The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Luis Mojica: Healing the Body Beyond Food
Imagine finding peace with food after decades of struggle—not through willpower or rigid restrictions, but by understanding the profound connection between your nervous system and eating patterns.
In this episode of the Kick Sugar Coach Podcast, I sit down with Luis Mojica, somatic therapist and founder of Holistic Life Navigation, to explore how trauma, stress, and dysregulation drive disordered eating—and how somatic practices can help us heal at the root.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
✅ How trauma and stress get stored in the body—and show up as food cravings
✅ Why diets and willpower alone don’t work for long-term healing
✅ The connection between sugar addiction and nervous system dysregulation
✅ How to build true food freedom without strict rules or fear
✅ Practical somatic practices to help you heal beyond food
For so long, we’ve been told that if we just eat "clean," cut out sugar, or stick to a plan, we’ll finally feel in control. But what if the real key to healing is learning how to feel safe in our own bodies?
This conversation is eye-opening, deeply personal, and packed with insights that will shift the way you think about food, trauma, and recovery.
Enjoyed this episode? We'd love to hear your thoughts—share your feedback with us here!
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
Hello and welcome to an interview today with Luis Mojica, who is a somatic therapist, a trauma nutritionist and the founder of Holistic Life Navigation, where he educates people around the world about how to recover from stress and trauma. He uses whole foods, self-inquiry and somatic experiencing as relational tools to befriend the body and find safety within ourselves or within yourself. Welcome, luis.
LUIS MOJICA:Thank you, my friend. Nice to be back.
FLORENCE:So I will say that I think I probably discovered Luis through my work with Dr Amy, some of my training and education, I think that's how I got introduced. And then I went on and did Luis's seven-week although I'm so slowly, very slowly, making my way through the material. But his seven week course called finding safety in self. So I know Lewis academically as someone who works in this space, but I also know his work firsthand and it is truly unique Just the way he's combined some of the sort of self-inquiry that top down, as they call it, which we're going to get in today, and some of the bottom-up recovery approaches to help us, you know, deal with stress and trauma, which is welcome to the. There's no human not dealing with these issues.
FLORENCE:So everyone is going to find, I think, something in this interview to relate to and take away. Louis, let's start with your story, because most of us that come to this summit have struggled with food. We're either compulsively overeating or restricting or overeating sugar, or we have metabolic syndrome and we're interested in nutrition and trying to figure out how we can feel better. So do you want to share a little bit about your story with food?
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah. So I have kind of two stories personal and then professional. The personal story with food is I grew up with a condition known as intersex, so my biology was dominated by estrogen and so for the first 14 years of my life I was estrogen dominant. So I developed very much like a girl would develop and I developed breasts and hips and could not create muscle tone and that that in and of itself was very confusing. But then the pure abuse was extremely traumatic.
LUIS MOJICA:So for me, after many years of different kinds of abuse and violations and harassment, I had so much anxiety and self-hatred and pain in me, I had so much body dysmorphia I was in a lot of. I was just in a very depressed state around myself and my body and I discovered if I would eat a lot of potato chips and sandwiches and cheese, I could quell these huge emotions of anxiety that wanted to come up, but only for so long, you know, because when you binge eat you have this temporary soothing of the energy that wants to move up and out, and anxiety is essentially creative life force that wants to move up and out. And anxiety is essentially creative life force that wants to move up and out. But when you are scared and you don't want to be seen. Your body represses that and it creates like a pressure cooker inside of you. So eating lots of food kind of slowly quieted down that pressure cooker for maybe an hour or two and then I would metabolize it and I would need more and thus began the binging cycle that so many people here are aware of and that started in fifth grade and went on until I don't know I was 29, maybe 29, 30, around there is when I ended my binging, which we'll get into in a little bit. So I had this personal history of using it to try to remediate symptoms of PTSD, repressed memories. So many things in my body was holding sensationally.
LUIS MOJICA:As I started studying psychology in college, I dropped out to then study nutrition because I found food as a shortcut to mental health balancing. People would go to therapy and they wouldn't even want to talk about certain things because they were really big issues or they would be given a diagnosis. That felt like an identity and they thought they were fixed that way and so they kind of gave up on working on anything but food. Was this like amazing new way where I could work with people and just shift some few things in their diet and suddenly you would start to see their entire mental health first of all flourish but also transform from a place of feeling really shut down and dissociated and even self-hatred into oh, I have the capacity for stress and for pain and for pleasure and all these things because of the nutrition and the biochemistry of that.
LUIS MOJICA:So I was in private practice for about a decade when in one week three different women came in who all had an extreme dependence on chocolate, and I don't mean like a handful, I mean like bars and bars and bars of chocolate a day, and it was showing up in their lab work through pre-diabetes. So they were coming to me because they wanted to kind of reverse this and prevent being full on diabetic like their family members have been. So I looked at their diet, I looked at their journals. I would get people to write down so I could see what they were eating and these women, every day, around three or four, would just indulge in like loads of chocolate and sugar. And I would say what happens at three or four? And they would say that's when my husband comes home from work.
LUIS MOJICA:And I thought that was interesting, that when their partner comes home from work. They engage in this habit. And so I said well, what if we started reducing or even eliminating sugar just to get your levels back, and then we'll figure out how to reintroduce it? And they all said if I do that, I'll have to leave my husband. And that was the really interesting light bulb moment for me where I thought, you know, coming from my I was binge eating at the time, by the way but coming from my own binge eating in between sessions, but coming from my own experience, I thought this is fascinating.
LUIS MOJICA:You know, I always thought my binge eating was just because I love food.
LUIS MOJICA:Because a lot of people will say like I just love food, I love pleasure food, I love the taste of food. I can't take away my joy of food. But with these women I was noticing their binging on chocolate and sugar was actually a way to remediate the sensations that would come up around their husband. So the sensations, had they been sober, let's say, without the sugar or chocolate, would drive them to leave the relationship or change something. But the chocolate was allowing them to be soothed in a very unpleasant situation.
LUIS MOJICA:So, long story, much shorter. These women, two of them left after two weeks because they wouldn't remove any of the chocolate. The third did like an elimination plan with me, went on a whole food diet and I think in three months left her husband and took her two kids to live in a townhouse quite happily and transformed her whole life. And that was when I started getting interested in somatics. That's when I thought what's underneath the addiction, what's underneath the dependence, what's the unmet emotional need or the repressed memories or emotions that this food is interrupting us from being in touch with?
FLORENCE:Incredible, incredible, so, as you. So you were around roughly that age, then 29, that you were starting to sort of phase out. So what? How did you turn the corner with your binge eating? It's a really difficult eating disorder. It's wellowned as being a really intractable, difficult one.
LUIS MOJICA:It is. I mean, if we think about time-wise, it was 20 years for me, so that's a long time, and I developed with it. So it was part of my developmental experience of my body just kind of always knew this. I couldn't really remember life before binge eating, so it was something that was so predictably there for me. But it was really somatic psychology in particular, somatic experiencing and learning how to track my body's sensations and learning how to embody my experiences. Because I was very I was very cognitive. At this point I could tell you I could identify traumatic experiences I had. I could identify emotions. I could tell you I could identify traumatic experiences I had. I could identify emotions I could identify. You know how I felt, but I couldn't feel it, I wasn't in it yet. And so somatics was like this bridge between my mind's ability to identify and my body's ability to experience, and so mind was used with body and together it was this incredible partnership of oh, I can track sensations and even have a conversation with my body, rather than the sensations going out of control or ignoring sensations just for thoughts. So over time I remember essentially getting to the point, after practicing different embodiment practices and creating a lifestyle change where I would sit down to binge and I would be able to feel it.
LUIS MOJICA:And binging for anyone that's ever binged knows it's a dissociative experience. You're not in your body. When you're binge eating. You often lose track of time, you can't remember eating the whole bag of chips. Suddenly you're at the bottom of it, but the whole middle part you kind of blanked out. Sometimes we're watching TV while we're binging, so we're not even focusing on the food. So, so we're not even focusing on the food.
LUIS MOJICA:So I was finally feeling like every moment, the pulling of the chips, the chewing, how it felt in my throat, my stomach, and what shocked me is how uncomfortable it actually felt. So when I was embodying the binging, there was a discomfort and that was the thing that I needed. That I didn't have for 20 years. I didn't have the ability to feel my body saying enough, this is too much food. And now I did have the ability to feel my body saying enough, this is too much food. And now I did. So it binging went from being this cognitive thing of I love food to the reality, the somatic experience of I actually don't like eating that much food, it doesn't feel good, and then by not doing that by backing off when it didn't feel good. I was left with emotions that usually the dissociation of binging would would remove me from having to experience. But thankfully I had the somatic practices.
LUIS MOJICA:So this completely changed my private practice because I had people who I would prescribe a plan of food to, who just couldn't for the life of them sick to it. These are people that had unprocessed stress and trauma. It wasn't the food that was the issue. It was when the food was removed, in the sobriety of not having a food addiction or disorder, there were all these sensations that were suddenly available to them, but they didn't know how to be with them yet because the food would interrupt that. So now I had a way of teaching people. Because I had taught myself and learned where I was taught as well and had lots of support. I could teach people how to feel the thing that comes up when you don't eat the food that normally suppresses that.
FLORENCE:And that was the real shift in my personal life and in my practice with my clients. Amazing, that's totally been my experience as well. So how long in terms of that timeline of you sort of dropping that behavior it didn't sound like it was overnight. For most of us it's a bit of an on again, off again for a while. How long was that timeline for you?
LUIS MOJICA:Around 27 years old was when because that's when we were expecting our daughter, and I remember that was the year so much started coming up for me.
LUIS MOJICA:You know so much unprocessed trauma, so much father wound all these things I never really had to deal with started emerging in my body. So I would say 27 is when I started getting conscious, started learning about somatic, started practicing, studying, and I would say it was a good three years from that point till it actually felt uncomfortable to binge eat. So it took three years, and when I say three years I mean practicing every day. There wasn't a day that went by where I didn't do some kind of somatic practice, so it wasn't just going to therapy once a week, it was my lifestyle had to become a more embodied lifestyle, but still, even every day. It took three years, which is really important for people to hear, and I'm glad you asked, because when they hear my stories and your stories and other people's, the mind thinks oh, they just woke up one day and had an epiphany, and like an epiphany is mental, but to make it actually a practice takes years. So yeah, about three years.
FLORENCE:Yeah, it's a multi-year journey and I think it's. Yeah, I think that I come out of the 12 step background and it was like if I could just get abstinent. You know that's, I've arrived. I've arrived, I just need to hang on to it. Right, need to get sober, sugar, flour, sweetener, sober, and then I need to stay sober.
FLORENCE:And all of my efforts went into that achievement and it felt, you know, like sometimes just white, white, knuckling through every moment, making calls, going to your meetings, doing everything it took to stay sober. But I completely, I completely missed the fact that in those, in that when that when we put the food down, our stuff comes up and when that's when I put the food down and the stuff comes up to such an extent and they don't have the skills to meet it and greet it and to process and integrate it and welcome it and be with it, embody it. It's just a matter of time before I'm going to go back. And then I feel like a failure and I was constantly focused on the abstinence and not focused on the fact that that is a symptom of the fact that my body's dysregulated. I have abandoned and neglected it and probably abused it, and it's a cry. It's a cry for the kind of attention. You're talking about the somatic practices. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by somatic practices?
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah, and one thing I wanted to ask when you were saying your piece, that was, I think seventh grade was my first called Weight Watchers. In seventh grade and it was from that point until I was about 30, where I was also doing what you were doing. I was trying to abstain, I was trying to completely eliminate, I was trying to. I was like this food is bad, this food is good, and being in that kind of binary of good and bad with my eating it just made my addiction and my binging much worse, because I would go on these kind of purges and these cleanses, you know, for months and get really sick doing it, because I was cleansing out all these toxins from the excess I was eating and I would just dive right back in. So there was no actual capacity, like said, being created for my emotional self. I was just focused on this pattern, thinking well, if the pattern or the behavior was gone, I should be fine. But in the absence of the food, the presence of the emotions I never learned how to be with came up. And that's where the somatic practices come in. And so that one of the simplest somatic practices and just for people listening who've never heard even the word somatic or don't really understand it. All it means is that you're basing your experience in your body, so you're not fully centering the body, but it's a body-based therapy or a body-based practice. The first thing everyone listening can do is literally just notice what supports them right now, like if you're in a chair, feel all the parts of your body touching the chair. If you're walking, feel your feet on the ground, notice the air around you and the temperature in your skin, look around you. But as you look around you, don't just look at a tree or a guitar or a window. Feel in your body where you feel that thing in your environment. So this very simple practice I call feeling the now, we're just noticing right now, in this moment. What does this current environment feel like in my body? Why is this so important? This anchors us into where we are and for people that have a history of trauma, this moment of anchoring to where you are teaches your body you survived.
