Are Your Thoughts Making You Gain Weight?

Confession: I took a page out of the media handbook and hit you with a headline to get your attention. Weight gain is not as simple as “thinking it into existence.”

But I CAN tell you this: what you think about your food changes your ability to absorb and utilize nutrients.

Have you heard of the cephalic phase of digestion?

This phase is crucial to how our food is utilized. How and what you THINK about your food impacts the way your body absorbs and utilizes nutrients. In fact, researchers have shown that 30-40% of our digestive response is due to the cephalic phase, which is our awareness of what we are consuming.

This is what your brain needs to know:

Does it smell good?
Is it colorful?
Does it look appealing?
Are you grateful for it?
Does it appear to be a threat to your survival?
Will you feel nourished and safe with this meal?

The crazy thing is, you’re not even thinking these things on a conscious level. But your body picks up on it. In fact, there is an interesting component to this phase, called the “cephalic phase insulin response.” Simply thinking about carbs, or even fantasizing about a piece of cake or candy you are restricting, can cause your body to produce excess insulin. This is just another reason I like to focus on the principle of ADDITION over RESTRICTION… and another reason I hate dieting. Stress is stress to your body, whether it’s a perceived stressor or a real stressor.

So, this holiday season, be intentional about pleasure. Get excited to sit down and eat a nourishing meal with those you care about. I always say, “a body in stress will not digest,” and this reminder is needed even more so during the holidays.

When you sit to eat, slow down, breathe in between bites, and chew your food. Remember – the only part of digestion you can control is the amount of times you chew to assist in the breakdown. Be sure to allow your senses to take over; that’s when the magic happens. Food heals. It brings peace.

Food is crucial for survival. We must create a relationship with food that makes us feel safe.

If not, we make what is intended to be a restful and healing experience a stressful and inflammatory experience.

Your body will let you know which is which.

If you need help with any of the above, reach out! Optimizing digestion is a big part of what I like to work on with my one-on-one clients. We also dive into this a bit in my Feast 2 Fast program, which re-launches early in January. It looks like another weight loss program, but I assure you, it’s all about incorporating real food into our real lives – and allowing room for the fun food we get pleasure from.

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with good food, good people, and lots of good JOY!

Make Like a Tree and Let Go

There are less than 50 days left in the year. This inspires a lot of go-getters, influencers, self-help authors, and leadership coaches to call for some kind of goal-setting push to finish the year strong.

But I want to consider something else.

Instead of doing a hard push, forcing yourself to live up to some imaginary expectation for yourself only YOU are freaking out about, let’s acknowledge what you’ve been through and the coping mechanisms you’ve developed in effort to support you.

No judgment. No shaming.

I’ll go first.

When I’m stressed, I like to numb out with a bag of flavored chips that will make me feel like crap afterwards.

Do I want to do it? No. Is it “healthy” from a physical, mental, or spiritual standpoint? Probably not. But it’s familiar to me. It’s comfort. This coping skill worked when I was younger. It brought me temporary relief and comfort when I was depressed and couldn’t find relief or a way out of the dark hole I had fallen into.

By beating myself up for continuing to fall victim to my coping behavior, I make it worse, and cause more stress… making me more likely to repeat the behavior, perpetuating the cycle of unpleasant feeling, coping, shame, unpleasant feeling, shame, and coping.

So the worst thing I can do, in order to cope with my stress, is to add on more rigidity, more standards to live by, forcing an already stressed out and emotionally dysregulated brain into more dysregulation.

It’s going to backfire. My brain wants to keep me alive, and when things get hard, my brain will find the familiar way out. Every time. It’s what brains do.

Continue reading “Make Like a Tree and Let Go” →

Why Cutting Calories Creates Long-term Chaos

Are you cutting calories to lose weight?

A recent groundbreaking study, authored by 17 experts in the field, was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition called, “The Carbohydrate-insulin Model: a Physiological Perspective on the Obesity Pandemic.”

