Neuroscience and Listening to Your Body w/ Alyssa Chang

Steph Gaudreau
Welcome to Episode 284 of the Listen To Your Body podcast. On today’s show, I’m welcoming coach Alyssa Chang. She is helping you understand how to use neuroscience to listen to your body. The next evolution of harder to kill radio is here. Welcome to the Listen To Your Body podcast. on this show, we’ll explore the intersection of body, mind, and soul health, and help you reclaim your abilities to eat and move more intuitively. Hear Your body’s signals, and trust yourself more deeply. I’m Steph Gaudreau, a certified intuitive eating counselor, nutritional therapy practitioner, and strength coach. On this podcast. You can expect to hear expert guest interviews and solo chats that will help you deepen your trust with the food movement and your body. Remember to hit the subscribe button and share This podcast with your friends and loved ones. Now, on to the show.

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the podcast. And if you didn’t hear last week’s episode, first of all with Michelle Shapiro, go listen to that. But if you didn’t hear, I wanted to thank you again for listening to the show because we’ve just passed 3 million downloads for this little podcast and I am so grateful to you for listening to the show. It’s been almost five years of podcasting, which is just incredible to think about all the guests who have been on the show all of the things that you’ve learned from this podcast. It makes me a little bit misty when I think about it, but it’s been such an incredible pleasure and honor to keep bringing you this show every week. So, thank you for that. Before we dive in, if you have not gotten your tukus over to sign up for my newsletter, you’re gonna want to make sure you do that. This is the listen to your body newsletter. It is Steph Gaudreau com/LTYB for Listen To Your Body. The reason is, I, I’ve been in the metaphorical kitchen, cooking some stuff up for you. And I gotta tell you, I am excited. I am so stoked for the possibility that is going to be coming your way to work with me in several different capacities. I’m not exactly ready to let the lid off of this quite yet about what it is what it’s going to be and why Frankly, I want you in on it. But suffice to say all of the announcements about that are really going to come out to that newsletter first and foremost so if you want to be in the know you want to be the first to hear then head over to Steph Gaudreau comm slash lt Why be sign up for the newsletter? I only send good things I mean you know me so do that you can pause this episode and come back or just do it after the show and you are going to want to come back to this episode. This is Alyssa Chang. She is an incredible brain-based health and movement coach and she is giving us all I love this bridges everything that I am so this is like nerdy and in my wheelhouse and I know you’re going to love it because this is the show. I think that’s going to help you understand how to connect the science aspect of listening to your body with the more mushy gushy emotional intuition parts. So if you are somebody who’s like, yeah, I want, like, give me the real science Give me the, you know, the nerdy evidence, give me all the data helped me understand the frame. If you have been waiting for that, this is your episode, and you are going to want to put a star next to it, share it with everybody that you know because Alyssa has a really interesting way of not only communicating this but the way she does it. The topics that she talks about are so fascinating. I found myself during this episode just wanting it to keep going on and on. And I can tell you one thing. I want to have her back on the show without a doubt because I know that this is stuff that you all are going to just find incredibly fascinating. So one last thing before we dive in, share this out on social media. After you listen, tell everybody to go listen to this show. And tag. Coach Alyssa Chang that’s her Instagram handle and myself, Steph Gaudreau I haven’t it’s an underscore Steph, underscore Gaudreau tag both of us. We want to see what you think about this show and what you learned and how it impacted you. Alright, so make sure you do that share it on social. Alright, let’s jump in. Hey, Alyssa, welcome to the show.

Alyssa Chang
Hi Steph!

Steph Gaudreau
I am so glad that you’re joining me today on the listen to your body podcasts because so much of what you do is that sweet spot that a lot of people in my listenership in my community are or are seeking, right, which is how do I incorporate my body’s signals? Like, how do I even stay aware of them? How do I incorporate this? And yet also, I know there’s all this evidence-based research and science How do I marry these two things together? So that I can live my life and feel good in my body. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show because you do such amazing work in that in that realm. Well, thank you. So yeah, absolutely. So I love you know, on your Instagram, which is how I got connected with you A while ago that you talk about brain-based health and movement, which I think is so cool. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody freeze it just like that. Everybody, of course, is like, duh, I have a brain. Yeah. Or sometimes they think, Oh, my brain is just sabotaging me or, you know, I have a lot of negative thoughts in my brain. And so it can almost become this kind of adversarial relationship or perspective. Why did you come to start really talking about brain-based health improvement and what do you mean by that?

