How to Use Food Cravings as Feedback of Your Nervous System States

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.

By the time I started graduate school, I had noticed the connection between food and mood. I had moved through the binge restrict cycle, I had become a certified yoga teacher and health coach, and I started to notice that providing someone with a meal plan could only take a person so far in cultivating more peaceful, connecting, and grounding food interactions. I observed that whenever the conversation of food came up, there were so many emotions, sensations, and memories that would also arise. 

Through my three years at Naropa, I kept sharing and teaching to anyone who would listen about the connection between somatics and nutrition. It felt absurd to me that food was rarely a conversation I ever had with a therapist and it was never talked about as a way to get to know myself or that my cravings could inform me of how I was doing or what my needs might be. 

From the time I graduated in 2013, I've been tracking themes in my sessions and conversations around what somatically shows up in our food behaviors. In my interview for my PhD in somatic psychology in 2024, I was asked what I would bring to the program. Again, I passionately shared that I believe eating is a somatic practice and there is a need to bring the field of nutrition into somatics. 

This feels like an almost 20-year journey to reach this point today, where I'm finally seeing that others have observed these themes and have been just as passionately trying to combine these fields of study. One of those people, who I'm thrilled to bring back onto the podcast, is Luis Mojica. 

If you missed our first conversation, I highly recommend checking it out and I can link it in the show notes HERE. Luis Mojica is a Somatic Educator, certified in Holistic Nutrition and author of "Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma" coming out on April 28, 2026.

With years of experience working at the intersection of trauma and healing, Luis has become a sought-after teacher and speaker in his field. He reaches thousands of students annually through his online courses and webinars, and hosts the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast.

We chat about how Luis also came to combine the fields of somatics, nutrition, and trauma, food as a witness to your darkest moments, what different foods will do in your nervous system, the importance of titrating balancing foods into your meals, owning the choice to lean on food when your capacity to be with your body is low, somatic practices to move through cravings staying connected to yourself, discovering what your most craved foods are trying to do for you emotionally or relationally, and so much more. 

If you'd like to support the Satiated Podcast, leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts to support others in finding the show. You can also check out the links in the show notes where you can find all of my affiliate links, join Satiated+ and be able to Ask Me Anything each month, or check out working with me 1:1 or in any of my programs including my self paced programs and my three month live Somatic Eating® Program. The next class will start May 21st and you can join now at somaticeating.com. Now, welcome Luis! 

Luis Mojica 04:38

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Luis Mojica, and I'm a trauma therapist, somatic practitioner, educator and nutritionist. The short story is I was born into an intersex body that caused me when I was developing to have a lot of confusion and body shame and overwhelm. And with my peers, it just compounded, because I was bullied, I was sexually assaulted, I was harassed, and so this kind of period in middle school is when I think back on it was the most difficult of my life, and I didn't want to live I really hated myself, and I was so immensely overwhelmed by the anxiety that lived in my body. I couldn't think straight, I couldn't sleep, and the only thing I could do was eat. So I would eat and eat and eat. And it was the only way I could find a little bit of softening around the anxiety. But only it only worked for an hour, sometimes even less, and I have to eat more. So then I gained a bunch of weight from the food I was eating. And I got very, very sick, and I developed asthma and cystic acne and high cholesterol, and I mean, all these, these chronic illnesses. So I lived the next few years of my life sick all the time. I had some incredible openings in my life where I music being one of them, nature being another one, and then nutrition, discovering the food could actually heal my body, and that led me down to the path of becoming a nutritionist, and then getting curious about the kind of underbelly the subconscious. What role does trauma and history and relationship play in what we eat? It was completely unexplored at the time, and so I started training in somatic experiencing, and then I was able to bridge those two together. So this book that I wrote, food therapy is this whole bridging of really, 20 years from the moment I decided to drop out of school for psychology and go into nutrition to the moment I'm here with you now and bringing all of it together.

Stephanie Mara 06:36

Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. I mean, it's really interesting just to hear how we all get to this point of especially when there's like a history of past trauma, and we're doing the best we can to take care of ourselves through these very intense, somatic, embodied experiences and not knowing what else to do. And I find that I always like to soften the judgment and increase the compassion that it's like this was the wisest, most adaptive thing we could have possibly done is to go and find food and very specific foods that give us a very certain felt sense in the body. And I really resonated with that because I was there as well during my teenage years and leaning on food to help myself feel a certain way when I didn't feel safe in my environment. And so I'm curious, as you've even started writing your book and going throughout your history, what do you feel like was really starting to inform you that there is a connection between like food and feelings, or like food in our nervous system, like, oh, like, I remember when I started to play with food and nutrition, it was like, oh, wait, food can make me feel a certain way. It's not just used to like, make me feel better or cope, like, it can actually also make me feel good and stabilized?