LUIS MOJICA:When you don't do that, your body has a posture. So let's say, let's say I'll use my experience being bullied. So let's say, let's say I'll use my experience being bullied. I learned to shrug my shoulders up and cave my chest forward to kind of hide my breasts when they were developing from this estrogen dominance. So in my development I learned to have a certain posture of hiding, to try to the trauma through the somatic lens. It's not that someone bullied me or pushed me or said something horrible to me. It's the way my body responded to it and held the response. So my body was stuck in that posture even when no one was bullying me 20 years later.
LUIS MOJICA:So for me to get somatically experienced into the now, I started feeling, oh, this posture is here when it doesn't need to be so for me because it's unique for everyone that does this work.
LUIS MOJICA:It was about pulling my shoulders back and down and seeing how long my body would maintain that before we'd curl forward and it'd be all day long. Oh, my shoulders are curling forward, let me pull them back. And that was my kind of somatic experience and practice for the first five, six years was just teaching my body when you pull your shoulders back and your chest is out, no one's making fun of you. Nothing bad has happened. I had top surgery when I was 23. So I have a very male looking body and chest. No one would even know my history. So it was like my body was updating the reality of this moment and that led to me being able to embody the binging and then, when I wasn't binging, sit with the thing that came up, because I was in the present, so I had the resourcing to do so on my journey of somatic experiencing and doing somatic practices is that I'm a hyper.
FLORENCE:I'm hypervigilant. All of us who fall on the trauma spectrum are just as a matter of whether or not we're hypervigilant out or hypervigilant in or maybe a mix. I'm an in. I don't actually find the outside world very threatening. I don't find people threatening. I am very threatened by sensations in my body, anxiety. I feel every little, everything, everything like hyper, hypersensitive to everything happening internally. So when I first learned about orienting oh my gosh, what a relief to be un, I don't know, to be unburdened from this obsessive oh my gosh, what's that? I bet you I've got arthritis or like, and I wasn't a hypochondriac but just constantly fearing all these sensations and emotions and the intensity of them. And to look around and just notice the tree and the rain outside and the little rosebud that's blooming, and to be completely freed up from the terror that I feel inside was really powerful. And for other people it's when they drop in and they start to connect to their inner world that they get reprieve, a relief from the obsessive fear you know watching that happens from outside.
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah, I relate to that as well, because I was hypochondriacal for years. I had so many doctor's appointments and heart scans and brain scans and CAT scans and MRIs because my symptoms were so intense that the doctors actually thought I had a brain tumor at one point. All these sensations. But then that secondary response of being so hyper focused on the sensations created more secondary sensations of stress and activation and adrenalization and my body was just so overwhelmed with charge. So learning how to orient it's interesting.
LUIS MOJICA:Becoming more somatically aware has actually made me less hypochondriacal and you'd think it cognitively it seems like the opposite. People think being somatically aware means being focused on every little thing your body does. That's not really the case. It's actually being in relationship to where you are, in the space you're in. So it includes the rosebud, it includes the sun, it includes the sound of the birds singing and it includes a little bit of pressure in my chest. But when that pressure in my chest isn't the only thing I'm attuning to, it usually spreads and goes away. When it's the only thing I can connect to, it becomes way too overwhelming and it will become panic.
FLORENCE:Oh my gosh, that was totally my experience. Thanks for saying that even better. Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah, it was a relief to be to have my attention pulled out.
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah.
FLORENCE:To notice. I'm safe and I'm right here in the now and it's all as well. It's actually beautiful. I'm safe and I'm right here in the now and it's all as well.
FLORENCE:It's actually beautiful, but I was so absorbed with the pressure in the chest and the thousands of other sensations coming through. Let's talk a bit about sugar. So for you, as I recall from our interview last year, there was a point where you realized I need to unhook from this, that I need to, and you did a two year abstinence stretch and that you found it very helpful, but that at a certain point you realize I don't need to live in this binary good, bad abstinence. You know rigidity, so can you tell us a little bit about that part of your food journey?
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah. So I again, like I said, I came from this place of binging and purging, so it'd be the situation of eating so much food and then I went through a little bout of anorexia of not eating at all and exercising a lot. And then I went to purging through cleansing, so it wasn't vomiting but it was really intense. Pills and herbs and foods that would be super activating and eliminating, you know, like very loose stools, very sick stomach, because I was taking so many of these powders, essentially to push things out of my liver and out of my body and my bowels. So I got into that and that went into the abstinence model of okay, certain things are really bad for me and they're going to create illness, they're going to create addiction, they're going to create pain. I have to completely avoid them. And if I can't avoid them completely, I am screwed. I will never get out of this, I'm stuck. I can't avoid them completely, I am screwed, I will never get out of this, I'm stuck.
LUIS MOJICA:So I went through this cycle with sugar because I was highly addicted to sugar. I come from a lineage of people very addicted to sugar. So I had a dependency, an emotional dependency on sugar, and I mean lots of sugar, multiple sodas through the day, multiple candy bars through the day. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of grams of sugar. I can't believe I didn't become diabetic, but I was really, really, really, really addicted and dependent of it. So I went through a two-year stretch where I didn't do straight two years, but in that two-year period I went to really deep low-sugar diets and then eventually I did a no-sugar diet at all no fruit even for about seven, eight months, I think it was, and that was the deepest, longest abstinence stretch I did with not having sugar. Now, what happened in those seven or eight months was profound. I was on a very healthy diet, I was doing yoga, I was walking and hiking, so my body was really happy and healthy. I can't pretend that it wasn't thriving without that.