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, such a great question. I think you know when people hear the Brain they often mix it up with like mindset. And so you know, my methodology is actually looking at the neuroscience work. So who we are our symptoms, everything that we felt, how we behave. They’re all manifestations of like brain health. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have all these different structures and lobes for our nervous system that all have very different responsibilities. And when we have like, let’s say, an injury we’ve had, you know, experience with maybe yo-yo dieting, restrictive dieting, over-exercising, and trauma and injuries, all of these things compromise the brain’s ability to not only interpret but process all that information in a way that gives us like, very desirable outcomes. In many cases. Unfortunately, these outcomes or outputs are compromised due to the lack of processing that’s fully integrated by the brain. So very common output which we can definitely dive in deeper on his pain. And you know, pain is basically the brain’s loudest output. So whenever we feel some sort of discomfort for discomfort or pain signal, you know, usually we’re like, oh, you know, my back’s a little sore from being on zoom all day, I’m gonna stand up and I’m going to kind of like move around a little bit. And so that type of, you know, the signal is, is basically the nervous system perspective on pain is that is actually a behavior change tool. It’s a signal by the nervous system to tell you to stop and address something. And in many cases, right, we go through the day when, you know, we talk about kind of that gap. I feel like a lot of people float in which is, you know, I’m confused. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do. How do I even go about listening to my body? It’s because there’s this big bridge that’s not being talked about, which is like all the neuroscience it’s all the reasons weight or possibilities where we can become more aligned with our body from the very root cause, which is, you know, how is your brain working? How is it interpreting all this information?

Steph Gaudreau
I love that and you brought it up so nicely there in that when, obviously, this podcast is listened to by my guest and we talked about listening to your body a lot and intuitive eating, but I always had to break that down for people. Yes, humans are intuitive beings in the sort of more I feel like ethereal sense, right? We have like gut feelings and instincts and that little voice in our head and we have that component but for a lot of folks, before we even get to that point, or even have the awareness of that is like how do we really become aware of what signals right the body sending what sensations you’re feeling in your body and we have that body-mind connection, but also the mind-body connection. Can you

Alyssa Chang
can you kind of speak a little bit

Steph Gaudreau
to that, you know, If somebody is very new to this concept of listening to your body, from your perspective, how how can we go about? You said pain right? When the pain when you’re having this like intense pain signal that’s obviously one of the like screaming signals but the other ways that you’ve helped people start to make that connection or start to become aware of those milder signals.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, that’s such a great question. I mean, I think the use of language regarding like intuition listening to your body, that gut feeling, a lot of the students I work with are like, Alyssa, I have no idea what’s going on. Right? Like, I have no idea I can’t even conceptualize, or maybe I can conceptualize like, it would be great to listen to my body. However, I have no idea what she’s saying. Right. I don’t know when she’s hungry. I don’t even know you know, what I should do for exercise on a given day because I’m not really clear on the signals and symptoms and what that all means. And so like when I talk about that gap, like neuroscience, to me is that bridge that allows someone to like to open up like a conversation with their bodies. And it’s like, oh, if I feel like you and I were just talking about like the different phases and you know energies women go through their cycles, there’s a lot of this, you know, I’m so unmotivated. I’m so tired, I’m eating, I’m eating out of control, I feel out of control. And it’s like, beginning to lead into curiosity because curiosity creates that buffer from our emotions. And as in you know, taking it from a brain-based approach if you can lean into being this like curious scientist over your body and really understanding that everything you experience every symptom is your body and your brain’s way of communicating to you. It’s like extremely powerful because you can replace that blame in that judgment with like, curiosity, but also compassion. Have been like, Wow, she’s tired today. Anyway, she’s tired. And it’s like, oh, well, I’m a couple of days before my cycle, you know, I didn’t sleep well last night and all these you start naming all these data points that you can begin to collect and create patterns. And so, you know, for some of my students who have no idea what intuition is no idea how to listen to their body. The scientific side of that is, well, you know, they may struggle with tapping into something called interoception. an interception is just responsible for giving us those cues of like, Oh, it’s time to use the bathroom. Oh, I’m hungry. Oh, I’m full. Like there are a ton of people that have no idea what those sensations feel like. And so from a neuroscience approach, you can actually like, create a lot of movement therapy options that allow them to strengthen those activation signals to the brain to allow them to tap into fullness and hunger and no one To get up and use the restroom, without having to be this like really combative, like, you know, I’m going to stop eating, when I’m 80% full, I’m going to stop eating when my plate looks like this and actually being able to sit in their bodies and experienceable this sit in their bodies and, you know, experience hunger and what that means without fear without judgment without shame. So there’s all these like really fascinating, like neural pathways that when inhibited or when, you know, there is trauma or trauma, whether it’s car accident surgeries, injuries that weren’t properly rehabbed, they’ll create a lot of blurriness within the nervous system. So our nervous system actually houses like sensory and movement maps. And so whenever we have trauma, and those movement maps aren’t actually rehabbed, or you know, given the kind of TLC that it needs, what ends up happening is it creates blurriness and the blurriness is what impacts our level of confidence in our body or level conversation. level of safety. And so when all of those things are really impacted, you will undoubtedly feel very disconnected to your body, you won’t trust her, you won’t have intuition, you won’t know what that feeling is like. And so, you know, by methodology, it’s like really understanding like, what is the status of your nervous system? Is she on your same team is able to, you know, communicate to you in a way that like you can actually hear it or all those signals impacted? So that’s kind of like a general summary of that approach. Yeah.

