Bioindividual Approach to Nutrition for Neurodiversity and ADHD

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.

Over the past few years, I've become more interested in neurodiversity. I began to explore my own neurodivergency that has become clearer and clearer to me as I've aged. It has been an ongoing conversation with my husband as he explores his own unique executive functioning capabilities. I started to have more and more people come to work with me navigating being on the ADHD or autism spectrums and telling me that intuitive eating didn't work for them. I saw this thread that many of the bodily changes that can occur as a response to past trauma can already be happening in someone's brain when in the spectrum of neurodiversity. This can include quicker shifts into activated or collapsed nervous system states, less dopamine and time spent in a safety and connection response, faster fluctuations into hyper or hypo arousal, more energy utilized to do things like socialize, navigate transitions, make decisions, and process sensory input.

This can also show up with food as struggling to hear hunger and fullness cues, eating becomes a sensory negotiation where you're either experiencing heightened sensitivity to texture, temperature, taste, sounds, or smells during eating, or sensory seeking with crunch, flavor, bodily experience, or consistency. There can be difficulties with planning, cooking, and even remembering to eat. I have found that the greater awareness you have about how your mind and body function, the less shame and the more compassion can be cultivated. This is not your fault and you were perhaps never taught how to work with the way your brain functions to set up systems and processes for yourself that support you in navigating food with more ease. When I came across Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas' work, I immediately reached out to him to bring him on the podcast.

Dr Miguel Toribio-Mateas is a clinical neuroscientist, nutrition researcher, and autistic ADHDer with a long background in the gut-brain axis and its interactions with physical and mental health. His work brings together neuroscience, nutrition, lived experience, and self-compassion to help people understand their bodies in a way that feels human and grounding. He has spent over twenty years studying how food, trauma, and neurodivergence shape our emotional world. He writes and teaches from that place, blending research with the reality of being a person who has known burnout, disordered eating, masking, and the deep hunger to feel at home in his own body. I absolutely loved our conversation. We explored ADHD and nutrition, listening to your unique body's signals, understanding sensory sensitivities, the role environment plays in food choices, the connection between trauma and food, finding balance in nutrition, and practical meal prep strategies.

Thank you so much to those who have recently left a review for the podcast and have been supporting the show. Ways you can support the Saiated podcast include please leave a review anywhere that you listen to podcasts to help others find the show. You can also check out all of my affiliate links, join Satiated+ and be able to Ask Me Anything each month, or check out working with me 1:1, I do currently have openings in my private practice, or in any of my programs. I have self paced programs and my three month live Somatic Eating® Program which you can join the waitlist for. The next class will be in May. All links are in the show notes. Now, welcome Dr. Miguel! I am so thrilled that you are here today. I am such a fan of your work. I feel like even already, just before we press record, I'm like, there are just so many things that we're going to be able to talk about today. So I'm just really excited to dive into just this kind of connection between neurodivergency and nutrition and trauma, and you know, all these things that I feel like is really at the forefront of a lot of people's focus right now. And so first, I'd love to just get started with you introducing yourself for those who that maybe don't know you or don't follow you on social media and like how you got into the work that you're doing today.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 05:03

Thank you so much Stephanie for having me. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this chat for a long time now. I'm Miguel. Dr Miguel. It took me a while to get there, so I use it without shame to be quite honest. I'm a clinical neuroscientist, nutritionist, applied microbiology. So I combined the three things microbiology, especially focusing on the gut microbiome and the human microbiomes, and within that, what I did, well, throughout the last probably 20 years or so, it's been a journey to get where I am today in terms of academia. I probably 22 years started 2004 with me going back to university from I had done sustainability, a typical ADHD autistic mind. I think I have ADHD and I'm autistic with a touch of OCD as well. Just to, like, make things a bit more spicy. I had done a number of different things. I did business and languages and philosophy, and I found sustainability, and I did sustainability. And then I thought, you know what, I'm going to become a yoga teacher. So I became a yoga teacher, and I started teaching yoga in the, like, the early 90's and and then I thought, oh, wow, Ayurveda is so cool. I need to learn more about, like, herbs and spices. And what do I do? Okay, well, I couldn't just do like, an online course, or like a correspondence course for, like, nutrition. No, I had to go, like, full on bachelor's degree with honors nutrition. That took me ages to do, and then as soon as I came out of that, I did a lot of this kind of a glorified CPD, you know, expensive certifications and board certifications and all the rest of you know, all the rest of that that I'm sure many people try and do, and then they think, oh, my god, I spent 20 grand doing that, and what do I do with it now? So I went through that journey, and then I thought, okay, I actually need to go back to college and get into the lab, because I really want to learn about set brain cells and neurons and things like that. So I did that, and I spent two years doing a lab based master's degree in clinical neuroscience with with lab practice. And then I thought, okay, well, that's cute, but I don't want to be in a lab, because it's quite boring to just like be working with neurons. I want to be working with people. So I got an opportunity to do a transdisciplinary doctoral degree, so it allows you to mix different subjects. So the underlying thing was neuroscience, but then I was mixing in my experience at the time was in microbiology, working in microbiome testing and looking at what microbes you might have in your gut and what impact they have on your health and so on. So I mixed that in and my nutrition work that went back, you know, all those years now, from 2004 so I studied the gut microbiome and mental health with a bit of neurodivergence added to it. If I was to complete that now, it probably would have been fully on neurodivergence, and I would have added other angles, like the ones that we're going to talk about today, but I did talk about trauma. I looked into trauma and lived experience as part of my doctoral degree. And it was all about how when you do clinical trials, which I did three as part of my of my training, you anonymize people. And in anonymizing there is value, because you obviously you don't identify them. It's all very clean and tidy, but you lose the richness of talking to people and actually getting to know how they experience different things. So when you try to standardize, it allows you to be more statistically precise, but it also means that you lose the richness of the personal experience, which I think is really valid. So a lot of what I talked about in my thesis, which I ended up doing as 85,000 word piece in the end, I had to, like, submit a special request to write more, because I wanted to write more and do diagrams and all this kind of stuff. I ended up adding an extra piece on this kind of immersive, immersive learning from my own experience as a practitioner. So there was an extra reflective piece on the work that I had done that was more lab based, and how it was important to to just acknowledge lived experience. So sorry, a bit around the houses answer, but that's how I came to be the kind of like the academic person I am today I guess.

