What is Somatic Nutrition?

I call myself a Somatic Nutritional Counselor. Today I wanted to dive into what that is exactly. When I went through graduate school to get my Masters in Body Psychotherapy, I was known in my class as the woman who was going to infuse a Somatic approach into Nutrition.

First, what is Somatic Psychotherapy?

It is a form of body-centered therapy that looks at the connection between the body and the mind. Our bodies can hold on to past traumas in every muscle of our being which can alter our body language, posture, and expression. Past trauma can sometimes show up as physical symptoms like pain, digestive issues, hormonal imbalances, immune system dysfunction, depression, and anxiety. Through Somatic Psychotherapy techniques, mind-body connection can be strengthened, past traumas can be healed on a bodily level, and body expression can change.

What I have seen in working with individuals around their nutrition is that we're so bombarded by conflicting nutritional guidance that many are trying to figure out how to feed themselves from a mental space bypassing any information they are receiving from their bodies. This can set us up to have a broken relationship with our food and body as we potentially disregard, shut down, stuff down, and do not listen to the messages our body is trying to send us through different bodily sensations. How have you felt in your friendships and relationships where you have not felt heard? This is how we can be making our bodies feel by continuously overriding it with intellectual interventions.

Somatic Nutrition is approaching every meal from a body-centered place and noticing how different foods feel in your unique body. This can be an incredibly empowering experience. Every nutritional rule or dietary suggestion you have ever received can be thrown out the window. Only your body will let you know what works with it and what does not. By discovering what foods digest easily and support you in feeling calm, an opportunity can arise to explore your relationship with the foods that you perhaps continue to eat that you realize don't support you in feeling how you want to feel.

This was a huge part of how I healed my digestion from years and years of digestive discomfort.

I had to slow down and tune in to what my body was trying to tell me through intense bloating and digestive pain. Symptoms often show up as bodily discomfort. Instead of experiencing that bodily discomfort as wrong or bad or something that needs to be fixed, we can actually thank the sensations showing up as that is our body's way of telling us something is not working for it either physically or emotionally. So let's say you discover that something like dairy doesn't sit well in your body. Perhaps you get bloated, or gassy, or break out in acne. I'm still a huge proponent that there is no good or bad food AND your body is sending you messages that this food perhaps doesn't digest easily in your system. Dairy then does not need to be labeled as a "bad" food and you can still eat dairy whenever you want. The opportunity here is exploring why would you continue to consume a food that your body is telling you leaves you feeling uncomfortable?

We get to approach this question with so much compassion and understanding. Continuing to reach for this food is serving you in some way. By diving into our bodily experience of a food it actually increases a sense of awareness of how that food feels in our body and how continuing to eat a food that leaves us feeling less than vibrant is protecting us from something we're perhaps not yet ready to look at or make a change around. You can be so very gentle in this process of cultivating this new relationship with your body and patterns with food. I call it a process as we will eat our entire lives and our body will shift and change our entire lives and so this is a process and a practice we can be engaging in over and over again to check in with our body and support it in feeling heard.

Thanks so much for being here with me today. If you're ready to explore this new connection with your body and a different approach to nutrition email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime!