the body will show this, right? This is why women are aging prematurely. It's why they have to rely on things like fillers and Botox. It's why they are having a hard time getting pregnant. They're having a hard time producing progesterone. They have a hard time even just building muscle.
You think of the lips as a muscle, and how many women right now, it's like an epidemic of women struggling with thinning lips. I see that it's something that's kind of so small and so silly, but it's also so large because it's a representation that the body is breaking down its own tissue at the expense of creating energy. But one of the main systems that is affected by this is the digestive system.
A couple of years back, I mean, it seems to still be floating around, but it was really popular to say “hot girl IBS” or like, “hot girls still have digestive problems,” which I thought was so silly when I heard it the first time. It’s silly even coming out of my mouth. But we see this epidemic of women and I notice it a lot within the fitness space and the hormone space and the health space in general and especially within the girl hustle or girl boss space, the female entrepreneur space.
How many women right now have digestive systems that are seriously in distress? And it makes complete sense. This process, this process of running on our backup systems, on our survival systems is incredibly hard, not only on our liver, which is constantly having to generate fuel instead of doing its 500 plus other jobs like creating bile and digestive juices. But it's also hard on the digestive system as a whole because our body can actually break down its own gut tissue. That's a very easy tissue to break down when we're under stress. And being in this chronic state of stress causes digestive system atrophy.
That's really what's happening to our digestive systems from not eating enough, from staying in survival mode constantly. Our digestive systems are literally atrophying if we want to simplify it and look at it in that way. That's what's happening. We're directing blood flow away from our digestive system constantly. Our enzyme production is going down our digestive juices, we're having a hard time creating stomach acid. We're having a hard time creating bile which helps us absorb our fat soluble vitamins, which therefore actually and our cholesterol, which allows us to actually create and generate hormones. We have a hard time making enzymes.
The pancreas makes most of our digestive enzymes, especially our fat digesting enzymes and our protein digesting enzymes. And these protein digesting enzymes don't just break down the protein in our food. They actually go out into the body and break down tissue, extra scar like tissue, fibrosis, fibrotic tissue that builds up in the body. And so of course you are allergic to gluten. Of course you're allergic to dairy. These are some of the hardest proteins to break down.
If you have a digestive system that's atrophying that you're constantly directing blood flow away from, of course your digestive system is struggling. And so your hunger continues to go down. Your capacity to digest food continues to go down. I love looking at the organs from a traditional Chinese medicine perspective or an emotional perspective. Oftentimes the liver and gallbladder are kind of seen as the areas where we process our anger and resentment and our bitterness, right? And so, of course, we're also becoming less and less able to process our experience and process what's going on in life. It's becoming harder and harder to digest life as a whole. And man do we see it.
Not only does the small intestine represent our digesting and absorbing and assimilating of food. It also is our digestion, absorption and assimilation of our experiences. How many of us have just experiences and anger and resentment and rage just sitting in our guts at the pit of our stomach, unable to process it, not willing to process it.
Then of course, our large intestine, we're so bloated and we can't poop, we're constipated because we can't let go, we can't accept. And that's really what the large intestine is. It's a representation of our ability to let go of what's no longer serving us, to let go of waste and to accept what we cannot control. This storm works together. It's this perfect storm to reflect our appetite for life, really. Appetite is a reflection of our appetite for and our ability to digest and assimilate life.
And it goes so much farther than just beyond the physical. We're hearing so many people in the hormonal space talking about right now like, you got to make bile and you got to make the digestive enzymes and you got to get a GI map and you got to do this and you got to focus on the hormones. What we're not seeing is the energy of it all. We're not seeing the bigger representation of it all. There's not just such a disassociation from our system, which I think so many women experience, right? We're so disassociated from our own experience, but we're also afraid of it. There's such a fear surrounding our body's needs, our body's urges. It's like we're afraid to truly unleash it and to claim it.
I think for a lot of women, there's a fear of claiming your appetite because we don't know what that's going to mean for us. Are we going to gain weight? Is it going to result in XYZ problems? We have so much fear surrounding our own body and so much distrust there that it's easier to just disconnect and cut it off. But as women, we need to accept the fact that we are ravenous. We're ravenous. We have needs. They're demanding to be met. It doesn't matter if we ignore it or not. They're going to keep speaking up and speaking up and speaking up and keep demanding to be met.
What we're seeing right now as a society is women are operating at a small percentage of their potential and they are fighting to stay there. They are having a really hard time meeting their own needs. They keep denying and denying and denying and at the expense of themselves. Because what this creates is a void, right when our ravenous nature and our need for more is being demanded and yet we don't claim what we need. We don't allow, we don't indulge in what our body is asking for. There's a void and there continues to be a void. A void, a void. And the bigger the hole that needs to be filled, the more of an energetic black hole we become.
