Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Hey. Hey. Welcome back. And welcome to this special bonus episode of the podcast where we are gonna dive into, really a kind of a replay, if you will, of the workshop that I hosted last week at the Nashville Health and Wellness Expo. And it's on food noise, GLP1s and the missing piece. No one's talking about, I. E. Trauma, right? Because we know that GLP1s can quiet the brain, they can quiet appetite, maybe even quiet food noise, but they don't heal the psychology underneath it. And so we have shame, diet trauma, and the restrict binge regret cycle that don't disappear with a prescription. In this session, I really walked people through some of these pieces around how do we make peace with food? How do we heal our diet trauma? How do we better understand food noise and how to address it with and without medication? And so I put the GLP1s in there because I had just started talking about it and just started researching it when I had pitched this idea. And really it was more along the lines of whether you're using them or not, here are the mental, emotional pieces that we need to address. But we also got to dive a little bit into GLP1s and why I am such a big fan of them and why I think they are so important and such a pivotal part of anyone's healing journey when they have been through any form of emotional, spiritual, verbal abuse. I really start off by talking about food noise, right? And it's that persistent, intrusive, often obsessive thinking about food and what you can eat, when you can eat, when you're going to eat next. It's just this constant preoccupation with food. And so sometimes it is around cravings and food urges. Sometimes it is related more towards feeling satisfied after eating. We're hungry, so we eat lunch. And then after lunch we still have constant thoughts about something sweet or something salty or alternating between the two. And sometimes it's that food noise that has us feeling a little more out of control and binging around food.
[00:02:20] And so the way that I think about it is it's like you're trying to read an article online, but you get all of these pop ups constantly, right? And it's like, sign up for my newsletter. Join my blog Read this, check out this ad, right? And we're just inundated. And you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm just trying to read the article. I don't want any of that shit. I just want to read this article. And that's what food noise is. It's like a pop up in our brain that's like, are you hungry? What are we going to eat later? Should we order pizza? That sounds good. Oh, I think there's cake in the kitchen. Without even trying to. It's almost like our brain is changing the channel of our thoughts towards food.
[00:02:55] And at the core of this, I believe, is diet trauma.
[00:03:00] We have mental and emotional baggage from losing and then regaining weight, trauma from being overweight in the past, and the mental and emotional damage that was done. What people said to us, how we felt, how we internalized things, as well as the mental and emotional baggage from trying to lose weight and not being able to.
[00:03:21] And so often what happens is because of diet trauma, there are triggers of fear and anxiety around specific foods and sometimes around eating in general.
[00:03:31] I really think of it as diet trauma stems from extreme weight loss protocols where we're taking away a foundational need, which is food. So we're either taking away how much in the quantity of, like, calories, or we're taking around certain food groups or macros, or it's some combination thereof, or sometimes it's around timing, and it's like we're taking away all food until it's noon or until it's this time of day.
[00:03:57] Because food is a necessity, because we cannot survive without it. It does create this trauma response in the body where not only emotionally do we not want to feel like we're missing out on things because of our diet. We feel like we have to white knuckle and just say no and just try harder. But our body, at a physiological level, it stores this. And so it's not just a trauma response of the famine of 2005 when you did the Atkins diet. It is actually a physiological response where your brain and your body is like, oh, my gosh, we almost died when we lost that £40. We need to store fat and make it even harder to lose weight in the future.
[00:04:39] These are the signalings between hunger and satiety. And this is part of what makes it a little bit harder to even follow a protocol that I would teach around. We're going to eat when we're hungry, and we're going to stop when we're satisfied. But if you have improper hunger signaling, if you have improper satiety signaling. And this is what they call leptin resistance. So leptin is often found in our belly fat. And so when we lose fat and we lose fat quickly, now we're also losing the hormone that's in our body that's signaling we've had enough because we have stores of fat on our body that we can tap into. And so now, instead of actually optimizing and utilizing fat on the body, your brain and your body are now going to work together and it's gonna be like, oh, we almost died last time. We got down, then we lost all that weight quickly. We don't want that to happen. So now we're gonna store fat and we're not gonna tap into it.
