[Ep. 338] How Nutrition Increases Your Capacity To Be Seen & Metabolize Stress

Feeling anxious? Your body might need to down-regulate. 

Feeling depressed? Your body might need to up-regulate. 

This modulation of finding balance can be achieved in two ways, through a simple supportive practice Luis offers, and through food. Food affects our biology 24 hours a day. What we eat can activate us into a fight-or-flight response, effectively inducing stress. Or, we can consciously alchemize our food to support our body to be in a place of balance. No shame either way. 

Eating to balance the nervous system helps the body build capacity to be seen. Luis recommends a snack practice to experiment with and see how your body responds. 

Here are a few ways to learn more: 

• Luis's book Food Therapy, find it at your local bookstore, library, or as an audiobook: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book
• The next six month Embodied Nutrition Slow Group, starting July 7
  https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/slow-practice-nutrition-group

You can read more about, and register for, the upcoming 6 month "Embodied Nutrition" program here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/slow-practice-nutrition-group

You can read more about, and register for, the retreat at Broughton in the UK here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/broughton-2026

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You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

You can follow Luis on Instagram @holistic.life.navigation

Questions? You can email us at info@holisticlifenavigation.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. Nutrition is really important here when you're working with anything that has a high level of stress, even good stress, like you're a musician, you're working really hard on a performance, and tomorrow night's the performance. That experience, that electricity of being attuned to by an audience is a stressor on your body, even when it's delightful. Guess what counterbalances the stressor of being seen? Food. I have written a book, Food Therapy. It became a bestseller in the first week, which really was exciting to see because I wasn't aware of how many people would be interested in this message. Because my message as a nutritionist is not the typical message of how to be healthy, how to eat clean, or how to even detoxify. It's a message about how to eat food in order to regulate your nervous system. And we hear so much these days about nervous system regulation because somatic psychology has become very successful and it's kind of becoming a bit mainstream, which I think is good. I want it to be mainstream. I don't want it to be a subculture because it has the potential of really having profound effects on our collective and individual lives. Because when you start living an embodied experience, you start to notice how your body actually experiences what you go through. Instead of your mind saying, I like that or I don't like that, your body shows you through tension and bracing. And so a lot of people jumped on the somatic psychology bandwagon, especially via somatic experiencing, which is the branch I'm trained in. And in somatic experiencing, we talk so much about nervous system regulation, which most people see as calming down or being more grounded or more settled. But there's much more to nervous system regulation than that. But let's first understand what it even means. What does nervous system regulation mean? Well, let's rewind nervous system dysregulation. Dysregulation of the nervous system means it becomes activated. So you're heightened, you have a lot of adrenaline surging through your body, your muscles are tight, there's a lot of electricity and energy coursing through your entire body, but even up into your brain. And it creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of stress. When we say I'm stressed, that's usually what we're referring to. But then there's the nervous system being really low. This is where we feel depressed. This is where we live in states of collapse or even functional freeze, not having a lot of energy, not being highly motivated, feeling very down, feeling a little cognitively foggy, foggy cognitively, however you want to say that. And what this means when we talk about being regulated is the downstate comes up or the upstate comes down. It's able to move. I prefer the term modulated, actually. Modulated is even more practical because for some people, becoming regulated and balanced means a little activation. They need to come up in energy to get to their equilibrium. Or some people who are highly anxious need to come down to reach their equilibrium. So whether your body has to come up or down, it's trying to reach a balanced equilibrium where it isn't overly heightened and stressed out all the time, but it isn't hypo activated and collapsed and depressed and unmotivated. It's in this nice middle place. But to achieve that balance, it consistently flows up and down instead of spiking or dropping, right? So a lot of people will employ, as I do, somatic practices, things like putting your hand on your chest and your belly. One of my favorites is letting your head be held by something and grabbing a pillow and squeezing it and looking at one thing in the room that delights you and just feeling what your body does as you do that. It's an excellent way to practice coming up or coming down, depending on where you are and eating balance. But one of the most overlooked resources or tools or beings that can help regulate or modulate these nervous systems is our food. Our food choices greatly impact the health of our nervous system because your food actually has the ability to turn on your fight or flight responses, which is a really big deal if you think about it. Because you might spend five minutes in the morning meditating, you might do a few minutes of breath practices or breathing