Luis Mojica 08:02

Yeah, absolutely. When I was writing the book, I actually opened it with this moment where I'm on stage talking about food addiction and binging. And while I was talking about it, it was simultaneously triggering my memory of when I discovered peanut butter. And peanut butter, for me, was this like gateway drug to binging and I was obsessed. And so when I went back to those memories of peanut butter, in particular, peanut butter balls, my mother used to make, it's like these really sweet, sugary peanut butter dough, that you round into balls and dip into more sugar, and she would serve it on a plate with me with a giant glass of milk. And so when I came home from school, I remember being like sweaty and smelly and slightly dissociated and lots of nausea and like my jaw would hurt, and I have this almost a migraine just from the tension of being in freeze, because I got all this attention again from being born intersex. I developed breasts at age 9, 10, so I got all this attention for these breasts I had developed as a boy. So I was walking around with my shoulders curled in so my whole posture, my whole body, was literally imploding eight, nine hours through the school day, I would walk into the house and close the door, and I could smell the peanut butter balls. I could, like smell them waiting for me, and when I would think about going to them, it was instant, instant bliss, instant softening, instant deepening, like an anchor in my stomach, and I would eat them until I couldn't fit any more in my body, and I was completely exhausted, like I had no energy, and I would just lay on the couch and watch TV. And it was this ritual of coming home from this, this place where people who literally assaulted me were in math class with me, and I was keeping it a secret. And so I was in this place that felt so dangerous and scary. But then got home and I had this food that tended to that because I didn't know how to tend to it. And I didn't tell my mother what had happened. Like a lot of kids who are sexually assaulted, we don't talk about it because we think we did it. So there's this massive amount of shame and fear of anyone finding out. So you're holding it yourself. And I've really come to appreciate Dr Peter Levine the way he talks about trauma now as what happens in the absence of an empathic witness. All those years were me, I didn't have a witness. I couldn't witness it. I was too young. I didn't know how to hold it. My parents, no one knew about us. No one could help me and intervene. My teachers didn't know all I had was those peanut butter balls. So my binge eating was really this incredible, empathic witness, like the food itself held something I didn't know how to hold and that's what came really clear when I was writing the book.

Stephanie Mara 10:42

Ooh, I'm so glad you shared that. Something I feel like comes up a lot with those that I work with is like this grief of when they feel like they get to the point of wanting to say goodbye to binge eating, they know it's not helping them anymore. They can feel somatically, what it does to their body, and they know that it's not actually providing the felt sense that they want. And I always like to talk about, like food grief, of there's a lot of grief at that moment when you're saying goodbye to something, but something about your story also brought in a new lens of you're also saying goodbye to a thing that was your witness, the only thing that maybe was the thing that saw you in your darkest moments and your biggest pain and wounds, and to say goodbye to that is like saying goodbye to your best friend. I'm curious how those that you've worked with have gone through that experience, because I find that that is actually a really pivotal moment in food recovery is starting to realize, like I can have a different interaction with food that actually makes me feel how I want to feel, but there's also all these memories that there is sadness, there is grief in saying goodbye to what was.

Luis Mojica 11:58

Absolutely. The one way I understand it, and I like to teach it, is that food replaces agency when you're a child, because when those things are happening to you, or you're in an abusive household, or you're just exhausted by life, whatever, you're a child, you can't get in a car and drive away. You can't kick someone out of your house, your life. You can't even call for help most of the time. You don't have a lot of rights as a child in that way. So our only agency sometimes is to control what goes in or out of our mouth. And so for me, it's just exactly that thing. I didn't have any way to fight back or yell back or ask for help, so my thwarted agency went toward, well, I'm just going to eat as much as I can. It's one thing I can do, and that food literally touched a place inside of me that was hurt. It literally touched parts of me that were constricted from the inside out. So walking away from peanut butter in general was exactly what you said. For my mind, it was, what's the big deal? It's peanut butter like get almond butter, but for my body, that was my empathic witness since sixth grade. It's literally it was, I was closer to it in that way than any human being in my life, because it knew how to hold me. When we're working with people with food, and we're not considering the subconscious relational component that goes in with it, we're just looking at the food as the kind of the issue, or the way I like to say it, is, we're looking at food through just a health lens. When we're looking at it through a relational nervous system lens, we get curious, wow, what is it actually gifting you? What's your relational experience with this being of this food it brings in food animism. And so when you say food grief, it's like, yeah, food grief comes because whether we know it or not, we're practicing food animism. We are going to the bag of chips instead of our friend for a hug. There's a personality even in that. So there's so much walking away from and I think of how it took me 20 years to really understand that and hold that in myself. Everything I wrote in this book came from that place, like, what would I have wanted to be given the information for navigating this, what practices would have helped me. It was really kind of like self centered in a positive way, so I could bring it to people that really need the kind of direct holding and guidance around this.

Stephanie Mara 14:12

Yeah, I want to bring it back to the experience of peanut butter, because I so resonated with that. I think maybe we talked about this in our first podcast episode as well that peanut butter was my thing, too, and it was always because whenever I would get sick, whenever I came home, lunch, every single day, was always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich specifically made from my mom. And so there was something very intimate and connected with peanut butter of love and soothing and attention. And whenever I wasn't feeling that way, it was like, well, I can eat a lot, a lot, a lot of peanut butter and maybe try to mimic that same felt sense. But it never did it. It always felt like I needed to eat more peanut butter. Because it was like, maybe it wasn't enough. I didn't quite get what I was looking for from it. And I think that there's also some experience in that as well, that I know that you start to delineate how foods can do different things in our nervous system. And I always think it's like important to bring in the context of when we're eating the food that it was regulating because of the context of eating the peanut butter in relationship with my mother, but when I'm in college alone, sick by myself, not reaching out for support, then eating a lot of peanut butter in that context provides a totally different nervous system reaction. So I'm curious if you can go into more of the different nervous system states that you've kind of identified, of how food does different things in our nervous system.

