Episode Overview

What if your body isn’t working against you?

What if the fatigue, cravings, bloating, brain fog, and energy crashes aren’t signs that your body is broken… but signs that it’s trying to communicate with you?

In this deeply personal episode, I share a completely different way of thinking about metabolic health, nutrition genomics, lab work, and healing after breast cancer.

For years, I believed that giving women more information about their bodies would automatically help them feel more connected and compassionate toward themselves. Sometimes it does. But sometimes that same information becomes another reason women feel flawed, overwhelmed, or like they are failing.

And that is not what this work is about.

Your genetics are not a list of defects.
Your labs are not proof that you are broken.
They are information. They are communication. They are your body’s language.

In this episode, I walk you through the idea of learning your body’s “love language” and I share an actual love letter written from my body to me based on my own nutrition genomics, blood work, and healing journey.

Inside this episode, we discuss:

• Why metabolic health data should create compassion instead of fear
• The difference between listening to your body and judging your body
• How genetics and lab work can help you understand your unique needs
• Why “common” symptoms are not always normal
• The connection between stress, inflammation, hormones, and healing
• The role food, sleep, movement, and emotional health play in metabolic wellness
• How self-awareness changes your relationship with food and your body
• Why learning your body’s language can completely shift the healing process

If you have ever felt confused about what your body needs, overwhelmed by health information, or frustrated trying to follow advice that doesn’t feel right for you, this episode will help you approach your body with more curiosity, compassion, and understanding.

Resources Mentioned:

Work with Laura:

https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

Download the app: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/breast-cancer-recovery-coach/id6720763813

