Recover from Trauma and Food Struggles with Nutrition
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.
I know what it feels like to be compelled to eat a certain food and not want to stop eating it. Others have described it as feeling like a wolf that takes over or feeling possessed. I always felt like I left the building of my body. I was not there anymore and when I returned I felt so confused about what had happened. I kept thinking it must be about the food that I needed to stay away from or about my own lack of willpower that I couldn't control myself and I just needed to try harder. It took many years to put the pieces together that my food behaviors were a response to trauma. Trauma creates a vast array of changes in your body that contribute to your food behaviors. Some things I've discussed here include alterations in dopamine production leading you to eat to increase dopamine momentarily. Your prefrontal cortex, where you engage in rational thought, is diminished in activity. Your microbiome changes where you have less of a specific type of gut bacteria that influences appetite. Disordered eating or an eating disorder is not about a lack of willpower or even control. It is about your body's sense of safety and has been your body's best attempt at creating balance and getting what it needs.
I talk about the connection between trauma and nutrition today with Timothy Frie. Timothy is a neuronutritionist, nutritional neuroscience researcher, and founder of the Georgia Center for Neuronutrition, the southeastern United State's first and only neuronutrition clinic. Timothy works exclusively with people who developed an autoimmune or neurological condition after experiencing trauma, grief, and burnout. He has been featured in CBS, Newsweek, Fox News, The Independent, and the New York Post. We talk about the impact of food on mental and emotional health, the link between trauma and nutrition, how healing from trauma needs to include both nutritional and emotional support, navigating the unknowns in nutrition, the diet industry, and practices you can start to engage in when interacting with food.
If you feel like you've tried every strategy out there to heal your food coping mechanisms like binge eating, chronic emotional eating, yo yo dieting, restricting, and body image struggles and still feel stuck, there are many ways you can work with me and learn my healing approach called Somatic Eating®. I have two self-paced Somatic Eating® courses or my 3 month live Somatic Eating® Program that will happen again in May 2025. I will leave the links in the show notes to check these out and you can join the waitlist for the next Somatic Eating® Program class. You can also email me at support@stephaniemara.com with any questions or to discuss working with me 1:1. Now, welcome Timothy!
Well, I am thrilled that you are here on the podcast today. You know, I feel like we have just been liking each other's posts on Instagram for a while, and so to actually like bring you here and get kind of an embodiment to the name and the wisdom that you are sharing is just really exciting for me, and I know that you shared bits and pieces on social media about your history and your past and how you got into this work, but for anyone who's listening that maybe is new to you and your work, I'd love to hear a little bit more around how you got into your combination of the work that you offer now.
Timothy Frie 04:15
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it definitely was not kind of the traditional past by any means, and everything that I'm doing today was really informed by my own childhood experiences, my own experiences with food and interacting with the healthcare system and healing recovering from all sorts of things that I experienced. So I think for the context of this conversation, I should probably go way back, and go back kind of to the origins of myself. You know, I grew up in a rural town in Delaware called Felton, and it was truly one of these little towns that was like something off a sci fi movie. There was one intersection, there was one school, there was one gas station. We were surrounded by farmland. And my great grandfather was a farmer, and I grew up, you know, kind of around that culture of just small community living very close to my family. And living in a rural area also meant that we lived in a food desert, and it also meant that we were very far away from my dentist, my pediatrician, and, you know, any sort of medical care like my pediatrician, I remember getting to drive 45 minutes one way to get there as a kid, and my family kind of struggled with access to health care because we lived in a rural area, and we, you know, grew up pretty poor, didn't have a lot of money to buy food. I remember at some point my grandparents, after they moved away from us, were actually mailing us boxes of food to kind of make ends meet and bridge the gap. So, you know, I saw from a very young age, and then experienced at a very young age what it was like to live with food insecurity and food scarcity. And, you know, as my parents income increased and, you know, their job changed, I saw, wow, we were eating better. We can eat more. You know, I felt more energized. I remember when we moved out of that area and moved into kind of a more suburban or developed area, I just felt more energetic. You know, like I felt like I wanted to play with people more. I felt like I just had I was more on during the school day. For me, as I went into elementary or went into middle school, I started to gain weight. You know, I don't think a lot of people think about how, you know, boys or guys are impacted by, you know, culture surrounding, you know, their weight in their body. I remember during that time just feeling really disgusted with myself, like, at a really young age, and wanting to change my body, and thinking about diet, and reading about diets and fitness in AOL chat rooms, like I remember going into, like, you know, the old like, diet Atkins was really big at the time, and, like, Slim Fast was really big. And so I remember just at a really young age, wanting to change my body, feeling very unhappy with my body. And around the same time, my mom was also trying to figure out how to lose weight. She was following the slim fast diet. I remember her like ripping pages out of a magazine and like making these kind of disgusting recipes, you know, that were included in there. You know, I just kind of started learning about nutrition and food and how the body worked. And it was something I was always fascinated with. I was always interested in, like, medicine, health and wellness growing up, but just never really had the opportunity to, like, express that in my own life. So, you know, as I got into middle school and high school, I continued reading about fitness, you know, I started lifting weights in high school and started eating a little bit better. And I noticed, you know, when I started eating breakfast, which is something I did not do for years, because I had restricted because I was so afraid of gaining weight, just felt like I could focus better at school again. You know, it was kind of as drastic as it was when I was younger, my grades started improving when I was eating breakfast and being really intentional about my lunch choices at school, and I was like, wow, I think food plays a really big role in this. So when I was in high school, those experiences experimenting with my own body really motivated me to go into the healthcare