145: Bloating, famine brain, my exercise routine, unwanted weight gain, trigger foods, God giving me Heart Led Eating: Listener Q+A

I've got my phone on Do Not Disturb. I'm ready to go. I'm so excited for this listener Q&A. It's been a while since we've done one of these and some of you say that these are your favorite episodes. So I'm really excited to dive into your questions. I'm Ashlyn, the host of Heartlet Wellness, the creator of Heartlet Eating. So grateful to be here with you once again. Let's dive into this episode. I have not prepared anything for those podcasts. I just wrote down some questions that got sent in from Instagram and I'm just gonna riff off of them today. So if you are one of my clients, you know that this is kind of how we run our our group coaching calls is we just talk and we explore and we see wherever we go. It's much better when I'm actually with a client or in my groups because I can ask you questions back and we can start to explore deeper things. So this is going to be not as easy for me because I'm I'm the kind of coach that really likes to ask questions back and get to know the root of the question. But for the sake of this episode, I'm just going to do my best to try and explore what you're actually asking. Question number one is can you discuss the scarcity mindset in relation to food? It feels confusing. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. So I have identified eight root causes when it comes to food struggles, whether you're struggling with overeating, under eating, obsessing about food, obsessing about your health. There are eight root causes that I see in my clients over and over and over again that are actually driving that food dysregulation. And scarcity is one of these root causes. So if you want to know if scarcity is your root cause, you can take the free quiz that I made. I'll link it in the show notes to see if it is. But when we have scarcity, a scarcity mindset around food, essentially your brain is living in what I call famine brain. When you have been on lots of diets or you've restricted your food, you've cut out certain foods, you've tried to meticulously micromanage your food, your brain starts to perceive food as scarce. Even if you are living in a world, which most of us are listening to this podcast, you are, even if you're living in a world where there's actual abundance of food around you, there's grocery stores on every corner, you can doordash, Uber eats food whenever you want, you probably have a refrigerator and a pantry full of food. Your brain doesn't feel like food is actually abundant because you have restricted your food. You're either ignoring hunger or you're creating all these rules around food or you're going on diets. And so your brain starts to feel like you're living in a famine. And so when you have famine brain activated, your brain feels the need to hoard food when you have access to it because it feels like that's your only chance to eat. Essentially your brain is saying, I don't know if she's going to start restricting again after this, I don't know if she's going to avoid hunger after this, I don't know if she's going to cut out food after this. And so right now while food is in front of me, I need to eat as much as I can to a stock up for winter essentially. So in order to actually leave scarcity mode, leave famine brain behind and step into eating like a naturally thin person, we have to reprogram your brain to see food as abundant. If we don't actually do that subconscious rewiring and literally shift your brain out of famine brain and into abundance brain, you're not going to actually be able to stop overeating or stop binging or stop having all of that food noise because your brain is going to be stuck on that old pattern of feeling like food is scarce. This is why you can't really relationship with food without actually doing that deeper subconscious rewiring and learning how to create the brain of a natural eater. Naturally, then people have abundance brain. They're not living in famine brain. They see food as abundant. This is why they can leave a few bites of food on their plate, even if it's something incredibly delicious because they see food as abundant. They're not scared that food is going to be removed from their life at the drop of a hat. Hope that makes sense. The second question is would your program work for someone who has binge eating disorder for 15 years? Yes, next question. I'm just kidding. Let's talk about it. Yes, absolutely. I have worked with clients who have been struggling with food for, I think the longest is 60 plus years. I've worked with some women in their 70s who have been struggling with food for 60 plus years and they have been able to fully heal from those food issues and return to eating naturally. Yes, 15 years is nothing. That'd be easy. Just kidding. Of course, I don't want to minimize your experience. I know that 15 years probably feels like a really long time to you and I know for me, struggling with food for even five to 10 years felt like forever and it doesn't really matter how long you've been struggling with food because within you there is a natural eater. At your core, you are a natural eater. You are a naturally thin person. You come into this world with an instruction manual on how to eat. It's called your body's built in calorie calculator. Infants are extremely connected to this built in guide and somewhere along the road you have disconnected from it either through diets or trauma or