LUIS MOJICA:However, my mind wasn't as healthy because I had this obsession with staying away from sugar. So even though I wasn't eating it, I was still obsessed with it in this new way of constantly avoiding it, constantly reading everything, constantly making sure I wasn't next to someone eating something sweet, and to me that didn't feel like recovery. It felt like I'm doing really great at avoiding something and I'm definitely healing my body in certain ways because I'm not having all this excess sugar. But recovery for me felt like I can sit with someone eating sugar and I don't get triggered. Recovery for me, in my mind, was I can eat a cookie and be done for days. That to me was actually the picture of recovery.
LUIS MOJICA:But I wasn't finding that model available anywhere. It was either the idea of you have to completely eliminate or just kind of eat what you want and don't shame yourself. And I wanted something in between. I wanted to play with the relationship to food, so seeing food as a being, as an animist creature, where this food has a certain, let say, personality, which we call nutrients, that affects my body in a certain way. So what's the personality of sugar? What does it do for me?
LUIS MOJICA:And I started to learn. Well, when the moment I feel sad or alone or less than it comforts me in this way that I don't let other people come for me. So I started playing with can I create friendships in my life and spaces and go to circles and healing situations, places, even in the forest creeks, trees, where I get that feeling of being held the way sugar holds me. And that was a real edge for me because I had to learn how to be tender and be witness to my tenderness, whereas I had the archetype, for so long, as the healer right, as the teacher, as the one that never needs healing themselves, and I held myself to that. So sugar was kind of like my nonjudgmental love and therapist, if you will. So making these connections gave me this breadth of experience of, oh, I can be held and supported, which meant I had all these other options of getting the need met that only sugar can meet for so long, and that's what started changing my relationship to it and that's why right now I would say I'm recovered, because I just the other day I walked down to the bakery and I got this tahini cookie.
LUIS MOJICA:It's a fresh baked tahini cookie. Now, I promise you, a decade ago I would have gotten six. I would have eaten them all immediately, been really sick, probably had to take a nap. Then the next day I would have done some kind of liver cleanse for that. But this time I had the cookie, I brought it into my office, I broke it in half. I thought I broke it in half, but I broke it into a third so it was even smaller.
LUIS MOJICA:I could barely get through the third. I enjoyed the taste, I enjoyed the texture, I enjoyed the flavor. But my body is already at this stable, gooey place in my life, my relationships, my diet, primarily, that I didn't need to seek this huge biochemical shift of six cookies. My chemistry is already at this place of oh, I feel pretty modulated. So I had a third of the cookie and I put it away and I forgot about it for a couple of days. Now that is to me recovery, because I would not even have been able to have that in the cabinet and going to go to bed with it not being fully eaten, right? So I'll stop there and see where you go with that.
FLORENCE:Oh gosh, I don't know where I'd go with that. There's so many people listening to this saying I want that too, louis, louis, sorry, I want that too, louis, I want Louise, sorry, I want that too. And I think that there's a little bit of a danger, because I also had done years of therapy trying to sort out my relationship with food. I mean, there was plenty of good reasons for me to be in therapy, but I was so frustrated about my binge eating and my I had a tiny stretch of anorexia as well and my my, because I was reading books on it I didn't want to be eating it, and so I was going into therapy and I just thought that if I could just deal with my issues, if I could just deal with my issues, then I could become a normal eater. I'm the kind of person that could have three quarters of a cookie and just leave it.
FLORENCE:And I didn't you know, but I also wasn't doing somatic work. I didn't you know, but I also wasn't doing somatic work. I wasn't around when I was younger that I was aware of. It's much more common now and it's so such an essential piece of the healing journey for all of us, but at that point I was doing more talk therapy. I did CBT very helpful but it didn't again, it didn't really fully give me this experience of being able to become this recovered normal eater, of being able to become this recovered normal eater.
FLORENCE:So I, yeah, I think there's a place for us to take the breaks from the sugar to heal the metabolism, the microbiome Like I think that's a real piece of the path for many of us on the addiction spectrum, for sure and at the same time work on the regulation of the nervous system. And then maybe you know, at some point you can, you're so embodied and you're so connected that your body can let you know when a third of a cookie is enough. Thank you very much, and you can leave it at that. But I don't think it's enough to think, oh, I could just do all this work that Louise is talking about and then I could just go and have, like you know, a little tiny bit of a cookie and be happy.
LUIS MOJICA:No way. And what you just said was really important because there's. I also did therapy for years and to me it's when we cognitively work on ourselves. That's not a somatic experience. It's not a bad thing at all, but it's not a somatic experience. So when you have the somatic experience of your body, updates to where it is and it starts to feel and it starts to learn how to move energy that's stuck inside of it, that transfers to everything you experience in your life and this is where what you just said is important comes in your innate body.
LUIS MOJICA:Wisdom is accessible to you all the time via sensation. When I'm cognitive, I'm dissociated, I'm not in my body. When I'm cognitively embodied, then my mind can witness my body and I'm associated. When I'm just centering the mind, I don't have access to the body. So I don't have access to discomfort, which is the sensation that comes up when I'm eating, when I'm binging. Essentially and I want to just backpedal that Binging is reflexive in response to discomfort. So I'll start to feel a pain or a worry or a trigger of some kind and within seconds to minutes I'm reflexively going for the food I'm addicted to. So I feel discomfort, but I don't have the practice of stretching out that discomfort. It's like my tolerance for it is really low and that's what drives me to binge, which drives me to dissociate. But when I can feel the binging, when I can have more capacity for the discomfort which somatics gives us, that doesn't happen as quickly. I don't dive into the chips. I can feel the discomfort for a good 15 minutes, 15 hours, 15 days, and then I go check out my relationship to the chips. So to me it's a pendulation.
LUIS MOJICA:I do believe in abstinence when your health and your life depends on it. I think it's the same thing with hard drugs. If someone's eating something that is literally ending their life, potentially they've developed serious autoimmune conditions, heart issues, diabetes, they're morbidly obese, something that's actually keeping them from having a healthy life and a long life. Abstinence is excellent for that. To me it's a temporary thing, and temporary for some people is years, Temporary for other people is weeks.