Stephanie Mara 09:37

Oh my gosh, there are so many overlaps in our journey, because I also started with focusing on the gut as well. My master's thesis was on cultivating a relationship with the gut brain from a somatic perspective, because the gut is talking to us in a lot of different ways, and so I've always found that really fascinating and interesting and people know my background here, and that, like, you know, got diagnosed with IBS, which was kind of a BS diagnosis of, we just don't know what's going on with you. So, like, got really fascinated with the gut. I agree with you that once you start kind of diving into that, it's like, there's a lot of curiosity of, like, the next thing and the next thing and the next thing of like, I also studied Ayurveda and just, you know, kind of going into really trying to understand how the body functions. And like I feel like, when I learned the field of somatics like that brought in such a different perspective for me, of starting to have to not take everything that I had learned nutritionally previously, and just like, blanketed over people, and it was like, it needs to be so unique and so individualized to someone's body and their lived experience and the context of their life. And I know, before we press record, we were starting to talk about that as well. So I'm wondering, like, what you found as you kept going and like, going through the layers of what actually is going to be supportive for someone to feel like they are, like, taking care of themselves nutritionally or otherwise based off of their unique body.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 11:16

I started working with people almost as soon as I started studying nutrition, because we have to do shadow work and clinical work from from the beginning to complete the licensing in the UK. So I had worked with people, and I had learned, kind of like the tools of working with people and the theory around you know, interpreting the evidence and translating it and everything else. But I think, as years go by and you accumulate things, and you realize what works for you, what doesn't work for you, and then you get a specific situation, like, for example, for me, the unchaining thing was my diagnosis of ADHD in 2020 and that was almost the culmination of a cycle of realizing that I needed to shed a lot of BS that I wasn't agreeing with. So I think even though I'm a scientist, I'm also quite spiritual, and I feel that that had a significance in my life, that at that particular point there was almost a message, okay, well, now there was the the epidemic, you know, everybody was kind of at home, quarantining, and I got my diagnosis just at that particular time where you couldn't go into an office anymore. And so there was so many things that just fell into place for me to actually just take time for me and realize and go inwards and realize what was working for me and what was not working for me. And really that cemented a lot of kind of intuition that had been growing for probably five years before then, and realizing that a lot of the stuff that is more regimented, a lot of the protocol based nutrition that is very regimented, that maybe those who sell you the protocols tell you, oh, it's personalized, it's evidence based, and it's personalized and individualized, because we do loads of testing. But sorry, darling, but like doing testing doesn't actually mean taking the person into account, because you're going to go back to a book and do a protocol that says, oh, if the leukocytes are between this range and that range, that means x. If your feritin is within that range and that range, that makes it that means x, and you need to prescribe x supplement, or you need to take out x food. And so that to me, okay, it's a sort of personalization, but it's not taking the person into account, which are two different things. And for me, taking the person into account became a lot more important, and taking into account the fact that some days you have full capacity to follow one of these protocols, and you think, oh, I feel so virtuous because I'm following everything that Dr so and so has told me to the T and oh, I feel a little bit better. So it must be that the protocol is kicking in, and I'm working and I'm spending all these 1000s of pounds or dollars or whatever in supplements and testing and everything else. And it's he's doing me a world of good. But some days you cannot even manage to do like a baked potato in the microwave, and that's what your nervous system is telling you. So what do you do with a protocol that's cost you 1000s of dollars that day that your body says, sorry, no, the most that you're going to manage today is a cup of tea. Ideally, you know, you cannot even, like, boil the kettle, so you put the mug of water in the microwave. So you just take shortcuts. And then I thought, okay, well, at one point, I was looking, 10 years before, at how genes might interfere with detoxification pathways and all of that kind of stuff. And I was thinking, oh, this is interesting, you know. And I was saying to people, oh, don't cook with Teflon. I'm not going to promote Teflon pans particularly or actively, I'm not going to say, go and buy Teflon pans. But equally, if you have a Teflon pan, it's perfectly fine to cook with Teflon. In the greater scheme of things, I think the last of your worries is going to be to cook with Teflon, especially if it's a pretty new Teflon pan that hasn't got any scratches. So you know, micro plastics, of course, another thing is that everybody's scared about micro plastics is almost being scared, like being scared about WiFi is like, you know, electromagnetic fields. Tell me where you can escape WiFi these days, you know, you can go to, like, a desert in the middle of Utah or something, and there's going to be like, 5g so how do you escape it? Is almost impossible. So in a way, your body is resilient, and your body adapts. And we have adapted to, you know, loads of changes on earth for the millions of years that we have been around, and we have evolved as humans during that time. And I'm thinking we are in that other in another age of evolution, and there are other challenges for us to worry about. And I feel that if we just because we are so multi layered, if you just focus so much on that biochemistry layer, on that genetic layer, on that, you know, nutrition layer that is interfacing the two, or just the microbiome layer, you know, I've worked with lovely people in the past who just focus so much on increasing one microbe on a microbiome test, but decreasing another one, and you lose the joy out of working with them, because it just becomes like a game of like, oh, I want my lactobacillus to rise, you know, whatever the price is, so I'm just going to put loads of probiotics in my mouth every day. It's not the point, I think you need to think, what is my body telling me? My body is going to tell me through a number of different means it could be that, yes, there is a bit of knotting in the in the bowel, and that's a message from the body. It could just be something else. It could be a fluttering in your gut that is kind of like more intuitive, and something you cannot really put your finger on why you feel like eating something that day that you didn't feel like eating the other day. And if you ignore it, then you're ignoring messages that are actually part of what the nervous system how the nervous system communicates with you. So you're basically shutting down the nervous system. You're saying, okay, I'm just going to use you to move. I'm going to move my fingers. This is the nervous system movement, dopamine, but I'm going to ignore the more subtle energy of the nervous system that I think is there, and it's part of being a human being so...

