Quit Ignoring These 7 Body Signals and Lose Weight for Good

If your body has been sending you signals you cannot explain, hear this. Your body is trying to tell you something. It is not malfunctioning. It's not betraying you. It is a system that has been asking to be heard sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. Mine personally, for decades. Most of us have been so busy managing our bodies that we forget how to listen to them. Today, I'm going to walk you through the 7 signs your body is doing exactly this. 7 signals I see in almost every high-performing woman and man that I sit with. And I'm going to give you 3 practices you can start using this week to respond to what your body has been trying to say. I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist, a registered dietitian. I'm the owner and founder of PhD Weight Loss, where to date we have helped over 13,500 people collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds. Today I want to walk you through The part of health almost no one names. You have been treating your body as a project, something to manage, something to optimize, something to fix if it acts up, when it acts up. Most of us have been living that story for so long that we don't even see it anymore. But the truth is, guys, your body is not a project. Your body is a communicator. Every single symptom that you have right now, your body's communicating something to you. Every tension, every fatigue, every craving, every hunger pang, every weird pattern that will not go away is not a malfunction. It's actually a message, and your body will keep sending those messages louder and louder and louder until it is heard. A body that is trying to talk to you does not stop trying. The 7 signs that I'm about to share are the ones that I see most often in people who have been carrying a ton of responsibility for a really long time. Notice which of these your body is trying to talk to you about right now. Sign number 1 is jaw tension. Do you clench your jaw? Do you wake up with a sore mouth or morning headaches? Do you grind your teeth at night? That is, for most people, especially women, repressed anger living in your muscles. Anger in the jaw feels like a lot of pressure. It feels like a dull ache when you wake up. It's tightness in your temples. Sometimes for me, it's the roof of my mouth that even goes tight. Anger wants to bite down. Anger wants to say something. Anger wants to move up and out of the body, and when it has nowhere to go, the jaw is what holds it. So every time you swallowed a comment, every time you smooth the movement over for somebody else because you don't like confrontation—again, I'm saying all of this out of personal experience—every time you were the reasonable one when you just wanted to scream, I. I want you to think that your jaw is holding that receipt. Sign number 2, tightness or heat in the chest or in the throat. The chest and the throat are where most people hold grief and shame. Grief in the chest often feels like a weight, like something is sitting on you. Sometimes it is a hollow feeling. Sometimes it can be an ache underneath your breastbone with no medical cause, of course. So wanna make sure that you medically get checked out, but if there's nothing going on, This is what grief and shame can feel like. Shame feels a little bit different. Shame is more like heat rushing up. It's this feeling of wanting to disappear, your chest kind of caving in on itself. But both shame and grief get stored in the same zone, which is the ribs and the sternum and the throat. For me, this shows up kind of like burning waves, and it starts in my gut and it goes up through my chest and up through my throat. When I have more anxiety, when my anxiety is on the higher end. I know this happens when my body has been holding on to too much, and I feel it move through me like just like waves up and out. If you feel a persistent tightness or a heat in that area and you cannot explain it medically, your body is talking, and it's not a disease. It's a message. It's saying that you need to work on releasing the grief and potential shame. Sign number 3 are topical tears. So what I mean by this is you cry at things that really don't warrant it, right? Maybe it's a commercial or a song on the radio, or maybe someone said something where in the past you're thinking, oh my gosh, that wouldn't have moved me at all. Those type of tears are what is referred to as topical. So what I mean by this is they look like they're about the small thing. But they are just the surface layer of much deeper grief that has not been given room to move through your body. If you are crying at everything or you feel like you have a short fuse or you are irritable, hear me, that's not you being unstable when you're doing this work of processing emotions and really listening to your body. That is a body finally trusted enough to let some of what has been holding move. And that's a good thing. There will be a messy middle, but just keep going through it and you'll find yourself on the other side. Where you feel much more grounded and much more trusting of how your body's going to respond. Sign number 4, you can't physically rest, right? You sit down to rest and your body will not let you. Your legs bounce, your hands look for something to hold, your mind spins with everything you should be doing instead. Maybe you're reorganizing your supplement cabinet for the 5th time. Even in moments where you have earned rest, your body is scanning for the next task. This is not personality. This is a