Episode Overview

Do you think it’s normal to feel discomfort in your body?

Or do you recognize discomfort as your body’s attempt to communicate with you?

In this thought-provoking episode, I challenge the idea that our bodies betray us.

We’ll talk about how we've been conditioned to ignore discomfort, push through pain, and normalize symptoms like bloating, fatigue, inflammation, and poor sleep—until something more serious forces us to listen.

I’ll share my personal experiences and real-life stories—including the heartbreaking loss of my brother to a curable cancer—to illustrate why tuning into your body’s signals matters now, not later.

I’ll walk you through the challenges of behavior change, the role of chronic stress in disconnecting us from our own bodies, and how mindfulness can help us rebuild trust and awareness.

This episode isn’t just for breast cancer survivors—it’s for everyone who wants to live a more connected, healthy, and intentional life.

🎧 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why people wait until illness to seek help (and what it’s costing them)
• How chronic stress numbs our ability to recognize body signals
• The psychology of behavior change and why we resist it
• Why your “normal” symptoms might actually be warning signs
• How to shift from blaming your body to supporting it with compassion

💬 Memorable Quote:

“Let’s drop the idea that our body betrays us—and start asking it what it’s trying to say.”

🧠 Scientific Research Cited:

1. Chronic Stress Reduces Interoceptive Awareness:
   “Stress and Interoception: An Overview and Research Agenda”
   Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016
   📖 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00569/full
2. Stages of Change and Behavior Change Readiness:
   “Stages and Processes of Self-Change of Smoking: Toward An Integrative Model of Change”
   Prochaska & DiClemente, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1983
   📖 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7077052/
3. Cancer Diagnosis Delays Due to Symptom Normalization:
   “Understanding delay in cancer diagnosis: a review of diagnostic pathways”
   Br J Cancer, 2009
   📖 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946132/
4. Mindfulness and Interoception for Healing:
   “Mindfulness-Based Interventions and Interoception: A Neurobiological Perspective”
   NIH, 2016
   📖 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4824261/

🤝Work with Laura:

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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 on the insides 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
Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome to Episode 408 of better than before breast cancer. With me. Your host, Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, we are going to talk about something so important today, because this, I don't know. Is it a belief system? Is it a thought? Is it a story we tell ourselves? I'm not sure you decide, but it's so important, and I want to give a caveat before we we dive into this. So you may have seen the title of this podcast is who's betraying whom. So when we talk about this, we're going to talk about the relationships we have with our body, and I'm going to bring up with you some of the common things that I hear people say, or one specific, common thing that I want to really talk about. But I want to encourage you to listen to this episode with curiosity, open mindedness, open mindedness and non judgment. Okay, this is not judgment. This is said with love and compassion. I'm in this with you. I've been there. I go there. I slip into it. Sometimes I get out of it a lot faster these days, but I've definitely been here. If there was ever an episode of this podcast you wanted to share with someone who doesn't have breast cancer. This is the one to do, because this really applies to everybody. Okay, so let me share with you something I hear all the time. I have people come up to me and they say, if I ever get cancer, or if I get cancer again, if I've had a recurrence, you're the first person I'm gonna call. Now, I appreciate the trust behind a comment like that, but it always makes me stop for a second, because my first thought is, why would you wait for a diagnosis to ask for support your body is speaking to you all the time. Every day, our body is giving us signals. It's telling us what it needs. Let's say that you're dealing with heartburn, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, poor sleep, headaches, random aches and pains, signs that you know are inflammation. These aren't just annoyances. These are not things to just dismiss or ignore. These are signals. They're not the things that you just have to put up with because you're getting older. How many times have I heard people say, Oh, getting old? Sucks. Why? Oh, this hurts, and that hurts. Why? What's behind it? We don't have to just accept that it is your body sending a signal, okay, your body is asking for attention. People's bodies do it all the time. It's our partner in life, this amazing body. And so today I want to ask you a different kind of question. I want to shift that mindset from the thought of my body has betrayed me, which I hear all the time. We get a diagnosis, we have expectations for our body to do certain things, and it doesn't do them, regardless of whether that's cancer or anything else, we have this idea, and probably because when we were kids, or we were young, and everything was fresh and new and not burdened by toxins, and there was no pain, and everything felt great. So we just associate things with aging, or we associate things with the body not working right? But what is it telling us? Are we learning to listen to it? So I want to offer a different way of thinking, and I want to ask you, what if your body has not ever betrayed you, but you have just decided not to listen to it, you've unknowingly, unknowingly, because you didn't think about it that way. Because nobody talks about thinking about it that way, right? We talk about is this is bad. We judge what happens if we are in pain or if we're having discomfort, because we want our body to be like, you know, Iron Man status and looking great and feeling great and having all the energy in the world while we eat pizza and wash it down with a beer. Okay? But that's not how the body works. Some people's bodies do and they have some good genetics. Mine doesn't work like that. Okay, so what if your body didn't betray you? What if you just weren't taught to listen? To the language of your body, understand it and respond to it accordingly. I know for myself that I have done this, especially after I finished cancer treatment the first you know what, even while I was going through cancer treatment the first time, right? I see this a lot with people who are in chemotherapy. I mean, I'm technically in chemotherapy now it's oral, but it is not nearly as toxic as IV chemotherapy, and does not make me feel as horrible as IV chemotherapy did. But even in IV chemotherapy, 13 years ago, I believed I had to power through. I still have to show up for work even though I had time I could take off because of my thoughts about what everybody else thoughts would be, and what I'm supposed to do, and my responsibilities and all of that, right? Never stopping to listen to my body and ask it first, what do you need? How do I take care of you? My body's so tired. Push through. Push through, push through, right? I powered through. It's what I believed. It was. I was taught. It was what, what people around us say, like, isn't that amazing? She went through all that and never took a day off of work. Hmm? Is it amazing? Was she listening to her body, whoever that she is, right? It's all hypothetical. I've seen people. I actually worked with a woman one time, and this is many, many, many years ago, and we worked in retail. I was in my early 30s. We worked in retail. She was with me. We were doing a store opening, and she was steaming her clothes and old school steamers, right? Dad, that's big base, and you'd fill them with water, and has a stand, right? It's like the old school, industrial kinds of Steamers. And something happened. I don't remember what went wrong, but this steamer just started spitting hot water. She had turned around, and it spit this hot water on her back and burned her horribly with this hot water. And she stayed there, and I said, you need to go to a doctor. You need to go get some attention. You need to get out of here. Oh no, no, no. There's too much to be done. I can't leave. I'll never forget that story, because it was so impactful for me, and it was like this woman desperately needed help, but she wouldn't allow herself to, because of her own belief systems and the conditioned belief that everything was sacrificable to look as if you had a good work ethic, which everyone knew she had a good work ethic anyway. Good work ethic anyway. Okay, so That's powerful stuff, and we've all been there, not to that extent, I hope, but we've ignored the whispers. We've ignored when our body says, I need something more or this isn't working. And I realize now very powerfully, and I pay a lot of attention to the signals my body sends me, I'm not always happy about it. I don't always want to rest. I want maybe to get something done, to be able to focus on a project, to be creating something that I'm really excited about, but my brain is not on board. My body is saying I'm tired, I need rest, I need a break. I need you to shut that computer. And so even though I may not want to, I have to work with my body if I want to heal, which I do, and it's that is the priority in my life to support the healing of this body, I must listen to it, even if you do not have active cancer in your body. This is critical for you. So when we're not doing that, we are so disconnected from our bodies. You know, even in in being disconnected, can we even feel or connect to different parts. When people call them out, I want you to just consider this for a second. When I was doing personal training, I would say to women, sometimes, Okay, before we do this, tuck your pelvis. And they would look at me like, What? How do you tuck a pelvis? What does that mean? Sometimes we're so disconnected from parts of our body for whatever reason, and sometimes there's a lot of good reasons, valid reasons, why we've disconnected from that. Let's say breast cancer, gynecological cancers, all these things where the body has been changed dramatically, and it's traumatizing and we disconnect from it. Okay? So there's that part of it, but then we're also conditioned. Let's go back to this pushing through. From a very young age, we're taught to ignore discomfort, right? You got cramps, put on your big girl panties. Take an Advil. Move it. Move it. You got to go to school. You're tired, drink some more coffee. You're sad, it'll be fine. Push through. Just go on right and over time, ignoring the cues that our body gives us, that our mind gives us, becomes second nature, become very disconnected from the language of our body and those whispers of irritability and poor sleep and bloating, and we're like, oh yeah, I just have always been bloated. I always get bloated. Yeah, that's not the way your gut supposed to work. How long has your body been sending you a signal that something down here is not going right, right? And when we don't speak the same language of our body, we don't hear the warnings. It gives us. Another thing that affects this is chronic stress. So there was a fascinating study in frontiers in human neuroscience, and it showed that long term stress can reduce intraceptive awareness, and that's the ability to perceive the sensations inside our own body, like knowing when you're hungry, knowing when you're tired, knowing when you're anxious. How many times have I had discussions with people we talk about food and food habits, and I ask them, Are you eating because you're hungry? And the response is, I don't know. I don't really think about that. So this study said that individuals exposed to chronic stress showed reduced sensitivity to their body signals, which can impair self care behaviors and delay detection of health threats. Okay, that's really important to think about. So when we live in constant stress mode, we become numb to the very things we most need to hear our body telling us it needs attention.

