In today’s episode, we will investigate the parallel between how we react to certain food and how we react to thoughts. We will also explore why the most approaches to food sensitivities lead to further disempower people from their agency.
Food Sensitivities VS Thought Sensitivities
This podcast is a great follow-up to Undiet Your Coaching Podcast episode 73-The other reason for intuitive eating.
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on food Sensitivities vs thought sensitivities:
- The wellness culture approach to food sensitivity
- The role of agency in food sensitivity
- The unique way each human reacts to thoughts
- The intuitive eating approach to food sensitivity.
Mentioned in the show:
Register here for – How to teach nutrition without co-opting diet culture Live
New Intake Forms – Non-Diet Client Assessment Tools
Episode Transcript:
Undiet Your Coaching Ep74-Food Sensitivities VS Thought Sensitivities
Welcome back, my dear colleague.
We're gonna talk about a parallel today between food intolerance, food sensitivity, and thought sensitivity. And in order for you to appreciate this podcast to the fullest, I recommend that you listen to podcast 73.
Because in podcast 73, I'm teaching you the other reason why intuitive eating is so important, and this podcast will show you a parallel or an analogy or an example of that and how it shows up in wellness culture or the way that mainstream is teaching about food, nutrition, health, and wellness.
And I wanna give you some background about this episode, this idea of putting food sensitivity against thought sensitivity came to me in a recent webinar that I was teaching for Undiet Your Life called Rebellious Eating Solution.
Rebellious Eating Solution is really focused on deconstructing the reason why people struggle with food, and that's what we call rebellious eating behavior. And I have been doing this particular webinar for almost three years. When I say I've been doing it, I've been using the same structure, the same presentation, the same webinar. I've just been redoing it live, for three years and every time on the dot, the same thing happened, every time in the Q&A section. One of the first questions I get, I swear to you every time, is this one: but what about my food intolerance? Intuitive Eating's gonna force me to eat everything. Something around that.
And I'm sure for those of you who are in the field and are running consultations with clients, which I used to do as well, this is one of the first objections that I used to get: but what about all my food intolerances?
And at the beginning, six, seven years ago, this objection used to infuriate me. And now that I know what I know, fast forward seven years later, I have the deepest compassion for people who ask me this because I understand why their brain is using this argument in order for them to continue being part of a structured way of eating, diet, culture, dieting, food restriction, wellness, culture, all the things.
And I wanna share the behind the scenes of the answer to that question, an. So the first thing I want you to understand, coach trained in behavioral coaching, you understand already why the brain is offering this objection to a pitch of intuitive eating, which is really what a webinar is, right? If we go into talking about business, webinar is a way of pitching your product, which is coaching with you, in this case with intuitive.
The brain is offering this argument because it wants to continue the current state of affairs. So to the brain, to the human brain, any change, transformation outside of the current reality we are experiencing is deemed dangerous. It's deemed fear-based, avoidance, don't want to go there. I understand it may be "good for you," but the brain is like, I don't know how to deal with this. We've never been an intuitive eater, so this thing is scary. I can't promise results. I can't manage it. Let's stay a restrictive eater.
So that's the first layer as to why the brain is offering that, and it's anchoring on food sensitivity because when these smart people that attend my webinar understand, obviously I'm explaining it clearly enough that their brain's like, holy crap, you mean I'm gonna have to make my own decision about food? You mean to tell me I won't be able to follow a list of things that are "bad me." I have to challenge each one of those things and figure out for ourselves what doesn't work for us.
Whoa, we don't know how to do that. I can't trust my body, it's scary. Way too much efforting, way too much risk. You have to understand that people who have been restricting and dieting for years have no notion of trusting their body anymore. It used to be there, but it got reprogrammed to think my body is wrong, my body is a problem. My body obviously can't be trusted. Look at me physically, like I've gained weight, I'm fat, how can I trust my body?
So when you put them in front of a formula that will say, you trust yourself to make decisions with food, there will be a fire alarm in their brain. Beep me beep. Every single front of safety in the nervous system will react. All of that is unsafe because learning to trust the body is something that they haven't done and they don't know how to do.
