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Hello, hi, and welcome back to Rooted Conversations.
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I'm Mackenzie Grace, functional health practitioner, and your guide through the messy, nonlinear, deeply worth it process of actually healing your body.
00:00:10.800 --> 00:00:23.199
And today's episode is one I'm really passionate about because I think it challenges one of the most deeply held beliefs in diet culture, a belief that a lot of women have been operating from for years and sometimes decades without ever questioning it.
00:00:23.440 --> 00:00:33.119
So today we're talking all about restriction and specifically why chronic restriction, chronic under-eating, chronic dieting, riding the edge of not quite enough, doesn't produce the results it promises.
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Why?
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It often also makes the very problems you're trying to solve worse.
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And what's actually happening in your body when you have been in this cycle for a very long time.
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So if you've ever felt like your metabolism is broken, like you're doing everything right, clean eating, staying disciplined, working out consistently, but your body just refuses to cooperate, then I want you to stay with me for this whole episode because I think it's going to reframe so much for you.
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So let's get into it.
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Okay.
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I want to start by painting a picture because I think most of you are going to recognize yourself in the story.
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A woman comes to me sometimes 10, 15, 20 years of dieting.
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Like she's tried it all.
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She's done the calorie counting, the macros, the cleanses, the elimination diets, and the six-week programs.
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For her in her 20s, she'd restrict, she'd lose weight, she'd feel like she cracked the coat.
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But somewhere along the way, it stopped working.
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The same strategies that used to produce results are now producing nothing.
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So she's eating less than ever, she's exercising more than ever, and she's noticing that the scale doesn't move or it's actually moving up.
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Her energy is terrible, her hormones feel like they're a mess, and she's exhausted in a way that literally, no matter how much sleep she gets, doesn't fix.
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So the conclusion that she's drawn is because it's the only conclusion that diet culture has given her, is that it must be that she's not trying hard enough, that her metabolism is just slow, that she needs to find a stricter protocol, a more aggressive approach, and just have more discipline.
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And so when I tell her the opposite is true, that her body isn't broken, that it's doing what it's actually designed to do, that more restriction is the exact wrong tool for this problem, there's usually a pause because a part of her already knew it.
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She'd felt it for years.
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She just didn't have the language for it.
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So that's what today is about.
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I want to give you the language, the biology, the framework so you can finally understand what's happening in your body and hopefully make a different choice.
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So before we get into what's wrong, let's make sure we're on the same page about one thing.
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What is metabolism actually?
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Because I think the word gets used in a lot of ways that can be very confusing.
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Your metabolism is not some fixed rate that you're either blessed with or cursed with.
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Like you know that girl that you're jealous of because it seems like she can eat whatever she wants and never gain weight, or you don't understand why your man can go on a diet for a week and lose 10 pounds and you think that it's just you.
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Your metabolism is not a machine that runs at one speed.
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It's actually dynamic, it's responsive and it adapts.
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It's an adaptive system that is constantly adjusting to the information that your body's receiving.
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So the most basic definition of this, your metabolism is how your body converts resources into energy.
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So it's governing not just how quickly you gain or lose weight, but your body temperature, your heart rate, and how quickly you burn fuel, how efficient you produce energy at a cellular level, and every cell in your body is involved in your metabolism.
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And the important thing to understand about your metabolism is that it is designed to adapt to environment.
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So, like I said, it's not fixed, it's flexible.
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When resources are abundant and the body feels safe, it's gonna run efficiently.
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It burns fuel freely, it invests in hormone production, cellular repair, immune function.
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But when resources feel scarce or the environment feels threatening, then it's gonna shift into what is called more of a conservation mode.
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So, really what that means is it's just gonna slow down, it's gonna hold on to things, and it's gonna protect.
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That's not dysfunction.
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That is the most sophisticated and survival system in the known universe.
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So it's doing exactly what it's designed to do.
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And the question is just whether or not the signals that you're sending it are matching the reality that you want to live in.
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So let's kind of get into the biology around this because I really want you to understand what's happening under the surface when you're chronically undereating.
