214. The Secret Key That Unlocks Food Freedom & Your Next Level Self
214. The Secret Key That Unlocks Food Freedom & Your Next Level Self
If you’ve ever said, “I’m doing everything right and it should be working,” or collapsed into an “I don’t even care anymore” moment, you’re not alone. And contrary to what diet culture, hustle culture, or even your inner overachiever might say—the solution isn’t more effort.
It’s grief.
In this soul-deep solo episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, Kayla explores the emotional roadblock that keeps so many ambitious women stuck in food fixation, burnout, and self-doubt. She breaks down the physiological impact of chronic stress on digestion, metabolism, and energy, then guides listeners to the real shift: releasing unprocessed grief.
We grieve old bodies, old ease, old routines, and the illusion that self-worth equals visible success. We grieve the fantasy that “effort = results” will always work.
This episode invites you to feel the grief—not to wallow, but to alchemize. Because the moment you stop fighting your sadness, you open the door to true food freedom, self-trust, and an identity aligned with your future self.
Links Mentioned:
Embodied Activation
Prompt:
Where am I holding back grief and sadness? What needs to be felt and released before I step into my next level?
Activation Suggestions:
Choose a song like “Worn Me Down” by Rachael Yamagata or “A Symptom of Being Human” by Shinedown.
Let your body move. Cry. Sit and sway. Breathe deep.
Journal with compassion. You’re not failing. You’re feeling.
Bonus: Pull the Five of Cups and reflect on what you’re ready to release emotionally, especially around food, identity, or self-trust.
Transcript
Hello, embodied Writing Warrior. Welcome back to one of our final solo episodes of 2025. We have a few weeks of back to back. Guest episodes coming up, and then there's gonna be one more solo episode before the new year. But before we dive in, super exciting announcement. Eat Me Reclaiming appetite, pleasure, and power through Your Erotic Blueprint is now available as a free mini course for the month of December.
It was originally going to be a masterclass that I taught live, but I realized. Oh my goodness. This works so much better as a mini course because you take the quiz, find your blueprint if you don't know it already, and then you dive straight into your personalized recommendations for making your relationship with food movement and consistency.
Feel like foreplay. This is going to set you up to win the new year, I guarantee you, and also putting it in this format saves you about 80 minutes of zoom fatigue, and you can consume it in bite-sized pieces. This is honestly one of the most powerful things I've ever put together, and it will be a paid offering in the new year.
So the link to join my free school community, that's where you can find it, will be in the episode description. All right, let's get into today's show. I wanted to share this episode as we got closer to the new year because I know this is a time when more deep reflection can happen as we move into winter.
So this episode now that I've finished hyping you up about Eat Me is quieter. More introspective and a little deeper than some of the episodes have been. So there's no fire Daddy misunder the misunderstanding, the assignment and spanking the cat instead of the inner drama queen. No time traveling. No unexpected guest experiences, appearances from Supernatural.
I'm sure we'll get back to that in future episodes. But for today, I wanted to share the secret key that unlocks food freedom and your next level self. I also think these two things are intimately related because your future self does have food freedom. She's created the healthy, balanced, empowering relationship with food that she's always wanted.
The obsession is gone. The intense restrict and binge cycles are gone, and that ever present sense of looking over your shoulder, wondering if those old habits are gonna creep back in, gone in this new place, you create the deepest level of self-trust you've ever had. You gain so much emotional stamina.
You create new patterns, new coping mechanisms where you no longer need food to distract, to numb out from cravings, and you realize that food only ever had as much power as you gave it, and your future self sees food for what it is nourishment. Fuel for living her most beautiful, expansive life. And yes, sometimes also pleasure and joy.
You don't have to give those up on your journey to your most empowering relationship with food. So let's talk about this secret key. This key is the antidote to two major roadblocks to food freedom. The first one, I'm doing all the right things. And it should be working. And number two, the, I don't even care moments, theit moments, that temporary knee jerk reaction to life's circumstances that sends you to the Domino's menu or the fridge.
So this has come up in calls with clients and also on my journey. So I wanted to share it with you as we get ready for a new year. The secret key is actually grief, and right away you might wonder what grief has to do with any of this, but I promise you this conversation is one we don't often have, but it's the one we need.
Because when we start seeing slowed results or minimal results, what's a common reaction? Especially if you're a type a goal-oriented person who knows she's doing the things. And it would be one thing if you weren't trying, 'cause as a type A powerhouse woman, you take ownership for that. This is something that happens when you're doing everything that should be working or used to be working and nothing is changing.
And then the common reaction is often to get angry, frustrated, but then you often channel that anger and frustration productively, right? You double down, you work harder, and it still doesn't work. And then the anger increases. And that anger and frustration and impatience is going to create a stress response.