nervous system dysregulation or watching people around you go on diets, watching your caregivers go on diets and so you've lost connection to that guide but that guide is still within you. Through heartlet eating, we're not trying to create this whole new identity of this wellness influencer who knows how to track her protein and her blood sugar and all the things. We're actually just returning to the innate wisdom that's within you. Even if you've been binge eating for 15 years, deep inside of you is this natural eater and we need to remove the blocks that are clouding you from connecting to that natural eater. This goes back to what I was just talking about with root causes. There are unhealed, subconscious root causes right now that are blocking you from eating in that natural connected way. You can logically know how to eat. You probably already do. You're like, "Yeah, if I were to just eat when I was hungry, stop when I was full, then I wouldn't have a problem." But the problem is that I can't do that. I know what to do but I can't do it. That's because you have these unhealed root causes where your nervous system is leaning on food for regulation and safety. If we don't heal those things, if we don't grow your nervous system capacity and do that deeper nervous system work, you're not going to be able to eat normally because your system is using food as a regulating device, as a regulating tool. In order to heal from binge eating disorder in a matter of how long it's been, there are two things that we need to do. We need to actually heal your root cause, grow your nervous system capacity. Those are kind of grouped together. Then we need to remind you of that natural eater within you and practically learn how to eat in that way. Because if it's been that long, you've probably forgotten how to read your built-in calorie calculator. We need to get into the nitty gritty nuanced details of how to eat to a naturally thin person. You can connect to that in it wisdom within you. I would love to support you with this. The link to Heartlet Eating is in the show notes as always, where we can really explore this together and I can personally guide you. I'm a super hands-on coach, so if you join Heartlet Eating, we're going to become best friends. I'm going to get to know everything about you and I can't wait for that. Okay, next question. Once you mentioned, you're going to tell the story of how God gave you Heartlet Eating. There's no question to this, but I think this person is asking me to tell the story. Yes, I can tell the story. I'll keep it brief and maybe I'll make an entire episode about this because it's kind of a long story, but Heartlet Eating is fully channeled through. Through God. This might sound a little woo-woo to some of you, but it's my truth. When I was healing my relationship with food, I was working with a lot of therapists eating disorder, practitioners, coaches, and a lot of them actually made my relationship with food worse. I'm sure that I was maybe working with some people who shouldn't have been eating disorder advice. I remember there was one therapist that I had in high school who told me that in order to heal my relationship with food, I just needed to start tracking my macros. She was like, "Have you heard of this thing called if it fits your macros?" She was like, "It's amazing. You can just eat whatever you want as long as it fits your macros." I remember sitting in her office on the couch feeling so confused. Like, did this therapist just tell me that in order to heal from this eating disorder that I have, I need to track my macros. She clearly had her own issues with food and maybe she shouldn't have said that, but what I'm trying to say is I definitely received a lot of advice and support that actually made my relationship with food worse. I started to lose faith in the recovery world and especially when I started to gain a lot of weight from binge eating and overeating and then I had a lot of coaches and therapists tell me that I just needed to accept my body and not try to lose weight and that maybe this was just the way I was meant to be at and deep down in my own interknowing and maybe this was also God speaking to me, I felt like that just was not the end game. Like, that just didn't make sense to me. I really felt like it was my birthright to have a normal relationship with food and also live in a body that felt good to me. It seems like it wasn't fair that I had to pick between the two either having a period or having a lean body or having a normal relationship with food or having a lean body. I didn't want to choose between the two. And And I couldn't find any therapist or coach who was like, okay, with that. They were all telling me that I had to just accept the weight gain and their methods of recovery were very much eat whatever you want whenever you want, just like go have all your food rules, like it's disordered to have any sort of boundaries around food. And so I stopped seeing these therapists, these coaches, and I decided I'm just gonna figure this out on my own. I'm a very high achieving driven, independent kind of person, and I was like, I'm gonna figure this out on my own. And that was when I started to really question some of the people in my life who were naturally thin. I guess this could be a God thing too. I was blessed to have some friends and family members who have never struggled with food, have always lived in a thin body, have periods for the women that I spoke with. And I