173. 7 Signs You're On A Warrior's Journey (NOT A Weight Loss, Health, Or Fitness Journey

173. 7 Signs You're On A Warrior's Journey (NOT A Weight Loss, Health, Or Fitness Journey

What if your struggle with food was never just about food?

In this power-packed episode, Kayla shatters the illusion of a traditional weight loss journey and invites you into something much deeper—a Warrior’s Journey. Through seven soul-stirring signs, she reveals how your drama with food, body, and health might be the sacred battleground where your true identity is fighting to emerge.

This is the episode for every woman who knows she’s powerful—except when it comes to food—and is ready to reclaim her fire, her focus, and her fierce feminine force.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

💫 Why your food struggle might actually be a portal to power
🎭 The hidden cost of making food and weight your main character
⚔️ How to tell if you’re on a Warrior’s Journey vs. a health journey
😮‍💨 Why cycles of burnout and perfectionism don’t mean you’re broken
🌀 The real reason your inner “crazy” is actually sacred and essential

Transcript

Alright, Warrior Queen - if you're tuning in for this one... Get. Ready.

173 episodes, and I believe this episode, perhaps more than ANY others I've created, has the power to change your life.

But before we dive in, a quick update:

I’ve absolutely LOVED being back behind the mic with this new energy and deeper purpose I’m bringing to the show.
And... one of the things I’m practicing right now is slowing down, honouring my capacity, and letting myself be seasonal when needed.

I’m about to step into a big transition—traveling back and forth to Prince George to look for a new home, packing, cleaning... all the moving pieces. It’s a lot.

And historically? I haven’t exactly thrived during major life changes. Maybe you can relate because transitions are a lot sometimes.
But this time, I’m doing it differently.
I’m choosing to stay regulated, intentional, and present—especially when life gets chaotic.
And that means creating more space where I can.

So, I’m putting the podcast on a little hiatus until the move is complete.
You might still get the occasional pop-in episode when inspiration (and time) align, but the regular weekly schedule will return later this summer.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being patient.
I can’t wait to share what’s on the other side.

Alright. Now... let’s get into the magic.

I believe you're listening to this episode for a reason. You're listening to this because it's meant for you. And I know this has the power to shift everything, especially if you've been stuck in what feels like an all consuming battle with food and health and consistency for years or even decades.

This is going to hit home if you've watched others just decide one day to transform their health and they just do it. No drama. Maybe there's some challenges and setbacks they encounter, but it's still steady, incremental progress over time until boom, they've achieved the result they desired.

And you're over here thinking, "Why can someone else just make the DECISION and then just do it? Why is it SO MUCH harder for me?"

There's actually some profound reasons why this happens. Some people are on a vanilla weight loss or health journey. They have some unhelpful habits to break and some healthy changes to create, and they do that work. And there is nothing wrong with a vanilla health journey. It still takes tremendous intention and work and inner strength to undergo this type of transformation. Any change is hard, and any transformation needs to be celebrated.

But some people THINK they're on a weight loss journey but they're truly on a warrior's journey.

And until you stop making it about the weight, the food, the overeating, the inconsistency with your habits, you will not find the growth and expansion waiting for when you realize, wait. This isn't about weight or food. This is about power and an identity reclamation. This is Warrior Work.

Let's get into these seven signs that you are not on a weight loss journey, but actually on a warrior's journey.

If any of these feel uncomfortably familiar… you’re not alone. I get each and every one of these struggles because they've been my struggles as well.

1. You already know what to do—and you’ve done it before. You’ve had stretches of 30, 60, 90 days of alignment. You’ve succeeded… and yet you keep looping back to the same patterns with food, weight, or energy. You’re not confused. You’re stuck in something deeper.

This was true for me. I had SO much success with my own health and fitness journey. I was in the best shape of my life when I started my personal training job.

And within months of getting this job, I was binge eating every night. I gained over 40 pounds. I felt like the worst type of imposter because I knew what to do, both from years of training to get my certifications AND from applied practice in my own life, and I was coaching people on how to do it while doing the exact opposite behind closed doors.

It was only after I fully left the health coaching space in 2023 that I became the healthiest, fittest, most consistent, and most confident I'd ever been. This left me VERY disenchanted with the health coaching industry, so much that I vowed to stop talking about binge eating and emotional eating altogether at one point. All for the wrong reasons, which we'll talk about shortly.

Think about this in your own life? How many books have you read, courses have you taken? You probably have enough knowledge and lived experience to coach a crowd of people to victory... as long as those people are on a TRUE health journey, NOT a warrior journey.

If you're still in the struggle with all this knowledge and temporary experience of success, keep listening.

2. You believe in your power—except when it comes to food. You’ve achieved big things in other areas: career, relationships, business. You know you can do hard things. But food? Weight? It’s different. Stickier. Heavier.

There are so many powerhouse women out there who have achieved every single thing they've set their mind to... except changing their eating habits and creating the health and energy they desire.

This is not because food or your lack of willpower are the problems. It's because the hyper-focus on food and eating is an energetic leak and a distraction from the heroine's journey you're meant to go on.