LUIS MOJICA:It depends on the individual experience. Once your body has regained its health and vitality, once it is healing, once it's repairing and you're able to pendulate between the felt sense of your emotions and the desire to eat something, that's when you gain the wisdom of oh, a handful of chips is so pleasurable. I don't have to go beyond that because you're feeling your body, you're not quelling your emotions with that. So that's one really important piece for me and I don't know if I can go into the other piece or not about essentially how to eat the cookie and these things like a pro, like what that means when you're actually doing it. Do you want to go there yet or do you want to wait?
FLORENCE:You know what?
FLORENCE:I wouldn't mind lingering a little bit around the topic of abstinence to see if people can help discern, to what you know, to what extent is this tool, this, this stage of recovery, something they might want to consider and maybe to help them discern how long, like can it be a couple of weeks for me, or I'm one of those people that maybe need to do it for two, five years till the brain is healed and there's a neutrality about it? You can kind of take or leave the cookie. So I wasn't sure if you could speak a bit more about abstinence.
LUIS MOJICA:Yeah, yeah, there's two things I can say to that. I love that you call it a tool. I think people just hearing that is a first, really good step, because when abstinence becomes just you or your life, you kind of lose the sense of no. This is actually a tool. I can abstain from an addiction and never deal with the underlying reasons why I was addicted To me. That's not full recovery, that's just pausing something and avoiding. So there's abstinence, there's avoidance. If I'm abstaining from the food and in my abstinence, working with what comes up in response, that's really incredible recovery. That that gives someone a potential for serious repair.
LUIS MOJICA:But this is where it's so individualized. If you have, you know, high cholesterol, you might have to abstain for six weeks and once you get your blood panel, your cholesterol has come down. Most of my clients six weeks. Their blood cholesterol will come down exactly to where they need it to be when they ascribe to whatever I was giving them.
LUIS MOJICA:However, if you have a situation where you have to lose 50 pounds for your health, or you have heart disease or you have diabetes you're talking about someone needs six months to three years, you know. If you have liver issues like non alcoholic, fatty liver, these are the cancer. These are things that take much longer than just six weeks. So it's so dependent on the individual and especially the hopefully a naturopath they're working with in addition to a medical doctor, so they have good, well-rounded opinion of of holistic healing, but for them to understand the amount of time it takes to not have this toxin or this habitual food feeding, you know, their, their, their degenerative disease. That's going to be the answer, you know, for those people listening. Um, when it comes to let me pause there what do you think about that piece?
FLORENCE:first, Brilliant Love it.
LUIS MOJICA:Okay, easy. So the second part for me, when it comes to abstinence and when it comes to recovering from it, is we can't just remove something without replacing something else for the individual, because every single addiction we have is meeting a non-med need. Every single one, it's someone trying to find safety in themselves and they can't. So they look outside themselves and they find it in the substance or the person, or the work or whatever the food, whatever it is. When I take away a food that for me for 20 years helps me feel safe and helps me go to work and helps me sleep, that I can't just not replace my life, you know, bring something else into my life to meet that need. Let's say the sugar was meeting. So when I was talking about my abstinence, with sugar, in that abstinence I also was taking steps toward creating relationships that gave me what the sugar was giving me. I took steps to learn how to journal and how to listen to my thoughts and write them down and not believe them. This is where self-inquiry came in. You know, I took steps toward working with therapists, being more transparent with my partner, having even stepping away from relationships and situations that would stress me out and cause me to eat sugar. So my lifestyle had to change to start meeting the needs that sugar was meeting.
LUIS MOJICA:When someone abstains from something and doesn't understand that the addiction was meeting a need, then nothing comes to replace that and the abstinence either creates a depression because you are now somehow deprived right, or it's very, very short-lived because that need will be met. This is why you see someone that stops using heroin and starts drinking a lot of alcohol, or someone who stops drinking a lot of alcohol and starts eating a lot of chocolate cake or drinking sugar like sodas and such. It will move to the next thing. Even though you've abstained from chocolate cake now you're just having Coke three times a day. So it's interesting to understand that without meeting the need of the thing you're pulling away, you're going to get it met somewhere else, sideways usually another sideways addiction.
FLORENCE:Totally agree with that. And I think the other thing that was powerful about abstinence for me is that because I was in and out of high sympathetic and crashing into dorsal freeze, I really couldn't get out of the freeze consistently or for any long stretch of time until I got onto the whole foods, because the sugars were creating the, the blood sugar swings, the neurotransmitter. You know highs and crashes. I just couldn't get stable enough to be able to come out, move into the sympathetic, take action towards recovery. That wasn't just about abstaining, was truly about meeting and greeting what was coming up in my body and then being able to spend more time in the parasympathetic.
FLORENCE:I think sugar is a block to trauma. I think it's a form of trauma for the cells. It overwhelms us at the cellular level and when we're so overwhelmed inside, almost anything outside is going to overwhelm me. I had such little capacity so it's constantly overwhelming myself and winding up in the trauma response. And so when I started to let go of sugar and my cells had more access to energy and I started to be able to direct my energy towards the true recovery you know practices, the somatic practices and the self inquiry that I did as well then I could stay out of the freeze longer and then spend more time in the parasympathetic. But I don't think if I'd ever got off sugar I don't know that I would have done the kind of trauma healing, recovery work I've been able to do.
LUIS MOJICA:I totally get that and I think, even how you said, sugar traumatizes the body.
LUIS MOJICA:I really believe that, and I don't mean eating an apple, but processed sugar is literally biochemically traumatic for the body because you have this instant sequence of events that happens, a series of events where you eat the sugar, just like you said, it spikes your glucose and then it spikes your insulin and then it tanks your glucose, your blood sugar drops, and then it stimul your insulin and then it tanks your glucose, your blood sugar drops, and then it stimulates your adrenal glands to create gluconeogenesis, where your liver has to make new blood glucose from stored glycogen.
LUIS MOJICA:So this whole thing happens in a matter of 45 minutes to two hours depending on the body, where you go through so many different metabolic stressors and the body experiences this sudden increase and spike in glucose and the sudden decrease in tanking from insulin as threats to survival. So the body experiences an internal threat response. Then you have an adrenal response. So the biochemistry after eating sugar is the same thing as a car crash. I mean it's, it's, it's incredible. So it literally, on a biochemical level, is traumatizing your body when you're eating it that much, and then those large amounts especially truly, truly and dr lustig's book.