Steph Gaudreau
Well, I’m so glad you mentioned interoception or interceptive awareness of the nutrition component of, you know, what I teach and what a lot of people here are experimenting with and exploring I use. I’m obsessed with the idea of Indiana Jones lately. I don’t know why. Because like I’m going back to my you know, childhood self and thinking that Andy was so cool, but that concept of being an explorer and seeing what can I find what was out there and The energy around that is so expansive. So I know a lot of people are in that phase where they’re like, Okay, I understand that interoception is a thing because a lot of people don’t. Previously, previously, they may not have known even about that, and they’re like, okay, so it doesn’t sound like kind of, like, airy out there. See, you know, like out in the ether, but like, rather it’s this really scientific neuroscience concept. So like, Okay, cool. I can get behind that. How would somebody know if you know you’re talking about sort of unresolved or unresolved trauma, for example, how would somebody kind of made the connection, that what they’re dealing with in their, their struggle, their inability to really connect to those interceptive signals could be a result of that kind of unresolved or like, unmapped trauma that you’ve mentioned?

Alyssa Chang
Yeah. So you know, interception, we are Are we are allowed to have that really refined interoceptive kind of signals due to a very specific part of the nervous system called the insular cortex. So the insular cortex plays a huge role in helping us feel grounded in helping us feel stable. And I like to use the word like body ownerships are really kind of having that not only physical confidence, and you know, feeling like your body is yours. Because I meet a lot of students that like, don’t recognize the body that they’re in, they feel a stranger to their body, they feel like they’re really actually like floating through the world. So when I use the languaging, of like, you know, grounded and you can really feel your relationship to gravity, like there are many people out there that just have this huge disconnect. So they may really struggle with intuition and they may really struggle with like the element of listening to their body, but in many cases, because the insular cortex where it’s located, you know, things that will contribute to a lack of You know, refined interception, or like concussions, any type of head injury, we’re looking at surgeries really close to the brain. So this would include, like LASIK surgery, which is actually pretty common. And, you know, with the lack of, you know, or I would say with that type of trauma, a lot of people will struggle with, you know, orienting where they are in space. So, you know, for you and I, that’s more or less kind of proprioception, kind of also understanding who we are, you know, and I know a lot of the work you probably do as well with your students is getting them to live this fulfilled life that’s authentic, that’s aligned with what really matters to them. And, you know, a lot of people just really struggle with understanding who they are not and it could definitely be like environmental factors of like marketing and you know, what’s pushed on us as women but also just from the insular cortex actually just being very impacted due to trauma

Steph Gaudreau
That’s absolutely fascinating. Like, tell me more I want to dive into this more, you know, you mentioned and I think this would be a good time to talk about this. So, we were, we were all together with Laura Schoenfeld and a bunch of other folks on this kind of group zoom call that we did last month. And you I hadn’t had it on speaker or like I didn’t have headphones on. So my husband is here working from home and you started talking about this particular topic and he’s sitting on the other side of the room and his eyes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and he’s just like, gesturing at me while I’m sitting there listening and he’s like, this is so interesting. And you’re mentioning eyes and things like that in LASIK and anyway on this call and you’re talking about vision and vestibular work and sense of self and how it all integrates. I have I had never heard anybody talk about this and neither had he and so we just found it. So very interesting and I’m wondering if you can give us a little primer on that to sort of go into that direction?

