Luis Mojica: The Link Between Trauma, Food Choices, and Our Body's Survival Responses

Have you ever reached for a sugary treat to find comfort during stressful times? Luis Mojica, a somatic experiencing practitioner and holistic nutritional counselor, joins us to unravel his own spiral into sugar addiction against a backdrop of childhood trauma and chronic health challenges. Grappling with PTSD and Tourette's syndrome, Luis candidly shares how he sought solace in the sweetness of sugar, only to discover that his refuge was, in fact, reinforcing his struggles. His transformative journey sheds light on the complex interplay between our emotional state, food choices, and the path to recovery.

Luis guides us through the labyrinth of how our bodies react to trauma, seeking balance in ways that can lead to harmful addictions, like that of sugar. This episode peels back the curtain on the body's survival responses and how they can be triggered not just by external threats, but by internal turmoil and suppressed emotions. We talk about food as a communicator, capable of sending powerful signals that influence our stress responses and emotional well-being. Luis's insights into the biological and psychological impact of trauma are a testament to the importance of understanding the nuanced relationship between what we eat and how we feel.

Beyond the physiology of addiction, we touch on the potent role of somatic practices in fostering body awareness and emotional processing. Luis introduces us to techniques like pendulation, which can help us navigate through discomfort and find equilibrium. If you're looking for a beacon of hope in the often overwhelming journey to overcome sugar addiction and heal from trauma, this conversation with Luis Mojica offers a compelling blend of personal narrative, scientific exploration, and practical advice that could change the way you perceive and engage with your body and your cravings.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome everybody to an interview today with Luis Mojica, and I have specifically invited him to be a part of this summit because he can speak to the topic of sugar eating disorders, binge eating. He's lived it, he's walked that path, but he also has a really unique, I guess, window and a path of recovery that is very new to me and, I think, quite new to the addiction and recovery world. So I'm so very excited to share him and his insights and his journey of recovery with you today. So let me tell you a little bit more about him.

Speaker 1: 0:37

He is a trained somatic, experiencing practitioner. He is a herbalist, a holistic nutritional counselor, a life coach, and he has spent many, many years of his life really in suffering in a place of PTSD. At one point he had debilitating chronic asthma, cystic acne, adhd, tourette's, insomnia, weight problems, binge eating issues and other expressions of PTSD, and he is now free of all of these today. He has come to see that trauma itself is like a spirit that moves through our life and that if we know what to do with it if we don't know what to do with it, we suffer, but if we know what to do with it and how to work with it that it actually can move us into a deeper, richer life, and it invites us to work with the body nutrition, mindfulness, the whole shebang. So welcome Luis.

Speaker 2: 1:28

Thank you, my friend. I love just hearing all that. I'm here, here I am.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Well, I hit on some of your story, but why don't you tell us a little bit more about your journey with food and your struggle with it, and the trauma and recovery and your journey of?

Speaker 2: 1:44

recovery, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I had many, many childhood experiences that I grew up with, between age three and age 14, 15, that were really, really, really traumatic, one after the other. I dealt with a lot of bullying in school, I had PTSD for lack of a better word and I was diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome and nervous ticks and ADHD and all the chronic illnesses you described, because what I didn't know then that I know now is trauma is a biology. So it's not just like a stressful event that happens in your mind. It's actually like a whole hormonal imbalance that happens in the body. The nervous system gets disregulated, your blood pressure rises, your whole physiology changes.

Speaker 2: 2:31

So my agency as a child, like a lot of children, is what's to eat, because there's very little you can do about your situations when you're young, except for withhold food or eat excessive amounts of food. So I learned very, very quickly that certain foods could help soothe the pain I had in my body, the depression, the angst, the anxiety, you know whatever it was. And I think probably around the age eight, nine, I really started relying on foods and I started getting really, really sick because the amount of food I was eating and the kind of foods. I was eating a lot of them with chemicals and food colorings and things I was allergic to. That I wouldn't know until years later.

Speaker 2: 3:11

So I developed like cystic acne. I developed such intense asthma that I was on a nebulizer machine for 30 minutes a day, twice a day, just like a breathe plus steroids. I was on a ton of medications to try to lower my histamine response to things. I had high cholesterol I had. I was pre-diabetic I was. I was hypoglycemic for years before getting close to pre-diabetes. I would pass out all the time. My body was just like a mess, for lack of a better word, and it took me a while to understand how to start relating to that. But food was the first way I found some sense of, you know, temporary soothing.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Right and was a lot of those foods. Sugar.

Speaker 2: 3:54

Was the sugar the most oh yeah, yeah, sugar was my number one addiction, my number one trigger, my number one addiction. Yeah Right.

Speaker 1: 4:02

And would you say, you've recovered from your sugar addiction. Today, would you say, I have.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Yeah, I have. Yeah, I have, I have. So the way I hold recovery is not through an abstinence model. I totally respect that and I did abstain from certain foods for a number of years because they would trigger me to binge. And then Binging for me was just like oh, I'd eat like half a bag of chips. It was like 5, 6000 calories in one sitting for weeks until I would throw up, until I'd be so ill I'd have to sleep it off or I'd get really sick or something would happen. So my binging was about 15 years. It spanned Just to cope. So whenever I had a mildly stressful event coming up or something happened, I would just bury myself in food. There were even times where I was so poor I didn't have money and I was working at grocery stores or health food stores that I would steal the food because I had to completely fill my body up with calories so it could slow down, so my mind could slow down a bit. I was completely dependent and sugar was always the number one for me.