3. Your relationship with food is dramatic and draining. It’s not just about “eating healthy.” It’s chaotic, emotional, all-consuming. The cycles of overeating, restriction, shame, and burnout feel like a full-blown soap opera you can’t escape.

If you know, you know. The periods where you're ALL IN. You're meal planning like a champ. You're conquering every habit on your habit tracker. You're slaying the workouts... for a short time because you're pushing, forcing, obsessing.

Then... fatigue sets in from the hyperfixation. Burnout happens. After a week of numbing out, you find yourself waist deep in pizza boxes and take-out containers, four seasons into the latest women's prison show on Netflix. And you're furious with yourself because you feel like you undid ALL your progress and now you need to try HARDER.

If this makes you tired and frustrated just thinking about it, please remember that this is just helping you create some self-awareness so you can shift your attention and intention onto the deeper journey you're being called to. When you do this, all this drama around food and perfectionism melts into the background like butter on a hot frying pan.

4. You sense that your struggles with food are costing you your true potential. You know you’re here to do big things—to love harder, lead stronger, create more boldly. But this food thing? It’s taking up way too much airtime in your head and your life.

I want you to think about a few things right now - one, think about how much time you give to your food and eating journey. How much time you spend trying to "fix" your eating habits or fight off compulsions to overeat. How much time you spend obsessing over how quickly you can finally just hit the weight loss goal so you can move on and work on something else.

Two - think about how much you're already accomplishing in your life. The workouts you are doing, the amazing contributions you're making in your career or creatively, how you're showing up and taking amazing care of your loved ones. You're already doing SO many amazing things in the world, even if you often forget to give yourself credit for them. Which you probably do.

Now, imagine how much more fully you can bring all of you into the world and how much more magic you can create for yourself and your family ONCE you clean up the BIG energy leak that's happening because of this dramatic relationship with food. You're going to become unstoppable once you seal up this energy leak. You're going to reclaim so much energy, focus, attention, drive, agency. THIS is something to get so fired up about and I promise you, it is 100% possible.

5. You’ve realized this isn’t just physical—it’s emotional. The root isn’t knowledge or willpower. It's not about the food. If it was, something you've experimented with would have worked by now for the long term. Because I'm going to guess that you've learned all about macronutrient balance, the importance of protein, the power of eating whole foods, and every other nutrition hack out there. You probably also know which ones are most helpful and beneficial to you.

This isn't about the food. This is about emotions. Why? Because we're often not eating because of hunger. We're eating to stifle unwanted emotions. Emotions that feel like too much. Emotions that feel too intense. We're terrified of showing them to the world because the world has already made us feel like we're too much, like we're crazy.

Stifling true emotions leads to discomfort and resentment. Discomfort because we're not giving ourselves the space to feel what we feel, so we eat or numb out in some way to distract.

Then there's resentment - whether it's directed at yourself internally or resentment directed externally at those around you. Resentment often leads to self-sabotage - overeating, drinking too much, scrolling instead of getting out for that nature walk, etc.

All the food drama is a cover-up. A coping mechanism. A portal to deeper healing. That's what I'm inviting you into in this episode.

6. You’re hiding behind your struggles. Somewhere deep down, you know the chaos with food is keeping you safe. Safe from being seen. Safe from rejection. Safe from putting your real gifts into the world.

This is one of the big ideas that came up in this conversation I had with an amazing coach. This happened last summer sometime.

Not all women, but most likely you if you're still listening to this episode - are at risk of spending their entire life playing the dramatic eating game. And they do this so they can hide. They use their weight and food issues and all the drama to avoid putting themselves out there and actually doing what they want to do with their life.

This was one big, misaligned reason why I decided I would stop talking about binge and emotional eating altogether. It seemed like every time I tried to talk about it from the realm of having a breakthrough and wanting to be more visible and do bigger things with my life, I'd started overeating again as a way to go back to hiding.

And then I figured, if I just don't talk about this thing I'm struggling with, then I won't struggle with it. But the struggle and the breakthroughs that have come from those struggles are meant to be shared. And to not share them because I falsely thought I would then cease to struggle with them myself... that was hiding.

At the root, this compulsion to hide comes down to a deep fear of being too much. Of being crazy. Of being rejected by the rest of the world for your big ideas and wild creativity and wolf-woman ambition.

So then you take your bigness, your creativity, your flair for drama - which can honestly be SUCH a good thing in the right context -, your ambition... and you channel it all into your relationship with food and weight.

Because as long as you play out the drama in the privacy of your own kitchen or in your car at the end of the day as you're mindlessly plowing through a stack of mini donuts in the dark before you get home and your partner can catch you, as long as you play it out in private - no one sees you. No one is there to witness ALL of you, in your wild, intense, ambitious, hungry glory.

But here's the thing - you're not actually hungry for those donuts. You're hungry to fulfill your potential and bigger purpose in life, and those donuts are just the unsatisfying substitute.

Now, onto...

7. You’re scared of your power—but more scared not to claim it. You’ve been told you’re “too much.” And what does it mean when women get told that they're too much?