This is where we're building on the prior podcast 73, when I taught you the other reason why we all need to take an approach of intuitive eating when it comes to nutrition food is because we need to rebuild that into people. We need to rebuild their capacity of trusting themselves, their agency. Otherwise, they will forever be in the loop of looking outside of them with food, with their health, with their body, and everything else in their life for authority.
So with that in mind, what is the parallel between food sensitivity and what I call thought sensitivity?
I'm gonna first go into the world of food sensitivity because if you are here listening to this podcast, you coach health, wellness, nutrition to some degree. That you are a graduated experts from dietetics in a university, to a health coach, to a life coach, you understand, to some degree, food sensitivity.
So let me talk about food sensitivity for a moment. And I just wanna make this clear because we have people from all backgrounds here. Food sensitivity is not the same thing as food, okay. I'm gonna get my clinical nutritionist version of me out here. A food allergy is a reaction from your immune system to a molecule of food. If you have a sensitivity and intolerance, meaning the same thing, sensitivity or intolerance, it's not your immune system reacting, it's part of your digestive system reacting. That's the simplest form of explanation. Food allergy is a life-threatening situation. People who have food allergy, they know they have food allergy because they're probably carrying an EpiPen with them.
And here's what I have observed. I've done my first three years after graduation from nutrition. I did hardcore clinical practice, nutrition client one after the other all day long. Those who know what I'm talking about, you know. Clinical practice, you see a lot of things in a lot of cases, a lot of patients. And I'm gonna tell you, all the patients I had that had food allergy, they had no desire, no craving to eat the food they were allergic to. Because the last time they did, they had a very, very, very, very bad experience.
And it's a trauma. In every layer of their being, it's a traumatic experience and they have no desire to repeat it. There's no craving. So when people come to me or used to come to me and say, I'm intolerant to this food, I crave it all the time, a k a gluten. People weren't celiac. I always, as we do diligently ask, have you been tested? Are you celiac? No. No, no. So tell me more about this intolerance thing. Well, I read so much about intolerance and I have arthritis in my knees, and then probably because of the gluten that I'm eating. So I'm intolerant to gluten because of the arthritis in my knee. Oh, interesting. So it's self-diagnosis. Yeah. But I crave it all the time.
Ah, that is was my number one sign to know that these folks were not testing in themselves. They weren't relying in their own wisdom to know what they were, "intolerant" to. They were relying upon external sources, and there was a reason why the brain was craving it. It's because they weren't really intolerant. It was just a story, a thought they were telling themselves in their brain. And because there's no test. Now, there's no test, and I'm saying that with a lot of caution. Today is March 15th, 2023. I am not up to date in all the research around food intolerance and food sensitivity. So if one of you is listening to this podcast and you are a research expert, and you know there's new research coming out that proves that food intolerance and food sensitivity is a thing and it's testable, please send me an email at [email protected] and let me know.
So what I'm about to say is from my limited knowledge. As of right now, there are no tests. Or the last time I talked to someone, I did an interview on this, on the going to be on the Food podcast, which, by the way, if you're not listening to that podcast, you should. It's a goldmine of information, but I did a podcast, podcast 283 with an expert in the field of digestive health who specializes in medical nutrition, and she does it from an intuitive eating and health at every size perspective. Her name is Beth Rosen. So if you want to know more, go listen to Podcast 283. She was telling me there was no test. She has a very specific way that she puts her client through to tests, food intolerance and sensitivity. And she doesn't do it with any tests. She does it by teaching her client to connect to their inner world and feel what's going on in their body with food. She has a protocol that she puts them through so her client can decide what they're intolerant to or not. And that's what food sensitivity is. It's a reaction to food physically and beyond the physical body. That's what I love so much about Beth as we, and as she looks at her practice way beyond just physical.