Speaker 1: 5:09

So how old were you when you started to turn this around, to make the connection between trauma and addiction? Yeah, Binging.

Speaker 2: 5:19

It was interesting. It was a number of years for the connections to come together. It actually started by accident so in 2000,. What was that? 2010. I remember I started I was a heavy cigarette smoker like four packs a day and I was a bit.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Oh yeah, it was intense and I was bingeing and I was drinking tons of coffee. My body was so dysregulated and I don't know how I discovered it. I mean, I was always very interested in health and I was actually, believe it or not, still studying nutrition at the time. It was just these were my coping methods. This would help me find a little bit of a safety. But I found microbiotics. I was kind of exposed to microbiotic way of cooking and eating and it was so profound for me. I remember, for the first time in my life, eating a meal and feeling this feeling of being settled, not knowing why, but just feeling like something slowed down. I felt a bit more grounded in my body and as I started eating more microbiotic foods, I started craving less cigarettes.

Speaker 2: 6:23

And then one day which is funny because the founder of macro botics was like a huge smoker, but and then he got to the point where one day I woke up. I will. I think you the, I think you've had enough passing away again. So even such a passionate smoker. But I woke up one day and I didn't want a cigarette. So there was no willpower and I thought it was so strange. I'm like I tried quitting smoking so many times and I couldn't and I couldn't, but I woke up with no desire to smoke. I was in 2010. I have not had the desire to smoke since 2010 and so I got really curious like what is this? And let's have to do nutrition. So I started kind of noticing some foods had a really grounding effect, some had really stimulating effects and had really depressing effects. And that made me get very curious and eventually open up a nutrition practice after I was certified and holistic nutritional counseling To just teach people how to work with their food and relate to it differently. And I would find in my practice I was in private practice for a really good amount of time. Oh, I'm was a decade until I would learn oh, okay, these.

Speaker 2: 7:25

There are certain people whose trauma response is to eat certain types of foods. So the anxious people are eating all these really heavy foods. The depressive people are eating all these really stimulating foods. I started making like a little kind of not really as an official spreadsheet, but just documenting this, and I started categorizing different foods in these groups stimulating, balancing and depressing. Now knows, the stimulating foods or aroused people like hyper aroused, their nervous system made them very alert, kind of created that adrenal response.

Speaker 2: 7:56

The depressing foods really slowed people down and I started seeing it was this way that the body could kind of negotiate its state and Play with alchemy if it was too heightened, you could eat something like a pizza and it would slow you down. If you were too depressive, you could drink a bunch of coffee and skip your meals and it would speed you up. And I discovered most people lived in what I call seesaw regulation, where they spend their day waking up to stimulants and then Soothing themselves in the evening with depressive foods and they live their days like that every day, day in and day out. As I brought balancing foods of people's lives and their trauma started coming up and that was very interesting to me. When they didn't have access to the foods that would depress or stimulate them, they suddenly felt their body as they were like embodied in the way the other foods couldn't do, and from that embodiment, memories, sensations, emotions, things would emerge that before those other foods kept out.

Speaker 1: 8:51

Wow, fascinating. Yes, and I've noticed that too that there are foods out of that that are that I noticed that I would use to stimulate me when I was in the freeze. Response and foods that would sedate me when I when I was looking to actually drop back into that numb place, that I would use them To drop back in the freeze because I didn't know how to get back to the parasympathetic. I didn't know how to get back to that place where I was balanced and grounded and present in my body. So do you want to talk a little bit more about what is trauma like? What's your understanding of that?

Speaker 2: 9:23

Absolutely. Trauma is a response, so it's not the event itself, it's how the body responds to the event in order to save you. So any event that the body perceives as a possible threat, whether it is or isn't, it resonates in the body as a possible Threat, which creates a trauma response fight, flight, freeze or fawn these are like these 4f, some trauma response and it's a whole biology. It's an adrenalized state and the moment you have adrenaline, you have vasoconstriction so your blood pressure rises and To make you more alert, to go to your brain, and when your blood pressure rises, you have that feeling that we call activation, that pressure that builds in your body, that kind of feels like a panic. So there's this biology, this constriction that happens in the body. It's a propellant that propels you, in Whatever way it's meant to in that moment, away from this threat so you can survive. Whether it's fighting, fighting, freezing or fawning, it's purely survival and it's meant to be temporary.

Speaker 2: 10:18

What makes it so damaging is it becomes a way of life. So instead of me just freezing for one moment and taking a breath and looking around and my body gets calm and settled in and loose again, I stay braced. And when you have chronic stress and trauma, like I had in my childhood. You develop it's called developmental trauma. You develop in that biology of adrenaline and constriction and vigilance. So your body develops, expecting threat to occur because it has already, and that means by the time you're an adult you don't really remember another way of living. You live from that physiology. So everything your body does from that point on is to find balance. And this is where drugs, addiction, food comes in.

Speaker 1: 10:59

And how do drugs addictions in food balances out?

Speaker 2: 11:02

Oh, my gosh, they're really incredible medicines, even though they're so potent and deadly. A lot of them are so deadly they're. They're potent medicines because they change your biochemistry. Like, let's think of listening of sugar. Okay, when you eat a certain amount of sugar, it what's been tested so far is over eight grams. So if everyone listening, that's anything more than a teaspoon to give you an idea, like how Little amount of sugar you need.