Stephanie Mara 17:33

Yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying is that, and I'd love that you actually brought in of somebody says this is going to be bio individualized, that if you are doing testing of any kind, they are looking at a book to be like, okay, based off of the testing I'm doing, build the protocol that I'm supposed to follow with what I find out that, not to say that that's entirely wrong, but that also it leaves out what you're pointing to, of the narrative of the body and the person's lived experience. I've worked with a naturopath once. This was like, many, many, many years ago, and she was like, okay, based off of what we discovered from your stool sample, you have this imbalance, we should do this supplement. And I think we were, like, waiting on some more tests from, like, the stool sample or something like that. Every time I took it, I was like, I feel sick. I was like, I don't feel good. Like, every time I get this, like, scratchy throat, I'm not feeling right in my body. And she's like, I don't know, like, based off of what we've discovered so far, like, this should be the thing that you should be taking. And then more information came in, and she said, oh, you actually shouldn't be taking that, because you have, like, this overgrowth here of that, and that's actually feeding that more. I was just like, I didn't need you to tell me that. Like, I could feel that in my body that this is not a supplement that I should be taking. And so I find that that's where, like pointing to the beauty of like bringing in nervous system and somatic work, and like listening to the body and trusting our felt sense comes in in all of these modalities that it can't just be this blanket suggestion of, like, here's what you're supposed to do based off of, like, what we know about your body.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 19:19

Yeah, absolutely, and what the practitioner might not know unless is a super duper practitioner with lots of different tools, and the understanding of the intersections where people live is that how you're going to experience something depends on a number of different factors that are not just biological. If you are straight versus gay or queer or trans, or, you know, or you're black, and you live in a neighborhood that various different problems, and you've grown in that kind of environment where black people felt like, you know, racism against them. You're going to grow with that kind of like level of alertness, the threat that can be determining what your body is telling you. I'm saying black. It could be Latino. It could be, you know, it could be white people in certain places, you know, women. It could be again, me being a queer person, you know, I've gone through assault and bullying and everything else, and my body has learned to behave in certain ways that are different to somebody who's not got my same background. So it's not about just like the color of the skin, it's about basically all these intersections where we inhabit. You move to another country, then you become used to that country, but you kind of like you're an alien in that country to a certain extent, or something quite funny, I go back to Spain, where I grew up and I was born. I came to the UK when I was 21 so I've been here like most of my life, but at the same time, when I go to Spain, I should feel like I'm home, but I don't. I feel like an alien in Spain. So that's kind of like another weird thing. So if I was living in Spain, that's going to have whatever consequences on my nervous system. I'm in Madrid. I just came back from Madrid, and I can feel the frequency is not right for me. It's kind of scratches me. I don't feel settled. It's kind of in other places, in Spain, I feel more relaxed, but Madrid kind of like frazzles me. It's kind of makes my energy a bit weird. So all of those things have an impact. We cannot measure them directly. We can say, you know, the energy of the city is doing this through your, you know, mitochondria. I guess at one point in the future, we might be able to do that. But at the moment, it's just, we just trust the intuition of the body, the intuition of the nervous system, the fact that you feel things in a different way, and when you add another layer of that intersectionality, which is neurodivergence, then it makes things even more, you know, complex, because you're going to have certain days where you feel that you need to avoid sensory input, because that's what your nervous system needs. It needs cocooning. It needs calm. It needs kind of isolation. And some of the days you might feel like you want, like lights and sound and flavors and so again, that's kind of like tending to what your body wants, as opposed to just the evidence or the or what is written in a protocol. And nobody's going to give you that. I mean, you can have people coach you, as I'm sure you do in your work coach people understand how to understand how to listen to those messages from the body, and that's the part of the somatic work. But at the same time, it needs to come from you. It needs to be you understanding what your body is telling you, and then you're reacting to that and respecting your own rhythms and honoring your own rhythms that might be different to other people's rhythms.

Stephanie Mara 22:42

Yeah, I completely agree with that as well. And you know, when I was going through long covid, I've told my whole story here, but I lost my ability to swallow for about like, two years, and it slowly came back that ability. But while I was doing that, and like, you know, worked with a bunch of different people, and they kind of wanted to understand that as my body continued to heal, and I was getting like full functioning capacity of my lungs back, and everything was healing where I could start to kind of swallow more consistently again. And I think there was probably a vagus nerve part that got interrupted, and things like that, I took a test on my sensory relationship, and it came out as both sensory speaking and sensory avoidant. I was like, cool. I was like, this makes so much sense. I'm like yeah, I vacillate between the two, and that I think that there's a lot of empowerment when you know more of these things about yourself, because then it's like, based off without judgment or shame or guilt, if I tune into where's my sensory sensitivity today, then I feel like you get to align everything that you're doing with food, with the environments that you put yourself in, how many interactions you can have that day, just aligning with your body, not seeing, and this is what I heard you saying, not seeing it as something to fix, like there's something wrong with the way that my nervous system functions, but learning more, this is how my nervous system functions, this is how my brain functions, and I get to learn how to work with it.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 24:11

Yeah, it makes absolute sense. And I was talking about ways of working that are protocol based, and, and, of course, that's, you know, the kind of dangers of falling into that trap and and how listening to the body can take you out of the trap. But there are other similar situations where you listen to people, so you're not necessarily working with somebody who's giving you a protocol, but you listen to somebody who tells you this is how ADHD people behave. And you've just been diagnosed, you were completely oblivious to anything ADHD, you just felt a bit like strange, and you didn't fit in or whatever. You know, everybody's got their own journey to the diagnosis or discovery. And then you get the diagnosis, and you start browsing things, even the algorithm will pick up that you're looking at things, and you suddenly see more ADHD content, and you see that kind of, like, more trivialized ADHD or autistic or neurodivergent content is basically very stereotypical. I mean, I'm not saying like, stereotypical as in, like, oh, autism, Rain Man. I'm talking more the 2026 stereotypical, you know, you have a cute reel of somebody with like, you know, 2 million likes, and it's like, oh, my ADHD today. And it's like somebody being very forgetful. So you just basically, you create these assumptions about yourself based off what other people are saying about themselves, because they that's their experience. But the reality is that being neurodivergent, whatever flavor, is going to be an individual experience as well. And going back to the sensory seeking or sensory avoiding, a lot of the myths are, oh, autistic people are very sensory avoidant. So, so basically, you just get a diagnosis of autism, and all of a sudden you just go and get yourself the, you know, the noise canceling headphones and, you know, like, dark glasses. But some days you just want, like, you know, I'm autistic. Some days I don't want any noise at all. And if there is a tiny bit of noise, like, it's super quiet where I live. But if, even if that the heating goes off and the boiler starts making, like, how many noise, some days I'm thinking, oh my god, that's so annoying. It's just like, it's like, almost like misophonia. It's kind of like it gets in your brain, and it kind of like it's like a nail in your brain. But some other days, I could just have music playing, and I'll have music, like, quite loud here I'll have, like, choral music. I love, like Renaissance music. It's just so it's almost like 2d music, as opposed to, like 3d. Is kind of like very it's like basic, but complex and beautiful at the same time. And I'll play that really loud, and my dog loves it. And he goes, I got a subwoofer, and he goes and lies next to the subwoofer. I think he likes the vibration of the bass, so he goes and falls asleep next to the subwoofer, which I think is really cute. And yeah, and some days I honestly cannot tolerate any sensory thing. I just get aggravated. I get angry. I get, you know, and again, that's my nervous system saying what I need that day. And I think honoring that and realizing that you're going to have different days and different patterns. And if you are a biological woman and you have cycles, then you're going to feel, even, you know, more of a fluctuation along the cycle as well. And that's nature is kind of, I think we just want to, I feel we just want to, like, control everything too much. And we're not supposed to control everything so much. It's nice to have a resemblance of, you know, an idea of control. So you have some parameters to live your life by. You want to control absolutely everything, certainly for neurodivergent people, I think is a way to actually lose your mind just try to control absolutely every single detail.