field. So I went to a vocational nursing school. I worked in my community hospital for a couple of years after graduating high school, and kind of became really disgusted with the lack of prevention and nutritional care in the acute care setting so many people who would come back over and over again with chronic health conditions, and we never talked about food, we never talked about their relationship with their body. We never talked about how their stress at work, and, you know, the stress within their family or whatever was impacting their health, and it kind of was like, I don't want anything to do with this anymore. You know, this is what healthcare is. So I ended up kind of changing directions a little bit. I went kind of into the business side of things and my own story of mystery diagnosis, and was bouncing around from doctor to doctor, trying all these different diets, getting all sorts of tests and imaging, and nobody could figure out what was going on with me and after my grandmother died from leukemia in 2015 things really kind of hit a peak for me. And ended up being hospitalized a couple of times and saw a functional medicine doctor for the first time, and that was really the first time where another healthcare professional explained this link between stress, food, diet in a way where I was like, wow, okay, so we really are manipulating our neurochemistry when we eat, you know. And I was just so fascinated by the impact that food had on our brain and on our immune system. So that ended up inspiring me to go back to school to get a master's in nutrition. I had earned a psychology degree at some point along the way of everything I just shared. While I was in graduate school, I became very interested in fatty acid metabolism and the role of DHA and EPA, two types of omega three fatty acids, their role in ameliorating neuroinflammation and people who have mild TBI or concussions, particularly in athletes, and learning that DHA supplementation and something that comes from fish can help people recover faster from a brain injury. That was just like, okay, I I'm on the right path here, you know, like, I love this. And that really kind of sent me down this path of mental health, nutrition, nutritional psychiatry, and then really wanting to understand, kind of like, the sociology of nutrition, and zooming out, understanding more these kind of systemic and macro level influences on nutrition behavior, and so that really kind of brought me to neuronutrition and nutritional neuroscience. I spent a few years working with education companies, training other professionals, health coaches and nutritionists and personal trainers and nurses and pharmacists and things like that, on a variety of different topics related to nutrition and how to work with, with people who have chronic health conditions. You know, with what I'm doing right now, I'm kind of split between finishing my doctorate degree and researching and working with clients. And it's, it's really incredible, because the people that I'm working with are the same people that like they're, they're who I was, they're who I used to be. They're struggling with things that I used to struggle with. And they're, you know, they're, they remind me so much of my own family and people that I care about. So, you know, hope that was kind of a good summary of some relevant things that brought me here. There's, there's really a lot, but yeah.
Stephanie Mara 10:53
Yeah. Thanks for sharing all of that. And I really appreciate you just naming your experience with struggling with food and body image, because I often find, like a lot of people that even come on here, are talking about the female experience of disordered eating and what contributed to that, it's not talked about enough how much pressure, not only that men have, but also it's not as normalized for a man to even talk about the struggles or that they were struggling in their relationship with their food and their body. It's like, oh, if you just look externally how you're supposed to look, societal expectation, you know, then you're doing fine and toxic masculinity and all of that that goes into like what it means to show up as a man in our culture, which is so toxic. So, you know, I appreciate you just naming some of those pieces.
Timothy Frie 11:48
Yeah, you know, I, for about 10 years, actually struggled with binge eating, and, you know, orthorexia and muscle oriented disordered eating in particular. And I remember at one point going to my therapist and telling her about all of the thoughts that I had about food, and how I was getting to a point where I was feeling exhausted thinking about food all the time. And her response to me was, well, I wish you know the majority of my clients could be like you. You know it was like these disordered behaviors were being interpreted as discipline around food. And you know what I what it took me many years to learn is that, you know, nourishing your body with food and having some intentionality with food is not the same as disordered eating. You know, it's not the same as having an eating disorder. And we don't ever really learn how to eat. We never really learn how to nourish our bodies. And it's one thing I've always really appreciated about your work from the very first post I ever saw of yours was you talk a lot about how your nervous system is a reflection of or your dietary choices and behaviors are a reflection of your nervous system, and that is so absolutely true. You know, there is so much research connecting chronic stress with all sorts of nutrient deficiencies and eating disorders and malnutrition, under nutrition, over nutrition, and then all the chronic, neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases that come along with that. And it is so important for people to understand, you know, regardless, man, woman, you know, whatever, how their body works and how to eat and how to nourish their bodies. And you're right, there is a just major void, not only with representation of men and other folks talking about the masculinity aspect of nutrition and body image, but also in training healthcare professionals. I mean, in my entire master's degree in nutrition, I don't think, I maybe spent 15 minutes, you know, learning about eating disorders, and it was just, you know, anorexia, bulimia, binge eating. Here's the bullets of the symptoms. No real exploration of what that actually looks like, you know, in practice. And I think it's easy for men to go a really long time, spend many of their years, their life, struggling with an eating disorder, disordered eating, and they think that it's like, oh, this is just what I'm supposed to do and I'm really into fitness, or I'm really into bulking, or I'm just really into taking care of myself, but it's not always that cut and dry.
Stephanie Mara 14:06
Yeah, completely agree. And something that I heard in your experience that I'd love to maybe dive more into is that food actually also was the answer to healing as well. And, you know, yes, obviously, I talk about a lot here about how our food behaviors are a reflection of our sense of safety and our nervous system, but not enough as how, like both food is viewed as the problem because of everything that's playing out with it that needs to be, quote, unquote, fixed, but also can be the answer in that you can eat in a way that sends a cue of safety, or, as you were pointing, decreases inflammation, helps your brain function more optimally. And I'm curious if you could speak more to that.