Speaker 2: 11:28

The moment it goes over that teaspoon amount, you go into a survival response internally, right, your pancreas makes insulin to get all that extra blood sugar out of your system, so you don't have too much. And then you have a blood sugar drop because of all that insulin and then gets what Guess what gets created adrenaline, because adrenaline's job is to excavate glycogen, which is stored sugar, from the muscles to bring your blood sugar levels back up. So you go through this whole Grossly dysregulating experience just from like nine or ten grams of sugar, which is a very small amount. You know, when you go out and you have a, someone has a soda, they're having 40 to 60 grams of sugar in like a 20 minute period and it's liquid, so it's straight to the blood, so that one soda don't even mind the caffeine or chemicals added to it. It immediately Creates a euphoria because of the way it rises your blood glucose levels. Then your pancreas lowers them, so you get really depressive and your adrenaline turns on. Then you get really euphoric and clear and clear again. So this whole experience happens in your brains and your bones and your emotions just from nine or ten grams of sugar. So this is one.

Speaker 2: 12:35

One example of how biochemical Food is in. Any kind of addiction is because of that, the way it works on especially the adrenals. So the adrenals in the nervous system, in the brain, they're all connected. So when your adrenaline turns on, it is a rush, it is a high and that's part of what that Like a runner's high feeling comes from. It numbs things out, it takes away pain, it creates this like superhero experience. You just feel invincible. You know this is from a can of soda or a line of cocaine, it's. These are stimulating foods. So that's just one example.

Speaker 1: 13:09

And what about if the sugar food is actually sedative, like I get chocolate pop? You know where there's caffeine. The sugar caffeine combination can create that. But there's so many of us that will eat like bagels or pizza or sort of carbs that don't have that adrenaline or don't have that caffeine piece. Can you still have the adrenaline kick in after consuming those?

Speaker 2: 13:32

Yes, but way later. So if you have, those are the foods I usually put in the depressant category. So you're referring to sugar as something, in this case that turns into sugar like a refined carbohydrate right, Versus just like a simple sugar, like cane sugar.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Or like cookies, cakes, ice cream, things where sugar is combined with starches as opposed to sugar with caffeine.

Speaker 2: 13:54

Yes, I see it beautiful. Yeah, so if sugar is combined with like starch, or especially with fat, like ice cream or cookies or brownies, that kind of thing, you get a much slower release because of the starches and especially the fats. And if there's protein, even slower release, you still get a release. So if there's more than eight grams of sugar on that thing you're eating, that's eventually gonna do that same tip, it's just gonna go a little slower. So it tends to happen with baked goods, which is interesting, and even pasta, like something that isn't even sweetened but just like a refined carbohydrate pizza with cheese, like you were saying, which is actually very sweet. Lactose is loaded, is a lizard sugar.

Speaker 2: 14:29

When you have these foods they're so hard to break down because there's so much information. Now, what I mean by information is nutrition. Nutrition is just another word for information of food. So if I have like a bowl of brown rice, just plain brown rice, one cup, let's say I've cooked brown rice the information in that is so simple, it is simplistic. It takes my body like 30, 40 minutes to break it down slowly, releases it, digest, it, does this thing. The rest is fiber. When I have like brown rice pasta, just even leave out the oil and sauces and such. You have refined the brown rice into a flour, which has made its information more potent. So the amount of information I would get from one cup of cooked brown rice in a cup of, let's say, brown rice pasta, it's like three or four times the amount. Easy way to say this is more calories.

Speaker 2: 15:19

So once there's more information coming in that overwhelms the body, and any body overwhelm will always end up with an adrenal response. So even though initially it exhausts the body like a pizza is a perfect example totally exhausts the body. It takes a lot of energy for the gallbladder and the pancreas and the liver to create enzymes to break down these really concentrated fats and these really refined carbohydrates like in the crust and such. So it's exhausted. So temporarily, while you're digesting it, you're getting this settling sensation. This is why it's called a depressive food that I categorize it, as you get this slow depressive feeling which feels really good when you're anxious because you have anxiety.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Like I said earlier, you have excess adrenaline, vasoconstriction, all your blood pressure is up here, your face and your neck and your chest. It feels really bad when you eat a big pizza. Ooh, that all goes down to the stomach to start digesting it to the digestive organs. So you literally have this settling of your even your pressure, in your head for a moment and you feel comforted. This is what we call comfort food. Once it is digested, all that excessive information from the lactose, let's say, and the carbohydrates from the crust becomes excess glucose in the blood. Then you have to make insulin and then you have to make adrenaline. So it might be like nine or 10 hours later, but the same thing happens, just less quickly. So you go through a depression, first in the body, and then you go through stimulation.

Speaker 1: 16:44

Right. So we have stressful lives, we have a store trauma, we have a nervous system that's wired to be sort of developmentally wired to be hypervigilant, to be in a chronic fight, fight and fawn and freeze. And then you bring in sugar and sugar is actually sort of an extra sort of stress on the body, but internal and then you wind up in this chronic like it's very hard to regulate your system, it's hard to heal, to break out of it. So how does someone who's nodding their head going yep, I have all that, this is what I'm doing? How do they begin the journey of turning this all around?

