Truce with Food with Ali Shapiro, MSOD, CHHC
You've done Weight Watchers. Therapy. The functional medicine workup. You know more about nutrition than most people. And yet, you still can't make it stick. So now you're wondering if you're just the problem.
You are not the problem. The framework you needed—that integrates real, lasting change—just never showed up, so you keep blaming yourself instead.
Truce With Food® is a podcast for women in perimenopause and menopause who are exhausted from emotional eating, binge eating, overeating, and food noise taking up more space in their lives than they ever wanted. If you're eating when you're not hungry, can't figure out why what used to work no longer does, or just want a real conversation about your relationship with food and your body, you're in the right place.
Host Ali Shapiro is a holistic nutritionist, cancer survivor, and creator of the research-based Truce With Food® framework that’s also built on 19 years of real client results. She healed her own relationship with food and has spent nearly two decades helping other women do the same through honest conversations about food, psychology, physiology, and why showing up with a C+ effort gets you further than any plan that demands perfection ever will. And how the real work is to be counterculture and trust in satisfaction, not more discipline.
New episodes every other Wednesday.
Truce with Food with Ali Shapiro, MSOD, CHHC
254. Food, Stress, and Healing Your Nervous System with Stacey Ramsower
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A Truce with Food foundational focus is learning how to effectively respond to the stress that makes you eat. Because we are often reacting to the past when our sense of safety was compromised, which fuels our current stress.
For example, I used to binge on sugar during my cancer “scanxiety” season even though it was 15 years later. Because in the past, MRIs did find cancer (and I didn’t know I could ever not turn to food!). Logically I knew I was probably fine. But emotionally I was a wreck.
To effectively respond to your stress in the present, in Truce with Food, we tend to your body's physiology. Specifically, cultivating safety in your nervous system; your nervous system physiology under threat often leads to “Chuck it, F@#$ it” Ubereats, fantasy thoughts like “Diet starts tomorrow”, and binging.
Because your body’s physiology informs your “mindset”. Anyone who knows how crashing blood sugar fuels their anxiety knows this on one level.
To better understand your own nervous system reactions and accompanying food habits, I’ve brought back Stacey Ramsower from Episode 1 of this season.
We discuss how our nervous system picks up on stress, often before our brain, and that leads to out of control eating. Stacey is one of the few people I know who understands how the most powerful change involves your physiology and psychology.
In today’s episode, we discuss:
- The difference between your body, brain, and mind when trying to change your relationship to food (hint: most mindset work doesn’t address this and yet, your body communicates to your brain at 4x the speed!)
- How “Diet starts tomorrow” is a fantasy thought and often a sign you’re in a “Flight” nervous system reaction
- What the Flight and Freeze nervous system reactions feel like inside your body
- The connection between Binging and the Freeze nervous system reaction
- Two powerful practices to try and regulate your nervous system to better deal with your present stress and change your eating habits
Mentioned in this Episode
Free Food as Safety Gatherings
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