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I was sitting in an old lecture hall, daydreaming about health. As my professor scribbled on the whiteboard different caloric equations, I couldn’t help but question if there was something more my education had failed to teach me.
I couldn’t understand the idea that health, or at least weight, could be summed up into basic equations. There had to be more. I just couldn’t put a finger on what it was.
As I sat through those lectures, my questions ran deeper, but my understanding was slim. I had come here to find the answers to why so many people all over the world, especially those I loved, still struggled with their health no matter how many times they attempted the ‘perfect equation.’
I can’t say I ever found it in my college education, but I am grateful for the path that led me to look deeper. The path led me to understand, not only for myself but for a world of people, that health is not about what you do. It’s about what you perceive about what you eat.
Your Perspective Changes Your Biology
What you perceive is directly linked to the patterns you learned in childhood. You might find that your life, or at least what you perceive, isn’t your beliefs but what you picked up in childhood. Those beliefs are writing the story your body is telling. They also become the answer to change.
In this podcast, I show you how your nervous system responds to the story you tell yourself. That story becomes the story your body lives out. Changing health requires supporting your biology, but it also means changing your story. Listen to learn how.
Supporting Your Nervous System By Changing Your Story
Realizing how much like your parents you are, no matter how much you swore you wouldn’t turn into them, can be alarming in some cases. It easily happens, partially because we repeat what we see and also because, as children, it’s easy to hold onto other people’s beliefs.
When we’re born, we’re like a blank slate, an empty computer waiting to be programmed. That programming becomes the foundation for our lives; likewise, how your computer was programmed changes your outcomes.
Your computer programming is essentially the story you tell yourself. That story becomes the lens through which you see the world and what you perceive. It is a story created through absorbing your parents’ beliefs, the things they said about themselves and spoke over you, the events and situations you believed in, and all the other things that happened to you.
You are one big memory box your body constantly pulls from to keep you safe.
Because safety is of utmost importance to your survival, it is continually working to keep you safe.
But in some cases, the power of body memory also keeps you stuck, living out of a story that maybe wasn’t even your story but a story you picked from others.
If you want to change your biology, you have to change what you perceive, which means confronting the story you tell yourself.
Reframe your story to re-pattern your biology.
It’s easy to blame food or even your body, but in both cases, you miss the root. Of course, nourishment does matter! Your thoughts are only as healthy as your cells. However, the root of the other issue is often your perspective. Your perspective changes your biology because it signals your level of safety or threat to your nervous system.
As you’ve learned before, what you think about food changes what your body does with food because of the power of your nervous system.
That means healing comes back to understanding that perspective and then rebuilding it. This work is easier said than done, partly because it requires sitting in your perspective, which is often uncomfortable, but it also requires you to dig deeper.
To go back in time, not to stay there, but so you can heal there. If you can heal the old story, you can heal your current story.
Here are five steps to change the story (and stop living your mother’s story).
5 Part Plan To Change Your Perspective
01. Acknowledge the story you are currently living out
Health is less about what you do and more about understanding why your body is doing what it is. When you can understand it, you can support it, ultimately allowing you to provide more of what it needs to change.
But that starts by acknowledging what you are feeling. You have to live and be aware of what you feel. To sit in it and get to know it.
I know this step is painful, and we work hard to avoid it, but it’s the most necessary. Without awareness, you’ll never change the story but continuously repeat it.
In any situation, ask why your body is responding this way. What is it feeling like, and where is it coming from?
Try to get as specific as possible. What symptoms are you feeling? Why is your body holding onto body fat? Why can’t you sleep?
Just sit in it and let it speak.
02. Understand Your Story
Once you understand why it’s responding that way, dig into the story that prompted it. What do you believe?
Here, you can start to identify the roots of your story, and when you understand them, you can begin to reshape them.
In this step, ask yourself how the story was created. Who taught you that? Where did you learn it?
If that is not helping, begin to look at what others believed and spoke about themselves, food, and life and how you might have picked up on those beliefs.
03. Reframe the story
Now that you understand the story, you can begin to reshape it. You can reframe it by acknowledging what you believed and why you believed it and then speaking new truth over it.
This is a tricky step because we often skip the understanding aspect required of our old story. We are quick to jump into telling a new story, but you have to put the old story to rest before you write a new one.
You have to help your biology understand that the story isn’t true before you speak new truths. In a lot of ways, you have to learn to let go.
04. Learn To Let Go
This step and the previous one go hand-in-hand. It’s a bit of a repeated loop, a back-and-forth, a dance. As you understand the story and piece together why you believed it, in the process of reframing, you need to allow yourself the space to let it go.
The mobilization of stories out of your body, the act of letting go, is truly an art. It is not easy, but it can become easy, especially as you recognize and feel the benefits of not holding onto things that aren’t helpful to you.
To let go, acknowledge again what you believed, why you believed it, and what is untrue about it. Then, take a deep breath and tell yourself it’s time to let it go.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Let go.
05. Reinforce the new story
The final step is critical. You must reinforce the new story. Reinforcing the new story is the act of repatterning. You have to help make it stick.
When it becomes a new pattern, it becomes a way of life.
But don’t fear if this step is complicated or you find yourself chasing down the old story. This is normal. Patterns, no matter how unhealthy, are still safe, and we will continuously do what feels safe when we feel unsafe.
You’ll sacrifice what is healthy for what is safe.
To help, continuously create safety in your biology and mind by reinforcing the new story. Speak it over yourself, write about it, tell others, and come back to it repeatedly. Eventually, it will become your story.
But you have to stick with it.
How To Write a New Story Your Body Is Telling.
Your body is telling a story. Do you like it?
If you don’t love the outcome of your body, you don’t love the story. I know it’s easy to overlook, so many better said, what symptoms do you notice? No matter how much you hate them, those symptoms tell you something.
When you understand symptoms as communication from your biology to your mind, you can learn how to provide what it needs to change. But you can’t overlook this step. It’s the only way to make health last.
Inside Health Made Simple, I guide you on a transformative journey to rewrite the story your body is telling. This course offers unique perspective changes, integrating your mind, body, and soul to provide wholeness.
Ultimately, to help you get out and live!