thought, okay, these people are doing something that I'm not doing. They are not struggling with food, and they have a lean body. And I used to think it was just their metabolism or their genetics, but as I started to actually talk to these people about their relationship with food and just observe them, I started to really watch their behaviors. I was blown away at what I learned about how they eat, and it's very different than what eating disorder recovery people tell you to do, or what intuitive eaters even tell you to do. I know a lot of the intuitive eating world is very like, check in with your higher self and see what your divine higher self is calling you to eat in this moment. That's not how naturally thin people eat. They're not thinking about food in that way. And I started to apply the things that I was learning from them to my own life. Simultaneously at the same time, I was deep in my studies of polyvagal theory and the nervous system. And I'm a nerd for those of you who don't know. I love to learn, I love to geek out, and so I was going so hard to have this rabbit hole of the nervous system, and studying the work of Dr. Steven Porgis, who is the creator of polyvagal theory. I ended up getting certified in polyvagal theory for coaching, and was also studying integrative health care at the time. So I was just deep in this nervous system emotional holistic health rabbit hole. And also I started working with a somatic coach. So I was doing some deeper trauma healing and somatic work on my own system, nervous system work, and then studying naturally thin people at the same time. And I started to see this framework of eating that nobody had explained to me before. I felt like nobody was even talking about it. And I started to pair together nervous system stuff and natural eating stuff. And I started to see how all of my food issues were related to my nervous system, and how that was really the root cause of it all, but also the practical side of how I needed to learn how to eat was like a naturally thin person. And so I need to speed this up 'cause I'm talking too much. I basically started eating in this way. I healed my relationship with food at this nervous system level, and I started eating like a naturally thin person. And then I realized I was working with clients one on one at this point, and I had such a long wait list. It's like a year's long still to this day. I cannot get through the wait list. And I was like, I need to make this into a course. Like there's so much here that's in my mind. I need to turn it into a complete step-by-step guide that walks somebody through the exact process that I went through that allowed me to lose weight and heal my relationship with food at the same time. Get into the lean thin body that I knew I wanted, have a period, and also have food freedom. I felt like no one was talking about that. So I was like, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna make it. But I didn't have the language to even really describe what I was doing because at this point, it wasn't even called heartlet eating. It was just the thing that I had done to heal my relationship with food. And so I remember I sat down with my computer and I opened up a word document, and I just stared at the word document, and I had no idea where to start, what to write. I had no like framework or structure or like modules. Like it was just, I was like, this is all my life. I don't even know how to create language around this. And this is what I mean when I say, God gave me heartlet eating, because as I started to just write and create, it felt like things were just being dropped into my brain, dropped into my heart, and moved through me into my computer. And it took me an entire year to create heartlet eating, what is now heartlet eating. And there are so many visions and images, and like lessons and modules and things inside heartlet eating that really felt like God kind of dropped into my brain and dropped into visions that I then created language for. And it's like even better than I could have ever imagined. I'm completely obsessed with heartlet eating. It's so good. And I'm so grateful that I feel like I was open to receiving that from God, and I really do believe that my mission here, one of them on this planet is to help women eat normally and eat in the way that God intended us to eat, whether you believe in God or the universe or source, whatever it is for you. I believe that us as humans have an innate way of eating that we're meant to eat. And a lot of us have just completely lost the plot with all the wellness noise and the food noise and the dieting noise. And I really do feel that healing your relationship with food is a spiritual process. And heartlet eating is a spiritual process, even from the way that it was conceived. So that's the short story, but still very much so much of what I teach, I feel is just channeling through me as I share. I always pray before every single one of my client sessions and group calls. And I always ask that God will speak through me and share things through me that need to be said. And I feel it, I get goosebumps so many times during sessions. Okay, moving on 'cause I could talk about that all day. And the next question is what does a week of movement and exercise look like for you? It really just depends on the week. I exercise in the same way that I eat. I do not have a workout like structure. I mean, I have a very loose structure, but I really just listen to my body. I know that sounds