Speaker 2: 17:23

So I can say how I did it and how I teach it. And what I have found is this it's kind of like a two-part approach. One part is getting to become like the witness of your body, so learning how to have a relationship to those sensations inside of you. Those sensations that come up, those emotions, those big stressful experiences, those are what propel you to the cabinet to eat sugar. That's what that comes from. It's not like a burning, like spiritual desire to eat sugar, it's the body is propelling you there to cope with something you don't know how to be with.

Speaker 2: 17:58

So if there's a low capacity for, let's say, grief, just to name one thing a lot of people experience you don't know how to sit with grief your body will intuitively find habits and in this case foods. There's a term for this called auto-regulation. The body will find an auto-regulator to help you distract or numb out that sensation temporarily, because you don't know how to be with it. So one of the first steps before I even changed someone's diet when I finally trained and learned about trauma is to create a relationship to the body first. So there's the conscious mind and then there's the body two different things. So I'm not the body. I inhabit the body, which means the body is this being. It's really this animal that I get to take care of and have a relationship with. So when the grief comes up or the shame or the anxiety, I have a way of being with it. Now this takes months to practice and learn. It's not like just one day.

Speaker 2: 18:53

But as you practice that you find you have less cravings because you're less dysregulated. You won't crave things unless your body chemistry is off. If you have a regulated like homeostatic or homeostasis we talked about body, a balanced body chemistry you're not gonna crave anything. You could eat the most delicious cookie in the world, you'll have one bite, bite that was enough because you're balanced. If that state is dysregulated, which we live in when we have chronic stress and trauma, your body is automatically gonna look for things around it to change its chemistry, to change its balance, to get a different sensation.

Speaker 2: 19:30

So the first step is self-relationship. It naturally regulates the body over time, having a self-relationship with these parts, so there's even less of a charge around the craving. Then it's learning how to bring in balancing foods, because when you bring in the balancing foods again, they just help to nurture the adrenals, the nervous system, the blood sugar, even more. You have less of a threat response just based on what you're eating, that when you do eat something stimulating or depressing, you don't need as much of it because the effects are much faster and you feel them more. So willpower goes out the window, which I love, because willpower did not work for me. That's why I've been for 15 plus years. I abstained for years from like peanut butter and certain sugary things because they would trigger me to binge eat again. Now it's like I literally could go out and see the most delicious cookie and have a bite of it and not want anymore, and that feels like recovery for me rather than I have to avoid something in my whole life.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Right, totally get it. So you also did say that in the early days it was helpful for you to abstain from certain foods that were triggering the desire to binge. But then eventually, as you were sort of working on your regulating your nervous system, instead of having substances outside of yourself sort of either sedate you or stimulate you, you were learning to be with the sensations and show up for them instead of needing to self-medicate with food over them. But where did abstinence, so that those periods where you decided to abstain like where did that fit in? Was that after you were starting to do somatic work? Was it at the same time?

Speaker 2: 21:06

It was right, it was before, and so from my own experience with recovery, abstinence is really good when you don't have that established self-relationship yet. It's really important and I'm not saying that as like a diss to anybody, it's just the truth. If you don't know how to be with the emotions that come up, no shame, like no one teaches us this growing up. So it's a whole other path to go on Until you've established that abstinence is the kindest thing you can do for yourself, because it is a form of self-relating. You know, I knew for me, if I ate peanut butter, especially sweetened peanut butter, that entire jar would be gone in 20 minutes and I'd be buying another one. That was my trigger food. So I knew enough to kind of self-pair my body and say we're not going to have any of that in the house, because if we do, we're going to totally start binging and it's just not going to end up in peanut butter. It would be chips, it would be pretzels, it would be one thing after the other. Which is interesting with binging, because you eat a food that's super depressive, then you eat something that's super activating and you usually go back and forth like within an hour of that. At least that's how my body did it.

Speaker 2: 22:07

So the abstaining for me was a couple years to really not have those things that would trigger me. And then, once I felt the relationship to my body, I was more embodied to its boundaries. So I could eat a really delicious peanut butter whether it was a treat or peanut butter itself, a celery or something and enjoy it. And I would feel that satiation point which I never, ever felt before. And when I'd feel it I'd have this way to stop. And if there was an emotion there not just like I'm hungry, but there's an emotion behind the hunger I could tell the difference. I had no idea the difference between emotional eating and hunger eating before, and now that I have that felt difference, it's like I know which one's propelling which and I can sit with it. So I didn't have to abstain anymore because now I have this sensational relationship to those places.

Speaker 1: 22:54

Totally. And so what sort of somatic work did you do that helped you restore your capacity to stop fearing those sensations, to stop fearing your feelings, because I think that just feels like another threat, like they shouldn't. Their feedback? That's the whole irony of this loop, isn't it? That those sensations are feedback, our feelings are insights, and when we fear them and we run to the food, then we miss out on that connection to our body. So the very thing that we need to do to heal ourselves is the very thing we're fearing. We feel we are fearing the medicine, the self-connection medicine. So how did you overcome that?

Speaker 2: 23:37

It's really how you said that. I looked at how you said how the sensations are feedback. I'm an animist so I really believe like everything is alive. And when I learned that the body is a being, that it's not me, it's this being. You know it's very spiritual to inhabit a body because it's not you and we all kind of know that. But then we really start to know it like whoa. And so when a sensation comes up, just like you said, I now know that's my body speaking. The body does not speak through words, it's the mind. The body speaks through sensation.