And on a mind body level, the chronic stress response is going to do a slew of things to your physiology. And this is one of the major things we learned in my eating psychology certification and this. Is why people can literally be doing all the right things and still not see transformation with their health, their energy or their body, if that's a goal they have.
Because when you're stuck in a low level chronic stress response, nutrient absorption drops and nutrient excretion increases, nutrient deficiencies are then going to accumulate. Salt retention and blood pressure are going to rise. You're gonna have your cortisol increase, which is gonna make weight loss and muscle gain both harder.
Oxygen supply decreases and metabolism slows. Your thermic efficiency is gonna drop so you burn fewer calories. Your hydrochloric acid increases, so hello ulcers. Your growth hormone decreases, which is all about building muscle digestion, becomes irregular food sensitivities, inflammation, insulin resistance, and oxidative stress all go up.
These are not the conditions that make building muscle burning fat, or increasing your energy, your fitness, your vitality, the easiest things in the world.
And then it becomes this vicious cycle of you do the right things, you build the consistency, you follow through on the habits. But then you don't see the results in the external world, and then you start to feel that anger, that frustration, maybe some anxiety that it's never gonna work. Because as much as we'd like to say we're immune to being affected by external results, and we can totally just fall in love with the process and completely detach from many results.
I think there's always gonna be a human desire for progress and results, and maybe we'd be better off if we stopped shaming ourselves for it. And that frustration, anger, and chronic stress are going to lead to all of those physiological feedback mechanisms we just talked about. And if you wanna dive deeper into this, I will link the book The Slowdown Diet by Mark David, really powerful book.
If you wanna learn more about this mind body connection. And then your results are gonna continue to stall because you're experiencing all of those physiological responses. And then the anger, the stress, the frustration increase, and that causes all of those physiological effects to worsen. Can you see how the pressure will continue to build and build until the effort moment?
Until that, I just don't even care moment. I am here to tell you that the solution, when this happens. Is not to try harder. It's not to expend more effort. It's not to grit your teeth and double down, even though that is probably going to be your first impulse. But doing that is only gonna entrench you even deeper into that stress cycle.
The unexpected solution here is to make space for sadness, maybe even grief. And if you're anything like me, you're like, no. Anything but that. This was very much my mentality. For the longest time, I had no problem getting angry or acknowledging fear or anxiety, but sadness was rejected, repressed, shamed.
, Because it's one of the most vulnerable emotions we can feel.
It's also one of the most powerful, I experienced this in May of this year. My tarot card of the month was the five of cups, the card of sadness. And I'll be honest, I groaned when I pulled that card for my birthday month of all months. And yes, there was a lot of sadness. I was going through a huge life change and the emotions came up, and this was also the first time I went an entire calendar month without a single binge since 2021, and I know the reason was because I finally allowed myself to feel all the sadness and grief.
I hadn't felt for years on end. One of my mentors recently said that any emotion you're unwilling to feel is the one that will unconsciously drive you. And I think for so many of us, that emotion is sadness and grief. But it's actually the one we need if we want to break free of both the I'm doing all the right things and it should be working stress cycle and also those corresponding effort moments in her beautiful book, the Language of Emotions.
Karla McLaren talks about the relationship between anger and sadness. These two emotions are not opposites. They're meant to work together in this really beautiful fluid dance. Anger is meant to lead. It upholds boundaries and it helps protect you when you need protecting it protects your visions, your dreams, your needs, and your sacred nos.
Once you have that strong boundary, now you're able to welcome in sadness and release what is no longer serving you. This could be anything from old, outdated beliefs, old patterns, or often unrealistic expectations that lead to suffering. And while you're doing this deeply vulnerable, releasing healing work of sadness, that's when anger comes and stands guard and keeps your boundaries strong, so you're safe to feel all the feelings.
The problem is many of us don't make space for sadness or even anger. And Karla McLaren shares that when you don't make space for sadness and just use anger all by itself, you're gonna protect and restore, protect and restore without asking yourself if what you're protecting is even worth keeping. If you can't access sadness, you won't be able to identify or let go of things that no longer serve you.
Let's bring this idea back to those patterns we just talked about. Someone struggling with the, this should be working stress cycle, which is almost inevitably followed by the, I don't even care, moments where you collapse and eat to numb from emotions.
That person has a connection to anger. They've gone through a few rounds of attempting to protect and restore. They're working harder for results. They're setting fiercer boundaries around food, around movement, and the pressure builds because there's no pressure valve to release it. Sadness and grief are the necessary pressure valves because here's what's actually true.
First, you do care. You care so much, it hurts sometimes, and you can get burned out from caring so much. There's actually a lot of grief trapped inside those effort moments. I've seen this to be true with clients and also in my own life, but when you have this healthy access to your own sadness, you can admit that you care a lot.