Timothy Frie 14:53
Yeah, absolutely. So that's that's really big for me. You know, when I first was diagnosed with binge eating disorder, I went to what I knew, which was kind of like the diet space. You know, I remember, kind of getting out my textbooks and literally Googling, like, binge eating diet, and I'm like, wait, this is part of that, my desire to control my body with a diet, and manipulate the size and shape of my body with a diet, and feeling safe in that feeling comfortable in the familiarity of that that was part of this, you know, response and this complex that I had around food in my body. You know, one thing that we don't typically talk a lot about with binge eating or any sort of eating disorders, is, even though it's hallmark, it's very common, is the malnutrition that can come with that. You know, for me, I would go between periods over nutrition and under nutrition. I would unnecessarily restrict. But with that restrict and restriction would come iron deficiency, B vitamin deficiency, and, you know, all of these things, but many of these minerals and these micronutrients have a direct influence on our neurobiology. They impact our appetite and hunger signaling, they impact the way that our brains kind of generate neurotransmitters, and our body stress response signals, and our sleep wake cycles and all of these things. And if you're kind of existing in a space where you're malnourished, or you're in a state of under nutrition, your brain is not working the way it's supposed to be working. You know, your nervous system does not have the biological basis and needs, you know, to meet its demands. And I don't think a lot of people realize that, you know, when you're in a state of stress, or you experience trauma or in grief, your body has a greater nutrient demand because of that stress response, you need more of certain nutrients, and that's why people are at greater risk of, you know, these different nutrient deficiencies when they are, quote, unquote, eating healthy, but, you know, are still restricting, or, you know, just not eating enough. So, you know, the other thing that kind of comes to mind is, you know how we just have this tendency to go for supplements, you know when, when we're feeling something, or go for, you know, the functional foods, and, like, I'm big fan of supplementation, you know, I take a few supplements, you know, on daily basis. I rotate through them depending on what's going on with my life now. And, you know, I think that a lot of people who are used to dieting and are used to supplementation, they think that we can kind of supplement away these things we're experiencing in our body. But I kind of see that sometimes as a trauma response, you know, because the supplements and the diets are this externalization of an internal problem sometimes. And something I've, I've talked about before, is, you know, I think functional medicine, though, I love the functional medicine model. I use some of the, you know, functional medicine matrix and things in my practice, functional medicine can sometimes take advantage of people, unintentionally, who are looking for all of these root causes when the root cause is actually the way that their body has changed as a result of things they've experienced via trauma or grief or burnout or chronic stress, and they never learned what that means for them. So they spend years like bouncing from doctor to doctor, supplement to supplement, diet to diet, looking for this, this diet or supplement, or whatever, that's going to fix all these things. But it's kind of like the call is coming from inside the house. You know, these things become a distraction. They become an avoidance mechanism for us. If we don't learn how to nourish ourselves, and we're not able to come back to our body. It is very difficult, dare I say, impossible, to really make meaningful progress and recover from trauma.
Stephanie Mara 18:30
What it makes me think of is, oftentimes, I am talking about, you know, building a sense of safety in the body, and that can come from, yes, healing past trauma and cultivating more of the body's ability to pick up on cues of safety. But what you're also pointing to, and something that I am in total agreement with, is that when you're healing from disordered eating or an eating disorder, usually you have potentially spent years or decades of your life malnourished. Your brain and your body are not functioning optimally to sometimes do the deeper emotional healing work that maybe you also need to do because to be able to focus long enough or to feel safe enough to feel what's there in your body, takes some nutritional fortitude, so to speak, that you feel like you have the resources to do the grief work that potentially needs to occur. It's a little bit of both, that yes, the trauma healing, the grief, work, the nervous system regulation, work is all important, but if you're not doing it alongside giving your body the nutrition that it needs, you know it's always going to still feel like something's missing or something's not landing, because your body's having a hard time, like assimilating this work.
Timothy Frie 20:02
Exactly. And I find that for some people, you know, a lot of things are very black or white or dichotomous now, which is something else that can come from trauma. It can cause us to think it's all or nothing. You know, have these black or white thoughts. So I think a lot of people, they kind of go all in with psychotherapy or counseling, and that's important, you know, like, for people working with me like I require that they're still working with a therapist, or that they have worked with one recently, I think that's really important. I've been in therapy for 16 years, half of my life. That's important to your point. You know you cannot show up and truly be present in therapy and figure out how to integrate all of these things into your life if you're experiencing executive dysfunction that has a nutritional source. You know, if it's due to some sort of nutritional there's nutritional implications to your executive dysfunction. And I don't think you know, a lot of mental health professionals are adequately trained on nutrition. You know, there's major gaps in training there. You know, some of the most common nutrient deficiencies, like, you know, magnesium deficiency, iron deficiency, B12, B6deficiency, Omega three deficiency, zinc deficiency, all of these micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, they have a direct impact on our neurochemistry, like our brain and nervous system need these things to do what they do, and that's why deficiencies of a lot of these micronutrients present as neuropsychological challenges with, you know, brain fog and muscular fasciculations and pins and needles sensations and, you know, cognitive dysfunction and such. You know, there's been several instances in my life where I've had an iron deficiency, and one of the first things I noticed was you have low energy, and then that causes me to have a little bit more anxiety about my health, which causes me to have trouble sleeping, and then, you know, it's get back on this treadmill of, you know, going from doctor to doctor, trying to figure this out. And we don't really think to test for these things. We don't really think to ask a lot about people's diet. And when we do, it's just kind of like, well, how's your diet? How do we answer that? You know, like most people, do not know how to answer that. And that's a loaded question, you know. I also think too, we have a tendency to in the medical system just kind of dismiss the true impact of stress on the body. I mean, it, there is so much evidence and research and I mean, we didn't even need Biomedicine to tell us that being exposed to high levels of stress or experiencing something that just is incredibly traumatic changes your neurobiology, you know, like, do we really need to research that experiencing something traumatic might cause you to need a little bit more food? Or, you know, need to sleep more or something like that? You know, we just, we tend to dismiss stress in our culture, especially here in America, it's, you know, I work with people who, you know, when I ask them something, I ask them is, every patient or client is like, why do you think you're struggling with this? And it's kind of like, stress, you know, like, I always, usually get that, and I'm like, yeah, what if it is, you know, the medical system here is, it's like, okay, well, stop stressing, you know, manage your stress. And again, well, how did you do that? And you've spent years feeling unsafe in your body, and you've spent years having a dysfunctional relationship with food. It's hard to access those parts of ourselves sometimes. And something else that's kind of coming up for me is, I'm a big fan of somatic therapies and body based therapies, which I know is your whole you know, it's your whole thing is Somatic Eating®. It's brilliant. It's also not as simple as well just connect with your body. You know, when you've experienced trauma or you have a chronic illness, it's like how to do that. You know when our body feels unsafe and feels inaccessible and I've found that I know, again, this aligns with your work, food provides us with those opportunities. And that is what I think, the kind of overlooked therapeutic potential of food is. It's like, yes, we can talk about the way that food impacts our neurochemistry and our neurobiology, and we need to account for that. And food, interacting with food, eating food, preparing the food, having the meal, structuring the mealtime gives for all opportunities to practice mindfulness and practice, you know, grounding and just being present with ourselves, noticing our body, noticing how different experiences make us feel. And we just don't really, like we just don't really think about that with with conventional trauma treatment, or, I think a lot about addiction treatment too, you know, all of the nutritional implications of misuse and alcohol addiction and drug abuse. There's so many well established nutritional risk factors, but these things are just not accounted for. You know, when you go to get treatment for any of this. So there's a lot of gaps here.