Stephanie Mara 27:53

Yeah, yeah. And you know, something I've seen in that is that so many people maybe don't know that they're navigating sensory sensitivities, and that's where food has come in for them, where they feel like the issue is that they have a food issue, where they're using food to either turn down the sensory input or turn up the sensory input based off of maybe what they're choosing, or how they're eating, or how much of what they're eating. And it never had to do with, you know, diet culture, like willpower, weakness or any of that. It's like the food is trying to do something in your body that maybe, right now, there's just not as much connection or awareness of what's going on, which also feels scary when it's like there's something happening in the body and you don't understand what's happening or what has changed, and so I'm wondering if you've seen that as well of like, I love your posts recently, of just kind of talking about, like, you know, especially when you're navigating, like, ADHD there, we sometimes have to simplify nutrition and not utilize some of these other protocol things to be like, we have to work with what's going to work with your body.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 29:01

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I have seen food being used in that sense from my own experience. But also, I spent six years working in a psychiatry team where we focused on people with addiction issues, so using different substances or alcohol or a combination. And what I found is that, because the brain was really used to filling a gap, that for me, there was an emotional thing going on that they were not listening to, or they were they didn't have the language to articulate, or it was too painful or and in many respects, there would have been trauma as well that was kind of like hidden, and in some cases, not so hidden, and we know about it, but abuse, neglect and sometimes for years, and they use the substances to kind of like fill that gap, but then they turn to food in a big way, particularly when they had the means to actually go big on food and, you know, and start cooking with lots of ingredients and so on. It's almost like they replace the using substances with, like using food, and sometimes in a very healthy way, in almost like an obsessive way. It had to be all absolutely, you know, gluten free, dairy free, lectins. And I'm thinking, oh my god, you have been binges of, like, crystal meth, like, you know, like two years ago for like, a whole week, and now you're worried about, like, lectins in beans. Are you joking me? There is that kind of thing in the brain that the need for control, just like, transfers from one thing to another. And the need to feel that if you don't go again talking about the layers that we were talking about earlier, we have so many different layers that if you just tackle the biochemical layer, and we were, of course, doing blood testing with people, and you know, they had, like, stool tests, and if you just focus on that, and you just focus on trying to raise the whatever marker may be low, or whatever vitamin may be low, or whatever bacteria may be low, and you know, the nasty bacteria kill it with like some botanical or whatever, then you're missing on what might even be facilitating the environment for those supposedly nasty bacteria to take a hold in that person's gut. Because what we know is that emotions actually have a huge impact, as you will know from your masters as well, have a huge impact on the gut. So gut brain connection is bi directional, and what your thoughts are, the thoughts that are going on in here are going to affect the gut, and the inflammation levels in the gut, the mucus production in the gut, all of those things are going to make the gut more hospitable or less hospitable for certain microbes that we don't want to have too much of, you know, and people think of, you know, whatever Candida or Klebsiella, or, you know, the kind of things that if you go to a certain type of practitioner, they will want to kill immediately, and they'll put you on a protocol. And, you know, but the reality is that you can kill the microbes, and then, if the person hasn't done the more kind of inner work and found out, why did I get to the point that maybe I have facilitated that environment that is allowing those microbes to to come in. And again, I don't want to say this in our kind of in a virtuous way, oh, I have done it, and then you must do it. I'm work in progress.

Stephanie Mara 32:33

All of us are.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 32:33

I have good days. I have really crap days, really, really crap days. And I'm not virtuous in that way. I don't want to kind of like, sound like, you know, you need to do the inner work. I feel that if you don't do the inner work, and you don't start even just by listening to your body, it's not even like, you know, high levels of therapy, or, you know, whatever you know, modalities you want to think about. It's just simple listening to your body. Why are you doing the things that you do, and are you conscious of your decisions, or are you just following that some kind of script that you follow because somebody's told you that's the way that you need to be? And it could be that you do that as a neurotypical person, because you feel, oh, I'm a male, I'm straight, I'm supposed to be to do this kind of things that, you know, like guys go to the gym and they are kind of like, you know, masculine, and they do this, and you become like a character in this play, and you perform. Then if you are another character, you perform that character, or whatever. If you start stripping the character thing, and you just become yourself, and there's no script, who remains there, and can you be that person? And can you listen to what your body is telling you when it starts communicating with you, when there are less layers because the body to get to the layer that is deeper, if you're communicating from all that layer of you know, all those BS layers that you have accumulated, your body is not going to get through to you the same way as if you have a clean kind of a surface, come and talk to me, buddy. I'm clean. This is me. I have no layers of BS left. You can talk to me now. I can listen. And if you're open to that, then magic things happen. And then suddenly I spent years thinking, okay, so that was some kind of experience, clinical experience with people, but I spent years the same. I spent years binging and then restricting. Binging on something, or I couldn't possibly have that again for the next three months, I was almost like a carnivore at one point, ketogenic, blah, blah, blah, living on pork scratchings and, you know, thinking that it was amazing. And next I was back to being plant based completely, which I was for like, six, seven years back in the 90s, early 90's and and then I was doing something else. And then my friend came with some diet. Oh, if you do this diet is like 500 calorie diet, then it does, you know, it influences your mitophagy and your autophagy and your, oh, that sounds good. I'm gonna read about it. Oh, my god. I've become so evangelical about it, I just wanted to do that. And and I'm thinking, why am I doing all of those things which are very similar to me, kind of going the cycles that I was since a teenager, of partying a lot, and then thinking I'm never partying again, and then kind of like going, I need to be a good boy now and not party, and then hiding myself for six months, and then having another period of, you know, going out on a Friday and coming back on a Monday, and I'm thinking, why do I keep doing those things? What am I numbing? What am I escaping myself from that I don't want to listen to, and I think again, and it's, it sounds kind of like spiritual and kind of, you know, higher self and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, that has such an impact on simple things that I can have gluten and it's not going to kill me. I can have a slice of sourdough bread without thinking, oh my god, I'm going to get poisoned by lectins and gluten and whatever else you find that is wrong with bread. Or I cannot have dairy because it's going to do this to me. I cannot have that because it's going to do that to me. But also, I'm plant based, but I cannot have too many beans because of the lectins. And I'm thinking, oh my god, give me a break. What do I eat? And it just becomes so complicated. And we just make it. We just make life so complicated. And I'm thinking your nervous system is in constant fight or flight mode, thinking there's a massive threat coming, and you have been used to that because of your history of trauma, abuse, neglect, assault, everything else that might have gone on in your life. So your nervous system is like, it's like, lapping it up. It's ready to go. It's thinking, this is me, my element. I'm in fight or flight. I'm loving this, but it's just damaging you. It's like we were talking before we switched on the cameras about how I was looking at photos of me from like, 2010, 2015, 16, I'm thinking, I actually think I look better now, you know, because I my face just looks like 2010 my face looked like, I say cortisol, but you said histamine, but it's just like I just felt and it wasn't that I was bigger. I just felt inflamed. It was a different shape. It was kind of like, I don't know, puffy, and I have, like, puffy eyes and everything, and I'm thinking, wow, how did that happen? I don't know my lymphatics were not draining, or I was just so congested. And I think, and I said this to you as well before we put the camera on, thinking back with my stress levels at the time, I felt like I was on 10 Red Bulls or something at like 10 o'clock at night, and I'm thinking, oh my god, I've got so much going on. I'm so overwhelmed. I haven't got a clue how I'm going to come out of this situation. I need to go to bed because I'm completely naked. I need to go to sleep, but I just feel like I've just had like, 10 double espressos or one after the next and three nicotine patches. I just feel like, you know, like my stress was like, ah, and I'm thinking, it's not, it's not healthy and not, it's not going to be the same for everybody, of course. But if you feel even a tiny amount of that going on in your life, and you have a history of something that has conditioned your nervous system to react really quickly to a threat. And you then make food a threat, you're tapping into the same response that made you experience the trauma in the first place, and you relive the trauma with a different flavor. It's not obviously going to be the same as if you were neglected as a child, but your nervous system remembers that pain, and then you think butter beans are going to hurt my gut because they've got lectins, and you make them a potential threat. And your nervous system remembers that and thinks it's there. It doesn't need to create a new narrative. The narrative is there. It's imprinted. It's like the Old Testament. Is there, like, written in stone.