FLORENCE:I'm metabolical, I mean he's got eight different ways. The sugar damages the body. It's, it's not. It's incredibly complex and they know at a very micro level the impact it's having on our mitochondria. And we don't have enough energy, we're easily overwhelmed. And when we're overwhelmed we'll collapse.
FLORENCE:And then when we're in the collapse, like I, I had this massive epiphany when I kept realizing okay, some of my clients keep going back, they keep relapsing. What's happening? Every single one of them are dropping into the freeze. And when you get into the freeze response that hopeless, helpless, despairing, dark, energyless, immobilized collapse state. They will say fuck it, fuck it, I just get, I don't care, I can't fight this anymore, I'm too depressed, it's too hard. The thought of going into the kitchen and making a whole food meal, it's too much, I don't have it in me. So we got to figure out how to stay out of it, get when we're there, get out of the freeze and stay out of the phrase for long enough that we can have that energy that's right directed towards the somatic practices that truly heal us at the root levels well, that's where the word capacity comes in, because nutrition gives you balanced.
LUIS MOJICA:Nutrition gives you capacity. I mean your liver functions better and it can remove excess stress hormones from your blood. So you literally start getting calmer just because your body's functioning better and it's important people get that capacity is biological, it's not a mindset. It's your body's ability to metabolize stress and stress hormones. So when you're having a lot of sugar, you're actually lowering your capacity because the amount of stress hormones it creates. But when you're having very balanced meals and when you're actually able to eat sugar in a balanced way which people are like what does that mean? I can go there. When you're able to eat in a balanced way, it's not creating that same hormonal driving, stress induced biochemistry I was saying earlier. It does Because you're not pushing your blood sugar past its tolerance, its threshold.
LUIS MOJICA:Now everyone's going to have their own controversy around the amount, but all the blood in the body is around seven grams of sugar. Some people it's four, they found it's usually around seven. So at any given time your body has to have seven grams of sugar just so you can function. But that's already living in you. It doesn't mean you have to go eat sugar. Your body already has this stored in the muscles. It's in your liver. Every single thing we eat on our plates is turning into sugar, whether it is a piece of chicken or it's beans or it's carrots. Your body is turning into sugar. So our bodies are really good at transforming complex foods into glucose, because our entire bodies run on glucose. So we need the glucose. We don't need processed sugar to get it. Any food will give it to us. So I'm saying that because the issue here with sugar is not in the eating it, it's in how you eat it, how much you eat it. And is it the kind of sugar that's going to spike your blood sugar or is it going to gradually raise your levels? The spike in blood glucose is what creates the stress response. It's what creates the adrenal response, what creates the inflammation, it's what creates the autoimmune issues. A gradual rise in blood sugar does not do that. Even if it's gradually rising to a higher amount, you're not going to have the huge insulin response which then sets off the series of events that stresses you out.
LUIS MOJICA:So when I teach people how to eat sugar when they are no longer needing the tool of abstinence, if you're needing the tool of abstinence. You have to honor that and get the support you need when you're ready to move beyond that or you want to try moving beyond it, you always go back to it. You try these things that I'll suggest. The one thing that makes uh, the glucose let's say sugar turn into glucose much more slowly is complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins. So when you have a meal, let's say like one of my favorite, you know, let's say template meals is a protein, a bean and some kind of a vegetable. So if you sit down and you have a piece of salmon with some black beans and steamed kale, okay, that meal is full of fat and protein in the salmon, it's full of complex carbohydrates in the beans and it's a chalk full of vitamins and minerals and chlorophyll in the kale and a lot of fiber. So that meal in and of itself is on its own, is not going to spike your blood glucose level. It's going to slowly turn into a gradual rise, which is what feels like clarity and capacity through the day. It's what feels like having a level mood.
LUIS MOJICA:Now let's say after that meal I'm like I want dessert. Okay, If I eat a donut after that meal and the donut has 20 grams of sugar. So 20 grams, that's three times the amount my blood sugar already has. That's going to put me over so quick If I have a third of that donut. So I'm getting about seven grams of sugar. Let's say, seven grams of sugar after that meal I just had is not going to spike my glucose Usually.
LUIS MOJICA:I say this usually because everyone's bodies are unique so I can't just assume that everyone's going to have a blood glucose spike. You might still. Most people I've worked with don't. I've worked with diabetics who reverse their diabetes and they can go back to bringing in sugar if it's not an addictive way.
LUIS MOJICA:But the rule for me of eating sugar in a smart way is you never eat it standalone, you never eat it as a liquid. So no lollipops, no hard candies, no sodas, no fruit juices. Eat it as a liquid. So no lollipops, no hard candies, no sodas, no fruit juices. And you only eat it after having a meal. So you have your full meal, you have it after the meal and it has to be eight grams of sugar or less.
LUIS MOJICA:So if you want to eat a cookie, you look at the cookie.
LUIS MOJICA:You see how much sugar it has in it.
LUIS MOJICA:What serving of that cookie gives you eight grams or less and you eat that after you have a balanced meal like I talked about, with protein and fibers and fats and you know carbohydrates and such.
LUIS MOJICA:If that's what what's happening for an individual, that's how they're eating sugar.
LUIS MOJICA:You're going to find that you get this emotional and pleasure satisfaction from the texture, taste sugar in the cookie in this case but you don't go into addiction because you're already nourished, your body already has such a nourishment from the beautiful whole food meal you ate. So your nutritional needs are being met and your emotional needs may not be from the meal right away because it's not as satisfying as a cookie if someone's new to this but having a little bit of that doesn't spike your adrenals because it doesn't put you into that glucose spike, and so you actually have a balanced clarity even when you had that little piece of a cookie, because we're talking about eight grams or less. That's the role I work with people who want to have, you know, sugar in a healthy way in their lives and I haven't seen I mean knock on wood, so far I haven't seen anyone relapse into addiction. If they follow those rules. If someone skips lunch and they have a cookie instead, they're right back into addiction. So it's really about standalone sugar and the form it comes in.