[00:05:32] Now we're going to save that as a worst case reserve. And so often what happens is these extreme diets put our body into this kind of like starvation safety mechanism where your brain is trying to keep you safe. Your brain and your body now and all the hormones are working together to try to keep you safe, to keep you alive. Because in the past it was like, oh, no, that food was taken away.
[00:05:57] It thinks famine, it thinks world war. It is not thinking, oh, we're just trying to lose a few pounds for summer, or our body's just trying to become healthier.
[00:06:06] Our brain sees this as like, we nearly died. And now in order to keep you from dying again, we're going to signal more hunger and we're going to pack on the weight. And what happens most often and with insulin resistance is this is the trigger point is with cortisol, our body is now diverting away from creating other hormones and converting other hormones like progesterone or thyroid. And now it's going to take that base and it's going to create more cortisol. And when it releases cortisol into the body, it's also releasing glucose. But when we're in that state of fight or flight or one of those trigger moments, now your brain imagines you having to run away from a bear or having to fight off said bear. And so it's like we now are going to put the body in a short term state of insulin resistance because we don't want this to be properly pulled into the cells. We actually want this free floating glucose to go to your muscles. So we want this and we want to be able to put it into the muscles because we might need to fight or run away. So we need this readily available. So short term insulin resistance. But what happens is when we are Chronically triggered because of stress, because of abusive relationships, because of cortisol dysregulation.
[00:07:15] Now we have too much glucose and too much insulin in the body to where what happens with insulin resistance is those insulin receptors, they cleave off.
[00:07:24] And because they're cleaving off, they're not actually accepting the insulin. The GLUT4 is not pulling the glucose into the cell itself. So we have all of these pieces working together to try to keep you safe and alive. Okay? It is not just a matter of eat less, exercise more. What we have now is like we have this free floating glucose and insulin in part because of food and in part because of high and dysregulated cortisol levels. And we have often a cortisol resistance. So we have extra glucose, extra insulin. Meanwhile, your cells think they are starving because they're not properly attaching the insulin to the receptor, that's not attaching properly. And now the glucose is not being pulled into the cell. So the cell is like, oh shit, we're starving, send out more hunger. We need to eat more.
[00:08:15] So now you eat more, but you actually have enough glucose and enough insulin in your body, but it's just not being properly synthesized.
[00:08:24] So this is the core of insulin resistance. This is the core of why we are struggling to lose weight, no matter what other conditions you may have. And this is not just a food, diet, exercise issue. This can come from drops in estrogen and going through menopause. Long term keto or carnivore diets will also trigger insulin resistance. Too much of a good thing is bad across the board. Can we find some benefits in eating maybe more protein, more vegetables, fewer processed carbs? Yes, but too much of it can create a negative thing in the body. Just like too much GLP1 peptide can be bad, right? More is not always better.
[00:09:04] And this is really important is that when it comes to healing your body, to healing the food noise, healing your nervous system, healing your metabolism, it's not just about more peptide, more compound, more hormone. It's not just more is better.
[00:09:19] Sometimes what we actually need is more time and a healed and regulated body.
[00:09:26] We need more time with a healed and regulated nervous system.
[00:09:31] And again, that is one of the cool things about the GLP1s is that they are coming in and actually activating and healing your nervous system.
[00:09:39] Repairing that anti inflammatory shield of the vagus nerve, it's repairing and restoring that. Sun can be healing, but too much sun, not a good thing. This goes back to like the crux of the Issue is it's like extreme, hardcore. We want things and we want them now. We want instant results. This is often what's driving our long term health issues.
[00:10:01] So we got a little bit more into the physiology than what we did in the workshop. However, that is better explanation of why and how the body is functioning. Because it's trying to protect you.