Stephanie Mara 39:06

Yes, I resonate with so many of those layers. So first thing that I hear, overall, of what you're pointing to is how much like you're kind of talking a little bit about, like, the polyvagal theory of like, neuroception, of like, our bodies are always scanning our environment for cues of safety and cues of threat, and, you know, even if we kind of bring in the social determinants of health, way too much pressure has been put on what we're eating or how we're moving as like the ultimate, you know, quintessential things that we should only be focusing on of what contributes to health. But that's just not true.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 39:42

Yeah, the last 20 years, I can think back from when I started thinking about nutrition, like, you know, late 90s, like early 90s, to today, and it's just more and more and more nutrition has become so mainstream, but also so protocol and so it's like, you know, is like eating the wrong thing is gonna kill you. Ultra processed food is gonna kill you. Well, it might do. But what if you just fancy a donut one day you just need to be freaking out because you fancy a donut one day, where do you find balance? And I find where we are today is very difficult to actually listen to your body say, it's fine. You're safe. Have the donut, have the donut and cup of tea with it, and relax and enjoy it, and it's going to be fine. It's very difficult because we are bombarded with messages.

Stephanie Mara 40:32

Yeah, absolutely agree. And what you were pointing to also is that we can get to a place where we start to feel maybe safe with food, but if we're still in environments that don't help us to feel safe, like we're experiencing racism or marginalization or oppression that like stigma, you know that it continues to make you not feel safe. And naturally, when we don't feel safe in our bodies, food plays a role in being like, well, do I need more nutrition to be able to have, like, the nutritional fortitude to fight or flee from this threat? What is the threat? It's like, pervasive. I can't pinpoint it quite exactly, especially when it's just the environment and the world that you live in. And so it is kind of layered that I find what you're pointing to also is there's so much focus on the food that we miss, zooming out to be like, what else is going on? And what you were also pointing to, that I talk a lot about here as well, is that sometimes we go into food behaviors because it's mimicking trauma response that we already know, and we're trying to find some kind of completion with that trauma response, but what it does, usually is just perpetuate the trauma response, or the sympathetic activation that has become kind of home because it's what we've lived in for so long.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 41:52

Absolutely, yeah, and I talked about neurodivergence, but I can think of situations where the person I was talking to in clinic were absolutely neurotypical. And I was saying, but you know, can you think of some thing in your life that could be contributing to how you feel? And they say no, but they're going through a massive divorce, and I'm thinking, okay, so, you know, you're completely compartmentalizing the divorce situation with the fact that you've got IBS symptoms, and don't you think that they may be linked, that you basically you are trying to separate from a person that you have made the decision to separate from a person who you think is damaging you now. So that's painful for anybody, that will not have just happened overnight. You just didn't think, oh, I'm just going to divorce, and then you divorce, and that's it. It will have been a journey, and your body is responding, and the gut is so wise. It's like, you know, it's just full of, like, inner wisdom. That's why so many people have got gut issues, because it's probably the first organ or system that response to to the environment, because you just pick it up in there. It's just got so many nerve endings, and it's got twice as many glial cells as the whole of the spinal cord. So, you know, it's just incredible the amount of neural power that the gut holds. So it's understandable, it's going to pick up those nuances. So of course, the neurodivergent angle amplifies things, but this applies to absolutely everybody.

Stephanie Mara 43:27

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious if you could say more, even if someone's listening to this from a neurodivergent angle. So now we're kind of saying, like, okay, everyone deals with this, whether we're kind of have the awareness or not. You know, everyone's doing the best that they possibly can to work with what they have awareness around. I hear you on what you were saying before of just like, everyone gets to decide, like, how much work they do in this there's no one like saying you have to, like, go really too deep into your body or somatics or anything like that, like everyone's working with, you know, what they've got and what they're ready and capable of, but then you bring in this neurodivergent layer, and I'm wondering, like, when you said that, that can sometimes compound things or things worse or maybe more difficult, like, what there makes it more difficult when we add in that layer?