This study highlights these important areas:

An excess of calories doesn’t cause fat storage.
Caloric restriction often decreases metabolic rate and increases hunger.
What the energy source is made up of makes a difference in how the body digests and utilizes it,
Processed, easily digestible carbohydrates signal a cascade of hormonal and metabolic shifts that lead to fat storage and HUNGER.

The Energy Balance model has always stated that when you consume more calories (energy) than what you expend, you will store fat. What we are learning (and seeing in real time) is that it isn’t so much the calorie quantity as it is the quality. WHAT you consume will cause metabolic changes in the body, because not all calories are alike. A chronic restriction of calories alone can cause your basal metabolic rate to decrease, while driving the body weight “set point” up.

Restricting calories and consuming a lot of foods with a high glycemic load causes your body to absorb glucose quickly while also decreasing metabolic fuel concentration so soon afterward that your brain then believes it is depleted of energy sources (called “cellular semistarvation”) and will soon elicit hunger and cravings, so that the cycle keeps perpetuating. Whew! This requires a lot of work on your body’s part!

I don’t share this to stress anyone out. If you’ve been reading my blog or listening to my podcast, I don’t do the diet thing. But I do want to encourage people to partner with their bodies in order to find a place of healing and wholeness. The best way to lighten the stress load from a nutritional standpoint is to focus on whole food sources that are fiber-rich and help assist the glucose response.

Continue reading “Why Cutting Calories Creates Long-term Chaos” →

What’s Really Behind Your Hunger?

Weight loss and hunger are about so much more than calories consumed or “burned.” When looking to make changes to our habits, it’s important to take a deeper look into our relationship with food, body image, and ourselves.

Adrienne Youdim, MD, FACP, is an internist who specializes in medical weight loss and nutrition. Her mission is to transform the weight loss narrative to one that is both empowering and compassionate, inspiring people to live more physically and emotionally fulfilling lives.

Download this episode here or wherever you find podcasts.

Continue reading “What’s Really Behind Your Hunger?” →

How to Individualize Your Diet for Your Unique Body

Our bodies are so unique! The food that makes you feel amazing may make another person feel horrible.

While it is important to have freedom to enjoy the food you want to enjoy, it’s also okay to say no when your body doesn’t respond well to something.

This was hard for me to learn, and left me with “reverse food shame” for choosing the foods that are health-promoting for my body and brain.

We unpack all this on the latest episode of the podcast with guest Tracy Cromwell who recently wrote the book, Your Personal Journey with Food.

Continue reading “How to Individualize Your Diet for Your Unique Body” →

The Science Behind Why We Eat What We Eat

Have you ever wondered why we have all the health and diet information in the world, yet there are still so many struggling to make the right decisions to improve their health? In this episode we cover the WHY behind making the food decisions we make.

Download and listen here or get wherever you find podcasts!

Jack Bobo is the CEO of Futurity, a food foresight company that advises companies, foundations and governments on emerging food trends and consumer attitudes and behaviors related to the future of food. Recognized by Scientific American in 2015 as one of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology, Jack is a global thought leader who has delivered more than 500 speeches in 50 countries.

His new book is called Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices.

Key Topics:

The way our brain is biased against our efforts
Why we can’t just agree to disagree
How we have less trust in authority figures about our health
Confirmation bias in excess of information available today
Why people fear certain food over others
The “naturalness” bias
Why healthy food doesn’t taste good
The history of supersizing and unit bias
The “clean your plate” method and how it works against us
How our minds can trick us with what we’re eating, and the study that confirms it
Mental fatigue and decision fatigue in eating and grocery shopping
Solutions to change the way we think about our choices
Reshaping personal food space

Jack’s book is available now, and you can learn more about his work at this website. This episode is sponsored by Talkspace.

Get $100 off your first month with Talkspace when you use the code sparkingwholeness.

Top Brain Health Killers and How to Flip the Script

Five things will always sabotage your mental well-being:

Lack of sleep.
Lack of nutrients.
Lack of sunshine.
Lack of movement.
Lack of community.

I could leave it at that. It’s a whole post in itself.

But I want to flip this, because most of us know these things on some level. However, during times of stress, we often forget to take care of ourselves. We forget that we humans are basically just plants, and plants left without care will wither and die.