Stephanie Mara 24:34
Yeah, I completely agree, and we've created a system where it's either or. You either go do the therapeutic work, or you go to a nutritionist and do the nutritional work. And I always thought it was kind of crazy that here I am getting trained as a therapist, and there was not a single class on food or nutrition or how to ask my clients about what's going on in their relationship with food and yes, I did go into my master's program knowing that was what I wanted to support individuals with, but it kind of felt like a core thing that if someone is coming in with, let's say, depression, that I would want to ask them about what's also going on in their relationship with food, or what is it that they're eating? To get curious about well, like is some of how you're feeling in your body also due to what and how you're eating. And it's the same thing. I talk with a lot of nutritionists that also didn't get a background in they have to say, oh, well, I can explore, you know, what you're eating, and maybe when you're eating, or how you're eating, but when it comes to then going into the deeper emotional realms of one's relationship with food, they also really didn't have a class in that either.
Timothy Frie 25:54
Yeah, I experienced that, you know myself, when in my master's program, which, it's really fantastic. You know, I learned so much about how the body works, not so much about how to talk to people, you know, like we had one class in nutritional counseling talked about motivational interviewing. But, you know, had I not sought out, like post graduate training and trauma informed care and such, like, I would not be prepared to do this work at all. And have even found that, you know, this is not to, you know, dismiss or bash eating disorder nutritionists or dieticians or anything like that, but, you know, we just spend so much time understanding or educating professionals about the pathology, right? It's like, here's the biomedical lens of this, and then when we think about, like, how that actually shows up in the relationship dynamic between the practitioner and the patient. We don't really know what to do. So, you know, it's like a patient is depressed or someone has anxiety or have an eating disorder, there's a reason they're depressed and having anxiety and have an eating disorder, and that's also showing up in that relationship, if you don't have the ability to really hold space for someone to process and explore what all of that looks like. You're very limited, and I just call it like therapeutic potential, you know, like you're very limited with your tools and what you can do to help someone because you're so focused on the symptoms and addressing the symptoms are important, you know, and we need to take care of what people need now in the near term. And we also need to start to go a little bit more upstream with a lot of these things, you know. And I found that there's a lot of similarities with addiction treatment as a lot of similarities between addiction treatment and eating disorder treatment, which kind of disturbs me a little bit, you know, it's almost like we're just trying to use classical conditioning, you know, for these things that are not just about behaviors, you know, and I think that the majority of practitioners are that's what they learn. You know, it's like cognitive behavioral therapy. We change our thoughts, but if you're in a body that sending danger signals, and you're in a cell danger response, your nervous system is signaling to all your brain that you're not okay, you're not safe, it's hard to introspect like it is hard to retrospect. It is hard to manage all of those thoughts and reframe them, and I just we're not doing a good job with that. We're not. And that's why I'm so excited about your work when I found it because I truly feel like the work that we're doing, you know, is different, but kind of filling in this gap with what we're doing is kind of the next paradigm of addressing emotional eating and, you know, eating disorders just really addressing the actual manifestations of how trauma shows up for people in their bodies.
Stephanie Mara 28:34
I agree with everything that you just said, yeah, there's a lot of gaps that I'm also very excited that, you know, finding people like you and I, you know, have been interviewing some other individuals who've been coming on the podcast recently in just like this middle space that I feel like it's in the zeitgeist right now, like we're all sensing it, and we're noticing it, and we're tuning into it, and we're like, how do we fill in this gap that you know now is so clear and evident after what has been created for so long that we see like, oh, okay, now we can see more clearly what is missing. And so I'm wondering if we could just go back for a minute of something you said earlier was how much changes in the body, like nutritional deficiencies in a response to trauma, and I would love to if you could share more about that, because I find that isn't something that we have discussed very much yet here and just bringing in that awareness of I know with a lot of the individuals that I see, they're so confused as to when they start going into the trauma work that sometimes their food behaviors feel like they're getting worse. And I find that that can be two fold. That can be one, your body's reliving it, and so it's leaning on the resource it knows how to lean on. And the other piece that I feel like you could maybe share more about is that when you're been in a trauma response, and now you're talking about the trauma like, you need a lot more nutrition to get through that experience. And so, yeah, I'd love for you to maybe chat more about that.