Speaker 2: 24:08

So once I learned sensation was good, even like really unpleasant sensation, like that's my body speaking to me, I got curious instead of scared, whereas before then I got so scared the moment of pressure would build in my stomach, even a slight pressure. I would be grabbing a cigarette, grabbing food, like watching TV, finding some way to dissociate from the place, because I saw it as a problem, like it was going to lead to my death or passing out or going to a hospital, which had happened before because I had such bad anxiety attacks. And now I knew this is feedback, this is my body speaking. I got curious. And then, enough times of getting curious. The body shows you direction, shows you like stretch, take a breath, put your hands there, have a cry like write something down, and the sensation would dissipate. Now, never in my life except for my accident when I first played music did I feel sensations that were stressful dissipate in a way that I had like I don't want to say control, but I had a way Like I knew if I do this, my body will find comfort. That never happened to me outside of food before.

Speaker 2: 25:13

So the more I started being able to experience that on my own body, I no longer needed to abstain because the somatic practice for me was seeing sensation as a conversation between me and my body, and it's so hard to say that I allowed them. Thinking people like get this cognitively and really want to experience that. It's so hard to point to one practice. It's like I worked with really skilled somatic therapists until I finally became one, until I could even understand how to speak about these things. It's so beyond language. It's a felt experience and, like you said, we've spent most of our lives finding ways to not feel so, the medicine, the wisdom that comes with feeling we're so far away from. So it's really about having a way to even get back to feeling within your capacity, and as I say that, I mean I could share a practice if you'd like.

Speaker 1: 26:07

Sure.

Speaker 2: 26:08

Okay, I say one comes to mind. Anyone listening to this pause? Are they pausing, or is this live when they say it?

Speaker 1: 26:15

It's pre-recorded. They could pause.

Speaker 2: 26:17

Okay, great.

Speaker 2: 26:18

So if you pause and grab a pillow and put that pillow over your belly and just put your hands over that pillow and give a little bit of pressure, and the only thing you have to start doing when you get a little bit of pressure is notice where do I have constriction, when do I have softness and where do I have numbness, and just learning how to track that different parts of the body have different sensations, Like, oh, my chest feels tight, but behind the pillow it feels kind of soft.

Speaker 2: 26:49

To notice two things are happening at once. That's what started to change my life and it opened up this practice called pendulation, where if you feel something really painful or scary emerging, you naturally pendulate to a part of the body that isn't feeling that. You move between the two. You literally spend five 10 seconds in one, take a breath, five 10 seconds in the other and you pendulate between them three or four times and the body starts to resource itself because we don't just orient to the painful sensation. We hold that and the non-painful and the pleasant places. So, using a pillow, just scanning and feeling where these things live in your body and then pendulum between them invaluable, that very foundational practice has changed my life.

Speaker 1: 27:35

And I totally understand and you might not know, but I'm in somatic experiencing training and oh nice.

Speaker 1: 27:41

I think you said, or like my very first training, I was saying, well, what happens that they're talking about things that activate our nervous system, so some sort of like maybe it's a threat, but it's just something that sort of there's some activation in our nervous system. We're moving out of this place of just being really peaceful and calm and something's activating. And then they talk about completing the sort of cycle and I kept saying, but what happens at the top of the cycle? Like what do you do? And they're all just looking at me like I don't know how to describe it.

Speaker 1: 28:11

Florence, it's not a thing. It's unique to the moment, it's unique to you and your body, and I'm like I don't get it. Like, what are you talking about? But you spoke to that, that it's in the moment, like where in my body am I feeling pain or anxiety or fear, or? And to find it and just to be with it. And then, when you're with it, the body knows the body will do what it does with it. Right, there's no, you don't have to get in there and take the action. It's not willful, it's just presence. And that's such a revelation to I'm a fighter. I'll just just give me something to do, I'll do it Like and this is this. There's no place for that. This is totally just presence.

Speaker 1: 28:59

And then another thing you said that I think is so interesting is the Pendulation piece. I think there's a paragraph at the beginning of chapter 11, one of Dr Peter Levine's books, and he talks about how there's two types of people. They're the ones that are very disconnected and disassociated from their bodies, or they're on that spectrum, and then there are others that are really hyper-sensitive in their systems, Like they notice everything and every sound, every pain and ache, and I think I fall on that end of the spectrum, like a hyper-tuned end to the sensations of my body and everything around me. And so for me it's easy to stay really focused and connected to the pain and it's hard for me to orient to pleasure.

Speaker 2: 29:43

That's right.

Speaker 2: 29:44

Really hard he said so many important things because you were also saying the body does it for you. That's a huge part of what I teach people is the body processes all this stuff for us, like we think we're processing our trauma. We're really not. We're just creating an environment so the body can do what it knows how to do, which is process trauma and stress.

Speaker 2: 30:02

So I love that you said that because, like when you're riding that wave of sensation like the thing that feels like nausea or panic, coming up, it crests and then it falls and it breaks, you just feel this whole shift happen in your system. But to trust and feel safe enough to let it get to that point where it crests, that's our work as humans, as body inhibitors. It's our work to witness and create the right capacity, the right support for us so we can let that crest. Because as it goes to the crest, that's when we tend to pull back or grip or get really scared or tell stories about how it's going to kill us and then we get even more activated. So I appreciated you saying that and I'm just like you. I'm a fighter and I felt every little pore in my body.