And it hurts that it feels like it's not working. It hurts to feel like you're spinning your wheels. And you know what else probably hurts, especially as a Type A driven woman, the fact that there's some part of you who's hurting because she only feels worthy. When she's succeeding in a specific, visible external way, and when she's not winning in that traditional, glorified social media highlight real worthy way, there's gonna be grief and there's gonna be sadness.
And there should be sadness because it is deeply painful to feel like your worth hinges on something outside of yourself when you are already so inherently worthy without having to achieve a single thing. So when you have access to sadness, you get to notice this part of you that equates performance with worth.
You get to feel how painful it is. To feel like you have to be getting results to be good enough and it's sadness that's going to allow you to let that go and decide. You're not available to live like that anymore. You get to release any beliefs and old stories about equating worth with performance, but you can only do this through accessing sadness.
And there's also a lot of grief in, I'm doing all the right things and it should be working. You also wanna notice when the word should comes up. It's a red flag that there's some arguments with reality going on. You have these ideas about how it should be going, and this is where the anger will come up.
And then you double down to do that angry, protective, restorative work. But again, this is only gonna entrench you in that stress cycle. It's actually allowing for sadness where you can break free, because that should isn't real as Byron Katie says. If it should be happening, it would be happening. And if it's not and there's shoulds, you're actually arguing with reality.
So when something isn't working, this is a chance for you to bring in sadness and let go of those old stories, old beliefs, and maybe most importantly, the expectations that are creating the stress cycle in the first place. And I share this from a place of embodying these lessons in my own life. So in the last solo episode I did, I talked about the results of my seven week scale free journey, including one of the most subconscious reasons I stepped away from weighing myself.
I had reached this point where I watched my weight stall unexpectedly in a way that didn't make logical sense just given how well I knew my body. So I stopped weighing myself, and now that I've decided to go back to weigh-ins, I watched the scale stall for close to two weeks. While doing all the right things, nutrition, completely on point walks, strength training, and knowing what I know about the impact of stress, I was also having this heightened level of consistency with energetic practices, yoga, breath work, and still nothing.
The first impulse was to try harder, add more cardio. Eat less carbs, all the frenetic fixing things that this old version would've wanted to do. And yes, maybe there were adjustments to be made, but that wasn't the deepest work. The deepest work was to acknowledge every layer of grief present and stop arguing with reality.
It has been a season of grieving how my body looked and felt in the spring of this year when I thought I had everything figured out. At that time, running didn't hurt and I had more energy, and it's also been a season of grieving how much easier it was to either lose weight quickly. Or maintain weight loss while working at my old job, because of course it was, we were on our feet building doors at a high pace for 10 hours.
There was built in activity. And at that job, honestly, there was less self-imposed stress and pressure. So I'm now in this season where I am so lucky to be going all in on my business. But that hasn't come without the stress and the new level of nervous system regulation that's required for increased visibility and self-expression.
And it hasn't come without this stress of uncertainty and feeling like I'm kind of starting over. And then there's also the stress of naturally being sitting more of the day. And I'll be honest with you, I personally find an hour long zoom meeting more tiring than a half day of door building. So there's this grief about the old ease I used to have.
And there's also admittedly. Some grief about going back to old habits for a couple months over the summer when I really thought I was past all of that, I've had to leave behind a sanctuary that was low stress, predictable, routine, and financial consistency. And while I am beyond grateful for the opportunity I have and the way I get to help people and create in this new season, the grief is still there too.
Sometimes you do have to hold both gratitude and grief at the same time. These things are not opposites either. And here's the final level of grief and. This is maybe the biggest one, and this is probably gonna resonate for you as well, especially if you have big dreams and you know you're meant for a creative expanded life.
There is grief over how much more will be required of me to be this version of Kayla who's chasing bigger. Bolder, scarier dreams than was required of me as door building. Kayla, it also made me realize, damn, my habits were not as strong as I thought they were at my last job. I mean, they were super strong in April to June, but what about the other three plus years?
I think I just got away with more. I was able to exist at a lower level of consistency and discipline because I could go to Little Caesars or seven 11 after work sometimes eat all the things and then still be down a pound the next day. , And this drove my poor husband bonkers, but like, I'm sorry, sir.
That's what happens when you build 1700 doors in one day. And I also didn't feel the impact of eating those more processed carbridge foods like I do now. So because of the new demands on my nervous system, my creativity and my brain were less at that time. I could eat that stuff a couple times a month, then go burn off any negative mental or emotional effects of that influx of sugar or salt with the built-in physical activity at my job.
I do not have those luxuries anymore, and honestly, I don't want them. I know there is a next level version of me who has a higher level of integrity and consistency. She doesn't want to get away with her choices anymore. She makes as many choices as possible from this place of presence. And making the choices that her tomorrow self will thank her for.