exercises, you might do physical exercise for 30 to even 90 minutes. You may do yoga three or four times a week for 75 minutes. Most people go to therapy, especially when they're doing somatic work, an hour a week or an hour bi-weekly. But your food choices affect your biology 24 hours a day. Only 24 hours a day. So if you consider the impact, the deep influence, the long-lasting influence food has on your biology, I think it's pretty easy to deduce that food is probably the most profound influencer of nervous system health. And that's because certain foods turn into glucose, blood sugar, very rapidly. And whenever they do that, you end up having a fight or flight response. So you literally, your body creates more adrenaline, that same hormone that makes you activated, that stresses you out, that overwhelms you, that gives you anxiety. The thing that we get when we get in a car accident, or we're fighting with someone, or we're outrunning a predator. That same physiology is happening when you have pancakes for breakfast, or when you had coffee and you skip something solid, or when you eat a lot of sugar, or when you forget to eat for hours at a time, that same physiology of fight or flight happens. So this is important to understand before you go into my claim about well, how does this correlate to being seen and having more capacity to be seen? When you understand how food affects your nervous system, you can start to get really curious about my philosophy that I write about in my food therapy book, which is food-induced stress. Food-induced stress means the food I eat literally creates a stress response, regardless of what I'm going through. And I experienced this once in my bedroom. I was laying down, having sugary foods by candlelight, writing in a journal, listening to beautiful music, totally at peace. And my body was so activated by the flight or fight or flight response that occurred from the sugar spike. So it didn't matter that I was safe, that I was in a beautiful environment, that I had nothing to do for a couple hours. What mattered to my body is when your glucose spikes or dips, your body experiences that as a threat. My body experiences that as a potential threat to survival. And whenever the body experiences something as a threat to survival, the adrenals kick in and you have a stress response, regardless of whether it's a thought, something you ate, or an actual potential threat occurring in real time in your environment. So when you start to understand that, then you get to go into what I call conscious alchemy. You learn about these three categories of foods I talk about: stimulants, depressants, and balancers. And this is all detailed in my book. You can literally buy the audiobook right now, anywhere books are sold online, and listen to it when you're done with this episode, or order the physical book and then highlight it and write little notes and have it for the rest of your life as a guide. However, you want to read it, you're gonna get a lot out of it. But when you understand these three food categories, you become a conscious alchemist because now you can say, hmm, based on my circumstance, I'm tired, I need some energy, I'm gonna use a stimulant. But at lunchtime, I'm gonna have some balancers to ground my body. Now, when I get home from work, I'm a little anxious. I'm gonna have a little bit of a depressant to slow things down, but I'm gonna have a balancing snack to act as a speed bump to help my body get some support and peace before I go to bed so I can sleep deeper and recover. Now, when you learn how to use food in that way through a nervous system lens, you then learn how to use food to increase what I call capacity. Capacity is your body's ability to withstand experiences, emotions, and the sensations that occur from them. So when you have low capacity, the body's usually quite constricted. The body's usually overproducing adrenaline and it's so stressed out, it doesn't really have much bandwidth to adhere or to experience anything new, right? To have a to have the receptivity of any new sensation or information or experience. This can even happen relationally, where you suddenly feel cold and shut down with someone, you lack the capacity to connect. Well, when people are talking about being seen, whether it's in front of an audience, in front of their partner, or even in themselves, seeing parts of themselves, seeing emotions unfold from their subconscious. You need capacity for that. And the most, I should say, the most self-sabotage I have seen from people, especially people in businesses, when it comes to being seen, it comes from a low capacity and trying to put a body with low capacity into an environment with high sensation. That creates shutdown. That creates immobility, that creates overwhelm. So this is where food comes in. When your food choices are predominantly balancing, meaning the effect they have on your body is not to stimulate or depress you, when the effect they have is not to secrete more adrenaline and create more fight or flight response, more stress response. Your inner body has space, it has peace, it has a resource of nutrients and much more capacity to then deal with stress. And being seen is a stressor. Being seen is very unusual. It's a modern day phenomenon because historically we were not seen, we were a collective. We were a school of fish, we were a pack of wolves, we were embedded in a tribal collective village setting where we all worked together to better our lives and survive together. One person wasn't standing out like a celebrity. One person wasn't having thousands of people following them on Instagram. There was not one person, there was a collective. So our bodies have this really old, important survival strategy that says you will get further when you embed. And the more you are seen, the further you are from the collective, the more dangerous that is, the more vulnerable it is, the more you risk threat from