There is reaction to food that I have, I have food that I'm intolerant to. They're very specific and I can tell you exactly what happens when I eat them. And it's beyond just a physical sensation in my digestive system. Is the way that my brain gets all foggy and confused. It's the anxiety I feel in my emotional body when I eat these foods.
So, if you are in that process or help people determine their food sensitivity, it's not just physical, it's mental, it's emotional, and it's physical. And that's what the body wisdom, when you trust your body to tell you if a food works or doesn't work for you, it's more than just the physical body. I'm gonna give you the example of one food that for me it's not working and it's black beans. Don't know why, but when I eat black beans, well number one, within two hours, I start to get bloated. I start to get cramps in my belly. It's almost like I had food poisoning from the ribcage down to my hips. It's very locally there, and then I can't focus on anything.
I am so overwhelmed by what's going on in my body that my brain can't focus on anything. I gotta stop doing whatever I'm doing because my brain is not able to focus on anything and I get very anxious. Now, that doesn't happen often cuz believe me, I don't eat black beans often. If I eat it, I can't remember the last time. The last time I had it is when I used to be a dieter and I made black keto, black beans brownie. Sure, some of you have made that. My god, I almost died. It's the last time I ate black beans because I wanted to eat it. These days, if I eat black beans, it's because, I don't know, it's in the recipe. I don't know it's in the food that I'm eating. It's an accident because trust me, I do not desire black beans. I do not crave black beans.
Now, there's another food that I'm intolerant to, which many of you probably are too, which is corn. Corn on a cup. There's not good things that happens in my body when I eat it but I crave it once or twice a year.
When there's fresh corn on a cub, I make the decision, because the consequence are not as severe as black beans. It's probably like a two outta 10 versus black beans being a nine outta ten, five alarm fire. Corn on the cub is like a two or three outta 10. I consciously make the decision to eat the corn on a cub because usually it's with a family gathering. We have corn on the cub festival in our family in the month of September, and I see all my aunts and uncles and cousin and I eat them corn, and I know what's gonna happen for the next 24 hours. But it's a conscious decision because I trust that the consequence won't be that grave, that my body can handle it, and me and my body work together to process the corn on a cup.
Is that how you approach food sensitivity with your client? Is that how we talk about food sensitivity in mass media? It certainly is not in my world where I came from. I talk about it that way. My colleagues in the intuitive eating world talk about it in that way, but most people are not educated from that perspective. They're not taught flexibility around food sensitivity because food sensitivity is just another concept that's created to teach conformity outside authority, keep people out of their power. And that's the beauty of intuitive eating is it dismantle all these concepts. It dismantle all these outside form of authority even the pretense around food sensitivity in food intolerance would say, yeah, they exist, but let's test it on you. You test it on you and you decide what works for you and doesn't work for you, not the lists. You figure out on your own. Through the concept of food sensitivity, we get people back in their power.
I'm gonna draw the line here and I'm gonna start talking about thought sensitivity. Thought sensitivity may be something that you're not familiar with, and that's totally normal if you're not a coach. If you're not familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy or coaching, it's completely normal that thought sensitivity is foreign to you.
So let me explain to you what it is. Thought sensitivity is how you react to the thoughts in your brain. So for those that are very familiar with nutrition, I want you to think your thoughts are like a food going through your body. When you have a thought, it travels through your entire body.
So let me give you just a highlight of that. You have a thought about whatever circumstance you have a thought that thought within millisecond engages an electric signal, an electric current in your nervous system, central nervous system. So from the base of your neck all the way down your spine, that thought commands a reaction in your body. It commands a response, a behavior. And that information travels through your central nervous system to your nerves, and you feel the sensation in your body that actually can be measured and then you behave and you react a certain way. So one of the most basic example to a thought sensitivity that I have for you is when you have the thought, the fire is hot and you mistakenly put your hand around close or on the fire, your brain is like danger, danger, get your hand off the stove of the fire. And you react literally within a millisecond but it's a thought in your brain that ignited the behavior. The thought travel through your central nervous system and through your nerve. Poof, you pulled your hand off the stove. That doesn't just happen in case of emergency, it happens all day long.