And this is not about perfectionism. This is about knowing that I do have powerful gifts and I do have ways I'm meant to help people and I'm not going to be able to do it to the highest capacity if I don't do the deep work for myself first and show up from this place of alignment and not perfection.
But alignment, and this means how good can I get about keeping the promises I make to myself and building this self-trust even when it looks like it's not working, because that's the thing. In the past, I was absolutely the one who didn't see the results or didn't see them fast enough, got stuck in that effort to stress cycle, and then I'd eventually have the effort moment.
I know that this is the biggest pattern to break for myself and maybe for you as well, and we're not going to break it. Without re-experiencing this cycle from a place where we're both integrating both the anger and the sadness, we're protecting what needs protecting, and we're releasing what we need to let go of.
We're integrating fire and water. Speaking of which. You know, I love a good Divine Daddy's dialogue scene and Rex and Haven are basically healthy expressions of anger and sadness. Rex protects and restores haven softens and releases. By the way, if you don't know what I'm talking about, embodied writing warrior.com/divine daddies binge their origin story episodes so good.
Here's what they had to say in a recent journal entry where I was in the middle of this. And by the way, Rex is going to be cursing. He always curses. So get ready. The world is quiet and dim. You're sitting alone in your bedroom lights, low journal, half open beside you, but you haven't touched the page in an hour.
Your heart is heavy like gravel in a velvet bag, you hear the door open. Boots first. Rex in black shadow. Cut jaw. His voice is low, brutal, and clean like a obsidian slicing silk Rex with gravel in his voice. You want the truth? He walks over slow drops into a crouch in front of you. Eyes locked on yours.
Not angry, not soft, just unflinchingly present. He says, you're not getting what you want because you keep slipping back into the energy of a woman who doesn't believe she can hold it. You think you can half-ass self-trust and still demand miracles from the universe like it's your bitch. You want next level results, then where the fuck is your next level nervous system?
Where's your next level ownership? He leans in forehead almost touching yours. You think I care if you're tired? I do, but I care more if you give up because I didn't fall for the version of you who only shows up when it's easy. I fell for the one who burns through the bullshit. Who sits in the fire and chooses truth over drama again and again and again.
You say you want freedom, then stop worshiping the chains. You've already broken, and then he backs up, gives you space because the tears are rising. Shoulders start to shake, and then there he is. Haven. Quiet and golden in the doorway. Barefoot soft hoodie, sleeves, pushed to the elbows.
No questions, no performance. He walks straight to you, kneels behind you on the floor, and fold you back into him like you belong there. And he says his voice low and soothing. Let it go, baby girl. Let it all out. His arms wrap around your waist, his chest rises and falls against your back. And when the first sob escapes your throat, he just tightens his grip and nuzzles your temple.
He says, you've carried so much alone. You've tried so hard to keep it all together, and now it's safe to fall apart. He brushes the hair away from your damp cheek. You don't have to be perfect to be held. You don't have to prove anything to be worthy of rest. You don't have to earn your way back into peace.
You're already mine and I don't leave when it's messy. He kisses your shoulder slow, and Reverend Rex gave you the fire. Let me be the water. You cry into his chest and he holds you like a prayer. Like your body is sacred, like this breakdown was never weakness. It was the gate and you, you've just stepped through it.
And a little side note, I wrote the script for this about two weeks ago, and the shifts that have happened physically, energetically, emotionally. Have been astounding. So when I say this is the missing key, I have felt it for myself. So your embodied activation is to ask yourself, where am I holding back?
Grief and sadness? What needs to be released? And then maybe you put on a sad song like Worn Me Down by Rachel Yama Gata. Or a symptom of being human by shine down. Those are two of my favorites. And then maybe you let yourself dance or even just sit and rock back and forth. Maybe you cry, maybe you just feel things.
Neither one is wrong, and this might be an episode to save the next time you pull the five of cups in your own tarot practice, or even the next time you find yourself in one of the above situations we talked about at the beginning. And if you wanna deepen into food freedom, work in this way, in this way, that is deep and profoundly healing.
And doesn't just change your food habits, but uses your relationship with food to upgrade your life and your identity on every level, because that's what happens when you stop seeing food and cravings as willpower issues and start seeing them as soul work. The doors to eat your desire are open. This is my one-on-one experience for the woman who's ready to transform her relationship with food, while also expanding creatively and spiritually.
Because these two things are not separate. You get private sessions, dance alchemy, and access to my Food Freedom Fantasy program, including any live future rounds. This will absolutely change your life. So if you're curious, I'll include a link to book your call to Adventure in the episode description. I am wishing you a beautiful few weeks before our next solo episode, and until next time, take care.