Timothy Frie 30:14
Yeah. So, I mean, I think we're kind of shifting into, like, what happens in our body when we experience trauma, and, you know, there's plenty of great books and podcasts that will dive into the nitty gritty. Generally speaking, you know, I find that there's two main things that happen. One is the cell danger response, and two is, is chronodisruption. Now, the cellular danger response is, you know, it's kind of a relatively new concept, you know, it was first proposed by Dr. Naviaux in 2014 and you know, you can basically look at this as quite literally, our cells detecting danger through a number of different inputs and signals from different molecules, peptides, different hormones, the levels of them being too high, too low, mobilizing your cells and mobilizing the resources available in your body to meet your needs. I see hunger as kind of one of our most fundamental, like neurobiological needs for existence. You know, it's our body telling us you need to eat or you're going to die. You know, like an extreme example, but that's really what it is. It's like we need food to sustain existence, we need more energy. We need more nutrients. And so that's what happens with the cell danger response is you have your cells telling other parts of your body that we're not safe. We need protection. We need resources. And in response to that, you know things happen with your metabolism. You know you start to synthesize certain things more which are synthesizing certain things too fast, you build up high levels of other things. You know, as a consequence of that, and your body spends a great deal of energy dealing with all of that and processing everything and again, trying to keep you alive. So the cell danger response is, you know, something that ideally is activated acutely. You know, for a short period of time. The thing is, with traumatic stress, sometimes the few minutes or several seconds, it's it's big, you know, it has a significant impact on us, and it can lead to chronic activation of the cell, danger response. Another thing that can happen, I mentioned chronodisruption. This is something that basically involves our circadian rhythm, which is kind of like how our body is synced with a 24 hour light and dark cycle. When the cell danger response is initiated, it changes that circadian network. It impacts that circadian network. And again, if you have chronodisruption for long periods of time, you have cell danger response activated for long periods of time. You have all sorts of chronic issues that start to develop your body so intelligent, so smart, always trying to keep you alive. In trying to keep us alive, it can harm us sometimes. You know, we have to learn how to you know we're so used to like, resisting things. We're so used to, like, okay, we got to solve the symptoms, stop the symptoms. And true, yes, like, we do need to down regulate things. We need to get inflammation under control. We need to restore some of this normal messaging and signaling activity. But sometimes we also don't do that by, like, putting the brakes on or wedging something between something. We do that by facilitating what our body needs to get out of that state. And, you know, I think a lot of people say, Well, okay, well, what's the trauma diet? Like, what supplements do I take, you know, to get out of this? And the answer is so frustrating. It depends, you know, because I have no idea you know what you need without, without meeting you and understanding what your body is doing in your story, because it's not like, you know, there's the cell danger on and off supplement, you know, or that there's a diet that ameliorates all of these nervous system responses and ways that we've been conditioned by the things that we've experienced. It is really like unraveling a ball of yarn. And, you know, I use the analogy of a puzzle, you know, sometimes, some people have like 25 puzzle pieces, and we can see the final picture pretty clearly. Other people have like 5000 puzzle pieces, you know. But when they're in this state of malnourishment, they're not sleeping, they have chronic pain, they their energy is all over the place. They have a lot of anxiety about all of these symptoms and the way that it's showing up in their body. It's very difficult to, like we've been talking about just kind of go to therapy and learn these somatic exercises you have to address the neurobiological impact of trauma. And the way that I look at it is it really just it turns things up too high, turns some things up too high and turns other things down too low. It makes some things go too fast and some things go too slow. Nutrition is the, again, it's like the biological basis of our existence, and nutrition plays a direct role in our cell survival and everything that our cells do. So we can positively influence our neurobiology with food, how we eat and when we eat, and how fast we eat and what time of day we eat, even. That we know that insulin sensitivity is different, you know, later in the day. And, you know, we just don't really tend to think about like the timing of food, and all of these things can have a really big impact on people who are recovering from trauma. Now, the one thing I do want to mention, too is sometimes I say it depends, because it's good for some folks to have a lot of structure around food, and then other times we need more freedom and fluidity around food. Again, like learning how do we do that? How do you decide? How do you listen to your body? How do you respond to your body? Where I've really kind of focused my research is kind of that intersection of all this. It's like, what are the neurobiological changes? How do they show up, as you know, what behaviors are they presenting as, what beliefs accompany them? And how can we kind of challenge this a little bit. That's kind of what I do. But I'm happy to zoom in on any aspect of that that you think would be helpful for your listeners.
Stephanie Mara 36:05
Thank you for sharing the nuance of this, because I find that especially from diet or wellness culture, we're getting these messages of like, there is a right and there is a wrong. Even from wellness culture around all the detoxes and the cleanses, and this is what you need to do to create health in your body. And health and creating it is a specific experience that is the context of your life and what is happening in your body now. And so I love that you brought that in, because it also is sometimes the most health producing thing, if we're making this about health, which a lot of times when we're trying to sometimes manipulate how we eat or when we eat or where we eat, isn't always in service of our health, but if we're making this about the vibrancy and longevity of our body, that you know it's like sometimes actually eating more of a diverse array of foods, having more freedom, eating at different times of day, eating past when you've told yourself the kitchen is closed, quote, unquote, is going to be the most health producing thing for you, and then for other individuals, it's going to be I need more structure. I need more scaffolding. I need more care and more attention and intention around my food, and that feels like the most health producing thing. I appreciate that you brought that in, because there isn't this, like clear answer of, okay, everyone just needs to eat this way, and then that's gonna heal your trauma and your autoimmune conditions and your sleep issues and all of these things.