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And I want you to start with, I want to start with the thyroid because that's where a lot of the metabolism slows down.
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And so your metabolism produces hormones that regulate a lot your metabolic rate, your body temperature, your heart rate, your digestion, your mood, your energy, your ability to lose fat.
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Thyroid hormones are basically your body's thermostat.
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And when your body senses that food intake is dropping, specifically when calorie intake is too low for an extended period, it does something called downregulating thyroid conversion.
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So here's how that works: your thyroid produces a hormone called T4, which is an inactive form.
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T4 has to be converted into T3, which is the active form, before your body can actually use it.
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And T3 is what drives your metabolic rate.
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Under chronic calorie restriction, your body starts converting T4 into something called reverse T3 instead of active T3.
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Reverse T3 is essentially a decoy.
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It occupies the same receptors as active T3, but it does not do the same job.
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So your thyroid might actually look totally normal on basic blood work because most doctors are only testing TSH.
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So your TSH looks fine, but your cells are running on a fraction of the thyroid hormone they need because of what is circulating in the inactive version.
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So the result, your metabolic rate drops, your body temperature slight drops slightly, fat burning slows down significantly, you're gonna feel cold, foggy, fatigued, and you wonder why you feel so terrible, even though your doctor says your labs are normal.
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And this is the one reasons I always recommend getting a full thyroid panel, not just TSH.
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When I'm working with clients who've had a long history of dieting, this pattern will show up over and over and over again.
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Now, the thyroid, stay with me here, is only one piece.
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But there's another layer to this that's equally important, and it has to do with hormones that regulate your hunger and your fullness.
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So you've probably heard of leptin and ghrelin.
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And if you haven't, well, let me introduce them to you.
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Leptin is produced by your fat cells and it signals to your brain that you have enough stored energy.
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Basically, it's the hormone that says, Hey, you're fed, you're safe, you don't need to be hungry right now.
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And ghrelin is your hunger hormone.
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I like to think of ghrelin like a little gremlin because it rises when your stomach is empty and it signals that it's time to eat.
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These are really healthy hormones.
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They should cycle naturally.
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In a healthy, well-nourished body, these two hormones work together in a natural rhythm.
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You get hungry, you eat, leptin rises, hunger settles down, you feel satisfied, clean, simple feedback loop.
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That's what we want to see.
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But chronic restriction scrambles the system up.
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When you're constantly under-eating, leptin levels drop because your fat cells are shrinking, and leptin is produced by those fat cells.
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So when leptin drops, your brain reads that as a famine signal.
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And in response, ghrelin will go up.
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Your hunger drive increases, your cravings intention intensify, and your brain starts amplifying the reward response to food, especially the high calorie dense food, because it's trying to get you to eat more.
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And so that's why if you've ever gone in a calorie deficit and you're like, oh, I feel hungry all the time.
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That's again a natural response to the system that your body, that's a natural response that your body is having to the environment that it is responding to.
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So the cruel part of this cycle is that the women who have been restricting for years often describe feeling that she has no control around food.
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Like you feel like you have no willpower, like you're kind of like addicted to sugar.
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But what you're actually experiencing is a psychological hunger drive that has been elevated and dysregulated by years of underfueling.
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So again, that is biology.
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When you finally eat enough, constantly enough, long enough for leptin to recover, then your cravings will often dramatically settle down on their own.
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Not because you got more willpower, but because on a biological level, your brain stopped receiving famine signals.
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Okay, now there's one more piece I want to bring into this here.
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Okay, and then I'm gonna tie it all together.
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So stay with me.
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The last piece is cortisol, because chronic restriction is a stressor, even any sort of restriction, um, but a stressed body produces cortisol.
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And cortisol is not a bad thing, but cortisol has a very specific relationship with fat storage, and a lot of women are not aware of it.
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So cortisol is our primary stress hormone.
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Its job among many things is to mobilize energy quickly in response to a threat.
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To do that, it's gonna raise blood sugar, it's gonna mobilize stored energy, and that part really matters because it's uh going to store fat in the midsection where when you're staying chronically elevated, chronically stressed, and visceral fat in the fat around your abdomen and organs has more cortisol receptors than the fat in any part of your body.