[00:10:12] In order to heal food noise without medication, we want to heal our diet trauma, which means we have to break the restrict binge regret cycle. And we break it at the restriction point because what we've found is that binging decreases when given access to the, quote, forbidden foods. Because I don't need to binge on cake when I can have it today and tomorrow and the day after and the day after when I can have it every single day for the rest of my life. I don't need to binge on it and when I want more because inevitably there will be times when my brain is gonna be like, oh, that was good, we want more. More is better. It's part of the natural human thought process.
[00:10:48] But when it does offer me that now I can remind myself, no, I'm not gonna have more right now, but I can always have more tomorrow. I feel better about saying no to today right now, because I've already had some today and I know I'm getting more tomorrow. So we're taking away that scarcity piece. When we have some of these processes in place with different food rules that actually work for you. Things like, I'm not going to eat chips out of the bag, I'm going to put them onto a plate or in a bowl, or I'm going to put my spoon or my fork down in between bites of food. Or I'm not going to stand up in the pantry and eat straight out of the pantry or out of the fridge. I put everything that I eat on some kind of plate, I portion it out, I cut things in half, even something like a muffin or a donut or something like that. This is how we find food rules that work for us. One of mine was I need to have some healthy carbs at every meal. I need to make sure that I'm getting in more bread, pasta, rice, quinoa, potatoes, or healthy starches. Because when I have enough carbs in my day, I am less likely to be snacking and craving sweets later in the night. Letting go of all of those arbitrary food rules and looking at how do we moderate and we can't actually moderate when food is good or bad. And now I'm good or bad based on what I eat. This helps us to build a realistic long term eating plan where we can look at what can I do for the rest of my life without hating my life? And I meet myself where I'm at today and then I get 1% better.
[00:12:21] So this takes some of the mindset and the emotional dysregulation pieces and it brings it back to, okay, so what do we actually do? How do we actually make progress? How do we actually move forward in this area?
[00:12:34] That's what it looks like. On top of unwinding some of those habits and some of those thought processes around like, I can't lose weight and eat carbs, I can't lose weight and have dessert. We have to start working to prove ourselves wrong.
[00:12:48] But we also need internal physiological healing, we need metabolic healing, we need better hormonal regulation, we need a lot of other pieces in place to be functioning properly. And not everything is going to show up on labs. We can be subclinical in a lot of things and it does not mean that there is not actually true dysfunction in the body. This is one of the pieces, it's one avenue, one lens that we want to look at food noise and really addressing and healing. The bulk of my food noise went away because this is what I did.
[00:13:19] But I also know that I have clients and I have friends and family members who, who need a little extra support. Where this type of work is good, it's helpful, it gets them moving in the right direction. But they also need a little additional Support with a GLP1. And this is where we don't want to turn it off. We don't want to completely crush hunger. We want to make it to where it feels more manageable, it feels more in control, where we have proper hunger and satiety signaling and regulation.
[00:13:47] That's really what we're looking for because we have GLP1 receptors in the brain and we want them to receive better hunger and satiety cues via the vagus nerve from your gut. Right? Which means sometimes we need healing in the gut and on your vagus nerve and in the brain. And GLP1s are also made in the brain. This is a part of why I think we have a decrease in neuroinflammation when we're on these as well. The best way that I can describe it is that with a GLP1 it muffles the dopamine receptors in the brain associated with food and, and even alcohol. When it comes to the semaglutide, the way it comes off to me is it's like we're already starting to push a little bit on that dopamine receptor with the GLP1. Maybe it's like different gears is one way to think about it. You have like first through sixth gear. The GLP1 can be effective at pushing on it a little bit. That way we still feel in control, we can manage our stress eating or our emotional eating a little bit better. The other thing is we don't want to push too hard on the dopamine receptors because we don't want to turn off our zest for life. We don't want to lose all interest in food to the point where we're not eating. We don't want to lose all interest in hobbies. We don't want to lose all interest in sex and intimacy. We don't want to lose all interest in, like, external things that would bring us joy. This is really important because this, I think, is why we're seeing some people who have a decrease in anxiety and depression symptoms with people who are on these GLP1s. But we're also seeing some, and I'm sure you've heard stories of people who seem to be more depressed because of their use of GLP1. And I think their dose is just too high. It is turning off their desire for joy and pleasure. We're like completely saturating that with a peptide, but we're doing it. And typically it's because of really high doses, unnecessarily high. We don't want to turn off those joy pleasure receptors.