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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. Hey friends, welcome back to better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and you're listening to Episode 462 I am really glad you're here today, because I want to talk to you about something that's been on my mind a lot lately, and I'm hoping that by the end of this episode, the way that you hear your own body talking to you might shift just a Little bit. I've been coaching breast cancer survivors since 2017 so almost 10 years now, and I have evolved so much as a coach over that time. I started with a foundation in western nutrition, exercise science and behavior change. I moved into the metabolic approach. I trained as a life coach, which deep into the work that I do around mindset and thought patterns and multiple certifications in between. And as I've grown, my biggest teachers have been my own healing this body and my clients. And one of the things I've noticed as I move deeper into metabolic health work, where I'm looking at clients labs and their nutrition genomics aside, alongside of their lifestyle, was something that I really wasn't expecting, because I thought that handling people's data would help them understand how their body was speaking to them. That's how it works in my brain. I thought it would help them see how unique their experience in their body actually is. Because the foundation of everything I teach, which is one of the biggest evolutions from when I first started even my own healing after my 2011 breast cancer diagnosis, the foundation of everything is self love and self compassion. When we truly understand someone that we're in a relationship with, that's when we can have real empathy and real compassion for them. That's when we can support and love them so good and our body is the longest relationship we will ever be in. Think about that. It's a lifelong relationship, baby. What I found was that for a lot of women, this information that I was giving to them, this language of their body, did exactly what I hoped it would. It helped them make meaningful changes. They felt more connected to their body, their mindset shifted. But then I also noticed another pattern, and I want to talk about this because I think many of you will recognize this in yourself. Some women would get this beautiful, detailed information about their body, and instead of hearing it as their body talking to them, they heard it as a list of things that were wrong with them. They got stressed out. Some of them even froze and did nothing because the data felt like one more way they were broken. Right mindset is everything, and I get it because that's the way we are conditioned. Growing up in the world of Western medicine, we don't go in for routine labs in here, hey, so everything looks pretty good, but your metabolism is moving in a direction where I really think you could use some nutrition support. So here's a referral. We go in to find out what's wrong, and that's the whole framework. So then when we look at metabolic labs or nutrition genomics or a genetic variant that says your body works a little harder to regulate blood sugar, we hear it through the only lens we know, and we read it as another thing wrong with me. But that is not what the data says. Your genetics are the blueprint of how your body is built. Your labs show what's happening right now and what could use a little more support. None of that means you are broken. It means your body is talking. And the more I've worked with this information over the years, the more I've come to think of it as something completely different than a problem list, than something to be afraid of, and so I want to be really clear about something, because there is a difference between loving the body you have and listening to the body you have and what I'm. Talking about here is the listening part. The reason that matters is because your body is constantly giving you information, and most of us were never taught the language that it speaks, because it speaks in genetic snips, it speaks in lab markers, it speaks in how you feel two hours after a meal, and most of us are not trained to understand any of that. So let me give you an example. Let's say you have a genetic variant called TCF 7l, two. To the average person, that means absolutely nothing. But from your body's perspective, it's saying, hey, my pancreas works a little harder to produce insulin. So when we eat a lot of high carb or high sugar foods, my blood sugar swings hit harder, and that increases more inflammation inside of me, and that's not a defect, it's just your body telling you what it needs to feel good. So which language do you think builds a healthier relationship with your body, the one that calls a variant, a defect or a mutation, or the one where your body is talking to you about what it needs. So I was on a call with a client recently, and she has been doing incredible work, beautiful work, supporting herself in incredible ways making changes that have been genuinely difficult, supporting herself through it. And when this particular call, she told me she was struggling with her nutrition. So I said, Okay, talk to me about what's coming up. And she started to share her thoughts, and I started to hear a lot of self deprecation. It's not good enough. I'm not trying hard enough I should be doing more. And as I listened, it just really marks my heart a little bit, because I had given her this information for a completely different reason, and yet she was using it to build a case against herself. And then I had a light bulb moment, and I'm thinking about how to communicate this work better, because it's one thing to hand someone their data, and it's another thing to hand it to them in a way that doesn't get filtered through the I'm broken lens, and that's the work of an integrative metabolic life coach, and it's the work that I'm always evolving in my sister reminds me sometimes that I'm using insider language, that I've been in this world so long that I forgot not everyone speaks that language, and she's absolutely right. So I'm always