Episode Overview

As January moves along, many women begin to feel frustrated with their health choices, their healing progress, or the direction they are going. What once felt supportive can start to feel overwhelming.

In this episode, Laura shares a powerful personal story that highlights why diet and exercise are only part of the healing picture. She explains how stress, trauma, consistency, and self-honesty play a major role in metabolic and emotional health after breast cancer.

Laura also explores how constantly switching diets, supplements, therapies, or plans can actually slow progress, especially when we are not tracking data or giving our bodies enough time to adapt. She discusses why external health advice can become noise, how it can pull us away from intuition and internal healing, and why turning down the volume is sometimes the most supportive choice we can make.

This episode is an invitation to pause, reflect, and ask whether you need something new or whether you need more space, clarity, and consistency.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why stress and trauma can override even “perfect” health habits

• What HbA1c tells us about long-term blood sugar and metabolic health

• How inconsistency and lack of tracking create frustration

• Why self-honesty is critical for real change

• How external support can become a buffer that keeps us from deeper healing

• When it may be time to turn down the noise and tune inward

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 447

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. I am your host, Laura Lummer and this podcast is going to come out almost towards the end of January, and it sounds like it's a new year. January is not even over yet, but around this time, people start getting frustrated. People have maybe set some goals for their health or their life or things they wanted to accomplish. Right around this time, they start questioning their choices. They start thinking, Maybe I should go in a different direction. They start hearing people talk about successes they've had trying something else. There can be a lot of noise around us that causes us to question ourself, and so is all of this information supportive, or does it become noise that can be very distracting and very overwhelming to the things that are important that would truly move us forward in our life? You know, it's very easy for us to get fixated and distracted with tangible things, and so this has come up a lot recently for me in client calls, and I'll share a story with you. The other night, my husband and I were out to dinner with another couple. And this couple, they're very into health and fitness. They're in their early to mid 40s. They care about what they eat, they care about moving their bodies. They're very thoughtful about their lives, and the husband especially is very, very fit, right? So he's strong physically. He works out consistently. He's very successful and very disciplined person. So on the outside he looks like the picture of health, but as we started to talk in the conversation, he shared his HBA 1c and if you're familiar or not familiar with HBA 1c It's a blood marker that gives us an average of your blood levels over about the last three months, the lifespan of a red blood cell. And it's used to assess your blood sugar regulation and other things about your metabolic health. And so based on the number he shared, technically, he's falling into a pre diabetic range. This marker is indicating some insulin resistance, and that surprises people. A lot of times, when I'm looking at labs and they see this HBA 1c marker, especially when they think diet and exercise look right. And so we started to talk about this marker and a couple of other things, and it became really clear to me that this has very little to do with what he eats. It has very little to do with a lack of movement and a lot to do with stress. A lot to do with how hard he pushes himself. A lot to do with how his nervous system lives in almost a constant state of urgency. And a huge part of that, it's very understandable, traces back to his childhood, because he grew up in a war zone until he was 14 years old, a literal war zone, and that level of stress during formative years can shape a lot about how your body learns to survive, and even decades later, your body remembers, right? This is a very clear example of something I see a lot with the women I work with. We love to focus on diet and exercise, and I love to focus on that too. Don't get me wrong. I love my continuous glucose monitor. I love seeing how different foods impact me. I love looking at my labs, and they do matter. They support us in super powerful ways a lot of times. But it's very easy to stay focused there, because it feels tangible, because it feels productive, and because it feels safer than looking inward. It feels safer than looking at stress patterns. It feels a little easier and less scary than looking at emotional responses and old trauma. It's much easier to look at what we eat than how we relate to ourselves. Those things can be really hard to face, and they're very easy to avoid when there's always another plan to try, always another great recipe, a new supplement, a new therapy that someone's talking about on Instagram. And so that dinner just kind of made me think more about this topic, because so many of my clients recently I've had. Conversations with are just so frustrated with the way that they feel or responses that they're seeing in disease progression, in their labs, in their relationships, and so they keep switching up things because they want to feel differently, right? They keep switching up what they eat, they switch up supplements, they try one therapy, and then after just a couple weeks, they hear about something new, and they think maybe I was missing something, and I should try that instead. And so I want to talk about this, and kind of bring this all together, because it's important for us to realize a few things here. One, the human body takes time to adapt. It takes time to respond, and it takes time for change to settle in. So time is not just an important factor, but consistency matters far, far, far more than people realize, and it takes time to become consistent. What I often see is that people think they're being consistent with their plan, whatever that plan might be, but they're only tracking what they're doing in their head. They're going off, how it feels, what they remember, or what they believe they've been doing most of the time, right? And our brains are not great at collecting data and being accurate with the way they perceive data, but we are great at telling ourselves stories. So I'll have people say to me, no matter what I do, I can't get into ketosis, right? They want to follow a ketogenic diet for whatever reason. And so when I asked to see their food log, so I can help and see what we might need to tweak, they don't have any Well, there's no way to know if you're in ketosis without doing some specific tracking, and there's no way to know what's working for you and what isn't if you're not looking at what you're putting into your body. So that's the only