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So when cortisol is chronically high, your body is literally getting a signal to store fat centrally.
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That's why chronically stressed out women and chronically underfueled women are often carrying weight in their midsection, even when they're not eating that much.
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So you ever see those women or you've ever experienced this with yourself where they're really skinny, but they still have a belly, it's a cortisol response, not a calorie problem.
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So when you have a scenario where a woman is restricting harder and harder, cortisol is going up and up, and her body is responding to that cortisol by holding onto her fat in her belly.
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She's gonna restrict more, cortisol is gonna go higher, the belly fat stays there, gets worse, and you can't figure out what you're doing wrong because from the outside, you're doing everything right.
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But that isn't a problem of discipline, it's a problem of the signals that your body is getting.
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So let's put this all together.
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Okay.
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Um, I think that seeing it all laid out together, because I know we talked about thyroid, we talked about leptin and ghrelin, now we talked about cortisol.
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We gotta look at all of this together and how it actually creates a cycle.
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So you start restricting, and maybe it begins with benign, you know, you're like, okay, just start cleaning up my diet.
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I'm gonna eat less processed foods, I'm gonna become more mindful of my portions.
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And initially it works.
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Maybe you lose some weight, you feel in control.
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But when you do that over weeks and months, your body is gonna naturally start to adapt.
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So thyroid output increases, leptin drops, ghrelin rises, cortisol goes up because underfueling is a psychological stressor.
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Your metabolic rate is gonna slow down to match your intake, and so fat loss is gonna stall.
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So the conventional response and the response that diet culture is built on is to eat less and move more.
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So you tighten the restriction and your body adapts again.
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So you're gonna see a little bit of weight loss, and then it's gonna slow down, and then it's going to at some point find yourself where you've restricted, restricted, restricted, that you're only eating 1200 calories and now you're exhausted and you're cold all the time, and your hair is falling out, and your period is irregular or gone, and now you're wired and tired at night, and you can't sleep, and you're losing muscle instead of fat, and your digestion is sluggish, and you feel completely betrayed by your body because you felt like you were doing everything right, but now you're being punished for it.
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So, what you're actually experiencing is that a body, your body has actually slowed down and down-regulated every non-essential function to match the feel that it's receiving.
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So your body's not punishing you, it's actually trying to keep you alive with what it's been given.
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So, this is a conversation that I have with almost every high-achieving woman I work with.
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And I want to address it head on because I know that's where the resistance comes up.
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Resistance comes up.
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Now, when I tell a woman that they need to eat more, the reaction is almost always fear.
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If I eat more, I'll gain weight.
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If I eat more, I'll lose control.
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I've spent years trying to eat less.
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I don't know how to do this differently.
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And don't get me wrong, like I hear that, I really, really do.
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But I want you to understand this.
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The goal isn't to eat more forever and never think about food again.
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The goal is to eat enough, specifically enough, consistently enough, that your body stops perceiving scarcity and starts investing in function again.
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What that looks like practice practically is it looks like eating enough total calories to support your activity level and your biological needs.
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For women who've been in a long-term restriction, this is significantly more than what they've been eaten.
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If you've only been eating, you know, 800 to 1200 calories per day, um, then we need to start to slowly increase that.
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So this looks like not only just increasing calories, but prioritizing protein because protein is one of the most metabolically active macronutrients because most chronically restricting women are also severely under-eating.
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It looks like eating regularly, not letting large gaps uh form between meals that trigger that stress response.
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So eating every three to four hours.
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And it looks like doing this consistently over time, not for a week and then panicking and pulling back, but doing it for weeks and months on end.
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So results like this don't happen overnight.
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Like your thyroid conversion doesn't normalize in a week.
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Leptin takes time to recover, but the women that I've worked with who commit to this process, who stay in it longer, to let their bodies actually believe that food is coming consistently, they describe it as one of the most profound shifts in their health journey.
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Not just physically, but mentally.
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And the relationship that they develop with their body changes entirely.
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Because restriction does not just slow down your metabolism, it also breaks the restrict, it breaks the relationship that you have with your body.