Alyssa Chang
Oh my gosh, yeah. Okay, so this is what kind of like you said, right? I’ve never heard of this. And what’s fascinating is in the fitness industry, there’s so much emphasis on training everything from the neck down. It’s like, okay, you don’t even talk about the vision, the visual system, they don’t want to talk about the inner ear, even the tongue and mouth. But these areas are like, so valuable. So statistically, we take upwards of like, 70% of our information from our visual system. And so when the visual system isn’t trained, and we have muscles that attach to our eyes, that also need to have like, the time that we spend on like stretching and mobilizing joints and strengthening them. These muscles around the eyes also need that same attention time and care. And so, you know, you go to an eye doctor and they just check for acuity, right how clearly can You see, but they don’t actually check for how well can your eyes move. And so you want to think about like the eye muscles, they’re getting very good at staring at screens. So but that type of like constant activation of holding an isometric, imagine holding an isometric like a bicep curl, right? Like all day long, it’s going to get fatigued, it’s going to get really good at also holding that isometric. But will it be able to move out of that? Will it be able to not hold flexion? Will it be able to relax, lengthen and, you know, feel at ease. And so we want to think about our eyes as being that bicep cry symmetric when we’re looking at screens when we’re not, you know, moving them in circles and exploring a wide range of motion. And what does that eventually pan out too? Right, so we don’t move our eyes. Well, we actually again, when I talk about kind of those sensory movement maps, we kind of make those maps much blurrier. So when it comes to what We will feel confident in moving into what we will want to entertain doing, it actually becomes much smaller. And you’ll see this in like an older population, right? The way that some like, maybe let’s say a nine-year-old walk around, they’re definitely going to have a maybe like some sort of Walker, their head is going to be down, they’re going to be looking at the ground, and they’re going to be shuffling. So when we don’t move our eyes, well, our, our peripheral field of vision gets much smaller. And then when that closes in, you know, we may start to change how expansive we move, our range of motion gets, you know, much smaller, we may incur pain. And a lot of the students I work with who you know, maybe struggle with, like especially kind of like neck pain, especially right now with so much more computer work, neck pain, kind of shoulder pain. They do a specific vision drill, and they’re like, Whoa, my pain is gone and my range of motion is drastically better. And so all we’re doing is we’re specifically target In the visual fields of the nervous system, so again, open up that movement map that sensory map, to allow their brain to reconnect to an entire other movement option that they have. So again, when we don’t utilize that whole visual field, our movement options decrease, you know, and when our movement options decreased, there’s a lot of there’s this whole ramification of what ends up happening to the human body right we get more Thai or probably more irritated, you know, irritable as a result of like feeling more tension holding on to that tension digestive Lee, maybe we start noticing that we’re, you know, very on the side of more being more constipation because we are not, you know, expanding and moving and just having that fluidity to how do our entire system

Steph Gaudreau
absolutely fascinating. Yeah, you know, what, if somebody is kind of realizing I was doing I circles when you were talking about that, by the way I was to do some circles. But what’s it What’s one exercise that people might try in order to To to get their eyes moving, you know, off of their kind of short-range where, where they’re looking on their screens or their phones or anything like that. Do you have any example you could share with us?