way to tell if things are sneaking in, or how we can tweak macronutrient intake. But because we can get so used to thinking, I've got this right, and we just track whatever it is in our brain, and we generalize a lot. Frustration sets in and we tell ourselves stories like this isn't working for me, I can't do this. My body just doesn't respond. But we don't actually know that yet, because we haven't been consistent. We haven't gathered actual data, and Sorry friends, but we're usually not honest with ourselves and self honesty matters. We don't want to be completely honest with ourselves, which is why we don't want to track data, because data doesn't lie, right? And that's true whether we're talking about food, sleep, stress, movement, emotional, healing, relationships, everything, writing things down is so important. You know, when people will talk about even relationships, and talk to me about someone they're in a relationship with, and say that person always does this, or they're constantly doing that, and then I'll say, give me a specific example. Share something with me, so we can think about this in a different way. Give me a specific example of when that happened, and then they'll stop and think and say, Well, you can't remember something specifically, but I know it happens, right? So really thinking and doing work of writing and tracking, whether that's journaling or if it comes to food, if it's a food log, these are super important things, because that's how we clear out the noise, it's how we clear out the stories, it's how we clear out the frustration and the judgment. It's how we make informed choices that lead us forward, instead of guessing and throwing our hands up and saying, nothing's working and I'm stuck. So this pattern shows up externally and internally. Many, many times I am working with someone who shares with me a trauma or a past resentment or something that hurt them deeply, and then they'll say to me, I'm already past that. We don't need to talk about it, but it's very clear to me that there's still a strong emotion there. There are conditioned reactions there, there are stories that are still running in the background, triggers that are happening. And that's not a judgment and it's not a flaw, but self honesty is critical if we want real change. And one of the things I loved about our friend who we were having dinner with, is he said to me, I'm so used to living at a level of chaos that I keep creating it for myself. I just tell myself, it's a healthier form of chaos, right? Because the stress that he is under is stress he creates in his business or just his lifestyle. But he's telling himself it's a healthier form of chaos. Now that level of awareness matters, right? It's it's important to say, I'm creating chaos. It's important to be aware that calmness fails. Feels uncomfortable, right? Because we're not just healing habits we're learning to live at a different level of energy than the one we were familiar with, right? So being calm can feel uncomfortable. If chaos feels normal, easy, can feel wrong. If pressure is what we're used to, whether someone else is pressuring us or we've always pressured ourselves. And when we don't look at that honestly, when we don't level up our state of awareness, we stay very busy changing external things, while the internal patterns remain untouched. And this is where all of this outside support, all of the noise can change from being actually supportive to kind of undermining our ability to move forward. So when we hear about endless diets and supplements and therapies and exercise, and we listen to podcast after podcast after podcast of very well meaning voices, very valid information, but people telling us, try this, try that, try this. And it's very easy for us to believe that healing, or getting to that place we want to get to is about finding the right thing, right and so when we're thinking, this is the right thing and this isn't the right thing. We just keep searching all the time, and then that searching becomes a buffer. Right is a way to stay active without slowing down enough to feel what needs to be felt, or to stay with one approach long enough to allow your body and your mind to respond to it. So when support leaves you feeling scattered and frustrated instead of grounded, when you feel like you're constantly second guessing yourself, that's often a sign that you need to turn down the volume. Right? Not because any of the information is bad, not because support is bad, but because too much of it can pull you away from yourself and from noticing where your intuition is guiding you, where your needs are guiding you right. Healing isn't just about adding the right things. It's also about letting go, letting go of pressure to be perfect, letting go of the belief you're failing if something takes time, letting go of the idea that somebody else has an answer you're missing. Or sometimes someone will get on a call with me and they'll say, you know, this is the area I need help in. And as I start to ask questions, to understand, you know what they've already tried? Because nothing has worked. Nothing has ever worked. Well, tell me about some of the things you've done. I've done everything. What does everything mean? Like, let's get really specific. And then, how long have you tried that? Right? The important thing here is the the work to stay with yourself and support yourself, to treat yourself as a priority, and to not judge things as they don't work, but that maybe I didn't respond to that, or maybe I need a little more time and to be really honest about what you're doing and where you still need a little more care, right? What you might try again, what you might try for a longer period of time. So if you notice that you are feeling frustrated, or you are constantly searching, I just want to offer you this thought. Maybe you don't need something new. Maybe you need more consistency in what you're trying. Maybe you need more clarity about what you actually want to feel or achieve. Maybe you need more honesty, little more data and a little less noise. Right? The space to stay with one thing long enough to see what actually happens the space to notice what comes up when you get quiet, right? When you say, I'm just gonna try this. And my recommendation is that when I try something new for not less than three months, I mean, unless you obviously notice right off the bat that something makes you feel terrible. If that's something external or something emotionally, like this is not good, right? Like this is unhealthy. If you notice that right away, then yeah, definitely change that. But usually things have to take some time to settle in. And many times things are going to be uncomfortable, right? If I start exercising when I haven't had a regular exercise pattern, it's going to be uncomfortable. So instead of over training or responding to a sore body without doing anything, I want to respond by saying, Maybe I should tone that down a little bit so I don't get so frustrated by the pain, and I can continue to do this at a lower level as I build up my tolerance. That can work for our emotions too, right? We can dig into some. Thing and say