so bland. Everyone is telling you to listen to your body, but that is what I do. If I have energy to move, I will move in a way that feels good. Sometimes I do Pilates, sometimes I do strength training, sometimes I go on walks or I do yoga. Lately I've been really into incline walking on the treadmill. And I was first healing my relationship with food and trying to get my period back. I took a long time off of all forms of exercise. I just walked or did nothing. And as I recovered and started to heal, I noticed that my body started to naturally ask for movement again. And I started to add back in some Pilates and some strength training. And it wasn't until the past few months where this was such a crazy experience. I had this like deep desire to do cardio, which is crazy, because I've never felt that way before in my life, because I was always obsessively exercising and just burning out my body. But I've even been having dreams of myself lately, like running or jumping around in dreams. And so I started doing some gentle incline walking on the treadmill and that has been feeling so good. But like with all things, I only do it if I have energy to do it and I really do prioritize rest as much as I possibly can. Why do I get so bloated no matter how much or how little I eat? Probably because bloating has a lot more to do with your nervous system than it does with food. I used to suffer from extreme digestive issues. My entire life, even as an infant, I had horrible digestive issues. And I can say with my hand over my heart, the root cause of my gut issues was my nervous system. And this is coming from somebody who did all sorts of physical things, parasite cleanses and heavy metal detoxes and coffee animas and red light therapy over my gut. And IV therapy and working with all sorts of functional practitioners. And yes, these things are helpful. And I'm not gonna say that I didn't have actual microbiome overgrowth and physical things going on 'cause I definitely did. But I can see how from a young age, I was experiencing what I now know to be nervous system dysregulation. My system was constantly living in sympathetic fight or flight. I was a very anxious child. And of course, I was experiencing gut issues when my nervous system was living in fight or flight. Because when your nervous system is activated, it interferes with the digestive process. Your food is not going to be broken down properly. It's not going to move through your system properly. Your motility is going to be impacted. And that is gonna create bloating, constipation, gas, diarrhea. These are all symptoms of nervous system dysregulation. And then if we add the layer on top of it of you have an unhealed relationship with food, eating and food can actually feel traumatic to your body. You have so much wrapped up in food and the experience of food entering your body feels traumatic to your system. There's so much hyper vigilance around it that your body is not gonna digest that food. If you have a lot of food rules, if you're scared of eating everything, you're scared of gaining weight, you're gonna be eating from a place of dysregulation and that's gonna create bloating. It doesn't matter if you're eating the most perfect anti-inflammatory seed oil-free fod-map friendly AIP diet. If you're eating from dysregulation, that food is not good. going to be digested optimally. And so in order to heal bloating or heal digestive issues, it's really important that you actually heal your relationship with food. First of all, and let go of those food rules in that intense gripping energy that you have around food. But also your nervous system at a deeper level. We need to go into your nervous system. We need to release suppressed emotions that haven't had a chance to get processed. We need to grow your capacity, learn how to be in your body, all the things that we do inside HLE, heart-led eating, in order to actually address the root cause of these gut issues. I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with who have had gut issues completely go away after doing heart-led eating. That wasn't even their intention for joining heart-led eating, but they're like, how is my digestion the best has ever been? Because your nervous system is finally feeling supported, you're finally feeling safe, and you're eating in the way that you're meant to eat, which is going to help your digestion. When you're not under-eating, or you're not overeating, or just eating normally, your digestion can finally regulate as well. What if food and exercise are my main sources of purpose, and joy, and life? When I take it away, life feels empty. I used to feel this way as well, because if you're obsessing about food, and you're obsessing about exercise, it's probably what you're thinking about most of the time. You're probably watching what I eat in a day videos, and everything you follow on Instagram is about fitness and health and nutrition, and if you imagine your life without those things, it's gonna feel empty, because that is what you're putting all of your attention and effort into right now. And so we need to build your life in a way that you enjoy. Your life needs to be more enjoyable than food and exercise. You're not here on this planet to eat. You didn't come to this planet to just eat three times a day. Yes, you need to eat to survive, but you are so much more than food and exercise. Your life is so much more than that, and we need to actually work on building a life that feels more important