Oftentimes, they're also seen as crazy. And that is about one of the easiest ways you can dismiss a person. Oh, they're just crazy.

You’ve internalized that as “crazy,” “messy,” “unpredictable.” But you’re starting to realize, hopefully more and more as you listen to this... that "crazy" is just code for POWERFUL. And you’re ready to reclaim it.

So, how does a wound around being perceived as 'crazy' emerge as symptoms and challenges in the arena of food, health, and well-being?

Well, you could spend your whole life playing the dramatic eating game, and you do this so you can hide. You could end up using your weight and food issues and all the drama to avoid putting yourself out there and doing what you want to do with your life.

The coach I was talking about this told me that the challenge I'm sharing is warrior work. And the reason women who have these struggles burn out and don't get the sustained results is because they're trying to fix when they need to reclaim their true, deepest warrior identity.

And this coach asked me: "what gets birthed when their full crazy, big self can emerge? Who's THAT woman? Tell me who it is in you."

Real talk - this conversation got a little emotional. My throat got tight and I got a teary. And I replied with, "She feels like too much."

His response was to acknowledge this perspective and the emotional charge, while also replying with, "I see you as a badass. Like, I see the fierceness in you. I see the wound as well, I see the pain. But I see, like, you're a Warrior. If you weren't a warrior, I don't think you'd be ALIVE. I don't even know your history. Is that accurate?"

And honestly? He wasn't wrong. There have been times in my life where it was dark. And in many ways, the odds were against me. It is somewhat of a miracle I'm not dead after some of the wild things that have happened. And while I always want to prioritize humility, I do have to agree that it took some warrior fire to get through some of my old chapters.

More importantly, you have this same warrior fire inside of you. That's why you're still here, still listening. And here's the thing I want you to think deeply about as you reflect on your journey:

You're on a heroine's journey, and it's been camoflauged as weight work.

And here's something this coach shared that is potentially going to change everything:

You think you're dealing with weight, eating habits, inconsistency with nutrition... but what you're meant to do is reclaim your own inner warrior. This does not apply to every woman but for some women, yourself included, this struggle with weight and food is helping you hide the fact that you ARE a warrior.

And you got blamed for being too much, for being crazy. You probably overwhelmed whatever systems you were in - your family, your school, your community. You had teachers, parents, authority figures who didn't know how to deal with you. So, they labeled you as too much, crazy even.

And crazy is a write off. You've been written off and rejected in places where you wanted to belong, but they didn't know how to deal with all that power and intensity. They didn't know how to withstand the fire of your warrior spirit.

So, you turned all this intensity and power inwards, binding up your energy in struggles with food so you could keep hiding. Because then maybe you might fit in.

But there are places you aren't meant to fit in, and belonging to places you were never meant to belong isn't worth it if you have to shut down your authenticity, your self-expression and the fullest version of you.

Because if you keep trying to belong, keep trying to hide, and keep your warrior self in a cage, then you're probably going to stay stuck in the same patterns with food forever. I'm not saying that to scare you, but to inspire you to do this journey differently.

The only way through these patterns is to reclaim and activate your inner warrior. Because SHE is the one who can shift the relationship you have with food and help you build a level of consistency and follow-through in this area that will blow your mind.

The chronic dieter, the emotional eater you've been hiding behind? She doesn't have the resources to change this relationship with food. But your inner warrior does, and she's waiting to be unleashed into the world.

And once you remember who you REALLY are and let the warrior out, that's how you go from being written off to writing your own ticket. Powerfully. Intentionally. Unapologetically.

That's the work we're doing on this show. That's what I'm meant to be bringing you on a weekly basis. If you loved this episode and it spoke to something deep within you, I would love to hear from you on Instagram, Facebook, wherever. You can also visit my website, embodiedwritingwarrior.com to get on my email list for upcoming offers and opportunities to journey deeper into this work with me. When you sign up for my email list on my home page, you also get access to my absolute favourite journal process - the one I've been using for years on end that has changed my entire life.

You'll also find journal prompts and challenges from this episode on my website under the podcast tab.

Until next time, this is my invitation to you to remember your inner warrior and set her free because she will change your entire life if you give her the chance.

Journal Prompts

🌀 What if my struggle with food has been preparing me for my real work in the world?

⚡ Where have I been confusing power with perfection?

💖 What parts of me feel “too much”—and how can I see them as sacred?

🌿 What would shift if I approached my health journey like a reclamation, not a repair?

👑 Who is my Warrior Self—and what does she already know to be true about this next chapter?

Embodied Activation

This is almost like taking me up on a dare - get ready ;)

Share something publicly (Instagram story, FB post, a group chat, or to someone you wouldn’t normally share openly with) that feels just a little too bold. Let people see your fire. Let it feel like “too much.” Let it be medicine.

If you feel uncomfortable after, allow yourself to take some deep breaths into the discomfort. Then put on an empowering song that makes you feel powerful and magical and use your body to shake out the discomfort.

This podcast episode is me taking me up on my own dare, so I’m walking the walk right there with you.