Instead of connecting and honoring our system, we do everything we can to not. And you see this happening right now. I see women. What they're doing is instead of really claiming what they need and claiming their power and unleashing their potential and not being afraid of it, but being willing to meet it where it's at, they are doing more and more to control it, to try to control it, to try to keep it in a box and to try to almost deny its power. And it's leaving them so torn and so broken and women as a whole, we're so burned out because we can't contain ourselves any longer. It's too hard to do. It's like trying to keep a lion inside of a box. It just doesn't work for long.
It's almost like you get to a point where you just got to unleash it, you’ve got to let it go. Our appetite is meant to be honored. Our appetite is meant to be respected. And this is on a physical level? Yes. On a food level, yes. When you're hungry for something, eat it. But on a little bit of a deeper level, I see our appetite and cravings and emotions as deeply intertwined. I feel like all of them are messengers in a way. Appetite is a messenger, cravings are a messenger. And emotions are messengers as well.
Where cravings are the guiding messages of the physical body, they direct us to exactly what our body is needing and they tell us what's going on. On a deeper level, it's our choice if we want to listen or not. If we want to demonize them and suppress them and try to manipulate them, or if we want to actually just listen and indulge and see where that takes us. But at the end of the day, suppression and control is what leads women to a place of stress and trauma. It always leads us to that place.
We have this ravenous energy that needs to be unleashed and we have a ravenous nature about us and emotions. In the same way, emotions are kind of the spiritual message. They're the message of the subconscious mind. And they also tell us what's going on on a deeper level. They're not something to be controlled or fixed or manipulated or released even. It's our job to see them for what they are, what are they trying to tell us? So cravings are the messages of the physical body, whereas the emotions are the messages of the psyche. And appetite is both of those things coming together and being that driving force to show us what our system as a whole really yearns for and really needs.
Although we talked about the hormones behind our physical appetite or our appetite for food, today appetite goes so far beyond just the desire for food. Right? As humans, our appetites are what guide us and make sure our needs are met. And obviously we can be mindful of our appetite. Sometimes what happens is our cravings or our appetites are for something deeper. It can sometimes take practice to read between the lines and really tune in to what our body's needs are. We are in a society right now where everything kind of operates on efficiency, right? We live in a society that really values production, efficiency, success, achievement, speed, profits. It doesn't really care about the individual needs at the end of the day. In fact, the needs of the individual are a sacrifice as long as the system as a greater whole benefits. I think we're all kind of waking up to, hey, actually, this is not even a system I really want to be part of. Why are my needs not important?
Yet at every turn you see that we're being trained and brainwashed to suppress our own needs, right? It goes down to the basic levels of controlling the times that we eat. You look at the school system or you look at a lot of different corporate jobs where it's like the time that you eat is controlled and the time that you pee is controlled, the time that you poop is controlled. It's almost like you learn to have biological urges within the appropriate times. And if you don't, you try to cut yourself off or suppress them. You cut yourself off from them or suppress them in order to be able to be a functioning member of society. It's pretty sick and twisted, honestly, when you think of it that way.
Reclaiming Your Appetite
So moving on to action steps and what it actually looks like to reclaim our appetite. If you've been stuck in a state of just very low appetite, I want you to just step back and remember that this is not something that needs to be fixed. You're not broken, you're not less than.
And even if you have been trying to support your metabolism for a long time and your appetite seems to be a sticking point, or maybe you got your appetite back for a while and then it's gone again - I just want to remind you that there's nothing wrong with you. In fact, that can be a guiding message to let us know some things that are going on or there are things that we need to process or work through. The most important thing to remember is that the more we suppress, the more we ignore, the more we disconnect from our needs and our physical hunger being one of those needs, the more our physical hunger is going to evaporate and our body's going to speak up in other ways. It's going to let us know we're hungry in other ways.
Maybe we're going to start to get tired. Maybe we're going to start to get low blood sugar. Maybe we're going to start to get really irritable and cranky. Maybe our mood is going to tank. Maybe our period is going to start to get a little wonky or maybe our hair is going to start falling out. Maybe we're going to start to get anxiety. Our body can speak to us in other ways and if it's trying to speak to us in one way and we're not listening, it's going to be like, oh, don't worry, I got you. I'll let you know in a different way. And so evaluate where you're maybe ignoring or suppressing some basic biological needs and how you could maybe be a little bit more mindful of that.