FLORENCE:Very interesting. I definitely have clients in my practice that you know. A tablespoon of beans will spike them to 175, 180, 200, 230, really insulin resistant. And so for individuals that might be at the summit who have severe insulin resistance, there's no amount of sugar that's going to get into the cells because you're so insulin resistant that you just keep wanting, keep eating. It can't get enough, but it's because it can't use that form of fuel beating it can't get enough, but it's because it can't use that form of fuel.
FLORENCE:So for some people going back I know that, for some people doing ketosis and you don't have to be a huge meat eater to do ketosis there's ketotarians, there's vegetarians that are doing low carb and getting into ketosis, intermittent fasting, that support that to see if we can sort of resolve some of that insulin resistance so that you can then have some carbohydrates and actually have it get into the cells and actually serve as a quality glucose. Obviously, we're talking only about whole foods rare exceptions down the road. Maybe you can work with Lewis to bring in something a bit more refined in a safe way. So is that what you mean when you say how to eat a cookie like a pro?
LUIS MOJICA:I do because I think again and you bring up an important demographic of people who are insulin resistant, who have to, who have to abstain for their life until hopefully they can reverse that and their pancreas is functioning again and they don't have this issue, or actually the cells are accepting the insulin. They're not having this issue. So if they get to that point, great, they can go to what I'm talking about. One thing even those people can do is they can combine more fat with their carbohydrates that are whole carbohydrates, so they can have a small amount of, let's say, brown rice, not white rice, and combine some kind of fat like butter or coconut oil or even like a nut butter, like tahini sauce, with that. That's going to slow the release even more and it's not going to be this huge, huge spike. And lentils tend to be red. Lentils tend to be better for diabetics and people who are insulin resistant, more than beans would be in terms of also spiking. But we don't know until each individual tests themselves as they do it. But this is what I mean by eating cookie like a pro, because so many people will be turned away who want to learn how to do this when the message is just abstinence because it's just not practical for everybody.
LUIS MOJICA:There are people whose lives depend on it. Those are the ones. That it's non-negotiable, we don't have to question that. But some people's lives don't depend on it. They can eat sugar and still function and live to a long, healthy age, like a lot of people do. So it's important to me that they understand well, there's a way of how to eat sugar that will keep you from having this metabolic stress.
LUIS MOJICA:I'm not going to say it increases your health necessarily. Maybe it does, I don't know, but it's not like there's a health benefit to eating sugar. Besides maybe mental well-being. But on the cellular level and on a body level, eating it this way, after a balanced meal, eight grams or less with fat and protein, is going to not create the metabolic stress in your body.
LUIS MOJICA:And so the average person that's not willing to never eat sugar can at least, even on a road trip, can go into a corner store and buy a pack of tasty cakes and a bag of cashews or a beef jerky stick or something, and they can literally do this thing I'm talking about. They can eat the cashews, they can eat a beef jerky stick or something, and they can literally do this thing I'm talking about. They can eat the cashews, they can eat the beef jerky there they got their fat and protein or one or the other, depending on your diet and then you can look at the package and say, okay, how much of this would be eight grams of sugar? And they have a bite of the thing and they notice what happens in their body. That's the way people can actually apply it in real time. So I think it's a really helpful template if someone wants to bring sugar into life in a way that isn't going to imbalance or hurt them.
FLORENCE:Brilliant, and you know what, too, is that. I can imagine there's so many people and I certainly going back to my early days of trying to get abstinent. It was really. It's a I shouldn't use this word lightly, but it almost felt traumatic. The thought that I would never have sugar again like it utterly overwhelmed me.
FLORENCE:And then, of course, I did this before there was internet, before there was books, before there was coaches, before there were summits. So I was kind of muddling my way forward on my own, but I know I absolutely watched myself try and pull back on it, restrict that to feelings of deprivation, which absolutely, you know, led into more binging. I think it might've actually created the binging problem that came in later, because I ate sugar all day long before that. But it was only when I was realizing this has given me blinding migraines. I'm overweight, I have acne, I'm depressed, I'm like I was miserable and I really wanted to get rid of this sugar. I had good reasons for it. It wasn't wrong to have the thought I think I need to reduce, if not eliminate, my consumption of these refined carbohydrates, and I was very gung-ho and motivated to do it. But I absolutely fell into that trap of taking away something that my body saw as essential for safety.
LUIS MOJICA:That's right.
FLORENCE:And all of the trauma coupling that it had over coupling it had done with those foods, helped me regulate my nervous system, drop the stress that I can cope, and I didn't understand. I didn't understand that piece and so I was making it worse, even though it's not wrong to want to reduce, if not eliminate, your consumption of refined carbohydrates, and so if it's completely overwhelming at the thought of eliminating, this approach might be a really good first step and then move towards more of the letting it go as you become much more competent and confident with the somatic practice, work and and then. So maybe people do abstinence and then kind of gravitate more to what you're talking about. Maybe they start here and then gravitate more towards just letting it go.
LUIS MOJICA:See, I think that's an excellent, excellent point, because there's so much urgency in diet culture and in the medical culture of we have to do everything perfectly right now to prevent or get rid of this. And when you meet someone who already has stress with urgency, you go into freeze, you go into shutdown and that's going to create more of the addiction to, in this case, sugar. So for me, I do think this is a great first step for people to say, hey, you can eat whatever you want, just follow these guidelines. And then, when they do that, they start getting in a different relationship with the food. And then what I love to say is the sugar quits you. You know, you're not like.
LUIS MOJICA:Last night I did a ceremony and we had these delicious, these bars that are whole food bars with chocolate coating and the center is all these different nuts mixed together and a little bit of maple syrup, I believe, and there were eight grams of sugar each one and I took one bite of it and it was like, ah, that was good and I was done, and so it's kind of like understanding the sugar quits me.
LUIS MOJICA:I'm not like, oh, no, that bars are at the oh, I have to eat both those bars right now while no one is looking, it's like I don't even need it, it's obsolete because my body's so balanced from what I'm doing. So I have found more people and I'm glad you said that more people get successful at either eliminating sugar or simply not being seduced by it when they start with this model of, instead of eliminating, reduce, try these guidelines and feel what it's like to have a balanced body chemistry for a bit, which is very hard to do. When you're used to being in balance, it can be scary to actually feel calm. Once you get good at feeling calm, you're not going to even like the way the sugar feels in your body and you're going to be more, more sensitive even to the taste and to high sugared foods. Like an apple right now tastes like cake for me, so it's. I can't even eat a whole apple sometimes. So your body just gets more intelligent. It's less willpower, it's more of a natural inclination.