Timothy Frie 37:43
Yeah, I really appreciate you highlighting that, and that's something that Ilost sleep over that. You know, it's like the diet and the supplement industry,they exploit that like they I think people who have experienced trauma in particular are especially at risk for that pull to be impacted by that polarizing advertising. And that's a whole podcast episode there in and of itself. But, you know, I think that's really important to highlight where a lot of people I've realized are coming to me assuming that like, okay, well, what's the diet? What's the one that I need to follow, and the diet that's good for your nervous system is the one that's good for your nervous system. That's gonna differ every single person I know. Some people do have different medical conditions where, you know, it's very, very challenging and difficult to feel nourished and to feel energized. You know, especially people who have had different surgeries, you know, on parts of their GI system, or people who have like malignant disease. You know, it's very difficult to feel full and feel happy, you know, with your body sometimes. Sometimes we, the nutrition industry, or the diet industry in particular, really makes a lot of big promises, sets people up for failure, because we always blame the person, you know, if they can't stick with the diet, the diet didn't work. What if it's just that the diet wasn't right for your body, you know? What if it's not that you couldn't make it work? It's that the diet was not made for it to work for you. You know, we kind of have to think about it in reverse, where we have so many horrible thoughts about ourselves with food and what it means to eat certain things and want certain foods and prefer certain foods. And I find that a lot of people even have a misunderstanding of what emotional eating is. They think that it's, well, you know, I have anxiety, so I eat a little bit more, or I go out to celebrate with my friends. That's emotional eating. Those are like, normal, cultural things, normal biological things that you know, we should be responding to. Emotional eating is an avoidance, distraction behavior. That's when it becomes problematic, because it puts us at risk for all of these other, you know, health issues that can come with that. It's just so individualized. And I think we've just culturally here in America, been conditioned to like, what is the one thing? What is the thing? And science has never been that definitive about anything ever, you know, in nutrition science in particular, you know, is still quite new. You know, nobody has ever claimed that there is one diet that's perfect for every single person, like, yeah, you can find, you know, through epidemiological studies and you know, looking at all sorts of biomarkers of certain types of foods and dietary patterns and habits are more conducive to health, less conducive to risk factors, promotive of long, greater health span, greater lifespan. But we don't really account for, like, the social determinants of of nutrition, either in our nutritional health, but someone can afford what, you know, do they know how to cook? It's something else that kind of drives me up the wall with, you know, a lot of nutrition counseling. It's like, we have no problem telling people what to eat, but if you don't know how to prepare the food in a way that is delicious, it's not going to feel safe, it's not going to feel attractive. You're not going to want to invest the time and energy into eating something that you feel aversive to. It really comes down to nuance, and I find that one of the biggest things people ask of me is, "I've read all these articles and books and listened to all these podcasts and watched so many videos and bought courses, what to do." Like, you know, how do I put all this together? And that's one thing I love about your approach too is you're you're like, there's no diet here, there's no supplements here. If there is a diet, you will create that. You will discover that if there are there is a need for supplements, we will discover that because you'll learn how to determine when and if you need those things, and we're lacking nutritional literacy and bodily literacy. There's a number of reasons for that, but this is all nuanced, and I think the polarization of nutrition information and the polarizing communities that some people can get in really just contributes to people still having these beliefs that are very pervasive.
Stephanie Mara 41:41
Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought in that nutritional science is fairly new. It makes me just reflect on how much potentially diets are trying to fill this gap of creating understanding of a body that we are still working to understand. I mean, even just this would also be a whole other podcast, but even the research that we're doing on the gut microbiome. We are still learning how many different gut bacteria we have and what they do. And so, you know, we're getting to that place of like, okay, it's not just kind of taking a probiotic and then, like, that's gonna fix everything. It's like, okay,there's a lot of different kind of gut bacteria we have, and they all do different things inside of our body. I think it lends itself to how uncomfortable it is to sit in the unknown. Like, while you were talking about that's what I was kind of coming up inside of my body, of just a lot of this practice of being with ourselves and our nutritional journey is stepping into the unknown with our body of we don't know what it is that our body needs, and when we can't create some plan to know what our body even needs tomorrow, I don't know where my body is going to be tomorrow. I don't know how I'm going to even sleep tonight to inform how I may need to be in relationship with food tomorrow. It is kind of stepping into that unknown and there can be a lot of fear there. And so the plans and the rules and the structure can sometimes feel momentarily safety producing, if it feels like it's just too much to step into that unknown with your body.
Timothy Frie 43:25
Yeah, you know, something else that comes up for me, you know, I'm friends with Angela Alt, who was someone who, you know, created the autoimmune protocol with Mickey Trescott and they are awesome. And you know, she herself told me she was like, this was never meant to be a diet that people follow their entire life. You know, this was meant to offer a stepping stone or a framework for people to learn about their bodies and notice what's going on and kind of take the training wheels off, if you will, and then go back into your life. But, you know, we do what we do in the West, we monetize the hell out of everything. You know, we went, oh, there's a lot of money to be made by selling this information to people, and we have been applying that to diets for decades at this point. And it's not to say that AIP is not helpful for people who have an autoimmune disease, not at all. But again, I think these diets are meant to provide a framework. They're meant to provide some inspiration, some place to experiment with.
Stephanie Mara 43:25
Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious in your work, obviously, we can't really provide anyone with a specific answer, because we don't know what your unique situation is, but in this overlap of what you've been exploring, of like trauma and sometimes disordered eating or autoimmune issues, sleep issues, what do you find that you're often exploring with people, that you've seen some overlaps that someone could start bringing in curiosity of like, oh, these might be things that I might need to start looking into for myself if I have a history with these things.
Timothy Frie 44:55
So, you know, I think one of the first things that's often kind of powerful that I do with people it's just educating them about how trauma can impact them. So you know, when I look at someone's history, I look at their story, very curious about how much of this could have come from trauma. And pretty much everyone that I work with like they know they've experienced trauma. They've been to therapy before. So it's not like I'm really introducing new information to them as much as I'm introducing new perspective about what to do with that information. So, you know, one thing that I think is is helpful is for people to think about that, you know, have my life experiences impacted my health? How have my life experiences impacted my nutritional health, my relationship with food and my body? And those are big questions. You know, we can, we can spend a very long time processing, getting to the origin stories and seeing these beliefs and things that we have about ourselves. So I think being curious about yourself in that respect is really helpful, you know, with regards to, like, the overlap of how these different things present, you know, in my mind, I think about, you know, it really is just all different forms of stress and how our body handles that stress. And we talked about earlier, we tend to really dismiss how stress impacts us. And I think a lot of people are afraid to admit or accept that what they have experienced was indeed traumatic or is very stressful, and that their body is being impacted by stress. Because if they believe that they think it means something bad about them, that they're lesser or weak or not resilient, but we sometimes need to kind of take that inventory and accept, like, okay, this is what I'm dealing with here. This is my truth. This is part of my story. This is how my body is trying to protect me, and this is what I need to do to take care of my body. So I think kind of thinking about that too, again, like going back to, like, our beliefs about our body and food and what we think certain things mean about us. The other thing that I really encourage in my practice, you know, I'm very conservative with testing. You know, I think sometimes we start looking for things that we don't necessarily need to look for, or we start gathering a lot of data, and sometimes that's a distraction. But some of my clients are like, test, don't guess type people, and I appreciate that. And I'm one of those people myself. Think that it's really helpful to look at, you know, some of these systems and things that are directly impacted by traumatic stress. So looking at like, you know, neurotransmitter levels, and, you know,downstream metabolites of them, looking at cortisol, looking at, you know, adrenaline and norepinephrine, and looking for nutrient deficiencies, and just trying to kind of see, like, what's going on in there, what is going on with my body. And sometimes, we may not necessarily find that something is too high or too low, but we might find a pattern, you know, we might find some clues, kind of figuring out, like, how to respond to those clues, and what that means for people in a way that isn't always super forceful or aggressive, you know, like going to a nutritionist, or, you know, signing up for one of these programs, and it's like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to get up and blow my life out and, you know, implement all these things. That is not what your nervous system needs. I can assure you, it's never what your nervous system needs. I encourage people to be very gentle with themselves, with how they implement this information and structure it in a way where you have some gentle structure or some affirming structure, and that structure also needs to be flexible a little bit, you know? I think the best plans are adaptable. They're not checklists or not something that we are like, okay, I did this, this and this, and yep, sometimes those lists and checklists are needed. They have a time and place, but to expect yourself to live a life checking off things with regards to food and your health every single day, that's like the antithesis of what we should be aiming for. We're not aiming for compliance with rules and regulations. We're aiming for understanding and learning, responding.