trying to listen to my clients, and as I do, something occurred to me in this particular conversation, and I said to her, You know what? I want you to think about this information your body is giving you as a love language. I want you to imagine sitting down with one of the closest people in your life, your partner or your child or your best friend, and being completely open with them, no interrupting, no getting defensive, just hearing them listening, because you genuinely want to know what they need so you can support them, and that's what I want you to bring to you and your body in your relationship here. And so I asked her to do something. I asked her to take everything we've learned from her genetics and her labs and to write a love letter from her body to herself, and I could see that it landed right. She took a moment and she said, Oh, my God, I get it. There's nothing wrong with me. So there's nothing to fix. And I cannot tell you how often I tell my clients, there's nothing here to fix. You are, what you are. The question is, do you like what is being produced, what the outcome is of the lifestyle you're leading, or do you have a vision of a different future version of yourself? If so, what small steps can we take to support that future version of you? This is not about being broken or right or wrong. We don't need the judgment. It's about being present and asking, Is this working for me? And if it isn't, what's one thing I can do to optimize this? So I want to share my own love letter with you. I want to give you a sense of what your body might say if you understood the language that it speaks. And I want to be very clear that what you're about to hear is specific to me. It came from analyzing my nutrition genomics and my blood work. So this is the story of my body. Yours is going to say something different. So I'm not asking you to listen and then go do these things for yourself. I'm asking you to listen to how it sounds when a body gets to speak and notice what is coming up. So before I read it, I just want to invite you to get very curious about something you know, a lot of us have a story we tell ourselves about food, and that story usually. Found something like my body loves this. I feel fine when I eat this. This works for me. And I just want to ask, How do you know? Because there's a difference between what tastes good in our mouth and what feels good in our body an hour, three hours later, the next morning, over the course of a week, and I'll use myself as an example. Here, I live in Southern California, and we have a fast food place here called in and out. If you've ever been to California, you know about in and out, and if you haven't just picture your favorite burger and fry place that literally has a line around it from the moment it opens to the moment it closes at two o'clock in the morning. So if I sit down with an In and Out Burger and Animal Style Fries, which is saying that makes my mouth water because they're covered in this in and out secret sauce and caramelized onions and everything good in the world, I am going to enjoy that experience in my mouth 100% my brain is going to get a dopamine hit and tell me, get more of that. And that's the truth. That's really real. I'm not going to pretend that it isn't. So would I say, Oh, my body loves this. My mouth loves this, my brain loves this. But if I really get quiet afterward and I ask my body, I sit with it and I notice what its experience was, the answer is usually a little bit different. Something like really helped me feel bloated. I'm so tired, maybe a small crash comes a couple hours later. And the question is really not, is this food good or bad? Because that's not a useful conversation. The question is, what is my body telling me about how it experienced that meal? And am I willing to listen? And that doesn't mean that you will never have a burger and Animal Style Fries. It just means you're developing self awareness. You're supporting the relationship with your body. And so when you understand that your body doesn't feel good after a certain thing, we really don't do it as often. I'm not saying we never do it. Some things maybe never some things may make you feel so bad that you say, I am never doing that again. I'm just never doing that again. That makes me feel so bad that it isn't worth the flavor I get in my mouth for the suffering that happens in my body that might happen. So this is important, because if we eat a certain way long enough, the way our body feels afterwards, start to feel like a baseline. We start to think that feeling a little bloated is normal. We start to think that feeling foggy in the afternoon is normal. Needing caffeine to get through the day is normal, and it might be common, but common and normal are not the same thing, right? Just because everybody is over at the coffee line, at the at the break room, at three o'clock in the afternoon, that's common. But is it normal? Is it healthy? Is it optimal for your body, so your body has a baseline of vitality, and one of the most loving things you can do is you're very curious about whether you're actually living from that baseline or from a version of yourself that's adapted to feeling less than great. So I am not here to tell you what to eat. I am here to ask you, what is your body's response telling you, and are you willing to hear it in the same way you would hear it from someone you love? Okay? With that in mind, I want to share the first part of the love letter to me from my body. Hey, Laura, my love, it's me your body, the one who's been with you through every breath, every step, every year, every laugh, the one who carried you through two breast cancer diagnosis and never quit on you. I want to talk to you about the way I've been trying to talk to you for so long, through aches and cravings, through energy and fog and clarity. Let me put it into words you could understand. I want you to know something from the very start though, I'm not broken and I never was. I'm complicated and I'm specific and I'm yours. The pages of code you've been reading that's just me describing myself. Let me tell you