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great one. So I think one thing is huge, right is when I start talking about vision training, people are like, Wait muscles around the eyes and like, have muscles around the eyes. So one thing is like developing that awareness. So like, exactly like what you test it out for yourself is like, kind of just tracking your finger in a circle. And it doesn’t have to be very large, just like maybe the size of a basketball, and just follow your finger in a circle, and then switch directions and just do like one rep each direction because it’s so new and so novel. Some people could be really stressful. But what you might notice is that there’s pockets of your circle that do feel more high tension, right? You might feel your eyes like kind of tense up a little bit. You might notice your blink rate increase. You might notice that your eyes will dry in a certain area, you might notice your heart rate changes. So these are all just like, again, that nervous system response to it being something not only new but maybe something that’s a little bit hard. And if you think about like, Oh, just moving my eyes and all of a sudden I’m getting this like full physiological, you know, response. It’s probably arguably something that we should be doing so that we don’t have this like fight or flight response when we move our eyes up into the right. So you know, when we do that, and if someone goes into that fight or flight response to me, I’m like, oh, okay, maybe what we need to do is like, you definitely have some sort of blurriness and sort of add first, you know, response to that pocket. What I typically end up doing is asking them about their health history. Was there any type of trauma that happened when you’re looking up into the right, and a very common one is I was rear-ended right there. They’re like sitting in their car stuck in traffic and they look up to the rearview mirror and someone behind them isn’t stopping. So they get that huge impact, right and then they’re Nervous System is so startled. So now, you know going beyond that, every time they move their arm, their eyes up into the right, their lower back hurts or their neck hurts or their knee hurts. And so this is going back to that same kind of methodology that pain is an action signal to stop and address something, it’s a behavior change tool. And so for them, they perceive so much threat their nervous system remembers that whenever I looked up to there, right, something really bad happened. And so it’s a part of like our, like, my responsibility as their coach to help them clarify these movement bats remind their nervous system that hey, you know, looking up to the right is okay, like, we don’t have to go into this huge physiological response of like, increasing pain, you know, going through the all these other symptoms.

Steph Gaudreau
Wow. That’s so cool. I was doing that circle. I was like, I definitely feel looking down into the left. It wasn’t as fluid so I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. Like it’s just interesting to notice and to do that journey. And see if it gets better.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, and one thing for you step two is to then think about like, Did anything happen down to the left in your health history? Have you had any more injuries down to the left or on the left side of your body?

Steph Gaudreau
I mean probably, I crashed my mountain bike so many times over the ice race mountain bikes and like downhill from mountain bikes, you know, when you’re just on a ski slope, and just like, yeah, I’m down. And yeah, we wear helmets and all that stuff back in the day, but yeah, probably pancaked at some point.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah and the fascinating thing, too, would be if you notice if you always fall in the same way, because it’s often very common for my students to always fall in one direction, but when they always are falling in that direction elements outside of their body, receiving a lot of trauma, but then we highlighted a little bit about the particular system, your inner areas responsible for your relationship to gravity. So that’s what’s actually making you a very balanced human being. It’s not necessarily how many single-leg exercises you can do or how well you bounce on a Bosu ball, it’s like, Can your inner ear actually orient you to where you are in space, and it works with your visual system. So those two systems have to be in a really clear conversation of like, this is where we are, you know, the ground isn’t moving under you, and you’re not spinning around the world. But this is where we are. And so I think when it comes back to that conversation of intuition and gut feeling, right, it’s like, are these two systems actually working well for you to actually understand where you are in space, because not knowing where you are, or who you are is really, really scary for a lot of people and it’s, I like to remind people that it’s valid, the feelings that you have are valid and if we can link it back to health history or through some brain-based movement assessments, we can help heal you and help get you better, but we have to know like what part of your nervous system may be impacted.

Steph Gaudreau
It’s so cool. So very cool. I’m just a huge nerd. So I think this is all very fascinating. And a really different take on so many of the things that people deal with right pain, that sense of like getting really sympathetically dominant are really feeling very stressed very fighter flighty. And I think that this is going to open up a completely new doorway for people to potentially gain, you know, awareness and clarity and insight into the things that they’ve been dealing with that either have just become really upsetting or annoying or, you know, like, this is just how I am and I’m going to have to live with, right, this is all really fascinating for that.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of people just, you know, professionals, other doctors, it’s like, that’s just who you are, you know, oh, just accept your pain, right? just deal with it, manage it. And, I mean, I just put myself in their shoes. And I just think about, like, how would I feel after hearing that and it’s like, I would feel really hopeless. You know? So, neurology and like neuroplasticity is essentially the science of hope, right? You’re educating students and clients about, Hey, you know, we could rewire pathways so you don’t have to feel stuck, hopeless, or that, you know, in acceptance of a body that, you know, you don’t recognize, right, you don’t have their connected relationship with.