Also observe where you maybe perceive eating as a chore or an inconvenience. Because when we start to see eating as a chore and nourishing our bodies as an inconvenience, we really begin to kind of almost resist the urge to nourish. And that's when we really start to see our vigor for life suffer. We start to see our life force suffer in that place. We also tend to get addicted or really attached to uppers and downers, 1950s housewife style. So you might not know this, but in the 1950s it was really popular to use stimulants during the day and then horse tranquilizers at night to calm you down. That was how a lot of women would get through the day. And to me that speaks of just such misery within their life that they felt the need and the urge to have to do that. But I kind of see a parallel to what's going on today.
We see this obsession with coffee, right? But first coffee and the kind of coffee fanatics and mommy can't survive without her coffee themes going on. And then of course we have the downer, the wine, the alcohol. Mommy can't survive without her glass of wine. Mommy can't survive without her bottle.
We see this use of illegal substances, this parallel to that 1950s housewife of I'm hungry, I don't have the energy, I'm not nourished, I'm under functioning, but I'm just going to opt for whatever thing gives me that quick hit. It doesn't matter what the expense is, it doesn't matter the cost. Even though I'm dealing with XYZ things, I'm anxious, I have gut issues, I have this - there's a disconnect there from how we treat our bodies and how we look at our bodies and what we're feeling. Then on the other side, a lot of women, it's like we feel it away.
I think there's some shame there where we feel like we're living out that stigma of being called crazy or emotional and it's because we feel like we can't possibly handle the stress of life. Of course we're snapping, of course we're moody, of course we're complaining and we complain about every little thing and we nitpick. Of course we're overwhelmed. Of course we feel stuck because when we're so disconnected from our system and we're so disconnected from our physical needs and we're so used to suppressing our own needs, we get to this place where we are just filled with rage. We're just so angry all of the time and we can't process it because we are violating our own boundaries. We start to blame everything and everyone around us for making us so miserable, when in reality we're a victim of our own making and we're a victim of our own unsatiated hunger. We're denying part of our nature which is ravenous.
We have needs and we need them to be met constantly to be able to generate the energy that we need to to stay within that creative potential. It's our responsibility and our responsibility alone to satiate. I know that might be really hard to hear, no one can satiate our hunger for us. It is our responsibility and our responsibility alone.
So really the first step to reclaiming your appetite is to stop denying your nature. There is nothing wrong with needing to eat. There is nothing wrong with needing to nourish. There is nothing wrong with needing to wake up and fill your own cup up before you fill everyone else's cup up. In fact it's natural. It's biology.
Sometimes when we're stuck in this state it's kind of this vicious cycle of where we know we need to reclaim our appetite. We know we're not hungry but we need to eat. We know we need to nourish. It can be really hard when you're not hungry to eat. But I am a big believer that physical nourishment is the first place to start. Even if we just get something small in, celebrate it because every single thing we put in our body is a communication to the body.
If we have a really hard time getting there, the first place to start is what are you craving? Don't attach any stories to it but eat what you're craving because when you start to tune in to your appetite and really tune into what you're craving that's where that connection comes in. That disassociation turns into connection and the body starts to feel hey, she's listening to me again. She's tuning into me again.
And what you'll see is when you start to be willing to listen to your cravings and let your body lead you and let your appetite lead you and to not suppress and not cut off, you're going to find that your body opens the doors. The physical nourishment opens the doors to allow you to ask the deeper questions of what do I crave? What do I want? And this goes far beyond just what's on your plate. It goes into what do I want out of life? What do I crave in life? And I think that's where sometimes women have a hard time allowing themselves to reclaim their appetite because once you start to ask yourself what do I want to eat? Well then you start to ask yourself questions like what do I want? Period. And that is a much harder question to ask yourself.
So if you're a woman who is stuck in that kind of cycle, that vicious cycle of I know I need to eat, but I'm not hungry, you start by reclaiming your appetite. You start by just giving your body a little bit of sustenance. It doesn't matter what it is. Just tune into what you're craving and allow yourself to open those doors and then you can start to correct it later on.
Some other simple tips would be just to start eating breakfast. Breakfast is not a rule, it's a suggestion, but it's a way to gently and lovingly get your system going and fed to start your day off supporting your own energy production. I don't know about you, but every single woman in my life and every single woman I've interacted with has a really full day on her plate. Whether she's working, whether she's a mother, whether she's a stay at home mother, whether she's a working mother. I really rarely meet a woman who just lounges around all day. I'm talking most days. I feel like most of us are doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's just our nature, right? We're just constantly kind of hustling and bustling and moving around and tweaking things and doing this and doing that. And that requires energy. All of that consumes energy.