Speaker 1: 30:51

Oh my God, I'm so glad you said that Like no, I haven't found anyone who relates like that, yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:57

Oh, I couldn't sleep at night If I felt a twitch behind my knee. It would keep me up for hours, like I was hyper. I'm forgetting the word right now. You know where you assume. I'm very hyper sensitive. It will come to me where you kind of, if you hear a disease, you think you have it.

Speaker 1: 31:15

Oh, hyperchondriac.

Speaker 2: 31:16

Oh yeah, I had hyperchondriacis big time. I mean I was petrified at everything and it's amazing, as you're saying that I'm realizing I never stopped to actually notice that that's not the case anymore, like I'll have pains, weird sensations, and they don't create anxiety. That's shocking, because I was seriously a nervous wreck from that happening.

Speaker 1: 31:37

Oh my gosh, you know what? I think you've explained it even better than Peter Levine, which is saying something, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 31:43

I'll take it.

Speaker 1: 31:45

But even that idea of the crest right, like and just as it's activating, we're afraid of the sensations, we're afraid of our feelings, for lots of good reasons.

Speaker 1: 31:54

Sometimes it's because in childhood, as we activate, we activate our parents and they're like, shutting it down, or they're reacting, or they're getting angry at us, we're crying, we're fussing and they're like stop it Right. So we learn, for lots of good reasons, to shut those feelings down, or they were just too intense and we didn't have people who could help us process them right to co-regulate with. So, as we're adults now and these sensations, these feelings, maybe discomforts, activations, are coming up, and before we crest those of us who have issues with sugar and food you know the fourth half is food man we're in the pantry, we're thinking, we're having food thoughts right, and then we're either fighting with them. But if we have the food, my understanding is that instead of it cresting and completing the cycle and the body clears it out of the nervous system, we actually go back right, that it doesn't heal, it just sort of gets built up in our nervous system. Is that the right understanding?

Speaker 2: 32:52

So right, I just did a session earlier with a group and it was so clear, because this woman had this nausea in her body and you know, nausea is the seat of the fight response usually and so she had this fight. That just for very good reasons Like you said in childhood other experiences wasn't safe to let out like her. No, it wasn't safe. Yelling wasn't safe. Like sticking up for herself just wasn't a good idea. So the body froze and it fond, and so when that happens, it kind of like instead of the explosion there's an implosion and it hurts your internal organs. But to see her move through her fight and this big thing come out and get released, you could see that cresting happen, you could see that wave happening through her body and then something broke and she felt such a subtle. But to be like, like it's just like we're saying to be able to let that come up, like when food is introduced as a coping mechanism, the food pauses our body's ability to get to that big break, whether it's a cry, a yell, a shake, a moan, a yawn, a stretch. So you can be the simplest of things, but the food puts the pause button, says I'll make you feel better instead. And so when you're doing that, like I did from age eight or even younger you have decades in your body of pausing. This very healthy, natural response your body has to overwhelm. And so, like this term we're using, complete, it never gets too complete, and complete just really means it integrates. It's like something inside you opens up big stretch, crest breaks, goes back into your body. You know it's like a compost experience.

Speaker 2: 34:33

And so when that's why I was so enamored when I started studying trauma which being nutritionists would love me to that because the healthier people were getting on their diets, the more balanced their food, the more emotional they were getting, the more insomnia they were getting because they had all this trauma that the other food groups, like the depressants and the stimulants, those big responses, those foods gave the body.

Speaker 2: 34:58

They kept them from ever feeling these trauma that were stuck in their bodies. The balancing foods don't do that. When you go home and you have like beans and a piece of salmon and broccoli, you're not going to feel this sudden rush of euphoria, you're not going to feel like so lethargic you can't think, you're actually going to feel more, because the balancers give you more capacity to feel. That's why we don't go to those foods and we're stressed. So it was like shocking to me that on a physical level, these people were doing like better than they ever did in their lives, but on an emotional, self-relating level, they were getting even more anxious at times, and that's when the trauma piece came clicked in for me.

Speaker 1: 35:38

Lewis, that is exactly my experience, totally, and I would say that for the whole first year of being abstinent I felt like a skinned cat. I was just like, oh my gosh, I can barely like, and it was like when is this going to shift? And that created the void. It was so. I was so open and vulnerable and tender and anxious and all those things that I had to start to do my trauma recovery work.

Speaker 1: 36:07

I couldn't stay there, Like when the food's not there and there's that void, you're motivated. All right, let me do. Let me do the work.

Speaker 2: 36:15

It's really true and even as you say that back, it gives me so much clarity because when I went through those years of macrobotic eating and I went like no sugar, I had seen completely and I remember that same feeling of whoa I cannot hide from anything right now and that propelled me into therapy for the first time in my life. So it's interesting how that works, yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:35

Well, the interesting, the really interesting thing that I think that we're saying is that the fear that we have, a feeling like a skin cat, the fear of the sensations and the emotions and the feelings there's nothing to fear, we just we learned it to fear them, but they're not actually threats that end in the process of learning to just be with them for the little few seconds that we can tolerate in the beginning, that we actually have this incredible experience of feeling alive, of feeling kind towards ourselves, of feeling the pleasure of being soothed by ourselves, like it's actually pleasure Over time, over time, and I think that's the hard peep that people who have so much trauma like what are you guys talking about? This sounds terrifying.