Steph Gaudreau
So very important, such a foundational level. I know one of the other things you recently talked about, and this is just kind of one of my personal bugbears is you talked about a brain-based perspective to carbs. And I know we don’t have a ton of time left, but I would love to have you share a little bit here, right, because one of the things that we do on this podcast is helping people sort of navigating this more middle ground in their life, where they’re feeling better in their body, they feel more connected, they’re able to make choices that really are nourishing and sustainable. them. And this is still one of the things that get really upsetting confusing. There’s just a lot of misinformation A lot of you know, should I be more extreme with this and so I would love to hear your take on it from this point of view because again, I think you’ve offered people a really interesting new access point to some things that they may be dealing with in their lives that they had previously never heard about. So maybe a brain-based perspective on carbohydrates will resonate with somebody on that level that they hadn’t previously considered.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, I love that question. And so your nervous system your brain, it needs essentially two key things in order for it to survive one of it factors down into like fuel and activation so fuel from the standpoint of, you know, how well are you breathing is your body able to uptake the oxygen you’re receiving and then shuttle it to its working tissues? The second component is glucose. And so if you are embarking on alike, and this can even come down to like your, you know, in a, for example, you’re in a very unpredictable time in a very new environment understanding, you know, how do you establish new routines every day potentially, there’s a new stressor that comes up. You’re expending calories. And anyone who is trying to heal their body heals their metabolism, get out of pain, like that requires glucose. And when we go, you know, let’s say simultaneously you’re embarking on quote, unquote, a fitness or health program, in conjunction with glucose or carbohydrate-restricted diet, at some point, your body is going to show up for you in a way where it’s going to be at the is going to be somewhat confusing in the beginning, but it’s all based off of survival. So that’s when a lot of people will be like, I’m not losing weight anymore. I’m having all this pain. I’m gaining weight. I’m creating foods all the time. All of these manifestations and symptoms are basically survival outputs by your nervous system. So if we don’t have enough glucose in our nervous system to keep us, you know, fully asleep to keep us processing information, integrating that information, you will have a very chatty body, your, you know, your pain is probably going to escalate, you will probably feel more anxious. And we have to just really consider that anytime we’re thinking processing learning something new in a high-stress environment, expanding calories, like that’s all very new habits, that we’re creating new ways that we’re being challenged, that that’s going to be very calorie expensive. And so we it’s not in your best long term health interest to, you know, kind of approach it from this very low restricted carbohydrate approach while you’re trying to do something very new. Because at some point again, it’s going to be there’s going to be a an end in sight. And then almost like an overcorrection, that would happen again. And that’s just like a survival output. The body’s going to overcorrect because it felt so much stressed. When it was such an underfed state.

Steph Gaudreau
What are some of the what are some of those signs? I think you’ve already kind of run through them earlier, but somebody might say, Okay, this is an overcorrection. And I’m going to take that as a signal. And again, I think this is so is just a little bit of an aside, but appreciating you for saying, hey, like, let’s take some of the shame and blame and guilt out of this and just understand where it’s coming from.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, like, Oh, you and I were talking about just that, like, you know, I always use it. The phrase like how can I help you become a movement scientist, a food scientist, a mindset scientist, where you’re just exploring everything that’s going on in your body and in your brain and then gathering all that data and then understanding it right putting the pieces together. When it comes to kind of that overcorrection a lot of what I experienced As a coach and what I hear from my students is Yeah, definitely the pain right? When pain travels, as I felt it in my right knee moved up to my left shoulder, right and it’s like kind of doing that whole traveling. It’s typically a sign of lack of fuel. So either you’re not breathing well enough or you don’t have enough glucose for your brain to make that the subsequent neuroplastic change. So that’s a really common one. Another one is you’re literally craving everything that’s like white especially sugar so you’re craving start to hike in, you become more obsessive about food, you’re watching the Food Network, you’re baking all the time, but I’m eating it. Right, those are all really again, very common manifestations of you being in a calorie restriction and your brain literally right, hijacking all your behaviors in a way that it’s like always putting like these, like films on of like, let’s watch the Food Network. Let’s go to Pinterest and find like a banana bread recipe. You’re right. It’s all these like, that’s your intuition, actually. Right. Those are all those signals that come to your forefront as your Way of like, Hey, I’m feeling a little unsafe, like, how can we, like pivot a little bit so that we start to refuel? Because I’m feeling unsafe. And that’s a huge part of neuroscience is like, it’s always kind of scanning the environment and your behaviors and asking, do I feel safe. And in any instances where you feel unsafe, your brain is always going to do what it needs to do in order to create more safety. And that could be cravings, that could be traveling pain, that could be more anxiety. So those are definitely like the common ones I see.