FLORENCE:So amazing, amazing. I love that people have options and they are giving them so much hope that they can. They can navigate food in a way that brings them to peace as well as health. They don't have to, like sort of, continue to sacrifice, you know, their wellness, mind and body in because of this pleasure that we get from sugar. That it's really just a small piece that you fit in while walking the path of recovery that's right let's go back to the idea of somatic practices.
FLORENCE:So we've talked about that, but what do you mean by that? So we talked about orienting and getting a sense of your body, you know, in in terms of space. Anything else you want to add about what people need to understand about that piece of the equation?
LUIS MOJICA:It's such a huge question because somatic practices are. I mean, they're infinite, because what we're really talking about is a practice that pauses you so you can physically relate to your body. So when I say something like I'm sad, that's not a somatic practice. That's me cognitively saying I'm sad. The somatic practice would be where does the sadness live in my body? And then I notice, ooh, I feel like a little nausea in my solar plexus. Okay, put your hand. There is what I usually have people do. Okay, let's just hold it for a minute and see what happens. When we just notice the sadness is in there, what happens next? They might say I feel like I'm gonna cry. Or they might say they might yawn. Or they might say they might yawn. Or they might say, oh, I just want to stretch. So they start getting in touch with where the emotion lives in their body and then how it wants to move through their body.
LUIS MOJICA:When I say I'm sad, I'm not actually locating the sadness in me, I'm identifying with sadness. So it's a dissociative experience, because I'm actually leaving the body to identify with sadness instead of saying I have a lot of sadness in my gut right now. That's locating it. When you locate where your emotions live physically in your body. You not have a direct place to tend to. You have a part of you actually get to support and hold. You hear things. You hear the body say things like you need to tell your dad the truth. You know these, these kind of instructions start emerging when you can find where it lives in you.
LUIS MOJICA:The body has so many innate instructions for us. But when we identify with it, I'm sad, I binge eat, I'm depressed. We don't actually feel the sensation behind the behavior or the emotion. So for me, the easy way to kind of answer what is somatic practice means there's so many different ways I do them. It's identifying where the experience lives in your body and then touching it physically with your hand, like holding it and seeing what it shows you. That's one of many, but I would say that's the foundational practice of mine that has really changed my life and I've seen affect thousands of people at this point, just locating where it lives in your body. It gives you something to then attach to and be with instead of I'm just speaking about it as an identity. I don't even know where to begin. That's because we're not in the body.
FLORENCE:That's amazing. You're my only speaker this year. That's on my summit. That talks about the trauma connection with food and health. And the last piece I'd like to explore is that if we're chronically in stress and we're chronically in this freeze response, the trauma response, that state of overwhelm, they're similar, those are the same physiological, neurological, physiological states. It's really difficult to restore our health. So we can do our food perfect and be completely stressed Like I did it.
FLORENCE:I did two and a half no, just almost two years of back-to-back abstinence. I weighed and measured everything. I was obsessed about food. Still I felt better.
FLORENCE:Massive metabolic transformation. I didn't have a migraine for two years, lewis, like that was unprecedented since the age of three. I lost weight. I reversed stage four rosacea, like I had my prescription reversed, like it was a miracle what abstinence did for me, and I'm so grateful that I had a whole community of people to hold me steady while I experienced those transformations in body. But what wasn't transforming was knowing how to stop being in this very dysregulated nervous system of stress collapse, stress collapse. That was a piece that they didn't know about to teach me and I only came to an understanding of that through somatic work. So if it's the case that, yay, you're not eating sugar and there's metabolic healing happening, the body really truly can't heal the rest. Digest repair truly can't heal the rest. Digest repair, grow detox, like that only happens in the parasympathetic. So we can't fully restore our health till we know how to fully restore. Coming back into the parasympathetic, I don't know if people are familiar with those terms or not, but I wanted to give you a chance to speak to that absolutely.
LUIS MOJICA:I mean, that's what I would see in my private practice all the time and in my life at a certain point I would see people having abstinence and having the most, or practicing abstinence, having the most nourishing foods you know, like green juices, grass fed beef or you know, pasture raised chickens or eggs or vegans I mean you name whatever. The diet was beautiful, whole food, mindful eating, exercising. Yet they had no relationship to their body, which sounds strange because you would think, well, inherently you do. But no, you have a relationship to the protocol and the guideline and the structure of what you're doing, but you haven't actually befriended or related to your body yet. So you haven't learned how to help the body regulate from a state of activation to a state of calm or parasympathetic and, like you said, in that state other things repair that food can't even touch.
LUIS MOJICA:Food's comes from the somatic work of connecting to your body, not just having a certain diet that rigidly holds you. Sure, you'll reverse things. I reversed a ton of things as well as you have, and that didn't help me have better relationships to people and that didn't help me have better relationships to people. So there's this two parts to it, purely somatic, part of. On a cellular level, yes, abstinence and whole food eating completely changed our bodies, but on a relational level it doesn't necessarily change how we feel about us or how we connect to the world around us. So for me, the full package is being with food and being with body, and how the two play with each other as you're on the journey of abstinence or recovery or repair.
FLORENCE:Amazing, unbelievable. Any final words you'd like to share today before we wrap up?
LUIS MOJICA:I'll just say, because this is unique work that I offer in 2025, july 2025, I'm doing a six month program that's specifically on the intersection of nutrition and somatics. So it's a ways away from here, but at least people know there's something if they want to dive into this further.
FLORENCE:And if they go to your website, is there a waiting list?
LUIS MOJICA:Is there a chance? Yes, go to the website, click on slow groups and click on embodied nutrition. You can hit the wait list there.
FLORENCE:Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, your work, your wisdom, having lived through all of this and come out the other side and given us so much hope and thanks. Thanks so much.
LUIS MOJICA:Thank you, my friend, and thanks for the summit. I'm just, I'm endlessly grateful for people that put on this incredible acts of generosity so people can get you know accessible help.
FLORENCE:Thanks everybody for tuning in.