It says that the brain produces up to 60,000 thoughts a day. Now, 95% of these thoughts are unconscious. They're just thoughts. They're to automate various functions in your body and fuel your perspective. But everything you outwardly behave in the world, reaction to the world, into the world, started with a thought.
Now every single individual has a different reactions to any specific thought, right? So here's a great example of that. The thought, I am fat, for me, Stephanie, totally neutral, almost positive. But for another woman, when she thinks of herself as I am fat, the reaction, the consequence, the sensitivity that she experienced to it, is completely different than mine.
Why, right? Why is she having a different reaction? It is because of her past experience, because of her family. It's because of the social conditioning of diet culture, the indoctrination to her gender, to her sexuality, to her race. All these social constructs alongside her past experience or trauma influence different reactions.
We cannot have a list of thoughts and assume that everybody will react the same way because it's not true. But that's the parallel with food sensitivity. Food sensitivity in wellness culture gives a list of all the food to be avoided because they're dangerous and you're reacting to it and you're sensitive to it. The same thing happens with food as it happens with thought. Each one of us reacts differently based on so many factors. And that's the work, that's the journey of human being, is getting to understand ourselves, getting to understand our body, getting to understand our thoughts, our emotion, our reactions.
So when we coach people on food, we can't separate just talking about food from thought sensitivity. We can't coach health, we can't coach food. We can't coach any of those behavior if we don't also coach the thinking process. Because the reaction, the behavior we're trying to coach, let's say you're a health coach and you're trying to coach self-care, that's an outwardly behavior. The same thing if you coach binge eating.
Like I'm trying to go to all the different coaching specialty that typically listen to my podcast, but whatever you coach behavioral-wise, the reason why the behavior is present is in reaction to a thought. And even Alex tend to say that the reaction to certain food for certain people is also thought base. And there's evidence to support that. If you look at the research around IBS. There's a strong light of thinking, and probably by now it has been validated even stronger that the i b s symptoms that most people experience are a result of their emotional body in their thinking. Because physically emotion travels true the body causing sensations. And when you look at these piece of research around i b s, one of the most effective treatments for IBS is CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, right?
What we do in my world is cognitive behavioral coaching. There's a difference between therapy and coaching. Therapy is done with a licensed practitioner 1 0 1 most of the time, and they go deep in understanding why people think the way they do so they can correct the behavior. Cognitive behavioral coaching states just at the thought level. We don't do trauma healing. We don't do like past experience. We stay at the highest level possible and we teach people how to use a self-coaching framework. And we refer out if people need to go to therapists.
So food sensitivity and thought sensitivity, to me and my worlds, from my perspective and my belief system, are both or should be both approached in the same way. Right? Look at the individual in front of you. Help them understand why they are reacting to their thoughts, why they are reacting to food in a certain way. Coaching them that they have power over their thoughts, they have power over their body, over the food they eat. Never stripping them away from their agency over themselves, their life and their body.
That is when, for me, the work that we do at whatever level you're doing, it comes in complete alignment. So if you feel disjointed, you just know something is wrong in the approach. When you coach women, globally, for women, whenever you coach them on , very often it comes down to this empowerment. And most often it's intersected with body image and food because that's the, funny women above 30, it's just part of who they are.
So part of the work you need to do with these women is that work and claiming that their power and their, and for you as a practitioner, when part of your specialty, of your technique that you're using in your practice, promote this empowerment and you are trying to empower people, but at the same time, you're stripping away people from their power in this other part, that's when it feels yuck. That's when it feels like something is wrong , something is in misalignment. That's why I do with professional, to bring people back in alignment, to talk about nutrition, to talk about help, but in the way that is aligned with their personal value and how they live their life and how they view the world. The word alignment for me is big and it's becoming bigger and bigger and bigger in the way that I teach and the way that I coach people.