Luis Mojica 15:54

Yeah, these categories I've identified really changed. This is what started changing my life, a lot of my clients lives, because I was able to take food out of the nutritional lens, or the nutritional health landscape of antioxidants, nutrients, fiber, those are also important to navigate, but I wanted to put it into something that was relational and practical, right? So the balancers foods that don't stimulate anything, foods that just support you where you are, usually foods we would think of as being quite boring or bland. And then we have the stimulants. These are the foods that give you a big burst of energy. This is what you would drink or eat to wake up in the morning. Or if you were feeling really low and you couldn't focus, you would grab this to get that focus. And then the depressants, this is what I heavily relied on when I was binge eating. These are the foods that really slow you down. They're overwhelming to your system to digest. They actually exhaust you. They take a lot of energy to break down. And in that energy breakdown, you feel a little more settled. They depress what was trying to be expressed the activation. And when you understand these three different things, again, stimulants, what I would eat or drink to wake up or push through. Depressants, what I would eat or drink to fall asleep or soothe anxiety. And then balancers, the boring foods that wouldn't I wouldn't really reach out for if I was having an emotional turmoil, it wouldn't comfort me. It would just kind of support me where I'm at. If you can see it through that lens, then you start to understand exactly what you said you're eating these foods, not because you like them, which is what I used to tell myself, it's because I'm chasing the state they offer me. So when I was coming home for those peanut butter balls, that is a massive depressant food. It's so calorically dense and the amount I would eat, what caused this phenomenon called postprandial blood flow, where the blood from my brain would actually go down to my gut and that would relieve or alleviate anxiety while I was digesting. This is one reason a lot of us overeat, because it alleviates anxiety due to that phenomenon. But that kind of compulsive eating of that food showed me that my baseline was consistently, chronically activated. I was so adrenalized, so stimulated, so heightened, that I wasn't craving coffee. I wasn't craving like fruit juice or liquid sugar. I wasn't skipping meals because of that, I was trying to depress the activity that was coming up where someone who's really depressed, low, feeling slow, unmotivated, can't really think straight. They're not really going to think about eating a bunch of pizza. They're going to think about having soda and coffee and chocolate and skipping meals because they're looking for things that boost their adrenaline to get through. So there's this unconscious alchemy that's always happening between us and food because of the state it puts the nervous system into. And when you understand that, you start to actually understand why you're moving toward these foods and you're not so hard on yourself around it.

Stephanie Mara 18:41

Yeah, I find that that piece has been so empowering to understand that if I can pause long enough and get curious about, okay, what is it about this food that I want to reach for? It actually gives me a ton of body data of where my nervous system is at how I'm perceiving the environment. What are unmet needs that I have, and what is it that I'm looking for from that food that I'm trying to either mimic or like move my body into a specific state or place? And I'm curious at that point, because I know you've offered even on like social media, that we can still choose food, but we can do it in a way that's stabilizing, or we can start to choose, like, what else?

Luis Mojica 19:28

Yeah, so a couple things. First you were saying about when you slow down, you sit with the state. I mean, my primary practice around this is this somatic practice called pausing, interrupting your food cravings, or the roots of your food rituals. There's different ways I talk about it, but it's exactly this. I notice I really want a chocolate bar and I pause. And I call it interrupting, not eliminating, because you don't have to always eliminate it. But when you interrupt the just moving to it, you sit for a minute, just like you said, your underlying state that that chocolate bar soothes or supports starts to emerge because the impulse to have something from usually the stimulant or depressing category, the impulse only comes because there's some state you're carrying or you wouldn't have the impulse you might have the desire for pleasure. That's very different from an impulse, right? I might think I would love a delicious chocolate cake right now. That's different from I need one right now to get through right? So you start tracking impulse, you pause it, and then you see what state emerges. That state that emerges is what you're carrying around your body all the time, and when you sit with it, and I have a whole practice in the book, different prompts you can go through. It gives you this information. It teaches you what the food gives you. So instead of saying, I shouldn't eat chocolate cake, you get a sense of, okay, well, what does it do? Somatically, you feel the shoulders go down. You feel your breath get deeper. You feel it literally changes your physiology, just by thinking about it. You haven't even eaten it, just thinking about it. But then you go into, well, what if someone took this away from me? What would emerge? And you might feel a clenching in your gut, and you hold that you feel this absolute pit of grief that's teaching you in that moment, this chocolate cake supports this grief that lives in you. And so then I ask people, well, notice the grief, and ask the grief what it needs. Or ask yourself, how else outside of food can I support the grief? And that's when you get into really interesting practices that emerge. It might be somatic practices. It might be things like, well, actually, I get a lot of comfort from my friend, or I get a lot of comfort going to the park or laying in a bath. And this goes to your example, with the peanut butter. A relational experience. Eating peanut butter with someone is very different from I'm using it to isolate and depress something. So the whole point of the practice is to stop, pause, feel, feel the impulse arise, get the information from it. Discover some other ways to meet the same need that has nothing to do with food. And then when you're done, you get to choose, do I want the food or not? There's no you can't have the cake. There's well, now what's it like to eat the cake from this place? And for some people, it's, do I even want to eat the cake from this place? It's different for each person. So using your food cravings as a compass for your unmet needs is powerful, versus just trying to deny cravings or judge them you can't get to those inner places.