We need to be fueled for our day. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to start your day off by supporting your own energy production. There's nothing like going into a day not fueled at all. Of course you are made to move. You were made to rise and meet challenges. You're made to work, whatever that looks like for you. You're made to lift heavy things. You're made to be strong and courageous. But it's very difficult to do all those things when you're not fed, when you're just running on a black coffee or you're just running on a latte. It's very difficult to do all of those things well and not feel like you're just drowning. What I see again and again in my work is that it takes a little bit of time for that communication to come back or to come back to full flow.
You see women having to really fight, I guess we could use that word. I don't necessarily like that word, but having to really consciously and mindfully feed themselves well and consistently practice some consistent eating, at least three meals a day, getting just breakfast, lunch and dinner in, if that's not already your habit or your practice, it can take a couple of weeks to see the appetite start to return. It could be really hard the first couple of weeks. And this is where I kind of differ from the intuitive eating crowd, because there is this kind of intuitive, this push where it's like, well, you intuitively don't want to eat in the morning, so don't eat and that's okay.
But if there's a reason why you don't want to eat and you have a simple approach to that reason, is to eat. Well, sometimes it can be really helpful to reestablish some healthy eating patterns by eating breakfast within an hour or two of waking and get your metabolism started for the day. Get your body out of the stress state, out of running on glucagon and cortisol and adrenaline and get it back into a fed place so your liver is fed, your liver can convert those thyroid hormones it needs to convert so your liver can detoxify.
There's a lot your body has to do in a day, and a lot of those jobs need to be done fueled. And so if you're already hurting for energy and you're hurting metabolically, it's very easy to shift your habits and start eating breakfast. Having a nourishing breakfast, even if it's just a small something, it's the habit that counts. It's the communication that counts. But sometimes I will warn you, it can take a few weeks.
And this is what I call mindful eating or intentional eating, where if we are so used to running on these stress hormones, our hunger, our ghrelin and our hunger hormones will be suppressed. Our desire for fuel will often be suppressed. If we want to restore that, sometimes to break that vicious cycle, we do have to throw breakfast into the midst there. And then if for whatever reason, after a couple of weeks you still are not seeing the hunger return, your appetite for life is still waning or still weary, I would encourage you to really assess the stimulants you are consuming, especially right when you wake up.
You've probably heard me say a thousand times, eat breakfast before you drink coffee. I think sometimes people, again, they kind of oversimplify it and they turn it into a rule. But when you think of the hormones that we talked about today, where a lot of us, if we're drinking coffee right when we wake up, we've already been fasting for a good period of time, maybe 8-12 hours whenever we had our last meal. Our body has already fasted. Our body has already been without fuel for a while.
Instead of replenishing and getting our body out of that fasting mode where the body is having to regulate its own blood sugar by what it's stored up during the day, when you have a metabolic stimulant right away, like coffee, for example, that has caffeine, what that does is that stimulates the metabolism to start producing heat and that requires energy. So if you don't have any energy in the tank or you're really hurting for energy or you're already hurting metabolically, adding that is like pushing the pedal down with no gas in the tank and it burns you out really quick. It often will lead you to have anxiety throughout the day, that jittery feeling, that feeling of never quite having any peace or settling, you'll often have an afternoon crash with that too.
If you're in that state, you're going to feel that afternoon crash where you're really starting to get tired or sleepy or kind of having that afternoon slump and you're going to reach for that second coffee. So it's a really good practice to eat your breakfast. Make it a habit to eat first and either drink your coffee with your breakfast or even after your breakfast if you do okay with coffee. Some women are in such a state that they can't handle the metabolic stimulants at all, they need to take a break from them for a little while.
But if you're going to do caffeinated coffee or you're going to do caffeine, it's such a good habit to do breakfast first. So you can start the symphony of hormones off on a harmonious nature instead of this kind of cascade of like, crash and burn.
Lastly, the last tip I have for you for reclaiming your appetite is really to ask yourself if you're like, “I already do all the things.” Well, ask yourself, what can't you digest? What don't you want to process? What do you keep denying about yourself or your nature? What is an experience that you're just kind of holding on to and it's just sitting there in your gut, just not digesting, not processing, because that can absolutely impact our appetite as well.
Appetite is driven by remember I said there's cravings and there's physical needs, but there's also an emotional aspect to it where a lot of times emotions can drive our appetite as well. And so what is sitting there? What is there impacting the appetite that needs to be either acknowledged or worked through or felt through, because our emotions and experiences are very capable of impacting our physical appetite as well. I hope the idea of reclaiming your appetite resonated with you, and I hope you go out today and start to see your appetite as a wonderful part of your nature.
In the next episode we will continue to explore what I consider to be foundational concepts. And if you're looking to dive deeper into some of the hormones of the menstrual cycle I mentioned today, make sure to check out the next episode next week where we'll be talking all about it.
Episode Links
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