So that's what I wanted to share with you around thought sensitivity and food sensitivity to help you contextualize empowerment coaching and how we talk about food and nutrition and to really bring it home for you. I would love to hear any questions you may have on that or any feedback. Reach out to me on social media or send us an email at [email protected]. With that in mind, I'll see you on the next podcast episode and I love you. Bye.
Undiet Your Coaching Ep74-Food Sensitivities VS Thought Sensitivities
Welcome back, my dear colleague.
We’re gonna talk about a parallel today between food intolerance, food sensitivity, and thought sensitivity. And in order for you to appreciate this podcast to the fullest, I recommend that you listen to podcast 73.
Because in podcast 73, I’m teaching you the other reason why intuitive eating is so important, and this podcast will show you a parallel or an analogy or an example of that and how it shows up in wellness culture or the way that mainstream is teaching about food, nutrition, health, and wellness.
And I wanna give you some background about this episode, this idea of putting food sensitivity against thought sensitivity came to me in a recent webinar that I was teaching for Undiet Your Life called Rebellious Eating Solution.
Rebellious Eating Solution is really focused on deconstructing the reason why people struggle with food, and that’s what we call rebellious eating behavior. And I have been doing this particular webinar for almost three years. When I say I’ve been doing it, I’ve been using the same structure, the same presentation, the same webinar. I’ve just been redoing it live, for three years and every time on the dot, the same thing happened, every time in the Q&A section. One of the first questions I get, I swear to you every time, is this one: but what about my food intolerance? Intuitive Eating’s gonna force me to eat everything. Something around that.
And I’m sure for those of you who are in the field and are running consultations with clients, which I used to do as well, this is one of the first objections that I used to get: but what about all my food intolerances?
And at the beginning, six, seven years ago, this objection used to infuriate me. And now that I know what I know, fast forward seven years later, I have the deepest compassion for people who ask me this because I understand why their brain is using this argument in order for them to continue being part of a structured way of eating, diet, culture, dieting, food restriction, wellness, culture, all the things.
And I wanna share the behind the scenes of the answer to that question, an. So the first thing I want you to understand, coach trained in behavioral coaching, you understand already why the brain is offering this objection to a pitch of intuitive eating, which is really what a webinar is, right? If we go into talking about business, webinar is a way of pitching your product, which is coaching with you, in this case with intuitive.
The brain is offering this argument because it wants to continue the current state of affairs. So to the brain, to the human brain, any change, transformation outside of the current reality we are experiencing is deemed dangerous. It’s deemed fear-based, avoidance, don’t want to go there. I understand it may be “good for you,” but the brain is like, I don’t know how to deal with this. We’ve never been an intuitive eater, so this thing is scary. I can’t promise results. I can’t manage it. Let’s stay a restrictive eater.
So that’s the first layer as to why the brain is offering that, and it’s anchoring on food sensitivity because when these smart people that attend my webinar understand, obviously I’m explaining it clearly enough that their brain’s like, holy crap, you mean I’m gonna have to make my own decision about food? You mean to tell me I won’t be able to follow a list of things that are “bad me.” I have to challenge each one of those things and figure out for ourselves what doesn’t work for us.
Whoa, we don’t know how to do that. I can’t trust my body, it’s scary. Way too much efforting, way too much risk. You have to understand that people who have been restricting and dieting for years have no notion of trusting their body anymore. It used to be there, but it got reprogrammed to think my body is wrong, my body is a problem. My body obviously can’t be trusted. Look at me physically, like I’ve gained weight, I’m fat, how can I trust my body?
So when you put them in front of a formula that will say, you trust yourself to make decisions with food, there will be a fire alarm in their brain. Beep me beep. Every single front of safety in the nervous system will react. All of that is unsafe because learning to trust the body is something that they haven’t done and they don’t know how to do.
This is where we’re building on the prior podcast 73, when I taught you the other reason why we all need to take an approach of intuitive eating when it comes to nutrition food is because we need to rebuild that into people. We need to rebuild their capacity of trusting themselves, their agency. Otherwise, they will forever be in the loop of looking outside of them with food, with their health, with their body, and everything else in their life for authority.