Stephanie Mara 22:13

Yeah, I'm absolutely on the same page with you, and I love your reframe of we need to diminish the whole idea, or notion of eliminating because as soon as you say, okay, the goal of me pausing to connect with this is to not eat. It's kind of like, don't think of the pink elephant in the room. It's like, you'll kind of go through the process, but it won't actually land in your body. You're just waiting to go eat the food after you like, do the thing that you cognitively understand you like, quote, unquote, should do, but it's not an embodied experience. And this is where I'm finding a lot of people coming to me saying, like, well, somatic practices aren't working for me. And then we kind of talk through well, like, how are you approaching them, or what's your belief about them, or how are you moving through them? And it's very much from this cognitive place of like, well, I'm understanding that the field of somatics is getting really popular, and like, these things would be really helpful to me, but what we're asking is to connect with so much discomfort that at this point in time you actually may not have the capacity to connect with and it was actually I was really excited to have you come on, because there was a question that I was curious if you've found this in your work, or have been navigating this that I feel like in the process of and I've been on a similar journey of really realizing that I can eat in a way that makes me feel nervous systemly regulated, makes me feel safe, makes me feel energized and mentally clear, and so it's going after more of the felt sense now, of like what makes me feel the way I want to feel in my life, rather than any other lens that I could see nutrition through. But something that I'm finding is like, I did a lot of work before that, unaware of how these two things were connected, until now, to build my capacity to be with safety. But I'm curious, if you come across like, if someone tries to utilize nutrition as a way to feel safe, but they haven't built the capacity to be more in a parasympathetic nervous system response like, I'm curious if you've seen like it actually feel difficult to continue to eat in a stabilizing way, because you're not quite ready to even feel that way in your body yet, like your body hasn't updated its memory that the experience of safety can be safe. I'm just curious if you've seen that at all.

Luis Mojica 24:40

Absolutely. I mean, it's such an important topic, because, again, cognitively speaking, when someone thinks I'm going to eat healthier, right? They assume they should just be able to do that because it's the right thing to do. That's kind of the mainstream assumption. But there's a whole physiology behind eating balancing foods, which tend to be the, quote, healthier whole foods and there's a whole physiology change behind that. When you've been in chronic stress or you have PTSD, what that means for your body is it's chronically braced, so it's very tight, and part of that tension is actually read by the body as protection. It feels safe. So people get safety confused with comfort. Safety is often for the body, especially traumatized, overworked bodies, safety comes from a place of being braced all the time, being vigilant, being hyper aware, having excess of adrenaline being produced that creates a physiology that they have now attributed towards safety when you start eating balancing foods. And I talk about this a lot in the book. I talk about titrating them in not diving in as you titrate in the balancers, you also titrate in more sensation, right? You titrate in more softening. It's like dosing someone with plant medicine. It's the same thing. It's like, how much capacity do you have, just as you said, for openness, for what we call safety, which would be a physiology of openness and softness and a body that says, I'm not under threat, but if their body has associated safety with bracing and hyper vigilance, and these balancing foods are making them less vigilant because they're making less adrenaline, and the muscles are softening, and the breath is going deeper, and now grief is coming up, or anger that's latent is emerging, that's a state they were never trained to even know how to witness or hold and the average person that goes on a diet that's happening to them, and they have no idea why they're, quote, self sabotaging, it's because they don't know how to be with this state. No one's ever taught them. No one's even told them as a state to begin with. They just think, what's wrong with me? Why am I grabbing chocolate when I know it's hurting me? They have no idea. So this piece is so profoundly important, and it's a huge part of my work. I'm so glad it's a part of yours, because what every nutritionist listening needs to really consider it's when I shift someone's food, I shift their physiology, right? Or, even better, the foods shift their physiology. How is this person able to what's their capacity to live in a new physiology. It's literally having a new body. So I love titration here. I used to talk about this in the book, I have the top three balancers I teach the most about are beans, greens and proteins. And I say in the book, if you have pizza every day for lunch, have beans before you have your pizza, or have a handful of cucumbers and then go have the pizza like, bring in balancers to the depressants and stimulants, not instead of and then you start bringing them together. And you slowly, over time, over weeks, months, years, you one develop a palette for the balancers, because in comparison, they are really bland and frustratingly boring for some people. But you develop the capacity for that physiology change, because it happens way slower over time, and I see that being way more sustainable.

Stephanie Mara 27:48

Yeah, completely agree. And I'm so glad that you know you're speaking to this as well, that the piece around titration is so often, let's say a diet really just brings someone overwhelmingly into an entirely different place, into their body. And so even when we talk about like, diets don't work, like, yes, there's many reasons for that. But also when someone starts to maybe feel like they are living more in that less braced place, I'll just say that that may feel so foreign, especially if, like, what I hear from a lot of people who come to me now is they didn't even realize that what was fueling their food behaviors was a history of trauma. And just even having that awareness was like, oh, this was never a food issue to begin with. Like, this was actually me doing the best I could to navigate what was happening inside of my body. And I think a lot of people keep being surprised that it's like, oh, well, I just came to you to, like, stop binge eating, and now we're talking about, like, how no one was ever home for me.