15:01
this is really uncomfortable and triggering. Maybe we back off a little bit. Maybe we take it in a smaller chunk. Maybe we find a more steady way to support ourselves and give ourselves care as we're processing, right? So we want to allow that space to heal from the inside out, going back to space which I'm so focused on at the beginning of the year, right? Giving ourselves space, not necessarily doing less, but just doing what really matters, right? So release, first pillar of breast cancer recovery, letting shit go, the things that don't serve you, the conditioned beliefs that don't serve who you are any more in this life that don't feel good to you because that sock drawer that we call the brain is full. We've got to let some of it out if we want to bring in the socks that fit today, the ones that don't have holes in them, the ones that feel warm and cozy, right? And yes, that's a metaphor for thoughts, for behaviors, for choices that we make. So let's think about that. How much noise are you allowing in? How much resistance Do you carry to being inside, doing the internal work, listening to yourself and making the decision to turn down the noise, right? A lot of times when we decide to turn down the noise, like if you have five different podcasts, I mean, these take time, right? People send me podcasts and episodes and things all the time, and they sound super interesting, and I put them over in the parking lot space, I'll bookmark them and say, I want to get back to that, but I can't always listen to everything, because I have my priorities set, and I'm going to make sure that I stay focused on those priorities of what I want to achieve. I know how easy it is for me to get distracted, and so we have to ask ourselves, What is my priority for caring for myself? What is it that's important to me now and stick with it and tweak it as we go, rather than throw it out and change it if we don't get the response or we don't see what we want instantaneously, right? So when support, which we perceive as support, more information becomes noise, then maybe it's time to put on the earplugs and tune inside, to ask ourselves what we really need to heal, to grow, to invite in happiness, to release what doesn't serve us. All right, my friends, I hope that helps. I hope that we are clearing stuff out. We are purging in on and around us and making space to invite in all the joy that life has to bring for you. And if you need support and help with that, come and find me the breast cancer recovery coach.com where you can find programs to support you in nearly every aspect of your life. And you can also join my better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, where you get to interact with me, have live coaching and engage with a supportive group of women who are all looking to create lives that are better than before breast cancer. All right, friends, be good to yourself, and I'll talk to you again next week.

18:17
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

18:35
Give it all you got no hesitating.

18:38
You've been waiting all your

18:47
life. This is your moment.