So with that in mind, what is the parallel between food sensitivity and what I call thought sensitivity?
I’m gonna first go into the world of food sensitivity because if you are here listening to this podcast, you coach health, wellness, nutrition to some degree. That you are a graduated experts from dietetics in a university, to a health coach, to a life coach, you understand, to some degree, food sensitivity.
So let me talk about food sensitivity for a moment. And I just wanna make this clear because we have people from all backgrounds here. Food sensitivity is not the same thing as food, okay. I’m gonna get my clinical nutritionist version of me out here. A food allergy is a reaction from your immune system to a molecule of food. If you have a sensitivity and intolerance, meaning the same thing, sensitivity or intolerance, it’s not your immune system reacting, it’s part of your digestive system reacting. That’s the simplest form of explanation. Food allergy is a life-threatening situation. People who have food allergy, they know they have food allergy because they’re probably carrying an EpiPen with them.
And here’s what I have observed. I’ve done my first three years after graduation from nutrition. I did hardcore clinical practice, nutrition client one after the other all day long. Those who know what I’m talking about, you know. Clinical practice, you see a lot of things in a lot of cases, a lot of patients. And I’m gonna tell you, all the patients I had that had food allergy, they had no desire, no craving to eat the food they were allergic to. Because the last time they did, they had a very, very, very, very bad experience.
And it’s a trauma. In every layer of their being, it’s a traumatic experience and they have no desire to repeat it. There’s no craving. So when people come to me or used to come to me and say, I’m intolerant to this food, I crave it all the time, a k a gluten. People weren’t celiac. I always, as we do diligently ask, have you been tested? Are you celiac? No. No, no. So tell me more about this intolerance thing. Well, I read so much about intolerance and I have arthritis in my knees, and then probably because of the gluten that I’m eating. So I’m intolerant to gluten because of the arthritis in my knee. Oh, interesting. So it’s self-diagnosis. Yeah. But I crave it all the time.
Ah, that is was my number one sign to know that these folks were not testing in themselves. They weren’t relying in their own wisdom to know what they were, “intolerant” to. They were relying upon external sources, and there was a reason why the brain was craving it. It’s because they weren’t really intolerant. It was just a story, a thought they were telling themselves in their brain. And because there’s no test. Now, there’s no test, and I’m saying that with a lot of caution. Today is March 15th, 2023. I am not up to date in all the research around food intolerance and food sensitivity. So if one of you is listening to this podcast and you are a research expert, and you know there’s new research coming out that proves that food intolerance and food sensitivity is a thing and it’s testable, please send me an email at [email protected] and let me know.
So what I’m about to say is from my limited knowledge. As of right now, there are no tests. Or the last time I talked to someone, I did an interview on this, on the going to be on the Food podcast, which, by the way, if you’re not listening to that podcast, you should. It’s a goldmine of information, but I did a podcast, podcast 283 with an expert in the field of digestive health who specializes in medical nutrition, and she does it from an intuitive eating and health at every size perspective. Her name is Beth Rosen. So if you want to know more, go listen to Podcast 283. She was telling me there was no test. She has a very specific way that she puts her client through to tests, food intolerance and sensitivity. And she doesn’t do it with any tests. She does it by teaching her client to connect to their inner world and feel what’s going on in their body with food. She has a protocol that she puts them through so her client can decide what they’re intolerant to or not. And that’s what food sensitivity is. It’s a reaction to food physically and beyond the physical body. That’s what I love so much about Beth as we, and as she looks at her practice way beyond just physical.
There is reaction to food that I have, I have food that I’m intolerant to. They’re very specific and I can tell you exactly what happens when I eat them. And it’s beyond just a physical sensation in my digestive system. Is the way that my brain gets all foggy and confused. It’s the anxiety I feel in my emotional body when I eat these foods.
