Dr. Shawn: (00:02) Have you ever wondered? What do these people know that I don't know. How do I do it? How do I find my purpose, my passions? What if you could sit down with some of the wisest experts, everyday leaders and inspirational people who can answer your deepest questions. That is what we do here on the inspirational living podcast. We invite you to join us as we hold conversations, share wisdom, tips, and tools to inspire you, ignite your passions and vision for your life to awaken your sense of purpose and hope and leave. You inspired to design your best life. Join me, your host psychologist, Dr. Sean Horn, as we take you on an inspirational motivational and educational journey. So you can inspire by living an inspired life TRANSCRIPT Dr. Shawn: (01:01) Today. Talking with Stephanie Mara Fox, a sematic nutritional counselor, who helps us look at our relationship with food from a whole different perspective than what we typically are hearing out there in the community. I loved this message. I thought it was so full of wisdom and nuggets that we can take away to help us on our health journey. Let me share with you a little bit more about Stephanie. Before we begin. Stephanie Mara Fox supports women coaches and wellness professionals and feeling empowered and satiated in their relationship with their food body and business, to cultivate more confidence and create the life they desire to be living. She teaches the tools as sematic eating and her eating needing sensing system to support individuals with weight and body image concerns, stress eating, binge eating digestive issues, and creating peace around old wounds. She has worked with health coaches and wellness professionals and bolstering their confidence to create successful businesses. Dr. Shawn: (02:10) She has her master's degree and body psychotherapy is a certified mind body eating coach and a yoga instructor. She has been published in the international journal of body psychotherapy and somatic psychotherapy. Today. She is the creator of the program, satiated satisfying or physical and emotional hungers and the host of the podcast. Satiated. You can find her on her social media, her website, her podcast, where she offers all sorts of services to her audience, whether it is listening to her podcasts, participating in her groups, taking an online class or working with her one-on-one she has so much to offer. I hope that you enjoy this episode and please at the end, so you can hear more about what services she has to offer you. Dr. Shawn: (03:04) I'm going to jump right in and begin this conversation with Stephanie. Dr. Shawn: (03:10) What is Somatic nutrition first? Stephanie Mara Fox: (03:14) What is the word somatic like? That's probably the first question that I get asked a lot. So somatic means relating to the body as something separate from the mind. And so a lot of the work that I do around teaching individuals, the tools of somatic eating means tuning into your body to discover what foods resonate with your unique system, by attending to your sensations and bodily reactions. So what I often find is that we are so bombarded with mixed messages on what to eat, how to eat when deed that we've kind of lost a connection with our body and our bodily cues, and actually relying more on ourselves and trusting our body that it's going to tell us when and why and how, and what is going to be most supportive to our unique system so that you actually don't ever have to rely on an external cue ever again, because only your body can tell you what it needs. And when the Dr. Shawn: (04:16) Key that you mentioned there is to trust your, yourself and your body. I know coming out of a lifetime of dieting, I was given this message that I cannot trust my body, that my body will hijack me. It will take me down a road that somehow, and this is where the shame comes in. Somehow I'm unique in that I can not eat that cake, or I cannot have those chips because I will gain 15, 20 pounds or so. And then we experience this, yo-yo stuff losing weight, gaining weight. So then we believe what we're told that we can't trust ourselves to gain that trust or to even consider it. It's such a stretch for those that believe they can not trust their body. Stephanie Mara Fox: (04:58) Yeah. You know, everything that kind of the dieting world has set up is that we can't trust our body. I saw a meme at one point, that was like, the dieting industry is the greatest gas lighter. Just like, you know, they always say that like, we're the fault that if we try something and it's not working that actually that's on us, not on like this diet will never ever work for you. I mean, if diets worked, we wouldn't be talking about this anymore. That's why I really love to teach those I work with is okay, how do we come back into the body and even cultivate a sense of safety and the system that we're in so that you can start to hear the bodily cues again, because it can actually