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It's years of your body asking for what it needs and being denied, years of hunger signals that have been overridden and years of biological requests being dismissed as weaknesses.
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So rebuilding that relationship not only takes time at a physiological level, a biological level, and allowing your body to catch up, but also a mental and like mental level where you're in a place where you can trust it.
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And it absolutely is possible.
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And when it happens, it doesn't feel like giving up, it actually feels like coming home.
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So let me leave you with this.
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Your metabolism is not broken.
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Your body is not betraying you.
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You are not some mystical, magical unicorn that has found themselves in a place where nothing works for you.
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What your body is doing is protecting energy, holding on to fat, downregulating thyroid, and elevating hunger.
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And every single one of those responses makes sense completely given the signals that you've been giving it and the body has been receiving.
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So the question is just whether or not you're ready to change the signals.
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That means stepping out of the cycle of restriction and discipline and into something that feels scarier at first, but it's actually far more powerful.
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Consistent nourishment, rebuilding trust, and giving your body genuine evidence that it is safe.
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So if this resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it, especially with a woman who knows who's been stuck, and who you know who's been stuck in that cycle for a long time.
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Because sometimes knowing the biology is the first thing that actually lets someone stop fighting themselves.
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And if you want to work through this with support, and if you're someone who wants that support in your corner where you're able to rebuild your metabolism, your hormones, and your relationship with your body from the root.
00:14:24.720 --> 00:14:27.519
And I work with women privately through Rebolt Roots Co.
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And you can find me on Instagram at Kenzie Grace, and that's Kenzie with two Zeds.
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I'll see you in the next episode and take care of yourself.
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Hello, hi, and welcome back to Rooted Conversations.
00:00:03.120 --> 00:00:10.640
I'm Mackenzie Grace, functional health practitioner, and your guide through the messy, nonlinear, deeply worth it process of actually healing your body.
00:00:10.800 --> 00:00:23.199
And today's episode is one I'm really passionate about because I think it challenges one of the most deeply held beliefs in diet culture, a belief that a lot of women have been operating from for years and sometimes decades without ever questioning it.
00:00:23.440 --> 00:00:33.119
So today we're talking all about restriction and specifically why chronic restriction, chronic under-eating, chronic dieting, riding the edge of not quite enough, doesn't produce the results it promises.
00:00:33.520 --> 00:00:33.920
Why?
00:00:34.079 --> 00:00:38.240
It often also makes the very problems you're trying to solve worse.
00:00:38.399 --> 00:00:42.799
And what's actually happening in your body when you have been in this cycle for a very long time.
00:00:43.039 --> 00:00:59.200
So if you've ever felt like your metabolism is broken, like you're doing everything right, clean eating, staying disciplined, working out consistently, but your body just refuses to cooperate, then I want you to stay with me for this whole episode because I think it's going to reframe so much for you.
00:00:59.359 --> 00:01:00.960
So let's get into it.
00:01:01.280 --> 00:01:01.600
Okay.
00:01:02.960 --> 00:01:07.599
I want to start by painting a picture because I think most of you are going to recognize yourself in the story.
00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:12.319
A woman comes to me sometimes 10, 15, 20 years of dieting.
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Like she's tried it all.
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She's done the calorie counting, the macros, the cleanses, the elimination diets, and the six-week programs.
00:01:20.799 --> 00:01:25.760
For her in her 20s, she'd restrict, she'd lose weight, she'd feel like she cracked the coat.
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But somewhere along the way, it stopped working.
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The same strategies that used to produce results are now producing nothing.
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So she's eating less than ever, she's exercising more than ever, and she's noticing that the scale doesn't move or it's actually moving up.
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Her energy is terrible, her hormones feel like they're a mess, and she's exhausted in a way that literally, no matter how much sleep she gets, doesn't fix.
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So the conclusion that she's drawn is because it's the only conclusion that diet culture has given her, is that it must be that she's not trying hard enough, that her metabolism is just slow, that she needs to find a stricter protocol, a more aggressive approach, and just have more discipline.