Luis Mojica 28:54

Like, isn't that amazing?

Stephanie Mara 28:55

Yeah!!!

Luis Mojica 28:57

Yes, I'm so glad you follow those threads, because that's why I call the book Food Therapy. That's why the whole philosophy and practice is food therapy. It's a form of therapy via food. I'll give you the example I talk about this in the book. These three women, almost 10 years ago now, came into my practice. Neither of them knew each other, and they all had the same issue where they wanted to lose weight, they wanted to reduce inflammation, they wanted to lower their cholesterol, and they had upcoming blood panels. They wanted to do like a deep dive. I said, okay, we have to deeply reduce and eliminate sugar. It's before I understood any of this. We have to eliminate the sugar. Tell me your sugar sources. Each woman said the same thing. At 4pm I eat a ton of chocolate. My question then was, what happens at 4pm. They all said, my husband comes home from work. I said, okay, this is really interesting. We need to reduce this. What would it be like to not have chocolate Monday through Friday? Maybe just on the weekends. They all said, I would have to leave my husband. That's what we're working with. That food helped them tolerate an intolerable partnership, and in particular chocolate, it's a heart stimulant. It even causes oxytocin, the bonding hormone, to be released. So they were literally turning on their hearts and increasing their bonding hormones in the face of their husband not being able to connect with them. That's how incredible and how subconscious we are getting these needs met. But if I were to just assume people should stop having chocolate, I wouldn't understand that there's this whole relational need being met. I would say, stop eating chocolate like I did. And guess what? The other two women, they couldn't stop eating chocolate because they had this whole lifestyle issue. But the one woman who stopped eating chocolate, she left her husband three months later and transformed her life. Not everyone has the capacity to do it that quick, right? So that situation started teaching me, and it's what I talk right about now, just exactly what you said your food is actually showing me something that lives in your body, about your present or your past circumstances, and how you use this food, or this category, stimulant, depressant, to not metabolize, but to navigate the situation to modulate right the sensations and the emotions.

Stephanie Mara 31:05

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious if you have an example of what, for those who don't know what titration is, like, what that would look like when someone's trying to get more comfortable eating in a different way, but they're noticing how activating that is to their system, because right now, safety is connected to a sympathetic state, not a parasympathetic state.

Luis Mojica 31:27

Well said. What I would say to people, and one thing I did just recently in a group I was teaching, is I would say, whenever you notice a craving, don't consider not having it. Grab a balancer first, then have the craving. So even people that don't want to do the somatic work, they're like, I'm not ready to sit with what comes up because some people aren't. Identify a few balancers, nuts, seeds, greens, beans, animal protein, those are five different balancing food groups you can play with when you crave chocolate. Okay, I'm going to have a handful of cashews. Now I'm going to eat the chocolate. So you have one or two balancers on hand at the office, in the fridge, in the in your purse, in the car, wherever you are, and then, so whenever a craving comes in, you have that one balance, or you just eat it before you have the craving. When people do that, they're naturally titrating in the balancing foods. They're softening the blow of the stimulant or depressant that's going to come from the other food, because it digests slower when it's a balancer being consumed first. But it's slowly, just like you said, it helps them feel this different state shift in a way slower way. If I have a half a cup of beans and some steamed broccoli, and then I go to the pizza place, I eat pizza in a such a different way. If I have a handful of nuts and then I go to the grocery store, my cart looks very different than when I go there without a handful of nuts first. So it's interrupting any kind of compulsive or even emotional food choice with a balancer, and then still having it. That's that's the most successful way I've found with people. What do you think? How have you done it?

Stephanie Mara 32:56

Yeah, first, I want to say that I love that you are normalizing utilizing food as a resource. Because I think that that is sometimes really confusing to people like it always feels like the goal has to be to not lean on food anymore and just to eliminate that food is actually can be very stabilizing. Sometimes it's like your best ally in a situation that, like somatically, you just do not have the capacity to be with something. So I agree with you on that and teach that as well. And I think it's really important to name that is like, this isn't a matter of like, never leaning on food ever again, but bringing in, I always think of it as ownership, like that you are going to own the decision and the choice, like this is something that I'm going to choose right now. And I think that that's just to answer your question. That's kind of what I've explored, is if we can slow down enough to say I have a choice, and I find that so many people in the trauma recovery world talk about how important bringing back in a sense of choice is, especially when it was taken away, and that it gets to be an empowered choice of like, I'm going to choose food, and if I'm going to choose food, I'm always like, well, let's actually allow you to get what you want out of the food. Like, you want to feel greater peace. You want to feel grounded. You want to feel regulated. Okay, what's the entire experience to create for yourself that would actually do that? So where do you want to eat the food? What do you want to eat the food on? Do you want to go eat it outside, in the grass? Like, like, actually, not just focusing on like, what is the food I'm going to eat, and how do I make it okay to eat that, but making the entire experience be what you want it to be, so that you can pause afterwards and be like, okay, I ate the food. Did I actually receive what I was looking for from that food, and did I do it in a way that did actually reconnect me with myself. I found a lot of people actually leave an eating experience like that being like, oh, I just move on with my day now. That was great. I wanted that food. I ate it. I got what I wanted from it, and it did regulate me. And now I feel calmer and I can just go on to my next thing now.