predators and even warring tribes. So our bodies, even though in this modern era I'm on a you know computer right now talking to you, my mind knows no big deal. But my body says, this is really strange. I'm letting hundreds of thousands of people see me and hear me and attune to me and write to me. And it can be very terrifying, especially when you have a history of relational ruptures, of bullying, of cancellation attempts, anything where being seen is read by your body as dangerous, in addition to this ancestral survival response I'm talking about. So nutrition is really important here when you're working with anything that has a high level of stress, even good stress, like you're a musician and you're working really hard on a performance, and tomorrow night's the performance. That experience, that electricity of being attuned to by an audience is a stressor on your body, even when it's delightful. Guess what counterbalances the stressor of being seen? Food. Because when your food is not creating more adrenaline, you have more space to handle and metabolize the adrenaline that's created from being seen, from doing big things, through navigating ruptures by risking honesty. I mean, honesty is one of the riskiest things in the world because you risk potential rupture, disagreement, being misunderstood, being disliked. All those things require capacity. So I want you to start thinking of your nutrition as a way to increase your capacity for life. Not just to be healthy, but to have more capacity, because plenty of healthy foods actually activate and stimulate the nervous system. I've seen people lose weight, reverse illnesses, uh, reverse skin rashes, grow more hair, become fertile, all while also activating their nervous system. So they were a little more stressed and irritable, maybe sleeping a little less, but had these profound healing outcomes because some food that's stimulating is also very nourishing. It has antioxidants and vitamins and minerals and certain phytochemicals that are really protective on one hand, even though they stress you out on the other. So the way I'm teaching nutrition is not through a health lens, it's through a lens of how does it affect your nervous system. And can we do both? Can we still intend on certain health outcomes and needs while doing it through a nervous system perspective? That's what my book is all about. And that's what my upcoming six-month program, Embodied Nutrition, is all about. For six months, I'll be teaching you how to navigate all foods, whether they're processed, unprocessed, fat, protein, carbs, how to eat carbs, not restrict them, how to navigate labels, how to do all this through the somatic lens. Each month I'll teach one session just on the somatics of food. And the same month, I'll teach a second session on the nutritional biochemistry of food. So you'll leave cognitively learning how and why food affects you in a certain way. And I'll give you a guideline each month about how to experiment with certain foods. And you'll also leave with a felt sense of understanding the emotional uh attachment and result and consequence of certain foods. And when you bring these two things together, you get a really holistic way to navigate nutrition, eating disorders, trauma, and stress recovery because your food now becomes a source of safety, not something you stress over or become stressed out from. For more information on that, you can go to holisticlifenavigation.com or you can visit the link in the episode details. Tell me what you think about this and tell me what you notice in your body when you try it out. And you know what? Before I go, I want to give you something to do right now because I realized I didn't really give you anything actionable. And I don't want to leave you, you know, I don't I don't want to have a cliffhanger when uh some of you are not gonna sign up for this program. So I'm gonna give you a really simple thing to try, and it's simple. Maybe not easy, but simple. It's called fat-based snacks. And I want you to think about these fat-based snacks as speed bumps through your day, meaning as your day goes on, your glucose is spiking and dipping, and that's creating your fight or flight response and increasing the amount of anxiety and stress your body holds. So, a speed bump for this to slow down that stress response is fat. So, I want you to consider this two to three hours after every meal you have, I want you to have a snack that includes a fat with some kind of a fiber from greens. So I'll give you some ideas. It can be avocado with cucumbers, one of my favorite. It can be nut or seed butter with celery, it can be hummus with olive oil and carrots. I want you to have some vegetable with some kind of fat two to three hours after eating. If you skip breakfast because you just can't stomach it, two to three hours after skipping breakfast. So this gives you two or three snacks a day. Don't worry right now about calories. Don't think about nutrition the way we tend to. Just notice how you feel when you have this fat-based snack with some kind of a fibrous vegetable. Uh, one other option if you're just sick of vegetables and you want something sweet, bring in apples, pears, or berries with the fat. So I love, for example, two or three handfuls of salted cashews with two handfuls of blueberries. One of my favorite snacks, really easy to take on the road, really easy to grab out of the fridge and just eat without much preparation. So try these fat-based snacks two to three hours after you eat or after you skip a meal, and just notice your body. Notice how it's feeling. Do you have more emotional wellness? Are you more balanced emotionally? Do you feel more settled? How does your emotional body and your physical body react to this? Let me know below. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place. Maybe even put your hand over it and let whatever wants to come up come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.