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And so when I tell her the opposite is true, that her body isn't broken, that it's doing what it's actually designed to do, that more restriction is the exact wrong tool for this problem, there's usually a pause because a part of her already knew it.
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She'd felt it for years.
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She just didn't have the language for it.
00:02:17.599 --> 00:02:18.719
So that's what today is about.
00:02:18.800 --> 00:02:26.560
I want to give you the language, the biology, the framework so you can finally understand what's happening in your body and hopefully make a different choice.
00:02:26.800 --> 00:02:30.400
So before we get into what's wrong, let's make sure we're on the same page about one thing.
00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:32.400
What is metabolism actually?
00:02:32.560 --> 00:02:36.400
Because I think the word gets used in a lot of ways that can be very confusing.
00:02:36.639 --> 00:02:41.199
Your metabolism is not some fixed rate that you're either blessed with or cursed with.
00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:51.599
Like you know that girl that you're jealous of because it seems like she can eat whatever she wants and never gain weight, or you don't understand why your man can go on a diet for a week and lose 10 pounds and you think that it's just you.
00:02:51.840 --> 00:02:55.039
Your metabolism is not a machine that runs at one speed.
00:02:55.199 --> 00:02:58.400
It's actually dynamic, it's responsive and it adapts.
00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:04.240
It's an adaptive system that is constantly adjusting to the information that your body's receiving.
00:03:04.479 --> 00:03:11.039
So the most basic definition of this, your metabolism is how your body converts resources into energy.
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So it's governing not just how quickly you gain or lose weight, but your body temperature, your heart rate, and how quickly you burn fuel, how efficient you produce energy at a cellular level, and every cell in your body is involved in your metabolism.
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And the important thing to understand about your metabolism is that it is designed to adapt to environment.
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So, like I said, it's not fixed, it's flexible.
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When resources are abundant and the body feels safe, it's gonna run efficiently.
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It burns fuel freely, it invests in hormone production, cellular repair, immune function.
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But when resources feel scarce or the environment feels threatening, then it's gonna shift into what is called more of a conservation mode.
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So, really what that means is it's just gonna slow down, it's gonna hold on to things, and it's gonna protect.
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That's not dysfunction.
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That is the most sophisticated and survival system in the known universe.
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So it's doing exactly what it's designed to do.
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And the question is just whether or not the signals that you're sending it are matching the reality that you want to live in.
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So let's kind of get into the biology around this because I really want you to understand what's happening under the surface when you're chronically undereating.
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And I want you to start with, I want to start with the thyroid because that's where a lot of the metabolism slows down.
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And so your metabolism produces hormones that regulate a lot your metabolic rate, your body temperature, your heart rate, your digestion, your mood, your energy, your ability to lose fat.
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Thyroid hormones are basically your body's thermostat.
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And when your body senses that food intake is dropping, specifically when calorie intake is too low for an extended period, it does something called downregulating thyroid conversion.
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So here's how that works: your thyroid produces a hormone called T4, which is an inactive form.
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T4 has to be converted into T3, which is the active form, before your body can actually use it.
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And T3 is what drives your metabolic rate.
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Under chronic calorie restriction, your body starts converting T4 into something called reverse T3 instead of active T3.
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Reverse T3 is essentially a decoy.
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It occupies the same receptors as active T3, but it does not do the same job.
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So your thyroid might actually look totally normal on basic blood work because most doctors are only testing TSH.
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So your TSH looks fine, but your cells are running on a fraction of the thyroid hormone they need because of what is circulating in the inactive version.
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So the result, your metabolic rate drops, your body temperature slight drops slightly, fat burning slows down significantly, you're gonna feel cold, foggy, fatigued, and you wonder why you feel so terrible, even though your doctor says your labs are normal.
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And this is the one reasons I always recommend getting a full thyroid panel, not just TSH.
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When I'm working with clients who've had a long history of dieting, this pattern will show up over and over and over again.
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Now, the thyroid, stay with me here, is only one piece.
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But there's another layer to this that's equally important, and it has to do with hormones that regulate your hunger and your fullness.
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So you've probably heard of leptin and ghrelin.