nervous system that has been rewarded for productivity for so long, for so many years, decades, that stillness now registers as a danger to your brain. Your body has forgotten what safe rest actually feels like, and every time you try to give it rest anyway, the anxiety rises before the relief does. Sign number 5 is perfectionism. If perfectionism runs your life, consider that it is Adaptive. Like, perfectionism is more of a trauma response. Usually it comes from a childhood where being good enough felt like the only path to being safe, being loved, or maybe being left alone. Perfectionism was a survival tool. It kept you okay when you were small. It is not a personality trait, actually. It is a strategy. And the reason it shows up now as tension or maybe as exhaustion as a body that will not settle is because running that much control every single day does have a physical cost. One thing I want to name before we go further: this deeper work of unwinding what your body has been carrying requires a body well enough to hold it, a body that is nourished, not fighting chronic inflammation and metabolic depletion on top of the emotional load that you're dealing with. You cannot do somatic work in a body that's running on fumes. And I believe that's where PhD Weight Loss fits into this picture. It's not as the answer to the deeper work, but it is a foundation that makes the deeper work actually possible and supports this body, this vessel that's going to be going through a lift. When your body is fed well, when it's hormonally supported, when it's metabolically stable, it has the resources to feel what has been asking to be felt. You will be much more grounded in this process. So if you feel like this support would be helpful to you, go to myphdweightloss.com, or if you're watching this on YouTube, head on over into the description, click the link, and one of our nutritionists will help you build that foundation. Sign number 6 is chronic bracing. Bracing shows up everywhere once you know where to look, right? Your shoulders sit up around your ears, your belly is clenched even when you're sitting still. When you wake up, it feels like your stomach has been clenched. Uh, you wake up, maybe your are closed. Your breathing runs shallow. It's up in your chest instead of deep in your belly. Maybe you sit on the edge of your chair, your jaw's closed and tight even when you're alone. Your nervous system has been in any-second-now mode for such a long time, and your body no longer remembers what it actually feels like to be at rest. Bracing burns a lot of energy, and it's why you can be doing everything right and you just Feel exhausted still. I want you to know that if you're going through this, your body isn't lazy. It might feel like it, it might look like it on the outside, it might look like it to your friends and your spouses, but it is running this background program that consumes so much of your energy and so much of your life force. Sign number 7, the 8 PM pattern. You might have this pattern every night at roughly the same time. You reach for something to take the edge off. Food, sugar, something salty, and then maybe something sweet. Wine, scrolling until midnight on your phone, Netflix, checking work emails you swore you would leave alone. Maybe online shopping. You're like, hey, I'm not working, but you're shopping. Maybe you're starting 3 new projects. Whatever the behavior is, the mechanism is still the same. The emotional load you carried all day has to come out somewhere, and when your nervous system has no other tools to release pressure, you reach for the fastest available regulator. It's not a weakness. It's not a personality flaw. This is a body that has been white-knuckled for 12 hours straight, finally trying to unwind. The answer is not more discipline in the evening. The answer is actually less pressure during the day. One system That gets hit first when your body is carrying an emotional load is your gut. Your gut houses roughly 70% of your immune system. It produces your serotonin, which is the feel-good neurotransmitter, and it's in constant conversation with your nervous system through your vagus nerve. And I've done a video where I talk about the impact of the vagus nerve and how to calm the vagus nerve. I'll make sure to include that video in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. Now, when your body has been holding 4 years, the gut breaks down early and it recovers much more slowly. That's why I created GLP-1 Gut Longevity Plus. It's built around a next-generation probiotic called Akkermansia. Plus, I added polyphenols like grapeseed extract and resveratrol to rebuild the gut microbiome that has been depleted by stress and years of processed foods. It supports your gut, your nervous system, and your body's own natural GLP-1 signaling. You can find it at Dr. Ashley Wellness. Use code Ashley Ashley10 for 10% off. