Your Gut Already Knows
What a divorce, a 33-pound weight loss & a whole lot of kimchi taught me about the second brain I never knew I had...
In the year after my marriage ended, I lost 33 pounds.
I wasn’t trying to…I hadn’t found a new routine or cleanse or regimen. I lost 33 pounds because my body, under the specific and relentless pressure of that particular season of my life, simply stopped holding onto things…stopped functioning. I was quite literally running on fumes.
I had become Head Chef at North Miznon in Manhattan. I was running the show… 100+ covers a night, six services and 80-hours in a typical week…and I was fighting to feel normal, but every single one of those hours held a version of me who was performing competence while quietly coming apart at the seams in the background. I had moved out into my own apartment, I was paying bills on my own, and trying to figure out how to be a mother on a shared custody schedule that only allowed me to see my daughter 2 days/week. I walked everywhere…to clear my head, to move my body…I was climbing three or four times a week…I was trying to meditate, or trying to shut off the chaos in my brain for five seconds, and in the effort of trying… I felt like I was even failing at that.
My eating situation was routine at this point: eggs at noon when I came in for service prep and family meal at 4pm…which I mostly missed because I was doing inventory or rolling pasta ahead of service. I’d pick at whatever was left and call it eating. Each night, I would run the line of 10 cooks and a service for 100+ people for the next several hours…then walk home somewhere around 1-2am, and finally, if I was awake enough, I’d find myself standing over the sink eating a bowl of cereal before I passed out from exhaustion.
Layered underneath all of it, constantly, was the noise. The particular, relentless, not yet diagnosed ADHD-flavored noise of a brain that never once stopped running. I’ve often described it as loud…every thought was literally yelling…and there were no connected trains of thought…they were merely disconnected train cars (thoughts) that would crash into each other at any given moment, taking me off course. Did I make the right call? Is she okay? Am I enough of a mother if I can’t be there? What does this text from my ex mean? Is this the rest of my life now? Why do I feel so alone?
And in the midst of all of that…I started dating again, which added its own exciting but terrifying layer of what-ifs to the existing pile. I was 40yrs. old with a daughter and a career that kept me away from both of them more than I was willing to admit...and underneath, I was trying to figure out how to be a person who…um, dated?
I was trying to be interesting and appealing and relaxed when I was none of those things. Who would want this? was the question I asked myself constantly. I had only been with one person my entire life, my ex-husband, and navigating the idea of a sex life from basically scratch, at 40, as a chef who smelled like a kitchen most of the time, brought its own soundtrack of anxiety and self-interrogation that ran underneath everything else.
So…my nervous system was, to put it professionally, completely cooked.
And my gut knew it before I did.
The chronic stress brochure leaves out a lot...eventually, over time, your body stops whispering and starts screaming. And for me, it screamed in the most inconvenient and unglamorous way possible. Any time I ate something, anything at all, my gut rejected it. Almost immediately…like, sorry not sorry for the TMI, but that sh*t literally ran right through me…every single time.
Apparently, what was happening to me is called sympathetic gastric inhibition and stress-induced hypermotility. When we find ourselves in chronic sympathetic (first gear) overdrive, the brain triggers the release of a chemical called Corticotropin-Releasing Factor (CRF). This hormone binds to receptors in your gut, which literally causes your stomach to stop moving…which is why I couldn’t stomach family meal at 4pm…and it simultaneously accelerated the motility of the colon.
My body was in such a constant state of alarm that it had essentially decided digestion was a luxury it simply couldn’t afford. I was physically shedding weight because my digestive tract was evacuating rather than absorbing…at the end of the day, I was starving in the middle of plenty.
I watched the number on the scale go down over just a few short months…from 155 to 140 to 130 to 122. And you know? I kind of liked it…for a while. My wobbly bits smoothed out, and my clothes finally began to fit comfortably. I caught my reflection and thought oh, okay, I still recognize her. But I also knew, somewhere underneath, this look was not the same as being “well”…being healthy. My body at 5’5” with hips from my mama and a Boulware Badonk I was born with…this body I know is only truly at its healthiest somewhere around 135 to 140lbs. At that point, I was significantly south of that and shrinking…my gut was in open revolt, and no amount of liking my new reflection was going to change what I knew was happening.
I needed to heal my gut…so I did what a budding chef and food-loving person does…I cooked my way back to life.
I kefir’d my way back to being able to stomach dairy again. I kimchi’d and sauerkraut’d my way into a new digestive existence. I ate sourdough because bread is literally life, and I refuse to believe otherwise. I pre- and pro-biotic’d until things started moving the way things are supposed to, and my body started holding onto food the way a body does when it finally reaches second gear…rest and digest mode vs. the fight or flight mode…the one I had been stuck in for months.