Stephanie Mara 48:40
You know, even what you were just talking about in regards to, you know, not just waking up the next day and changing everything that you're doing, and how overwhelming that can be. And what I have been kind of reflecting on and exploring is, why are we drawn to dieting like, what is that mimicking and that whatever we do over and over again is associated with safety inside of our body. And so even to say, okay, tomorrow, Monday, I am going to go on this diet and change everything about how I'm eating and moving and like, how does that experience in your body feel familiar from the trauma that you already experienced, the too much, too fast, very sudden experience. And so even the way that you approach the healing can also be healing in and of itself of I'm not gonna spark that similar thing in my body, and I need to show my body that slow is safe and that I don't have to overhaul my whole life and everything that I'm doing to facilitate healing.
Timothy Frie 49:44
Yeah, you know, I think most people kind of intuitively know that Stephanie, like, they already know that that has not worked, like they know, but they just don't know any other way to do it. And, you know, here in America, like that's so culturally, like, indoctrinated into us, you know, like the individualism, the hustle culture, all in or all out, you know, all or nothing, type of thinking again, and our bodies are not all or nothing ever, you know, and we try to force it into compliance with these rules and such. And we find that it becomes difficult for us to do that, and then we're shaming ourselves for not being compliant that we're shaming other people for not being in compliance with that, and it's all because we never really learned what we needed. You know, we never really learned how to take care of ourselves. And our body holds the clues. Our body holds all the clues and all the information that we need. And add another layer of nuance there too, you know, there's an asterisk even with that, because for me, some things like, you know, I have ADHD, I listen to my body to guide my day, I would not accomplish anything sometimes. So I have to cue my body and offer my body reminders and some structure. I use a lot of timers. You know, I eat kind of around the same time every day, because that helps me. That feels so good to me. Other people, we need to come back to the body. We really need to connect to the body. And then I think, too, you kind of talked about what I call like this pleasure safety paradox, or pleasure familiarity paradox. It's like this is very familiar. This feels safe. Let me just keep trying this again without any real reflection of, like, why does this feel safe? Why does this feel familiar? Why do I think I need to do that? The diet being the fix and the solution is, you know, we've been very conditioned to believe that, and I think that's why we default to that.
Stephanie Mara 51:36
Yeah. I mean, what you're pointing to there is just the mind body connection. Something that I find when those that work with me, like one on one, when I say, like, you don't always have to be in your body all day, every day, are kind of surprised from a somatic practitioner that like I would be saying that. And so it is that, yes, we want to check in with the body and notice the body's reaction and how it feels, but if we stay there for too long, that's not helpful either. And sometimes, if we follow every impulse that we have coming from the body without kind of mentally checking that out and being like, okay, what are my intentions for the day? What are my goals? Like, what would I be receiving from this? Would this actually be giving me what I'm looking for takes both where it's like, hey, body, I noticed you have an impulse to do this, and what I really need to do right now is this. And so sometimes we get to redirect the body and we get to guide ourselves. And so it's both checking in with the body and then bringing it up to our brain to comprehend, to interpret. So we need both happening at the same time. And so yeah, it is such a practice, but for many individuals, and I know for many maybe listening here, you've potentially relied so heavily on understanding and comprehending, on the story, on the thought process, that just the body story has not been incorporated enough. And so we don't want to swing the pendulum so far in the other direction, where, now you're like, my brain's horrible, and it never tells me anything good, and I can only listen to my body. It's like, we need to find that middle space where we're pinging back and forth with both.
Timothy Frie 53:13
Yes, yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking about kind of fundamental, like, top down, bottom up, processing. You know, your brain is sending signals, information and inputs it receives from outside of your body, and then your brain is receiving signals from everything that your brain has instructed the things inside of your body to do, you know. And we really are just operating in millions of feedback loops and systems and things that are giving different cells and receptors, different clues and different messages. And sometimes to think about all of that, like, that's it's a little scary to think about everything that's going on in our body. And that was something I used to struggle with, because when I started getting really into, like, cellular nutrition and cell biology, I would be thinking about like, you know, I'd eat brussels sprouts, and be thinking about like, NRF2 and nuclear factor kappa beta, and what's this doing with interleukins, and how's this, you know, affecting, like, my thyroid tissue and, like, all these different things. And so it's like, having an understanding of yourself is important, but there's a difference between, like, understanding, receiving the messages, interpreting the messages, and obsessing about the messages and hyper fixating on the messages and feeling like hyper vigilant about the body again, it's like, like you said, we don't want the pendulum to swing either way, but I found that it's especially for people who have experienced trauma. They're very used to certain sensations in their body, and sitting with the that gray space can be very difficult. We actually, you know, you start to feel physical agitation and irritation. And I think that's something that is a barrier to habit formation. People who have experienced trauma because they've a lot of people haven't really learned how to tolerate that discomfort. And, you know, really, a lot of the somatic therapies may have said this already, but it's really about learning, you know, it's learning, it's it's neuroplasticity and, you know, I call a lot of these things like self induced neuroplasticity, you know, like we're turning, you know, a neural connection up, or speeding it up, or trying to stop, you know, and end a neural connection, or separate if you will, sometimes create new connections as well. But there's a level of discomfort that comes from that. And you know, learning how to withstand that discomfort is sometimes really important to growth and recovery in this context.