[00:15:43] And we want us to learn how to be able to handle an urge to handle a craving. To say, yes, I want more, but I'm going to tell myself no. And to say no from a place of self love. To say no from that place of creating a healthy relationship with food. We don't just want to crush hunger and turn off hunger to the point where we're not eating. We want to feel like there's a sense of control where we can be hungry, we can eat, we can feel satisfied, and we can go several hours without needing food.
[00:16:10] So there's way more to GLP1s than just food, noise and weight loss. There's true healing and regeneration that's happening in the body.
[00:16:19] These are some of the symptoms now that we're starting to see and starting to address. But I believe that the weight is coming off because we're actually healing parts of the body. We're healing some of that insulin resistance. We're decreasing the Inflammation significantly. We're healing parts of the gut, we're healing parts of the brain.
[00:16:36] Your body is better regulating hormones.
[00:16:40] And at the core I think we're creating much better cortisol sensitivity and we are decreasing the cortisol dysfunction. So we're creating better regulation and better sensitivity of cortisol in the body so that it can properly do what it's designed to do, so that it can be effective and productive and useful. Because cortisol is actually anti inflammatory in the body.
[00:17:02] It's just too much of it is what triggers and drives this dysregulation.
[00:17:07] But cortisol in small amounts is designed to be very good for the body. It's just in this overly stressed, overly stimulated society that especially we live in, in the kind of western world where it's just too much to say that we need to decrease our stress or we need to mitigate stress. It's like it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what we're dealing with. Between abuse and trauma and toxins and disease and all of these issues, this is just one piece of the puzzle. But it can be a really powerful, really healing piece and I believe is going to have way more positive impact on so many other diagnoses and conditions, diseases, even things like cancer.
[00:17:51] More on that later in future episodes. But this is what I talked about on Saturday and really just wanting to open up the conversation of yes, GLP1s are great and they have their place. But let's also not forget the lifestyle habits and changes that we need to make, as well as the emotional regulation that we need to build around food, around our bodies, around our weights, so that we're not terrified of coming off of a GLP either, so that we're not inducing something like a, an anorexic state. Because we're so afraid of coming off of the one thing that maybe feels like it's finally work.
[00:18:28] Going on a GLP for three months to lose 30 pounds just to gain it right back three months later when you come off, that's just going to keep your body in a state of diet trauma. It's not actually doing any good. We need a different way. We need a better way.
[00:18:41] And so we need to start to look at how do we do this in a way that works for your unique, specific body. And if you'd like some help with that, with really optimizing your health, reducing symptoms, creating better functioning systems and helping your body to perform at its best so that you can feel your best, this is what I do with clients every single day and I'd love to help you too. Your next best step is gonna be to schedule a free consultation and on the call we'll talk more about where you are, where you wanna be and I'll explain how my four part process could be a really great fit for you. But I don't know until we get on a call. Everybody is different, their situation is different and unique and I will be very upfront and honest like I have been with other people in and let you know whether or not I think that you are a great candidate for this or if there is anything that I see that might mitigate this.
[00:19:34] On one hand, while I do see GLP1s helping to create better cortisol regulation, if you are not also changing lifestyle habits and managing your stress, managing your trauma, doing other aspects to actively work on that, it may not be as effective as you want it to be. Depends on your own body and how you feel, how you do. But this is why we want a very comprehensive approach.
[00:19:58] Mind, body, soul, metabolic healing. It's possible and it's possible for you too. So if you'd like to learn more, I would love to chat. The link will be in the description. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns. And until next time, here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:20:23] If this episode resonated with you, it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
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[00:20:58] It's time to break the cycle. I'll show you.