Speaker 2: 37:21

Yeah, yeah, you're totally my experience and I found now from doing this work you know with people over the world that they get to that place either like wow, luis, I never thought I could experience like the death of a loved one and feel, okay, I never thought I could experience like losing my job and it was actually pleasurable. I mean, it's like crazy to hear it. And it's not because we're bypassing, it has nothing to do with like toxic positivity. It has to do with having the capacity for sensation and you said it really well. We don't we fear feeling because it feeling feels like threat, like when a big sensation comes to your body. It's the same physiology, is the same biological response as if there's an actual threat in your face, you're adrenaline, your blood pressure, your the mass of constriction of your body, of neurotransmission lighting up these. The same thing happens. So most of our lives are spent having a threat response to non-threat. But this, the situation in the body, is identical. So you don't really know the difference until you learn how to tell the difference and then you realize, oh, my body's triggered versus something's actually happening. But we learned this, like you said earlier, from conditioning growing up. If it was terrifying for your parents for you to feel and they screamed at you or they shut down or they had a big feeling. You learn that your feelings created really uncomfortable situations that weren't okay and and you weren't rewarded for your feelings. You're usually more rewarded for stuffing them.

Speaker 2: 38:52

I often say falling responses, the most socially rewarded response, because people like someone that agrees, people like someone that just makes you feel better, they like someone doesn't have needs and you're told that you're doing really well when you're able to manage your emotions by not feeling or having them. But when you have them you're like emotional or sensitive. So we have these negative connotations on the feeling that we're bathed in. So again, by the time we're in our 20s Even before then, we are terrified of our feelings. But, like you just said, once you could realize the feeling is feedback, it's a conversation. There are so many practices and techniques, both food and somatic, that make that give you more capacity to be with feelings. Then feelings are no longer scary, and when feelings are no longer scary, life's no longer scary. Life is not scary. It's the feelings that come with things that are terrifying. So it all, just, you know, moves me so much too and it's nice to me. Someone else has the same experience.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Yeah, Very similar and I wanted sort of circle back to the sugar piece that when we're consuming sugar for good reasons, we're trying our best to regulate our nervous system, to stimulate us or sedate us. The sugar itself is a threat, though right that that the toxicity of sugar becomes another. It's another threat going into the body, even though it's doing this thing on our brain chemistry and you know there's there's these stimulating and sedative effects, but at the end, the same thing that we're in this, there, we're in this constant Disregulated state when we're consuming sugar. And so for some of us, taking that time out, like really Embracing the idea that maybe none is better than some, while you're starting this journey of working with your trauma and we all have it, we all have trauma, like I think people think, oh, I don't have trauma, I wasn't sexually abused, thank God, I didn't go through a hurricane, my parents didn't beat me right and it's just as, as Louis Louis said, right, that's what I'm saying, it right?

Speaker 2: 40:46

Louise.

Speaker 1: 40:47

Louise, I thought little extra Louise.

Speaker 2: 40:49

Oh, I think of peace, you know, please.

Speaker 1: 40:52

Louise, thank you, as Louise is saying that Trauma isn't about the event, it's really about how your body responds to a perceived threat. That's right. So just to take that home, that that when you're consuming sugar, you're truly creating, you're adding to the sense of being under threat and that fear that that lives in our nervous system. Oh, and there's one more thing I wanted to say hmm, oh, darn, I think it's gone, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 41:21

What you just said that was so important because I teach this a lot and I haven't heard anyone say until now is there is a Secondary trauma like threat response when you, when you consume sugar or any, any, any substance that's potent. Sugar is so potent, so any substance that has a potent biochemical reaction, like the crates, on your body, that secondary thing is a secondary thing now for your body to have a stress response to. So you're already stress responding to your job. Let's say that's the first thing that's happening in your environment. You're having an adrenal response. Then you grab sugar and you eat it and it's soothed something. Yes, so there is a soothing that happens and that happens in the body.

Speaker 2: 41:57

And then, on top of the Primer, the first second, you know, trauma, stress response yet from work. Now there's a second stress response in your body due to the dysregulation from the blood sugar levels and the insulin, the adrenaline, and Then there's one to come up with that you know. It just keeps building up through the day. So you get actually further and further and further from this primary stress of your job, which is the root piece for you to be with and relate to and work with Through all these ways that we cope with it. So every time we cope, we're getting a temporary Sensation that helps us feel safe. That's very real and and and I'm just sacred, I'm not gonna take off for people and it's creating a secondary trauma response in the body and it's called an internal threat. Whenever something internally happens that's stressed out, the system and especially, you know, triggers the adrenals. You're having an internal threat and sugar definitely creates internal threat.

Speaker 1: 42:47

Right and I.

Speaker 1: 42:47

And just and over time, if we need the nutrition from our whole foods, these foods that are balanced, the salmon and the beans and the broccoli meal, if we're, if we're sugars, crowding out those food choices, over time we become nutritionally deficient and then our litter layer, our body, doesn't even have the nutrition it needs.

Speaker 1: 43:06

So then it's going into a fear for its life and there's just all these downstream effects in terms of our capacity to even cope with stress a little, as things can be Overwhelming. And if it's overwhelming we're living in this trauma response. So just to kind of bring that home, but if you know you have trauma in your history that you know that you relate to being going from these really high stress fight flight States into the freeze response, which is this collapsed, immobilized, depressed, hopeless, helpless, joyless place and you're going back and forth what you're eating, the food you're eating and the role that sugar plays into keeping you locked into. That is very, very real. So if you don't have any other good reason maybe you're not overweight, maybe you're not pre-diabetic, maybe it went up right If you have no other good reason to really consider Eating whole foods and working with foods to support your nervous system. It's because, if you want to heal from trauma, I think it's a big, important part of the picture.