Steph Gaudreau
Again, I think this could be very, it’s such a different way of looking at it and it right now, I know there are a lot of people who are you know, they’re experiencing all the things that you just mentioned. And they’re like, oh, but I know, I’m trying to also improve my health and I think I should be reducing the amount of food that I’m eating and or reducing the number of carbohydrates that I’m eating for XYZ reason. And I think what I hear you saying is that that stuff may have validity, but also if the signals that your body is giving you are kind of starting to shout louder and louder that that’s something too tough to definitely pay attention to.

Alyssa Chang
Yeah, I like to use kind of this like sliding scale of where it’s, you know, it’s my body. whispering Oh becomes chatty. Oh, it’s yelling now. It’s absolutely screaming, right? And so it’s like going through that kind of like, Oh my god, how loud are these pain signals becoming? And is it worth me being on keto or whatever, you know, low carb, high carb, low-calorie diet you’re on? Is because if you’re experiencing pain, like and your goal is weight loss like pain is still that very loud signal that your brain will interpret as something is like, again, using the word safety. Something’s unsafe, like weight loss is not going to be safer, right? what’s actually going to be more is more insulation or body fat. So you can be eating 100%, clean 100% quote-unquote perfect, but you’re in physical pain, your body is going to be resistant to weight loss regardless because it wants to insulate and wants to protect. And it’s just like this whole baseline knowledge of our baseline reasonings of how can we create more safety in the body.

Steph Gaudreau
I love it. I think this is so wonderful. I am incredibly grateful to have had you on the show today that we are we have come to the end, we are out of time. And I know in fact that these podcasts, people will be requesting a follow up to this or part two, so well ended there. So we save some stuff in the big but again, so appreciate you bringing this point of view to so many topics that have been explored before here or other we’ve had other guests that come on and talk about these things from a completely new way. So this has just been so incredibly fascinating illuminating, and I know that people are going to be very excited to hear it.

Alyssa Chang
Oh my gosh, thanks. Thank you.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, totally. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to in the world, how they can work with you, connect with you on social media, where can they do all those things?

Alyssa Chang
Yeah. So on Instagram, my handle is coach Alyssa Chang. My website is coach Alyssa Chang calm. I do run a 12-week brain-based online group coaching program, which is focused on everything I talked about. I actually teach you how to conduct your own brain-based movement assessment. So you can become that expert, more of an expert actually in your body, and understand your own neuroscience. So you can actually take that driver seat role of your health journey by implementing all the visions of breathwork the vestibular work to actually feel, you know, again, bridging that gap between conceptually really understanding listening to your body, intuitive eating gut feeling, but actually making some About from the neuroscience perspective. So I do offer that during the year. Yeah, and those are probably the best ways you can find me.

Steph Gaudreau
Awesome. Yeah, definitely everybody go check out it out. The Instagram account Alyssa talked about. It’s really great so much, just, I mean, it’s uplifting. It’s informational. It’s very loving. And I just feel like that’s a really great place for people to start and, of course, connecting to your course. So we’ll make sure we link all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I got to do this finally. As I’m sure we’ll make it happen again sometime soon.

Alyssa Chang
Thank you stuff.

Steph Gaudreau
All right, there we go. That’s a wrap on this episode with Coach Alyssa Chang. So many knowledge bombs, so little time could be the subtitle of this episode. If you want to get in on the show notes, including a full transcript. Go over to my website, StephGaudreau.com. There you’ll find the transcripts, you’ll find the links to list the social media, all of her stuff that she’s up to. You can go and dive in further. If you really if this spoke to you on that nerd level, then go ahead and connect with her. Follow her on social. Make sure you share this episode on social media. As I said earlier, tag coach Alyssa Chang and myself, Steph Gaudreau. We would love to see how this show is impacting you. And what may be doors it opened in your own understanding of how your body works and how to listen to your body and how to find that bridge. And do not forget to get on my newsletter Steph Gaudreau.com/LTYB for Listen To Your Body. I have been cooking up some really exciting stuff that I cannot wait to share with you. Literally this stuff will change your life. I’m just going to come out and say it right now. So you’re going to want to get on that newsletter. Steph Gaudreau.com. Okay, next week I have a dear dear friend of mine, someone I love so much coming on the show. If you have felt like you are not enough you are never enough and you keep coming up against not enough notice. She’s gonna share some of her best tips with you. Until next Tuesday. Thanks for listening and be well.