what I'm actually trying to say. You know that feeling when your mind won't stop, when you're processing everything at once, when you remember a comment someone said three weeks ago, when you feel things deeply and can't shake them off? That's me. I come T gene, the one that helps me clear out stress chemicals like adrenaline and dopamine. It actually works pretty slowly, like really slowly. It's why I'm sensitive, why I notice everything, why I'm a deep thinker and a deep feeler and my MA, oh, a gene works the same way. So when stress hormones come in, they don't leave quickly. They build up inside of me. What I need from you? Is to take stress seriously, not as a luxury problem, but as a metabolic one. When you push through, when you say yes to one more thing, when you stay up working those chemicals don't have anywhere to go. They circulate and they affect my mood, my sleep, my hormone balance, and, yes, my long term health. What would help me clear them out is magnesium, B vitamins, especially the active forms like methylfolate, methylcobalamin, quiet mornings, time in nature, slow walks, saying no to extra things, crying when I need to, singing in the car. I love that. Methylation is one of the most important things I do. It's how I make energy and repair my DMA. It's how I calm inflammation, process estrogen and keep my brain chemistry steady. And my methylation engine has a few worn parts, MTHFR and mtrr are among them. And what this means, in plain English, is I run better on the active forms of folate and B 12, I do better with leafy greens, lentils, beans, asparagus, avocado and animal protein, and when I supplement, I do better with methylated forms. When I have what I need, I run beautifully when I don't, you will feel it as fatigue, brain fog, low mood and trouble clearing the things I'm supposed to clear, including hormones. Okay, so I'm gonna pause here for a second. This is not part of my letter. I just want to take a moment, because if you're already feeling something stirring you, that is the whole point. I want you to notice what's coming up. Are you actually hearing your body, or are you just hearing some old story in the way everybody on Instagram approaches health, right? The what's wrong with me, story, the what needs to be fixed. Story, all right, so keep listening. Let me keep going. All right, back to my body's letter. Now you already know this, but I want to say it from my side. The way I process estrogen has a few quirks that matter for our breast health. My CYP one b1 leans toward making more reactive forms of estrogen metabolites, the kind that need extra help getting cleared out safely, and that com tea, the slow one is what's supposed to neutralize the metabolites. So I have a setup where I can make the more reactive byproducts, but then I clear them out really slowly. And that's information that tells you what I need. I need cruciferous vegetables every single day. I need broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, arugula, bok choy. The compounds in those foods, dim, sulforaphane, indoor three carbinol that helped me push estrogen down the safer pathway. I need fiber to bind those metabolites and carry them out. I need flax, chia seeds, berries, beans and vegetables. I need a healthy gut so may Astro balloon the bacteria that handles estrogen. Recycling can do its job, and I need you to keep me away from the things that mimic estrogen and overload my system, plastics, synthetic fragrances, conventional personal care products, pesticides on produce. And this isn't fear based. This is just how I'm built. Work with me here, and I will be able to work with you now. I have some real strengths too. My gstt one is intact, which is wonderful, but my phase one detox enzymes, they need support. I'm a slower acetylator, which means certain compounds in cooked meats and some medications take me longer to clear. What I love is garlic, onions leak the whole allium family, cruciferous vegetables, I told you, they show up everywhere, beets, artichokes, dandelion greens and plenty of clean water, sweating regularly sleep, because so much of my detox happens overnight. Was hard on me. Alcohol. I can metabolize it, but it really taxes me. Pesticides, plastics, mold, heavy metals, charred and processed meats, synthetic fragrances, all of that hurts me. Now, you don't have to be perfect, just please be aware my collagen and connective tissue genes, they're all flagged, and what that translates into is I'm more prone to soft tissue injury, and my connective tissue breaks down a little faster than it builds up, unless I'm really intentional. What I really need from you, vitamin C every day, multiple times a day, citrus, berries, peppers, kiwi, broccoli. I genuinely need more than the average person because of how my GST and SLC genes work, and vitamin C is the building block of collagen, I cannot make new tissue without it. I also need quality protein, like bone broth, glycine, rich foods. I need movement that includes range of motion balance and gentle strength training, not just cardio and. Warm ups and rest days, I need you to start pushing through pain and listen when something feels off. And the good news is my recovery system works really well when you give it what it needs. I do have a predisposition to blood sugar swings, TCF, 7l, two, IRS, one, FTO. FTO especially likes to talk to my hunger signals. So I'm asking for protein in every meal. Real fat, olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, fatty fish, fiber, fiber, fiber, vegetables before carbs, whole foods like sweet potatoes, squash, quinoa, beans instead of refined ones. And eat in a window that gives me time between meals to actually use what you fed me. Please don't graze all day, and please don't skip breakfast and crash at three o'clock when my blood sugar is steady, my mood is steady, my hormones are steady, my inflammation is lower, and my recovery work goes better, and that ripples through everything. Okay, this letter goes on, but I'm going to wrap it up here, and I'm going to tell you how it wraps up here. Here's the end. You don't have to fix