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 44:20

Yeah. So I think for me, it goes back to capacity and the fact that in order to follow any goodwill that you might find, browsing through Instagram and deciding that is a good idea to start so and so's diet, because it looks really cute and it's easy and, you know, you only need a few ingredients, blah, blah. And then you think, okay, it's fine. You save it. And then you think, right. So to now next thing I need to do a grocery shopping list that requires planning, which is executive function. So you're trusting the executive function that you might not have that day. Then something kicks in that could be as silly as your dog needs to go for a walk and you are not ready. So you get stressed. So stress then dampens further the prefrontal cortex and executive function, so you lose even the little bit of capacity you have in there, or it gets delayed, and then you get second wind, and you start planning your shopping when the shop is closed already, because that's when you basically light up and it's like 11 at night, and, yeah, it's just one of those things. And that's a reality. It happens in a neurodivergence a lot. So then you need to do even more things that require executive function. Like, you know, you go to the shop, you need to do meal prep, because that's what everybody tells you that you need to do. I don't necessarily like meal prep very much. I'm very much kind of, I like to put a meal together in 10 minutes, and kind of like fresh ingredients. I do a lot of wok I tend to just use two pans. I've got like 10 pans, but I tend to use just the same two pans for everything.

Stephanie Mara 45:59

Same, absolutely same!

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 46:01

Yeah, wok, beans, texturized soy or this thing in the UK, we get this thing called quorn, which is like micro protein with egg white is tasty. So I use a lot of that. So I use a lot of frozen stuff again, because for me, it's, it's my version of prepping. I don't need to chop spinach and freeze it. When I can buy frozen spinach in like little cubes, I microwave it, you know, and again, I rewind back to the days that I didn't have a microwave because I thought that waves were going to give me cancer and I was going to die. So, you know, I just didn't want that in my house. I didn't have a microwave. For years, I didn't have a TV because I didn't want to, like, you know, to watch too many things that were going to, you know, whatever. So I didn't have a TV and a microwave. Now I have two TVs, and I have a microwave that I use every day, and I'm fine, you know, I haven't died yet on that food. I'll use that because I think, well, it takes me two minutes to defrost something, and I don't need to spend hours prepping, you know, on a Sunday or something. I'll do, everybody has their own way, but that's me listening to my body and listening to what feels comfortable for me, so that I feel safe using frozen food, a lot of tinned food, like, you know, tin bins or in a glass jar or something, because I haven't got the time to soak beans from dry I have the best intentions. I buy them, I put them in the pantry, and then I ended up throwing them away because they were expired in 2009 or something. And I kept them that long, and I know that they last because they found beans in the pyramid, so they're fine, but, you know, I don't want to eat beans that are 20 years out of date. So, yeah, so, so all of that is our reality, and I think, is capacity and realizing that some days you're going to thrive doing this so and so dice and going to the shop and coming back and spending two hours cooking, and some days you just want to do, you know, a plant based burger in the air fryer with a bit of salad out of the bag. I listen to myself now, I kind of have a combination of both. So I have things that I'm maybe thinking, okay, well, this is going to take me a little bit longer to cook. And if I have the inspiration and the time, and, you know, I sometimes like to speak to a friend on FaceTime while I'm cooking, and we kind of body double, and, you know, we chat about things that happen during the during the day, and we spend an hour on FaceTime and we kind of that the time goes quickly, and sometimes I just literally want to spend five minutes cooking, because I've come back from teaching all day, I have a long journey to get to the university and back, and when I get back, it's like six o'clock or something. I've been out from seven in the morning, and I just want to literally just have something ready. So if I know that my other half is not going to be in the house, I'll do a an instant pot of vegetables or soup or something, and I leave it on, keep warm so it's ready for when I come back. It's hot when I come back and I just take it out and I can eat it. So those little tricks and understanding that, okay, I'm going to be completely exhausted when I get back. I know I'm not going to have the energy if I don't cook. I know that the days gone by I would have just had a bag of Doritos with like, some guacamole or something. I don't want to do that because it doesn't feel good for me, but I still need it, because now I know that my body is probably not going to like it, even though I do like Doritos. But, you know, I tend to binge on them if I have them, so I don't buy them. So it's just knowing all those things that you know what works for you, and to do that, you need to peel a lot of the layers that are super imposed all the time.

Stephanie Mara 49:42

Yeah, I appreciate all of those pieces, because I hear so much compassion in that, and like how much pressure we have now received from so many nutritional realms of like that. It has to be home, cooked, like you're talking about, sprouted, soaked, all whole foods, always balanced...

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 50:03

Oh, yes, completely. Activated! Oh my god. It's like, who has the time to activate nuts? Like, oh, and you keep them in this jar, and you move them to another jar, and in 21 days, 21 days, I'm starving. I want nuts now. I don't want to wait 21 days.

Stephanie Mara 50:22

Yeah. I mean, in my early 20s, I was trying to do those things. And I can't tell you how many times I had bowls of bowls of water out of food that would just literally, like ferment you don't want to eat, that it doesn't smell good, so many bowls just got thrown out. And so, yes, I think that there's this piece that you're pointing to, is that we have to really start to reassess what actually is going to lead to health. And like you are pointing to, like, if we are making this about health, about the vibrancy and the well functioning of our bodies, and we feel ease being in our bodies, you know, maybe most days, not every day. We're human. You know that it has to also take so much pressure off of food, because all of that stress that is being put on food isn't also leading to the health or the vibrancy that we're looking for, if anything, it diminishes it, because we're such in a hyper vigilant state that, like you were talking about that gut brain access that, like everything's just start shutting down, that you could be eating the most beautifully balanced meals and you're not really digesting them very well.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 51:30

Yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to, like, basic chemistry, like stress, even a tiny amount of stress is going to shut down gastric acid production. So it's not even more complicated than that, your stress, your amygdala is hijacked into thinking that something's going to happen, and then immediately you should have plenty of juice in your stomach that's going to be super low pH. So when the food arrives, it's almost like caustic. It just dissolves the food and instructs all the amino acids and starts going into the small intestine, and, you know, and then it starts, kind of like a washing machine. It moves a little bit as well, and it kind of like churns the food, and it goes into, like baby, into a puree, kind of like consistency, into the small intestine. And then you start drawing nutrients from there, and then a lot of water. And then you just get the fiber going into the into the colon. Well, the first process, which is amylase being produced in the salivary glands, you stop that. So it's basically an enzyme that breaks down carbohydrates. So you start prepping for food the moment you start thinking about it, and your mouth gets juicy, and you get amylase in there. Well, you'll start, you'll get a lot of amylase immediately when you get stressed in your mouth, because that's the response that your brain is sending to your salivary gland, saying, I'm prepping for stress. So if I'm eating anything now, it needs to be digested very quickly, because I'm going to need to start running from danger or engage in a fight. So I'm going to produce a lot of enzymes. So if you end up having a, you know, a bit of a potato or something, you know, on the run to fight a lion, then you're going to digest the carbohydrate really, really quickly. But then after that, and you've got a short window with that, and then after that, which is minutes, I guess I need to brush up my stress biochemistry and the amylase production. But I'm pretty sure that if it's under half an hour, 30 minutes of a window where then shuts down, and it starts shutting down the stomach as well, and the production of the hypo, the hydrochloric acid, and then basically, a lot of people say, oh, I've got indigestion, I've got heartburn, I've got IBS. It may not be any of those things. It may be, I'm not dismissing their lived experience, and I'm not going to diagnose them online without even knowing them, but in a lot of cases, it may be like this lady with IBS, who just was completely oblivious to the fact that she was immersed in a very painful situation, but she was so disconnected from the fact that that might have anything to do because she was paying a nutritionist to give a meal plan, she didn't want to talk to me about her divorce. She didn't she wasn't coming to me for therapy. She wanted a meal plan. She wanted Monday to Sunday with so many macros and so many, you know, so much iron and, you know, whatever. So she was not prepared to be talking about her she had pigeonholed the two things in two different areas of her brain. She was not ready to admit that they were connected. So a lot of people live like that. A lot of people just don't think, oh, but that's not anything to do with with nutrition. That's not anything to do with food. Well, yes, news flash, it does.

Stephanie Mara 54:52

I'm really curious to actually hear your thoughts, because I'm very torn here. I feel like I kind of reside in both camps, in that there's been more and more kind of modalities that are coming out around using nutrition for trauma like that there's a way to eat to kind of decrease a trauma response in the body, and I don't want to diminish that that could be accurate. But what I have also found is, like, kind of, what we're talking about here is that you could eat in a way that could diminish the trauma, but then also, if you're not addressing the trauma like food can kind of only take you so far. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on kind of like this new realm that's showing up of nutrition for trauma, and your thoughts on that.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 55:40

And I guess that you're referring as well to eating loads of protein, because your nervous system needs loads of protein, so you've had trauma, then increase the protein.

Stephanie Mara 55:49

Eating things in a specific order, so you're stabilizing blood sugar levels, eating in a way that wouldn't like, you know, not too much sugar, for example, so it's not like, you know, activating your adrenal glands, or things like that. Like, I think that people are trying to see that eating in a particular way can either, like, up regulate or down regulate your nervous system. I've seen obviously, like a huge effect, even in my own body and in trying to eat in a very stabilizing, balanced way. But it didn't necessarily, like, heal my trauma, like it maybe, like, turn the volume down of everything inside my body. But yeah, that's kind of what I was referring to.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 56:29

Yeah, and you're right, it's going to do what it can do in that layer that is self contained of biochemistry and nutritional biochemistry, but it's not going to go any deeper. So if your adrenals are conditioned because of childhood experiences to behave in a certain way for as much as you start the day with half a chicken or, you know, 30 grams of plant based protein and whatever, lots of polyphenols for neuroinflammation and everything else is going to scratch the tip of the iceberg of your nervous system, because your nervous system is all kind of hiding under the eyes there, thinking, heal me. I'm ready for some kind of, you know, some realness here. Give me space to communicate with you, and you're trying to communicate with the nervous system that's traumatized with like, little choice, you know, it's kind of, you know, you're trying to heal your nervous system with a bit of tomato and lycopene and protein, and it's cute, but it's not going to work. I don't think it's going to work if you have gone through a lot of pain in your life, and your nervous system remembers the pain, and you haven't had the space to hold that pain and to acknowledge it, and to say to yourself, I'm safe now, and that pain is in the past, and I can move on with whatever modality that you do it, it's the pain is going to it's going to remain there. And even when you've done the work, the pain is still there. It's kind of like you've moved on, but the memory is there. So if you behave long enough in us in a certain way, you can reactivate it. So I just think that having the illusion that you're going to do a 12 week trauma healing program based on nutrition is quite fantastical. I would love it if it worked. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody was healed after a 12 week diet with more carrots and salads and stuff, the world would be a wonderful place. But the reality is that is not as simple. You need to do the work. You need to listen to your pain, and you need to listen to what is happening in your life, and what things are echoes of those pain or of that pain that may have another shape, is that that is it that your relationship with a significant other of now is an echo of a relationship with your father or with your mother or with somebody else who costs you pain a particular time in your life. Is it that your work relationship is so toxic that is making you sick, but you cannot leave because you're worried about the financial implications of not having a secure job? So that's the ultimate lack of safety. You suddenly think, wow, you know, I cannot pay for my medical care, I cannot pay for my children's meals. You know, it's such a responsibility. So people get stuck in jobs that they hate. And you know, all of that is going to have an impact on how the nervous system is continuing to be wired, and if the wiring was funky to start with and then you add layers of funkiness that are continuing through life. It's never going to get straight. It's always going to be funked. So, yeah, I don't think a bit of carrot and whatever else protein or polyphenols are going to touch the sides.

Stephanie Mara 59:54

I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on that, because I feel like that was something when I first started down this path in, like my early 20s, and realized that, you know, I was going through a lot at that time. Was navigating depression IBS, really, what I learned, and I've shared here, is like I slowly got to discover, through lots of somatic therapy, that there was all a basis of trauma and a trauma response that was living in my body. But I really wanted to believe, especially with like, Julia Ross's work, and like, the food mood connection, and like all these things that I was starting to read, that like, nutrition was going to be it, that if I could, like, just find the right way to eat, that I could, like, stabilize myself and heal my trauma and not be depressed anymore. And I did that for so long, and I think that's why I always navigate when talking about food, very cautiously, that it's like food can be such a resource and an ally in helping us to maybe facilitate feeling how we want to feel, but also there, as you're pointing to, so many deeper layers that need to be attended to, to even, even if food was helping us to feel safe sometimes, if we don't have the capacity to be with that sense of safety, like we're not even going to want to eat that way, because it feels so uncomfortable to feel safe in our body.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 1:01:11