than eating an exercise. But we can't even get there. You can't even imagine that if we don't heal the reason why you're gripping onto food and exercise, because right now you're probably using eating, you're using exercise as a way to feel safe. Your obsession with it is actually a way to feel safe. You could even be obsessing about it because there are emotions and things in your life that you don't feel ready to face or feel. And so your brilliant nervous system, your brilliant brain are creating an obsession with food and exercise to distract you from the things that don't feel, you don't feel safe to be with yet. I know a lot of times I see clients who are just constantly thinking about food, constantly thinking about exercise, and there's actually some like big life stuff going on that they are not feeling safe to be with, not feeling safe to feel, whether it's a relationship that is misaligned or a career that is misaligned or living in an environment that's misaligned, or even just trauma that they haven't actually felt or dealt with or faced. And so the obsession with food is actually protecting you from those things. So we need to like get your life in order at first. Your life doesn't need to be perfect in order to heal, but we need to be able to feel our life. So that way food doesn't take on the role of distracting you from that. But then we need to practically add in purpose, enjoy into your life and create a life that is exciting and that you like being in. Because then you're not gonna need food to create all of that pleasure because your life is actually pleasurable. I've allowed lots of trigger foods to be normalized, but now I've gained 20 pounds. There's not a question here, but I can assume you're wondering what I would say to this. There's a difference between allowing trigger foods, like normalizing quote unquote trigger foods and healing a relationship with food and learning how to eat these foods normally. This is kind of what I was talking about in the beginning of this episode around how a lot of the intuitive eating world just says we need to normalize the sugar, we need to normalize these processed foods, like just eat them whenever you want, whenever you want, whenever you want, whenever you want, however much you want, so how we can normalize them. But this is still out of order eating, this ordered eating, disconnected eating. Naturally thin people are not eating french fries to prove that they're recovered. They eat french fries when their body is asking for it and when they're hungry and they actually have space to receive it. And so we have to not only normalize these foods, but we have to learn how to eat them within the boundaries of your body. You have to learn how to eat them based on your built in calorie calculator. So you're not over consuming food because over consuming food is still disordered eating. I know some of us come from this extreme place of restriction and so it's so a lot of the recovery world pushes just eat, just eat, just eat, just like replenish, or just eat as much as you can. That's still disconnected eating. We need to have boundaries around this. We need to learn how to eat normally again with the weight gain piece of this. And you said you've gained 20 pounds. I don't know where you started at. I don't know if you were underweight. If you were actually underweight, then potentially this is healthy weight that your body actually needed to gain. If it feels like excess storage to you and it doesn't feel like it was necessary weight gain, then we know that there's been disconnected eating happening. You've either been eating these quote unquote trigger foods when you're not hungry or past your optimal fullness point or when your body is not actually asking for them because connected eating isn't just about eating between hunger and fullness. It's also about listening to the type of food that your body is actually asking for. And when we are connected, we are able to feel that more accurately and we can tell if we are wanting to eat something from an aligned place where it's like, yes, this is something my body and soul actually want right now versus a regulation place where we have cravings and urges and we feel this like poll or this chaotic energy towards the food, not because it's actually aligned but because we're using that food for regulation. So when you eat trigger foods as you're calling them or I would guess that there may be soul foods within the boundaries of your body, you're not gonna be gaining excess storage from that. And the last thing I will say is with hyper-palatable foods with soul foods, we have to learn how to hear satisfaction cues with these foods. Fulness cues and satisfaction cues are very different. I go into this in so much depth inside heart-leading because when we're eating highly processed, highly palatable foods, we need to pay attention to the more nuanced energetic subtle cues that tell us that our soul has had enough, not necessarily just stomach sensation because our bodies are really not designed to eat these foods. Our bodies are designed to eat whole natural, I call them body foods from the earth. We've created this world of hyper-political, extremely tasty foods and our bodies aren't necessarily like programmed to know when to stop with those foods but we do have satisfaction cues which is what naturally thin people lean on so we can sense the density and the richness of a food more subtly and stop before we over consume that food. So if