me, because I'm not broken. I have my preferences, my soft spots and my strength, and have a lot of strengths, protective methylation, genes that respond to your care. Intact glutathione system, a vitamin D pathway that you've supported really well, a recovery system that bounces back. I am not a fragile thing, but I am a particular thing, and what I'm asking for is the same thing. Any good relationships ask for. Pay attention to me. Listen when I send signals. Don't override me. Don't punish me when I'm tired, don't shame me if I gain weight, don't ignore me when something hurts. Please feed me real food and move in ways that feel good. Give me sleep, sacred, uninterrupted sleep. Give me sunlight, give me clean fresh water. Give me people you love and let me feel that because connection shapes how my genes express themselves. And when you teach other women how to listen to their bodies the way you're learning to listen to me, that's part of how we heal too. Purpose is medicine for me. Meaning lights me up at a cellular level, we've been through so much together, two diagnoses, surgery, treatment, grief, rebuilding, and here we are still here, still talking, still figuring out together. I love you. Signed your body. Okay. That means a lot to me, and I get a very warm glow reading it, because it's not some Instagram influencer telling me what everybody on the planet needs. It's not a 20 year old who's never had an ache or pain telling me about the next miracle supplement from the Amazon jungle, right? It's my body. This was written based on analyzing my neutral nutrigenomics and my blood work. This is the story of me. This is me getting to understand my body. And what I hope for you is that listening to it helps you listen to your body in a different way. When it's tired. What does that mean to you? How does it tell you? What is it telling you, versus the story you tell yourself a body that must be getting older, or a body that's used to having so much energy, or a body you're comparing to someone else's, that kind of comparing and judging does not help us live healthy, vibrant lives, but listening does. If your body is uncomfortable, if it has had a hard time moving, if it has a hard time getting through the day, if it feels bloated and tired after you fed it. What is it trying to tell you? I think if we can shift our mentality to that whether or not you have the data I have, your body is talking to you. Do you want to learn its language? And that doesn't mean you have to go out and get all this testing done, but if you want to, that information is available to you in a way that it wasn't even 10 years ago, and that information can tell you specifically what your body needs to feel better without guessing. And I say that because so many clients have said to me, I don't know what to do, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know where to start. And then I've watched women invest in program after program after program designed to teach every single person the same thing, instead of investing in themselves to understand their own individual body. And there are two ways to do that. One is actually hold space for yourself and just listen and on it. I'll be really honest with you here, even when we start listening to ourselves, and we know what we want or what we might need to change, there's nothing better than getting someone to help you so a coach, a personal trainer, a dietitian, a nutritionist, someone who knows how to support you and teach you skills. Because how do you change the patterns that you've had for decades without a. Different set of skills or tools, our brains are wired to go back to what's familiar, and so it's really hard to change things on our own. I'm in my 60s, and when I want to make a change, I look for someone who's already living the version of what I want to create, and I hire them, and I say, talk to me. Teach me. How do you do this? Where do you see me getting in my own way, because it's really hard to see where we limit ourselves. That kind of investment in yourself is one of the most loving things you can do. I honestly believe that. But if that's not something that's in your resource wheel mindfulness and paying attention and listening and letting go of judgment to your body and saying, Oh, I realize this works for me. This helps me feel better, right? So we can always get that guidance, we can always get that testing, and we can always just invest more time into this relationship with our body, right? If you want to dig into that work with me, you can do metabolic health coaching with me, and you can find out all that information in the show notes for this episode, just go to the breast cancer recovery coach.com my website, or check the show notes for the link. And you can also find something that I think is incredibly helpful, my free guide on how to eat without fear and guilt after breast cancer that's available on my website. The Breast Cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash eat is totally free, and it walks you through a relationship and our thoughts about food is not a diet. I don't write diets because you know what a diet is, a tactical, strategic thing. Eat this measure that eat this measure, that your relationship with your body and your relationship with food is about the way you think about all of it. Yes, it's about understanding the tools that are available and what works for you, but it's also so much about the way you approach it and think about it, and how you and your body work together to receive food in a way that serves you. All right, I think that's a beautiful thing. All right, friends, I'll talk to you again next week, and until then, Please be good to yourself. Listen to your body and come on over to my free living well after breast cancer community and let me know what you learned from this episode, or ask me any questions you have about it. I look forward to answering everything. All right, I will talk to you soon.

27:22
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. A door. Give it all. You got no hesitating. You've been waiting all your life. This is your moment.