We were not designed to stay inside all day, blinking back at a screen with artificial light, head and neck perpetually tilted downward while the rest of our body is unmoving, eating food that is filled with hard-to-digest chemicals and additives, with a schedule so packed we don’t make time for people who are important to us.

Yes, I know that was a massive run-on sentence. It was exhausting (and convicting) typing it out.

Times of brief stress and opposition can be helpful for the body, but when we are continuously stressed, doggy-paddling up to the surface of the water all day long, we will start to feel side effects. It will impact our physical body’s health, and it will most definitely affect our brain’s health. It will cause us to be unable to make clear decisions, show empathy, and connect well with others – because we are in survival mode.

Our bodies are amazing at survival – that’s why you’re here. You’re here because your ancestors survived during difficult times. You gain weight after you diet because your ancestors were able to store weight during famine and not die. Your digestive discomfort is physical evidence that your body knows how to respond to mental stress and anxiety. Your blood sugar fluctuates in order to adapt to emotional stressors and physical stressors on your body. Your hormones are wacky, because duh, it’s never optimal to reproduce when there is a famine or threat to your safety (remember – your body doesn’t know the difference between a stressful job or a T rex chasing you). Even your afternoon fatigue that hits you like a load is a sign that you are overflowing with stress chemicals, and your body’s response system is working properly.

Your body is doing all the right things it is supposed to do. Your body is on your side.

Continue reading “Top Brain Health Killers and How to Flip the Script” →

Feast 2 Fast: Purpose of the Body

Summer is right around the corner and I’m here to remind you that the purpose of your body is NOT to get swimsuit ready.

The purpose of your body is to be “fit to serve” right where you are, with the body you have.

Here’s the thing, though – sometimes we get into a food rut, due to stress and factors outside of our control, and we find ourselves fueling on food sources that aren’t optimal for our unique bodies. It can lead to blood sugar instability, poor gut health, brain fog, fatigue, and overall blah.

Feast 2 Fast is a complete reset for nutrition, mindset and spiritual health! No calorie-counting, no macro-counting, no deprivation, no complications – just real food, the way God made it!

Continue reading “Feast 2 Fast: Purpose of the Body” →

How to Break Free from Yo-Yo Dieting and Live Your Life in the Body You Have Today

What does it mean to make peace with food and your body? Why doesn’t restriction work? What does it even mean to give yourself “unconditional permission to eat?”

Holly Toronto has 4 years of experience helping highly driven women stop dieting and build resilience to toxic beauty messages. She uses an intuitive and spiritual approach that guides her clients towards self trust, confidence and Sovereignty over their entire being; body, mind and soul.

In this episode, we discuss how to break free from the back and forth cycle of dieting for GOOD, how to live your life in the body you have without judging or objectifying it.

Download here or listen wherever you get podcasts!

Continue reading “How to Break Free from Yo-Yo Dieting and Live Your Life in the Body You Have Today” →

Feast 2 Fast Lent Round

The Lent round of Feast 2 Fast, starting February 17, is open for registration!

Typically, Feast 2 Fast is 4 weeks long, as we systematically use a pattern of feasting and fasting to increase metabolic flexibility and restore nutrient density. The Lent round is six and a half weeks long. We start with a brief sugar detox and incorporate a weekly superfast. We are encouraging each other to give up a food/practice/poor habit for the duration of Lent, while also adding in a divine activity to level up the spiritual focus and become more mindful and purposeful in who we are.

We are simplifying our lives to focus on what truly matters, and I hope you will join us! For more information or to sign up, click here.

No calorie counting.
No logging macros.
No mandatory workouts.
No shakes or supplements.

In this program, we use intermittent fasting in a way that works for YOUR unique body. We introduce real food carbs, whole food carbs, and my favorite – heck yeah carbs – which not only encourages metabolic flexibility, it encourages a healthy mindset toward food as well!

Weekly Zoom meetings are available for those wanting more individualized support, but they aren’t mandatory. You get to go at your own pace and use what components work best for you!

Sign up here.