Luis Mojica 35:19

I'm getting so excited. There's so many things you're saying that I want to the first was how you said normalizing leaning on food. I've never heard that before in response to my work, that is exactly what I'm trying to do. Because we're always like, are you kidding me? We have to lean on food. We need food for survival. Is there any more of a coded, it's beyond even codependence, is that we must eat this to live on this planet. That's the law of this nature, is you must eat to survive. So this idea of choice is really important, because it can seem, cognitively, when you're going on a diet, even you're losing your choice, but when you're impulsively eating, that is not a choice. That is a trauma response. So when I would go to the bakery and get a cupcake, and I would be like scarfing it down while driving, hoping no one saw me, and then getting home and trying to clean all the crumbs off so no one knew, that was not a choice I was making. My body was forcing me into this place because it was terrified of whatever emotion was coming up, and it was seeking that food to regulate something. And this term regulates important. I even want to add modulate to it, because if I was in a depressive place, I would eat something stimulating, and that would regulate me by bringing me up, just like if I was in an activated place, I would eat something depressing would regulate me by bringing me down. It was trying to attain some kind of balance based on where I was, but to feel...this happened last year. I'm sitting in my office, I'm working, and I suddenly feel this desire to go to the bakery down the street and get a cupcake. And I'm like, okay, let me pause and just be with this. And I noticed, okay, it symbolizes me having comfort, having support, having pleasure. And I was particularly unmotivated this day to do some of the work I was doing. It was a lot of admin stuff, and I sat with it, and I did the balancing practice. I got some cashews and blueberries. Ate those first because I needed to lean on something that was actually going to nourish me. The cupcake was my comfort. It wasn't nourishment. So these two things were nourishing me. And then from the nourished place, I didn't have the rush to get the cupcake. There wasn't that urgency, but guess what, there was still the desire for the cupcake. So I strolled outside, let the sun hit my skin, like felt the breeze, slowly walked the bakery, sat with everything there, like, what do I want? What really lights me up here? Okay, I want the carrot cake cupcake. I buy the carrot cake cupcake. Walk to my house, lay on the hammock, just like you said, like, how do you want to experience this? Take my shoes off. Set like a 20 minute timer on my phone, because I was, it was a work day, and I just sat there swinging on the hammock, looking at the trees and just savoring this cupcake. And to me, that's the example what I'm trying to teach, and what you're teaching is you're going to lean on food either way, if you're going to even lean on a comfort food, do it embodied. Don't do it with shame and shut down and dissociation, because you don't even get to enjoy the cupcake then, right? And that's why I think it's so important.

Stephanie Mara 38:11

Yeah, I love that example, because what I also hear in that is it entirely eliminates any experience of judgment, shame or criticism. And these are things that perpetuate why we continue to choose foods in a way that maybe feels more disembodied, because it creates that cycle of, okay, I want the food to help me, but then I believe that I'm not allowed to choose that. And then it is chosen in this disembodied, dissociated state where we're not receiving what it was and then when we come back online, we feel awful in our bodies. And then to make ourselves feel better again, the only answer that our body has is to eat food again, because it's been the only resource. And so I am curious, because you said, okay, if someone doesn't have, maybe the capacity to be with themselves, I'm curious if you have an example of, let's say someone does have the capacity to be with themselves. Because what I find also is, you know, there's a term urge surfing that is like, okay, I have to, like, surf this urge to do this food behavior. And what I see a lot of people in those circumstances is they feel like they're white knuckling it, like they go into the experience of craving and just feel like they have to get through it. And I find that kind of just perpetuates craving more, because then you're fearful of the craving because it also is you're fearful of how the craving feels in your body. So I'm wondering what you've explored, maybe more in the somatic realm, where someone's like, okay, well, I don't actually want to choose the food right now, but I actually don't know what else to do in the experience of craving.

Luis Mojica 39:55

Yes. So this is where so when you go into the interrupting cravings practice, I was talking about that puts you very quickly into the felt sense, into the somatic experience, behind the impulse, behind that urgency. So you don't just do the behavior, you feel the energy that propels the behavior. So let's say I'm thinking of the cupcake, for example. I might notice as I sit with that, whoa, my solar plexus has a fist in it, there's all this tension, there's all this pressure. It's kind of building to my chest and my throat. I'm not focused on the food now. I'm focused on the somatic experience. This is when I get to sit with the energy and get a sense of what does it want to do? It wants to yell. I want to cry. There's a conversation I want to have with somebody. Or, oh, I'm actually exhausted. I want a 20 minute nap, or I need to cancel my plans tonight. I'm dreading going out. All this information emerges just from the sensations. And I also have have that in the book. Ways you can work just with the sensations in case the food is something you're not ready to do, or you can't, you know the time, whatever the reason is, but just the sensational piece, letting the food trigger the sensational piece. You have all this information to work with then. And when we're working with activation, that pressure that comes up, all we're really working with at the end of the day, somatically, is the earliest stage of movement. Every time you feel activated, that's the beginning of the organization of movement and expression. And what most people will find even those listening, if you track your body, you'll find some place that's tense, usually, and behind that tension is a lot of pressure building. That's because the pressure wants to express. It wants to say, do, act, behave a certain way, and this tension is holding it back. This is what we call functional freeze so when you're working with these sensations, you're actually working with one part of the body that's in a freeze response, not the whole body, but one place that's bracing, and the desire to express is being met with a brace, and then there's all this pressure, and it's from that place that we eat to comfort ourselves, or overwork or watch porn or TV, ya know, whatever it is. So just being with that pressure and getting a sense of what does it want to do? One of my favorite questions is, what does it want to do? How does it want to move me? So much information emerges, and then you have the sensation being expressed and liberated.