So, if you are in that process or help people determine their food sensitivity, it’s not just physical, it’s mental, it’s emotional, and it’s physical. And that’s what the body wisdom, when you trust your body to tell you if a food works or doesn’t work for you, it’s more than just the physical body. I’m gonna give you the example of one food that for me it’s not working and it’s black beans. Don’t know why, but when I eat black beans, well number one, within two hours, I start to get bloated. I start to get cramps in my belly. It’s almost like I had food poisoning from the ribcage down to my hips. It’s very locally there, and then I can’t focus on anything.
I am so overwhelmed by what’s going on in my body that my brain can’t focus on anything. I gotta stop doing whatever I’m doing because my brain is not able to focus on anything and I get very anxious. Now, that doesn’t happen often cuz believe me, I don’t eat black beans often. If I eat it, I can’t remember the last time. The last time I had it is when I used to be a dieter and I made black keto, black beans brownie. Sure, some of you have made that. My god, I almost died. It’s the last time I ate black beans because I wanted to eat it. These days, if I eat black beans, it’s because, I don’t know, it’s in the recipe. I don’t know it’s in the food that I’m eating. It’s an accident because trust me, I do not desire black beans. I do not crave black beans.
Now, there’s another food that I’m intolerant to, which many of you probably are too, which is corn. Corn on a cup. There’s not good things that happens in my body when I eat it but I crave it once or twice a year.
When there’s fresh corn on a cub, I make the decision, because the consequence are not as severe as black beans. It’s probably like a two outta 10 versus black beans being a nine outta ten, five alarm fire. Corn on the cub is like a two or three outta 10. I consciously make the decision to eat the corn on a cub because usually it’s with a family gathering. We have corn on the cub festival in our family in the month of September, and I see all my aunts and uncles and cousin and I eat them corn, and I know what’s gonna happen for the next 24 hours. But it’s a conscious decision because I trust that the consequence won’t be that grave, that my body can handle it, and me and my body work together to process the corn on a cup.
Is that how you approach food sensitivity with your client? Is that how we talk about food sensitivity in mass media? It certainly is not in my world where I came from. I talk about it that way. My colleagues in the intuitive eating world talk about it in that way, but most people are not educated from that perspective. They’re not taught flexibility around food sensitivity because food sensitivity is just another concept that’s created to teach conformity outside authority, keep people out of their power. And that’s the beauty of intuitive eating is it dismantle all these concepts. It dismantle all these outside form of authority even the pretense around food sensitivity in food intolerance would say, yeah, they exist, but let’s test it on you. You test it on you and you decide what works for you and doesn’t work for you, not the lists. You figure out on your own. Through the concept of food sensitivity, we get people back in their power.
I’m gonna draw the line here and I’m gonna start talking about thought sensitivity. Thought sensitivity may be something that you’re not familiar with, and that’s totally normal if you’re not a coach. If you’re not familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy or coaching, it’s completely normal that thought sensitivity is foreign to you.
So let me explain to you what it is. Thought sensitivity is how you react to the thoughts in your brain. So for those that are very familiar with nutrition, I want you to think your thoughts are like a food going through your body. When you have a thought, it travels through your entire body.
So let me give you just a highlight of that. You have a thought about whatever circumstance you have a thought that thought within millisecond engages an electric signal, an electric current in your nervous system, central nervous system. So from the base of your neck all the way down your spine, that thought commands a reaction in your body. It commands a response, a behavior. And that information travels through your central nervous system to your nerves, and you feel the sensation in your body that actually can be measured and then you behave and you react a certain way. So one of the most basic example to a thought sensitivity that I have for you is when you have the thought, the fire is hot and you mistakenly put your hand around close or on the fire, your brain is like danger, danger, get your hand off the stove of the fire. And you react literally within a millisecond but it’s a thought in your brain that ignited the behavior. The thought travel through your central nervous system and through your nerve. Poof, you pulled your hand off the stove. That doesn’t just happen in case of emergency, it happens all day long.
It says that the brain produces up to 60,000 thoughts a day. Now, 95% of these thoughts are unconscious. They’re just thoughts. They’re to automate various functions in your body and fuel your perspective. But everything you outwardly behave in the world, reaction to the world, into the world, started with a thought.