Stephanie Mara 55:28
Yeah, and just for a moment, to bring this like full circle of something you were just saying that sparked in me was how, yes, we need the nutritional fortitude to do the trauma work, but then as you start to eat, potentially, in a way, just when you were talking about how brussel sprouts might process through you and what you're doing, what they're doing, that also, as you feel safer in your body because of how you're eating, you also have to learn how to be with the discomfort of feeling safer in your body eating in a way that helps regulate and stabilize you, and that might feel really uncomfortable to stay with that, again, it's not your fault that maybe some of the familiar food behaviors come back in. They're trying to help you not be with the discomfort of feeling safe. And so it takes both work, both that, yes, we need to support the body in getting the nutrition that it needs, but that also is going to lead to more safety that we also need to support ourselves in our nervous system to feel safe to feel safe.
Timothy Frie 56:32
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I always look for when I first start working with someone is just okay, what are your baseline nutritional needs? Like what does your body need to exist? And then a lot of people have challenges even meeting that because they just don't know what that is. They've never done that before. Now, I think one of the reasons a lot of people will start to make some dietary changes is because they've they've done it in a way that they start to make dietary changes and it becomes overwhelming quickly it's because they've overwhelmed themselves, like unintentionally, you know, it's again, we're going to do this blowout. I'm going to change what I eat, when I eat, how I eat, what time, how I food shop, what food I have in my house. Those are major changes. And, you know, I'm a big fan of, like, sometimes I'll ask a client to think about something for a week, and that's all we're doing. We're just going to think about it, and then the following week we're going to read about it, and then the third week, we're going to think about what it might look like to try it for one day or one time. That's reasonable, and that feels so much more accessible to people who have experienced trauma, because it's not like another extreme shift in state, you know, of being and sensing what's going on with ourselves and our environment. And, you know, I just, I think that we're, we've really underestimated the food, the impact that food can have on on our neurobiology. We think about food or nutrition as like, okay, these are the good foods. These are the bad foods. So I should eat, but nutrition is the cellular basis of our existence. You know, like in our cells do not have the nutrients that they need to do, what they need to do, then they will not sustain our existence. And, you know, we really need to learn what that means for us on an individual level and on a community level too. How can we take care of not only ourselves, but also in our community and people that we care about and others, and how does our relationship with others, impact food and the time, or our relationship with food and so forth.
Stephanie Mara 58:25
So well said, I feel like we could go on for like a whole another hour. And so just to, you know, take a moment, I usually like to wrap up with offering individuals listening like a baby step. You offered, actually just a beautiful baby step there of like just thinking about it and then reading about it. But I'm curious, you know, for those who are starting just to bring in this curiosity around their relationship with nutrition and what they're feeding themselves and how that impacts them, what would be a baby step that you feel like someone could take on their journey in maybe starting to feel safer with food.
Timothy Frie 59:03
I love that. I mean, so I mean, one question that kind of comes to mind, which, you know, I said a bit earlier, how have your life experiences impacted your relationship with your body? How have your life experiences impacted your relationship with your food? Big question. It's really zoomed out, but we can zoom in and out, you know, with answering that and we can spend time exploring and processing that. I read a really interesting study a few weeks ago where they looked at attachment styles in children, their mothers and their food behaviors. And no surprise, insecure attachment styles, you know, they had greater difficulty organizing food and planning their meals and meeting their nutritional needs. How have our life experiences impacted our relationship with ourselves?
Stephanie Mara 59:47
I think that is a fantastic first baby step is just starting to build that awareness of how did this kind of relationship with food get cultivated, and it got cultivated for a really wise reason based off of a million different factors that just to start to bring in that curiosity and kind of journal and write about that can start to also bring in some compassion, of like, oh yeah, this kind of way of relating with food, or these food patterns, they've all been playing out for a reason.
Timothy Frie 1:00:17
Yeah, like I said earlier, our body is beautiful, and all it does is it wants us to keep going. It wants us to survive. It wants us to feel alive and experience life, and we just have to learn how to enable that for ourselves.
Stephanie Mara 1:00:35
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here today and sharing all of your wisdom. How can everyone listening keep in touch with you and the work you're doing.
Timothy Frie 1:00:44
You can visit my website. It's TimFrie.com, or I'm on Instagram @nutritionfortrauma.
Stephanie Mara 1:00:51
Awesome. And as always, I usually put the links in the show notes, so I will drop them in there as well for everyone to check out and just thank you so much again for your time today. Just love this conversation. I feel like I'm definitely gonna have to have you back and get into, like, all the things that we said, oh, we could do another podcast about this. And, like, okay, so noted.
Timothy Frie 1:01:10
Yeah, let's do it. I am so honored to be here. Stephanie. This is something that has changed my life, my family's life. It's changed, you know, I know that this work, and the work that I'm doing and that you're doing is just changing a lot of lives, and I'm just so honored to have the opportunity to talk about all that with folks. So thank you.
Stephanie Mara 1:01:26
Yeah, absolutely. Well, to everyone listening, as always, I am here for you every step of the way on this journey. Reach out anytime. I will leave both of our contacts in the show notes, and I hope you all have a satiating rest of your day. Speak with you all soon. Bye!
Keep in touch with Timothy:
Website: https://www.timfrie.com/