Stephanie Mara 42:10

There's like, so many layers there that I'm like, we could go a whole nother hour, like, literally just on that.

Luis Mojica 42:15

Yeah, easily, easily.

Stephanie Mara 42:17

But I love the pieces that you brought in there was one the developmental piece, is that often these food behaviors I have found bring us to our earliest memories that we may not be able to remember with our minds, but our body is remembering in developmental movement patterns that even got interrupted, that we were growing from that place of like, can I actually feel safe and secure in the world? And we just found a way to do that through food. We kept receiving the feedback, but didn't have the words or the language to understand what it is that we were feeling. And if we're not growing up in an environment that can provide us with those words, like, yeah, I love that you're bringing it in well, what's the impulse? Because sometimes we have to drop out of I need to understand this. I need to, like, have the actual lived memory of it. And this is where somatic work is so cool and so fascinating that it's like, we don't actually need to remember. We can just trust that our body is trying to say something through the impulse, and if we can follow it. And I'm curious, if you have also seen this, that sometimes I get the question of like, but how do I know when it's done? Like, if I followed the somatic impulse, when do I stop it? And I find that that's a nuanced thing to answer, but I'm curious, from your perspective.

Luis Mojica 43:40

The short answer is it's never really done. The short answer is that it's always in a state of flux. Because the whole purpose of somatic experiencing and the technology of somatic psychology is to help redevelop your nervous system to respond to where it's at. So if you're have PTSD, if you have chronic stress, anxiety, your body is constantly responding to everything indiscriminately as threat. And so when you're doing the somatic practices, you're interrupting that indiscriminate threat response, and you're essentially asking your body, you know, where am I now? And maybe not those words, but all these practices, and the body kind of catches up. And I always help people just simply track softness and tension. If you just track softness and tension, it's way easier and less complex. And so you might notice as you're doing an exercise, or you're moving, or, you know, the food piece, you might notice your shoulders start coming down, okay, one part of my body started to settle. Or you might notice I'm punching the air, because I have all this anger, and as I do, I just took a deep breath so you notice these parts soften in response to you, letting these these states emerge. And that softness is your body showing you I'm not bracing for impact right now. And that's, to me, the best barometer is, has the tension shifted? Is it getting more tense? Is it staying the same? Because the tension from the body is bracing, it's protective, it's expecting something to go wrong. But this is why the food piece is so overlooked, because you can do those practices, and then you go and eat something that actually spikes your adrenaline. And so to understand how certain foods are actually turning on your stress response is super important, again, not to necessarily eliminate those foods if you're unable to, but to make sense of why you're so anxious, even though you're doing all this somatic work, even though your life is so good, even though you have a great friend or a great partner, that's all true, yet the meals you eat today are actually causing you to go into fight or flight, causing that bracing to stay on. So this is why the food with the somatics, to me is such a beautiful modality, because you're working with both all the time.

Stephanie Mara 45:43

Yeah, thank you for bringing both back in. And I also love your response of like, it never is truly done. It makes me think of like digestion, that digestion never ends until we're no longer here. And so like, yeah, we're just always in the process of digesting our sensations, and they may come to a point where you're like, I think I'm done with that for now. Just like, I think I'm done with this meal for now, but you're gonna get hungry again. You're gonna need to eat again and have another meal. And it's the same thing with the somatic practices of sometimes it's just your choice of, like, I think I'm done with that for now, and I'm just going to move on knowing that you may need to do that again. And I love that you're also bringing back in of like, yeah, you can do all these practices, but then if you're also eating in a way that continues to kind of up or down regulate yourself that yeah, it's like they need to go hand in hand. And this is why I am totally on the same page with you of why somatics and nutrition need to come together, to work together so that someone actually finds a sense of safety with the parasympathetic nervous system, but can also utilize food as an ally and a friend in that process as well.