Speaker 2: 44:04

You said it. There really is, yeah, and I just want to say one more time like you said, just to reflect it. It's not about what happened, so you can't think well, this isn't apply to me. I was never in a catastrophic event. There are children that watch a scary movie when they're four, that have the same PTSD symptoms someone that went to war. It's about how the body responds, it's not about the event. So people can just know. If you have a hard time sleeping, if you feel super anxious, we get stressed really easily if you have an addiction, these are all signs you have a dysregulated nervous system. Whether you want to apply the word trauma set or not doesn't even matter. It's just your nervous system is dysregulated, is reaching out for, for safety essentially. So yes, we're moving sugar hugely supportive for the nervous system and the adrenals.

Speaker 1: 44:54

Talk to us a little bit about the window of tolerance earlier you were talking about. You know our capacity to tolerate sensations and feelings in the beginning. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Speaker 2: 45:04

Yeah, and, interesting, sugar plays a role here too. So capacity is very biological. It's not like in my mind I want to get good at handling something, it's like my body's physical, biological ability to even metabolize stress. So metabolizing stress looks like many things. One thing it looks like the liver Literally soaking up excess stress hormones in the bloodstream. That's one way the body metabolizes stress. When there's less adrenaline in the bloodstream, all those symptoms start coming down. So your blood pressure starts to slow down and come down. Your nervous system starts to slow down, your brain slows down, everything starts to ground. So you need a healthy liver to do that.

Speaker 2: 45:44

The liver has to work so hard when you're taking in sugar, especially excessive amounts of sugar, so your liver is being impaired and how well it can work, how quick it can function, which means you're actually making it harder for it to do what it's meant to do, which is soak up stress hormones much, much quicker. That's like one actual biological experience of how capacity looks and how food or nutrition or, this case, sugar, relates to that. But capacity even to have the conscious awareness of your sensations, to know who. There's a tension in my chest. I'm gonna pause for five minutes and lay down and then I laying down that pause, your breath gets little deeper, your shoulders start to come down, the opening of your body happens and as it opens there's less charge stuck in the chest. It starts to kind of unfurl and metabolize and move through your system. So so capacity, really, as I've seen it, it shifts through rest and through a body that can metabolize really well, because it is a metabolic experience when you have hormones from stress coursing throughout your system.

Speaker 1: 46:48

Right, it has to process chemicals. I think of it as energy or emotion, but really it's chemicals.

Speaker 2: 46:55

It's chemicals. Every emotion is a chemical.

Speaker 1: 46:57

Yeah, Right, right, right. A lot of people are afraid of looking at their trauma because they think they need to relive them. I once had a client who, wow, she was molested at eight, she was raped at 13 and again at 16, three different circumstances, unbelievable. And at one point, at the height of her use and abuse of food for comfort to regulate her nervous system, she was eating 21 chocolate bars a day 21.

Speaker 2: 47:29

Wow, I guess that's totally related. That's like a bar with your four-pack cigarettes. Oh yeah, if I didn't have the four-pack, I probably would have had 21 bars. I would have required that too.

Speaker 1: 47:42

I know for my sensitive body that I would be dead. I think the first time I ate 21 chocolate bars I would have just died. That would have killed me. So God bless her system that could handle that. So she was so afraid of like there was so much terror and trauma in her body and she was so afraid of the thought of having to relive them because she would of course have to take the flashback. So what would you say to somebody who was afraid of that as they started out on this journey?

Speaker 2: 48:07

I mean, I relate to her. I had so many sexual violences and traumas growing up, so it's interesting that I too had a similar thing of needing excess to kind of keep that from coming up, like you're literally pushing it down. So I think it's, I guess, what's interesting for me. In my journey. When I went into cognitive therapy before I found somatics, I was reliving my stuff. Every time I was telling details, stories, names, experiences, without feeling my body, and my body was just writhing and I was terrified about what I was gonna find. So whenever a sensation came up, I was like I don't want no, thank you, I don't want to be reminded, I don't want to find a new thing. I'm already doing with these like four things.

Speaker 2: 48:50

But what was amazing about somatics is I learned that it's not about going back to the experience. Unfortunately, your body might take you there sometimes. You can't always help it, but that's not the goal. The goal isn't to go there, the goal is to go here. Actually, it's to be able to sensationally feel where you are right now.

Speaker 2: 49:09

And then let's say, like my memory of a molestation, which I also experienced, is in my gut. Let's say like I feel it in my gut when I talk about it or when I think about it. And here I am in this room. The sensation of being in this room attunes to that little place in my gut and that place in my gut says it's not happening right now. Oh, it's been 30 years. Wow, we're completely okay. And it's so unfolds and it isn't clenching against life anymore like it started to. From that event, it has now merged with the reality that there's no threat here. So it's actually by not going back you heal more trauma, because you're feeling where you are now, and that's what metabolizes things. That's what actually helps your body attune to safety and regulate.

Speaker 1: 49:58

Oh, so amazing. Thank you for sharing that. All right, is there anything else you would like to share today, before we wrap up on the topic of sugar sugar addiction recovery trauma?

Speaker 2: 50:09

I know I'm just. I loved meeting you and being part of this. I'm happy I could learn something.

Speaker 1: 50:15

You really did. Thanks again for your time and thanks everybody for tuning in today. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.