you wanna know the difference between fullness and satisfaction, it's inside heart-leading in the soul wisdom module, we go into it in so much depth there. Let's see how much time do I have left? Let me do a few more. I'm, let's see, I'm sometimes not hungry and then when I start eating, I'm ravenous. What do I have to do? Okay, let me explain why this is probably happening. There could be a couple of things going on but if you are not feeling hungry but it's been a long time since you've eaten and you probably know that your body is actually eating food, there's a good chance that your hunger cues are being blunted by your nervous system. When our nervous system is activated and living in either fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, any state other than safety, we can't necessarily hear stomach hunger as clearly and it's not that your body doesn't need food, it's just that you can't actually hear that hunger. And then once you start eating, your body senses that food is coming in and you have that feeling of like I just need to eat everything right now because I don't know when I'm going to eat next. And that's the second thing that I wanted to say is that if there's any lingering restriction going on or avoiding hunger or even over exercising, your body is going to want to hoard food once you start eating because there's this fear that you're going to overcompensate later or you're not going to eat enough later, which comes back to the scarcity mindset that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, we need to create abundance with food so you know that even after this eating occasion ends, there's gonna be another eating occasion and you're going to honor hunger the next time it comes. So practically what we want to do is first of all, heal the root cause behind why you're not experiencing hunger, probably because there's chronic nervous system activation going on so we need to learn how to feel safe throughout the day so you can hear clear stomach hunger. And then we also need to get your brain out of famine brain back into abundance brain. And the last thing I will say is once you start eating sometimes we can have this activation of old binge pathways where there's actual neurological pathways in your brain that associate just all eating with binging or with overeating. And so your brain starts to feel like food equals binge. And once I give myself permission to eat, I need to just eat it all right now cause maybe that's what you did in the past. And this is an instance where we want to learn how to process. process that urge to eat past fullness and honor the body's stopping point, honor that boundary of fullness and deal with the dysregulation that's triggering overeating separately. And that requires learning how to process urges through the body somatically so you can let go of those neurological pathways and rewire your brain to want to honor hunger and fullness, not because you're forcing yourself to but because you genuinely want to. The last one I will answer for today says, "Can you please list some affirmations to heal your subconscious beliefs around food?" No. I'm not going to do that because I don't believe in affirmations. I have so much to say about this. I do not think affirmations are necessarily the biggest way to move the needle when it comes to your relationship with food because you could sit around all day and say, "I am healthy, I am vital, I am not a binge eater, I eat in a connected way, but if your nervous system is dysregulated, those affirmations are not actually going to land, our thoughts are a reflection of our nervous system. If you're living in fight or flight, if you're living in shutdown, your thoughts are going to reflect that state. And so if we actually shift your nervous system first, your thoughts will naturally follow. If we shift your system into a state of safety, you will naturally believe the truth that you are a natural eater and that you can eat within the boundaries of your body. It's not going to feel like something you're trying to convince yourself of, you're just going to naturally feel that to be true. And so what I do with my clients more than affirmations is focus on the root cause and bottom-up approach, body to brain approach, get the nervous system into a state of regulation and then naturally your mind will follow. And as far as healing the subconscious beliefs, like healing the subconscious root causes, we do this through a lot of somatic and like inner child reprogramming parts work inside HLE. And this is more than just affirmations. We have to actually go back into these memories and these moments in your life when these root causes got created and rewire them, reprogram them into your brain. And there's a lot of specific visualizations and somatics and body stuff that I have developed throughout the years that allows us to do this, which is all inside heartlet eating. So I wish there was like a magic spell I could wave a wand right now and just reprogram your brain, but it requires so much more than that, which is why I created heartlet eating. That's where I'm going to stop for today. I hope this episode was helpful and I'll for sure make more of these in the future. So if you have a question or I didn't get to your question, send it to me on Instagram and I'll add it to my list for the next time that we do this series of listener Q&A's. So grateful to be here with you and I will talk to you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]