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And if you haven't, well, let me introduce them to you.
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Leptin is produced by your fat cells and it signals to your brain that you have enough stored energy.
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Basically, it's the hormone that says, Hey, you're fed, you're safe, you don't need to be hungry right now.
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And ghrelin is your hunger hormone.
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I like to think of ghrelin like a little gremlin because it rises when your stomach is empty and it signals that it's time to eat.
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These are really healthy hormones.
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They should cycle naturally.
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In a healthy, well-nourished body, these two hormones work together in a natural rhythm.
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You get hungry, you eat, leptin rises, hunger settles down, you feel satisfied, clean, simple feedback loop.
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That's what we want to see.
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But chronic restriction scrambles the system up.
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When you're constantly under-eating, leptin levels drop because your fat cells are shrinking, and leptin is produced by those fat cells.
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So when leptin drops, your brain reads that as a famine signal.
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And in response, ghrelin will go up.
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Your hunger drive increases, your cravings intention intensify, and your brain starts amplifying the reward response to food, especially the high calorie dense food, because it's trying to get you to eat more.
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And so that's why if you've ever gone in a calorie deficit and you're like, oh, I feel hungry all the time.
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That's again a natural response to the system that your body, that's a natural response that your body is having to the environment that it is responding to.
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So the cruel part of this cycle is that the women who have been restricting for years often describe feeling that she has no control around food.
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Like you feel like you have no willpower, like you're kind of like addicted to sugar.
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But what you're actually experiencing is a psychological hunger drive that has been elevated and dysregulated by years of underfueling.
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So again, that is biology.
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When you finally eat enough, constantly enough, long enough for leptin to recover, then your cravings will often dramatically settle down on their own.
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Not because you got more willpower, but because on a biological level, your brain stopped receiving famine signals.
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Okay, now there's one more piece I want to bring into this here.
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Okay, and then I'm gonna tie it all together.
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So stay with me.
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The last piece is cortisol, because chronic restriction is a stressor, even any sort of restriction, um, but a stressed body produces cortisol.
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And cortisol is not a bad thing, but cortisol has a very specific relationship with fat storage, and a lot of women are not aware of it.
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So cortisol is our primary stress hormone.
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Its job among many things is to mobilize energy quickly in response to a threat.
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To do that, it's gonna raise blood sugar, it's gonna mobilize stored energy, and that part really matters because it's uh going to store fat in the midsection where when you're staying chronically elevated, chronically stressed, and visceral fat in the fat around your abdomen and organs has more cortisol receptors than the fat in any part of your body.
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So when cortisol is chronically high, your body is literally getting a signal to store fat centrally.
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That's why chronically stressed out women and chronically underfueled women are often carrying weight in their midsection, even when they're not eating that much.
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So you ever see those women or you've ever experienced this with yourself where they're really skinny, but they still have a belly, it's a cortisol response, not a calorie problem.
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So when you have a scenario where a woman is restricting harder and harder, cortisol is going up and up, and her body is responding to that cortisol by holding onto her fat in her belly.
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She's gonna restrict more, cortisol is gonna go higher, the belly fat stays there, gets worse, and you can't figure out what you're doing wrong because from the outside, you're doing everything right.
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But that isn't a problem of discipline, it's a problem of the signals that your body is getting.
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So let's put this all together.
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Okay.
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Um, I think that seeing it all laid out together, because I know we talked about thyroid, we talked about leptin and ghrelin, now we talked about cortisol.
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We gotta look at all of this together and how it actually creates a cycle.
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So you start restricting, and maybe it begins with benign, you know, you're like, okay, just start cleaning up my diet.
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I'm gonna eat less processed foods, I'm gonna become more mindful of my portions.
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And initially it works.
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Maybe you lose some weight, you feel in control.
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But when you do that over weeks and months, your body is gonna naturally start to adapt.
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So thyroid output increases, leptin drops, ghrelin rises, cortisol goes up because underfueling is a psychological stressor.
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Your metabolic rate is gonna slow down to match your intake, and so fat loss is gonna stall.
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So the conventional response and the response that diet culture is built on is to eat less and move more.