11:25
We normalize discomfort. I mentioned that just a second ago, but we say things to ourselves like, I guess this is just what it feels like to get older. I mean, everybody's tired, right? I mean, isn't everybody stressed? Doesn't everybody go through this and again? Like, I talked about bloating, yeah, my guts just always been off. That's just how it is for me. But those are signals. There was a 2021, review on cancer diagnosis delay, so putting off going to the doctor to understand whether or not you had cancer. And I'm going to share a story with you about that in a second. And this found that many patients expected discomfort in their bodies. They expected discomfort so they waited too long to seek help, thinking that their symptoms are just part of life. And I'm going to this just brings up a lot of emotion right now unexpectedly, but I think about my brother who died at the age of 32 from testicular cancer, which is a very curable cancer. My brother had all kinds of signs that something was going wrong. He had shortness of breath, he had night sweats, he was overweight, he had energy issues. He had swelling in the testicle, and he didn't address it. He delayed a cancer diagnosis until the metastasis was so far spread that it took his life in six months. Okay, this is, I don't, I don't even know the right words for it. I mean, what a tragedy. But this happens all the time. So even if we are we've never had a cancer diagnosis, and we don't have cancer, we just have our body saying something's off. So this is like when people come to me and they say, and I've said this too, when I was first diagnosed, I was so healthy till I got cancer. But when you think of it like this, and you look back, were you? Because you couldn't have been if you have cancer. If someone comes to me and they say, I have a cancer diagnosis, I already know there's mitochondrial damage, there's gut dysbiosis, there are certain things that just come along with it, because when those things go off balance in our body, we have that vulnerability, and it gives an opportunity for cancer to take root. Okay? So these things that we think are normal parts of life and we were just healthy, are they really right? So here's an interesting thing, because when it comes to listening to your body, we have to take into consideration behavior change. So if we notice things going off or going wrong, and they're going to cause us to have to change something in life, and we know that, right, maybe we send some things off. We're like, I'm going to change the way I eat, and that's such a pain. Or I really like cheese, and I don't want to give it up. And so behavior change happens oftentimes when the cost of staying the same is too high, and that's kind of pushing it pretty far down the road. So according to there's this theory that I've talked about before on the podcast that's called the stages of change model, and it says that people don't change until they're in enough pain that staying the same feels worse than the fear of change. So unless something is urgent, like a diagnosis, we often just keep doing what we've always done. Hence, the people who come to me and say, If I ever get a cancer. Diagnosis. I'm coming to you, but I'm looking at them, and I see the dark circles under their eyes, and I see this thickness and the gray power in their skin. And they tell me about how bloated they are and how tired they are. And I say to them, please don't wait. Let's fix what's going on right now. People move from contemplation, from thinking about it to action when the perceived risk of not changing becomes greater than the discomfort of changing. That's straight from the theory of change model, and I'm repeating it because it's so important to understand. It's not about laziness. It's not about denial. Sometimes it's about denial, because fear is involved, and so we deny things. But the fundamental issue here is how the brain protects you from what it sees as scary or uncertain. That's how this organ works. Remember, this organ in between your ears, has certain ways that it works, and we call it the human brain, right? It's got certain attributes. So we have to not judge ourselves. Because I oftentimes do hear people and they talk about behavior change, or if I say, why would you wait to get cancer to make change, they say, I don't know. So much work, so much effort. It's so hard. Well, trust me, it's not as hard as after you've already got cancer, trying to undo it. Talking about this is so important, because anything to pay attention to it, to change it, to acknowledge it, to increase awareness. In order to do anything like that, we've got to have space and quiet time. We've got to have a little bit of space to just go, Oh, I see that now, right? But modern life is so loud. It's so busy. It's so crowded between pings on our phone and endless to do lists and emotional energy, taking care of other people, raising children, taking care of elderly parents, taking care of stuff at work, who has time to check in with themselves, right? Who has time sit and check in and go, whoa? What does it say? Is my body sending me a signal? Is there something I need to do? We don't have a lot of time for that, but research shows us that mindfulness practices like yoga and breath work really do help us to reconnect to our body's signals. They literally rebuild pathways that stress has disrupted. There was a 2016 review, and it said that mindfulness practices enhance interceptive awareness, remember that understanding, listening to our body and emotional regulation, both of which contribute to improved health outcomes. That means when you start to listen, even just for a few minutes a day, you begin repairing the disconnect between this you your consciousness, and this you your body. We start to repair it. So let's come back to the big question, who is betraying whom?