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure you head on into the description with that code Ashley10. You'll also get 20% off your first subscription order with free shipping. Now, here's what I want you guys to walk away with. These 7 signs are not defects. They are not problems your body is creating to inconvenience you. And I know personally I have felt that way, but really your body is trying to tell you something you needed to hear a really long time ago when it was whispering. To you, and now it's just very loud. When your body speaks to you like this, it's not that you are broken. It is actually really great intelligence, and that is loyalty coming from your body. Most of us come to our bodies from fear— fear that they're betraying us, fear that if we do not fix them, something bad happens. And a body approach from fear will keep talking louder. It's just going to keep the hypervigilance going, and it's not going to allow the nervous system to calm down. If you will not listen to the whisper, it will send you the symptom. And if you will not listen to the symptom, it will send you a clear diagnosis. When you approach your body from compassion, from the choice to listen to the one body, the one temple you have been given for this lifetime, your body is not the problem. It has been the messenger the whole time, and it will stop shouting the moment you sit down and hear what it has been trying to say. So How do you start listening? I want to give you 3 practices. You don't need all 3. You can pick the one that lands the hardest for you and start there. Number 1 is uncensored writing. I really like the book Mind Your Body by Nicole Sachs, and she has created a journaling method called Journal Speak. This is a practice that has changed a lot for me, and I would love for you to give it a try if you're open to it. And what you do is you set a timer for 20 minutes Grab a pen and a piece of paper. Don't do it on your phone, actually, like pen to paper. Pick the one thing that has been sitting in your body the loudest right now. It could be the anger, it could be the grief, it could be the resentment that you have been swallowing for years. Maybe you don't even know what the emotion is, but it's an event or it's something that just keeps circling in your mind, like it's just taking up the most space. Write about it. And you're gonna write like nobody will ever read it because nobody ever will. Don't edit it, don't soften it, don't try to make sense of it, which is what I generally try to do is say, oh gosh, I can see that. I know why this happened. It's such a gift. But don't do that. Don't let yourself do that. If you wanna scream on the page, scream on the page. If a rage comes you are ashamed of, let it out. The whole point is to say the things that you've never let yourself say. Don't be reasonable. Don't be nice. Don't be the version of yourself who has been holding all of this in. When the 20-minute timer goes off, you're going to take those pages and you're going to rip them up. You're going to throw those pages away because no, it's not for anyone to see. It's just to get it out of your brain, right? It's not for reflection. It's not for anybody else. It's for release. So you're going to take those pages and you're just going to rip them up and throw it away. Rip up the evidence. It's not for anyone. It's just to get it up and out. And you're probably going to want to do this every day, 5 days a week, until your body starts— and I would not even stop, but you want to do it. And as you do, you're going to find that your body does start to trust that it is a safe place to be able to feel these emotions and let them go. Number 2 is to feel the sensations in the body. When one of these signs is active, when your jaw is clenched or your chest is tight, You don't want to run from it. You're going to sit with it, put your hand on the place where you feel it, breathe with it, let it move through you. This is a piece that not many people talk about, is that emotions have to physically move to release. They can't just be thought through. They have to be felt through. And then number 3, which can be a hard one, especially for us perfectionists, is acceptance. I think it's one of the biggest ones, can be one of the hardest. For me, it has been a really important part of the picture. Right? Not fighting what is here, not trying to fix it, not trying to make it go away. Just accepting what is present right now in my body and that it is allowed to be here. Right? That single act of just allowing what has always been rejected is what starts to allow the release and allow the body to feel safe enough to be able to let go of what's no longer serving you. I always say that weight loss is a process of letting go. Letting go of all of the excess fat weight that no longer serves you and all of these emotions that are tied to it. And another interesting thing that I have found clinically through my experience of serving thousands of people is that as we drop weight, we're dropping emotions that were tied to that weight gain in the first place. So whatever happened to you, let's say when you were 30 pounds overweight, might come up as you hit that 30-pound milestone. And guess what? You're going to need to work through that. That's why no medication, no injection is going to allow you to lose weight, allow you to keep it off for good. You've got to go through this deep work if you want true sustainable transformation. Now, if you want to keep pulling on this thread, I do have an episode called Why Is This Happening for Me? that pairs beautifully with what we just talked about. If you're watching this on YouTube, just click right here on the screen or you can find it in the description. And if this episode landed For you watching this on YouTube, subscribe so the next one comes right to you. And then tell me in the comments, which of the 7 signs was the hardest one for you to listen to? And what are you going to work on? What do you think is that underlying emotion that needs to come up and come out? I want to know. Remember, you've got to step up to make the change. Lead with your heart, train your mind, and listen to what your body already knows. I'll see you next time.