take time. So what I'm talking about, I'm like, oh, just listen to your body. Stephanie Mara Fox: (05:45) Like also kind of a hard thing to do. So it can actually take time to be like, okay, what are all of the factors that are maybe getting in the way of hearing your bodily messages so that we get to kind of work through those first, you know, a sense of shame. That's a big one, you know, of all of the beliefs that you may be received from childhood and early on in your life and have built up to today of like, why it feels hard to trust yourself and listen to your body. We kind of have to sometimes work through those first so that you can start hearing your bodily messages again. Dr. Shawn: (06:19) Yes. And is there a chemical component to that too, where the body loses its way so to speak and we have to help it to become sensitive to those cues, those chemical cues of hunger and being full. Stephanie Mara Fox: (06:32) Yes. Like, uh, obviously, you know, individuals have heard her probably about like Greenland and leptin and all of these things that, yes, there are many things that can throw those things off. Uh, what I often think of. So, uh, my background is I've done a lot of research on the gut brain. And so we have, what's called the vagus nerve in our body. And it's kind of like the highway of communication between our head brain and our gut brain. And this highway can get hijacked, basically it's connected to our parasympathetic nervous system. And so if we are not in a relaxation response, if we have experienced trauma in our life, if we have experienced, uh, situations, uh, that have kind of, it hasn't felt safe to be in our body. So it feels actually safer to beat disembodied. It actually is harder for our body to communicate with each other, to actually feel those fullness and hunger cues. And so, yes, there is something physiologically happening in the body. And a lot of the time when I'm supporting my clients with is like, okay, how do we do some like vagel toning and like actually support the body and feeling safe again so that we can more easily hear our hunger and fullness cues. And it starts with just feeling safe in this system. If we cannot feel safe, if we are in a fight or flight response, and we feel like we need to be running from a tiger, it just throws everything off. Dr. Shawn: (07:57) Yeah. So you're talking about when we're under trauma, we program ourselves to numb out to our body could disconnect from it. So then we don't recognize when we're full, hungry, tired, stress, tension, those kinds of things. So you are bringing in that con that polyvagal theory about the vagus nerve and how it relates to the nervous system and how we can use that to bring our defenses down and reconnect in a safe way with our body. So what is this vagal tone? Everyone in polyvagal is talking about that and trauma work. What is your vagal tone? So help us understand that. Stephanie Mara Fox: (08:33) Yeah, so some tricks that I offer my clients to basically, um, when we activate and kind of tone our Vegas nerve, it actually supports us in going more into the parasympathetic nervous system, which is basically just your relaxation response and that everything kind of flows much more easily when we feel relaxed. So like that's where it all starts is like, okay, we need to be in a relaxation response, anything that you want to heal and your relationship with your food and body has to start from a place of relaxation. Specifically, Dr. Shawn: (09:07) What I've learned is when you are in that green zone, that parasympathetic zone relaxed, you digest better, you absorb your nutrition better, you process blood sugars better. So the metabolism is working in your favor, but when you're in that yellow zone or red zone of, of fight and flight and freeze, that it messes with your blood sugar and your digestion. And so you get a lot of gut issues, right? Stephanie Mara Fox: (09:33) Absolutely. So I spent a decade healing, my own digestive issues. So I know a lot about this. Yes. Dr. Shawn: (09:41) Yeah. So that's what I'm hearing you say about how it flows better. And you're talking about that. Stephanie Mara Fox: (09:46) Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, some of the things that I offer those I work with around like vocal toning are, uh, humming, uh, gurgling, even singing and whistling, uh, splashing your face with cold water. You know, it doesn't, it, these are the not like big things. Um, even this is why like chewing, like chewing your food more actually helps activate the vagus nerve. And so like even when you're actually eating, the more that we choose, the more that that meal actually feels relaxing to our body. Dr. Shawn: (10:16) Interesting. So you, these exercises will help you bring in a relaxed state so you can connect with your food, but absorb it better and so forth. How did you clean and heal your gut with all of these, those years? Stephanie Mara Fox: (10:31) I found