It started to work…slowly, then all at once. I came back to myself, my weight began to rise back to stable levels, the color came back to my cheeks…even some wobbly bits showed back up…and this time, I loved them. My gut finally started to quiet down, and I filed the whole experience away as: yikes, that was rough, fermented things helped, let’s move on.
What I didn’t fully realize then, and what I’m only beginning to understand now, years later and several rabbit holes deeper into research, is that I didn’t just heal my gut, I had rebuilt my nervous system from the inside out.
Your gut is not just a digestive organ, it’s your second brain…literally.
Apparently, there are over 100 million neurons in our gastrointestinal tract, more than are in our spinal cord, and they form what is called the enteric nervous system (ENS). This system operates almost entirely on its own, independently of your head-brain upstairs. This system has its own thinking, processing, its own ways to communicate, and it has been doing all of this long before anyone even noticed.
The main line of communication between your gut and your brain is the vagus nerve I mentioned last week. It’s the longest nerve in your body, running from your brainstem through your throat. About 90% of the signals running on the vagus nerve travel gut to brain…upwards, not the other way around.
Scientists have recently discovered specialized cells in the gut lining called neuropod cells. These cells form a direct, lightning-fast link with the vagus nerve. These cells taste what you eat, and in milliseconds, they flash a message directly to your brain…meaning your gut is literally and actively sending instructions to your nervous system.
When my gut was in open revolt in my UWS apartment at 2 am over a bowl of cereal, it wasn’t just a digestion problem…it was my nervous system…it was my gut telling my brain, loudly, urgently, that something was very wrong. We aren’t safe, we cannot digest this right now.
And serotonin…it’s important, too…it’s the messaging about our mood, if we are feeling okay or if we are totally out of balance when we’re depressed. About 90% of the serotonin in our bodies is produced in our guts (not our brains). When chronic stress effs up our digestive systems, our bodies will literally route blood and energy away from digestion and toward survival. In survival mode, our stomach suffers, our mood suffers, our ability to feel regulated and balanced…our capacity to not completely fall apart over something so very small.
I lost 33 pounds and thought it was just a stress response…but underneath, my serotonin supply chain was completely shutting down. My body was losing the very thing it needed to tell itself that things were okay…that I was safe…that it could rest.
The kimchi knew...the kefir knew…the sourdough especially…stubborn and fermented and alive, it also knew, too.
What they were doing, what I was doing by eating them, intuitively, the way a chef reaches for what feels right…whether I totally understood the science or not in that moment…I was building a wall of psychobiotics. I think that word sounds so badass…it’s like an army of bacteria and fermentations that have the power to directly change your brain chemistry. A study out of Stanford Medicine showed that a diet high in fermented foods dramatically increases microbiome diversity and actively reduces the inflammatory proteins in the brain that typically drive anxiety and racing thoughts.
When your microbiome is fed and functional, your nervous system has backup. When it’s depleted, by chronic stress, by not eating, by cereal at 2 am as the sole nutritional provider, everything suffers.
No one truly knew that any of this was happening to me during the divorce. I was hundreds of miles away from my family, my safety net, and my best friends in the city, who were dealing with their own chaos. Sure, they noticed the weight loss, but like me, they thought it was just stress…or, also like me, probably thought I looked better in my slimmer state. Nobody said: hey, by the way, the stress you’re under is actively dismantling your dang nervous system. That nervous system is the one responsible for your mood, your digestion, and your ability to feel safe in your own body. I clawed my way back to stable…I believe because of the things I had learned while becoming a chef…that, and…I trusted my hands when my brain had given up.
I’m back, and sure, my weight still fluctuates…the difference now is that I know…I know to listen to my gut. I go back to what I learned during this time…I know now that stress, age, movement, and exercise all matter so much, and now…I know, too, that so do the things that can bring our gut back to stability…fermented food, protein, fiber…oh, the fiber is SO good. Food is fuel, and these things are JUST as important as the movement we give our bodies…more so, even.
Next week…in my meal prep and in my own home, I’ve been looking more into how hormonal cycles change what your gut needs every single week of the month…the infradian nourishment schedule and why eating the same way on day 4 and on day 24 is working against everything your body is trying to do. Let’s call it the 28-Day Kitchen…and let’s figure it out together, next Sunday.
For now, try to add one fermented thing to your week. Something alive…tangy…real. A spoonful of miso dissolved in hot water…a spoon of kimchi alongside eggs, rice, chicken, whatever…a small glass of kefir. Your gut might be trying to tell you something, and I think it’s worth it to start listening.
xo,
Jess