Now every single individual has a different reactions to any specific thought, right? So here’s a great example of that. The thought, I am fat, for me, Stephanie, totally neutral, almost positive. But for another woman, when she thinks of herself as I am fat, the reaction, the consequence, the sensitivity that she experienced to it, is completely different than mine.
Why, right? Why is she having a different reaction? It is because of her past experience, because of her family. It’s because of the social conditioning of diet culture, the indoctrination to her gender, to her sexuality, to her race. All these social constructs alongside her past experience or trauma influence different reactions.
We cannot have a list of thoughts and assume that everybody will react the same way because it’s not true. But that’s the parallel with food sensitivity. Food sensitivity in wellness culture gives a list of all the food to be avoided because they’re dangerous and you’re reacting to it and you’re sensitive to it. The same thing happens with food as it happens with thought. Each one of us reacts differently based on so many factors. And that’s the work, that’s the journey of human being, is getting to understand ourselves, getting to understand our body, getting to understand our thoughts, our emotion, our reactions.
So when we coach people on food, we can’t separate just talking about food from thought sensitivity. We can’t coach health, we can’t coach food. We can’t coach any of those behavior if we don’t also coach the thinking process. Because the reaction, the behavior we’re trying to coach, let’s say you’re a health coach and you’re trying to coach self-care, that’s an outwardly behavior. The same thing if you coach binge eating.
Like I’m trying to go to all the different coaching specialty that typically listen to my podcast, but whatever you coach behavioral-wise, the reason why the behavior is present is in reaction to a thought. And even Alex tend to say that the reaction to certain food for certain people is also thought base. And there’s evidence to support that. If you look at the research around IBS. There’s a strong light of thinking, and probably by now it has been validated even stronger that the i b s symptoms that most people experience are a result of their emotional body in their thinking. Because physically emotion travels true the body causing sensations. And when you look at these piece of research around i b s, one of the most effective treatments for IBS is CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, right?
What we do in my world is cognitive behavioral coaching. There’s a difference between therapy and coaching. Therapy is done with a licensed practitioner 1 0 1 most of the time, and they go deep in understanding why people think the way they do so they can correct the behavior. Cognitive behavioral coaching states just at the thought level. We don’t do trauma healing. We don’t do like past experience. We stay at the highest level possible and we teach people how to use a self-coaching framework. And we refer out if people need to go to therapists.
So food sensitivity and thought sensitivity, to me and my worlds, from my perspective and my belief system, are both or should be both approached in the same way. Right? Look at the individual in front of you. Help them understand why they are reacting to their thoughts, why they are reacting to food in a certain way. Coaching them that they have power over their thoughts, they have power over their body, over the food they eat. Never stripping them away from their agency over themselves, their life and their body.
That is when, for me, the work that we do at whatever level you’re doing, it comes in complete alignment. So if you feel disjointed, you just know something is wrong in the approach. When you coach women, globally, for women, whenever you coach them on , very often it comes down to this empowerment. And most often it’s intersected with body image and food because that’s the, funny women above 30, it’s just part of who they are.
So part of the work you need to do with these women is that work and claiming that their power and their, and for you as a practitioner, when part of your specialty, of your technique that you’re using in your practice, promote this empowerment and you are trying to empower people, but at the same time, you’re stripping away people from their power in this other part, that’s when it feels yuck. That’s when it feels like something is wrong , something is in misalignment. That’s why I do with professional, to bring people back in alignment, to talk about nutrition, to talk about help, but in the way that is aligned with their personal value and how they live their life and how they view the world. The word alignment for me is big and it’s becoming bigger and bigger and bigger in the way that I teach and the way that I coach people.
So that’s what I wanted to share with you around thought sensitivity and food sensitivity to help you contextualize empowerment coaching and how we talk about food and nutrition and to really bring it home for you. I would love to hear any questions you may have on that or any feedback. Reach out to me on social media or send us an email at [email protected]. With that in mind, I’ll see you on the next podcast episode and I love you. Bye.