Luis Mojica 46:58

Yeah. I mean, what is more somatic than eating. Your body knows how to do it. Your instincts emerge. It digests it for you. It transforms it into your hair and your cells and your skin. I mean, like you don't have to even think, and your body just does it. The fact that nutrition is left out in the field of somatics is like a blunder to me, and this is also where choice starts to emerge. Because when you understand these three categories that I was outlining, stimulants, depressants, balancers, when you really cognitively get them, but somatically can experience them, then you gain choice. So it's like 8am you're rushing out of the house to work. You have very little time, very little energy. You grab a coffee because you're choosing to use a stimulant because you know you need that to get through the arc of the morning at work. Great, but because you chose a stimulant, you know? Well, there are balancers, like cashews, there are things like broccoli, there's salad, there's chicken, there's eggs. Okay, for lunch, I'm gonna have a balancing lunch to kind of soften the blow to my adrenals that the coffee gave me, or I'm grieving, you know, someone just died, or I lost a job or a relationship, I don't have the capacity to call a friend. I don't want to sit with this right now. I'm going to eat ice cream because I need a depressant right now. So choice starts emerging, because you navigate these categories based on your state and your circumstance, and you consciously choose, like you said earlier, the ownership. I want this effect right now because of what I'm going through. And for me, that conscious choice, shame is gone. Shame always came when I didn't understand it and felt like I hated myself or had no willpower. But to actually say, you know what, I want the cupcake to stimulate and depress me a little bit. I want the comfort from the potato chips. Great! Shame is way harder to metabolize than a bag of chips.

Stephanie Mara 48:45

Completely agree. And I also love that you're naming that sometimes I feel like from diet culture or wellness culture, there's a lot of pressure that, like every single meal, has to be quote, unquote perfect. And I teach actually something similar, a think of balance as something that can happen throughout the day or even throughout the week, that it doesn't have to be so much pressure on every single meal, because sometimes, like, I know, a lot of people have, like, a lot of sacred rituals around their morning coffee that they do not want to disrupt, that that is just like their favorite time of day, doing whatever traditions they have with their morning coffee. And so I love that you are also bringing in great like receive the pleasure or the experience you want from that food. But also we can then look out towards the rest of your day to say, how could I support my body the rest of my day if I'm going to start my morning that way?

Luis Mojica 49:45

Yes, because, because there's nothing wrong. The thing about the stimulants and the depressants, many people, when I teach this, they'll quickly organize it into the bad foods. There's nothing bad. They're simply stimulating or depressing. That's all there is. You could have 100% organic pineapple juice that is a stimulant, and it also has a ton of antioxidants and vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals. So it's not about health, it's about how it affects your body. And yes, when you get that, it's a completely different way to do it, because you can handle stimulation through the morning. Your body can't handle it chronically throughout your life. It needs ups and downs. So as long as you're the conscious alchemist and you will be with these this understanding, it becomes fun. It's like, ooh, I'm gonna enjoy this coffee for four hours. And then before it crashed me out some nuts and berries. It just becomes so fun, at least for at least for me, I have a great time with it.

Stephanie Mara 50:35

Yeah, I completely agree. I love everything that you have shared today. I want to be respectful of your time. I'm going to absolutely need to have you back at some point so we can get into another conversation. But I always like to wrap up with, like, a baby step. You've offered so many things today. I'm even wondering if there's, you know, something else in your book that you would want to offer. But if someone's really lit up by this conversation and they're like, where do I start, is there a baby step that you feel like would be beneficial for someone to play with?

Luis Mojica 51:07

My favorite baby step is starting just by categorizing your food. Really ask yourself the simple questions for this, if it's a stimulant, is something I would eat or drink to wake up or give me more energy? If it's a depressant, I would eat or drink it to fall asleep at night or soften me if I had a lot of activation. So what would you eat or drink to wake up? What would you eat or drink to fall asleep? If you just use those simple prompts, and you look at your meals, you start to learn, oh, I'm using this as a depressant, or oh, I'm using this as a stimulant, or oh, this does neither. This must be a balancer for me, because just cognitively getting that that's going to teach people so much, and have so much education from their body to navigate a gas station when they're on a road trip like you don't, it's not even about healthy quality food. It's just understanding what's it doing to my nervous system, and then you get that choice. So that's where I would actually begin.

Stephanie Mara 51:59

I love that, because we can't change what we're not aware of. And so just building in that awareness of where am I at right now without changing anything. And it sounds like a little bit of journaling, just to kind of start to reflect and even reference your body, of like, well, how do these foods that I often find myself reaching for, what do they do in my body? That's such a great place to start. And I'm curious how listeners can keep in touch with you. Where can they find your upcoming book?

Luis Mojica 52:27

Yeah, so if you go to HolisticLifeNavigation.com, all of my events are there. I do six month intensives with nutrition. I do retreats, workshops. There's a lot there this year that we're doing, but the book, I'm so glad this is coming up before any of you who pre order the book. Now, you can copy your order number into the book club that I'm going to do. I'm doing a two month book club is absolutely free if you purchase the book. So I'll be teaching people, over the course of four different sessions live, how to navigate certain parts of the book and answer their questions. So that's going to be the most, I would say, the next step support, because I will walk you through the book, and then after that, there's deeper ways to work with me, if you wish to.

Stephanie Mara 53:05

Awesome. Yeah, I will put all of those links in the show notes, and just thank you so much for being here. I always love connecting with you and getting into these conversations.

Luis Mojica 53:14

Me too. There's very few of us in the field still, so it's always exciting when I meet somebody, and I appreciate you and your time.

Stephanie Mara 53:20

Yeah, absolutely. Well to everyone who's listening, as always, if you have any insights or aha moments, email me at support@stephaniemara.com and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Luis:

Website: www.holisticlifenavigation.com
Link to book page: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book
Podcast: www.holisticlifenavigation.com/podcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holistic.life.navigation