Exactly. And I'm just thinking of another analogy as well. And I'm not suggesting that anybody needs plastic surgery, but it's almost like you get to a point in your life where you think, you know what, I'm going to treat myself to a facelift. And instead of that, you think, now I've just seen face lift equivalent cream that you buy in Walmart for like $25 that's everything a facelift will do for $50,000 in 12 weeks, you just apply the cream, and suddenly everything lifts up, and you look like, you know, you look oriental, almost, because you're so pulled back and, you know, you look amazing. And if you want to heal the trauma with something superficial and just tackling that one layer is not going to happen. You need to go all the layers, like the facelift will actually lift all the layers of your muscles and readjust them, and that's almost like the equivalent of the rewiring of the nervous system that you need to engage with by means of listening to it. And again, it will be different modalities. It will be even just self reflection. I think you know you don't necessarily need to work with somebody. You just need to find the space to hold yourself and say, who am I? It's just that sometimes it's a lot more difficult, because you need to first find the awareness that you need to find the space, then find the space. And life always has a way to give you something to do, whether it's your dog needs walking, or you need to do an extra shift at work, or you're too tired, or you haven't got the capacity, or, you know, so if you have somebody to coach you through what you're going through, then that's always going to be a better option, I feel. And it may be that some people need that for a very long time. Some people are very intuitive, and they pick up things like sponge and they only need, like, three sessions with somebody, and then just pick it up, and they learn the language, and they go talking nervous system language to themselves, like beautifully in three sessions or four sessions, or whatever. That is the analogy that you know you need to go deep and understand what is going on deep inside your body, and understand all of those connections that we have talked about, all the intersections that you inhabit, to allow you to inhabit your own body and to embrace you as the full wonderful meadow of beauty that you are, and you are complex and nicely weird, and that is you, and you don't need to dumb it down.

Stephanie Mara 1:03:39

So beautifully said. I feel like I could talk to you all day, and I'm absolutely going to have to have you back for like to go into so many other directions I want to go into, but to respect also your time, you know, I always like to wrap up with a baby step for individuals who are listening and really resonating with everything that we've talked about today, you know, you even put out a post recently of like, things that had nothing to do with nutrition that were like, here are things if you are navigating, like ADHD, I think it was like the simplicity of, like, get outside in the morning. Like, you know, decrease sensory input if you need to. I'm curious, food or otherwise, what are some baby steps you would offer to someone who's maybe trying to navigate their own body in new ways?

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 1:04:25

Yeah, I think nature is just the most incredible thing. And it doesn't need to be a two hour walk or a hike. It could be just a 10 minute walk in the park. And for me, is the consistency as well. So if you feel good when you go out for a walk, even if it is just 10 minutes. If you stick to doing that a few times a week, you're rebuilding the pathways that are connecting you to that bit of nature. And again, it could just be your local park. It could just be that you haven't got access to the local park, and you just basically go around in a neighborhood and focus on the trees, or, you know, or just step into your balcony and enjoy the bit of light in the morning and look at what you know, some planted pots that you might have in your balcony, whatever access you have to greenery, to plants, to trees, to hills, to water, we are wired to connect with that, to align with that, that is in our genes. We get close to that there's a nice reprogramming that goes on without having to be too aware or to having to work too hard for it. It's just almost like we just soak it in. That would be my number one, and another one would be just self compassion can take so many different shapes, but I think just be aware of your own capacity in that particular moment, and just stop for a second. And even if you want to close your eyes and take a breath and ask, what am I feeling now and what do I need now to maybe feel another way? And it could just be that all you need is to stop for that one minute and just breathe and connect with your body. And when you open your eyes again, you don't need to do anything particular, but you've just taken that one minute out of the chaos. And it could just be that all you needed was to have a cup of herbal tea or a cup of coffee. You know, it doesn't need to be virtuous. It doesn't need to be chamomile, organic chamomile. It could just be, could be a cappuccino. You know, you just fancy a cappuccino. Well, allow yourself to have the cappuccino without guilt and enjoy the cappuccino in a mindful way. So don't have the cappuccino while you're scrolling through Instagram and are you trying to reply to three emails at the same time and not doing anything in particular, but trying to do too many things at once. Just stop, have the coffee or the tea or whatever, and just enjoy that moment without doing anything else, and just look at all the out of the window. Let the brain actually navigate imagination and yeah, allow it to be free. I think those two things would be my top baby steps.

Stephanie Mara 1:07:13

I love both of those because they're free for the most part. You know that it's like self compassion is something that is available to you in any moment. And nature is literally around us all the time that you can step outside in any moment and be able to, you know, I always like to focus on trees like, especially if you're having a moment where you're just feeling really activated or triggered, or, you know, sensitive, and that, like, I always like to imagine, like tree roots growing out of my feet, and like, you know, tapping into, like the root tree structure that is here in the world, because that's how they all communicate with each other. But it's like, yeah, there's this opportunity all around us to connect with something that can give our body a sense of safety. And so I, I love those examples of things that people can start to play with, and I'm curious how listeners can keep in touch with you and the amazing work that you're doing in the world.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 1:08:09

I'm most active on Instagram, so I'm sure that you're going to be sharing that in your episode notes. But yeah, I'm DrMiguelMatias on Instagram. I've been posting in Spanish lately as well, because I've just written a book which is out in April in the UK and the US. I wrote two versions of the book with two different publishers, because it's just how it happened. So it's not a translation, it's almost like an adaptation, and it's actually out in Spanish. So if anybody speaks Spanish and wants to buy it in Spanish that is already available in Spanish, but I talk about all of these things that we've been talking about. Yeah, I post on Instagram almost daily when I feel that have the capacity as well. So I try to do what I preach. And some days I don't post, or a whole week I don't post, and I try not to feel guilty as well when I don't post, because I don't want to just be trapped by the algorithm. So if you see me missing out for a few days, that's because I've got other things going on in my life, and they are taking priority, but that's where, probably where you can find me. And then if you follow me on Instagram, you'll find my website as well, and I've got a substack as well. It's like more long form and so on. So the links will be there, and then you can get to know me a little bit better.

Stephanie Mara 1:09:24

Awesome. Yeah, I will definitely leave all of those links in the show notes to your book. And I definitely recommend following you on social media. That's how I found you. And I love everything you're putting out on Instagram. And I think it's really important just to also, you know, decrease stigmatization around working with your body and how it is, even if you're navigating ADHD like you know, you just have a beautiful different way that your brain operates, and you just get to learn you know what works for it, rather than even you know, seeing it as I don't know, less than or whatever. But, yeah, I so appreciate everything that you shared here today, and thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom and everything that you're doing in the world.

Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas 1:10:09

Thank you so much, Stephanie, for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Stephanie Mara 1:10:12

Absolutely! Well to everyone listening., if you have any insights that you want to share with me, email me at support@stephaniemara.com, or DM me on any social media platform, and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Dr. Miguel here:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmiguelmateas/
Website: https://drmiguelmateas.com

Book: ADHD Body and Mind https://amzn.to/4riUEjo