18:08
I believe your body is and always has been on your side. You know, at the beginning of the year, well, end of the year, beginning of the year, just passed, in December, I had a flu at a cold in January, a horrible flu. And I remember, after I recovered, just sitting there thinking, what an amazing body I have, that while it's healing from cancer, it's healing from the stomach flu, then it's healing from a cold, then it's healing from influenza. Wow. It wants to heal. It's always on my side. It's always working to try to get back to feeling well, right? I believe our body works incredibly hard to get our attention, and then when it finally can't compensate anymore, then it gives us a big wake up call, if that's what it comes to. So please know that I am not saying by any means that you caused your illness. I'm just saying that now, if you could understand how to rebuild a relationship with your body, you may understand what actions you could take to support its ability to heal. Right? Illness is complicated, multi factor influenced by all kinds of things, sometimes not present, preventable, sometimes not reversible. That's not your fault. But if you want to be able to do things to help yourself feel better, this awareness can be a benefit to you, right? So what do you do? I invite you this week and going forward to just start to increase awareness. When something feels off stop for a sec. Notice it. Wonder about it. Don't catastrophize about it. Don't think it's some horrible disease or something like that. But notice. Hmm, I'm feeling bloated. Maybe I should start paying more attention to what I've been eating recently. If you're feeling tired, rest. If you have to cancel something because your body needs rest, so be it right when your body is whispering to you, listen, and maybe that listening will allow your body to not get to the point where it has to scream, okay, maybe ask yourself that question, what would it look like to treat my body like my best friend in the world? In it is your best friend, and not like an enemy. So let this be a moment to start you on a new path of reconnecting and listening again to your body and see what that does for you. Let's drop the idea that our bodies betray us and be curious and ask, Hey, my best friend, what are you trying to tell me? What do I need? How can I support you? All right? And if this episode resonated with you because of you or because of someone you know, share it with them, let's help each other to be more connected to ourselves, so that we can all be healthier, and maybe we can see a lot of lives living healthier and longer as a result of that. All right, my friends, until next time, be good to yourself. Listen to yourself and be good to your body, and I'll talk to you next week.