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So you tighten the restriction and your body adapts again.
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So you're gonna see a little bit of weight loss, and then it's gonna slow down, and then it's going to at some point find yourself where you've restricted, restricted, restricted, that you're only eating 1200 calories and now you're exhausted and you're cold all the time, and your hair is falling out, and your period is irregular or gone, and now you're wired and tired at night, and you can't sleep, and you're losing muscle instead of fat, and your digestion is sluggish, and you feel completely betrayed by your body because you felt like you were doing everything right, but now you're being punished for it.
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So, what you're actually experiencing is that a body, your body has actually slowed down and down-regulated every non-essential function to match the feel that it's receiving.
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So your body's not punishing you, it's actually trying to keep you alive with what it's been given.
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So, this is a conversation that I have with almost every high-achieving woman I work with.
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And I want to address it head on because I know that's where the resistance comes up.
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Resistance comes up.
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Now, when I tell a woman that they need to eat more, the reaction is almost always fear.
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If I eat more, I'll gain weight.
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If I eat more, I'll lose control.
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I've spent years trying to eat less.
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I don't know how to do this differently.
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And don't get me wrong, like I hear that, I really, really do.
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But I want you to understand this.
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The goal isn't to eat more forever and never think about food again.
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The goal is to eat enough, specifically enough, consistently enough, that your body stops perceiving scarcity and starts investing in function again.
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What that looks like practice practically is it looks like eating enough total calories to support your activity level and your biological needs.
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For women who've been in a long-term restriction, this is significantly more than what they've been eaten.
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If you've only been eating, you know, 800 to 1200 calories per day, um, then we need to start to slowly increase that.
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So this looks like not only just increasing calories, but prioritizing protein because protein is one of the most metabolically active macronutrients because most chronically restricting women are also severely under-eating.
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It looks like eating regularly, not letting large gaps uh form between meals that trigger that stress response.
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So eating every three to four hours.
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And it looks like doing this consistently over time, not for a week and then panicking and pulling back, but doing it for weeks and months on end.
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So results like this don't happen overnight.
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Like your thyroid conversion doesn't normalize in a week.
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Leptin takes time to recover, but the women that I've worked with who commit to this process, who stay in it longer, to let their bodies actually believe that food is coming consistently, they describe it as one of the most profound shifts in their health journey.
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Not just physically, but mentally.
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And the relationship that they develop with their body changes entirely.
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Because restriction does not just slow down your metabolism, it also breaks the restrict, it breaks the relationship that you have with your body.
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It's years of your body asking for what it needs and being denied, years of hunger signals that have been overridden and years of biological requests being dismissed as weaknesses.
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So rebuilding that relationship not only takes time at a physiological level, a biological level, and allowing your body to catch up, but also a mental and like mental level where you're in a place where you can trust it.
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And it absolutely is possible.
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And when it happens, it doesn't feel like giving up, it actually feels like coming home.
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So let me leave you with this.
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Your metabolism is not broken.
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Your body is not betraying you.
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You are not some mystical, magical unicorn that has found themselves in a place where nothing works for you.
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What your body is doing is protecting energy, holding on to fat, downregulating thyroid, and elevating hunger.
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And every single one of those responses makes sense completely given the signals that you've been giving it and the body has been receiving.
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So the question is just whether or not you're ready to change the signals.
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That means stepping out of the cycle of restriction and discipline and into something that feels scarier at first, but it's actually far more powerful.
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Consistent nourishment, rebuilding trust, and giving your body genuine evidence that it is safe.
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So if this resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it, especially with a woman who knows who's been stuck, and who you know who's been stuck in that cycle for a long time.
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Because sometimes knowing the biology is the first thing that actually lets someone stop fighting themselves.
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And if you want to work through this with support, and if you're someone who wants that support in your corner where you're able to rebuild your metabolism, your hormones, and your relationship with your body from the root.
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And I work with women privately through Rebolt Roots Co.
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And you can find me on Instagram at Kenzie Grace, and that's Kenzie with two Zeds.
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I'll see you in the next episode and take care of yourself.
