Episode 298: Cultivating Resilience Through Human Design and Nutrition
Want to bounce back from stress and adapt to life’s challenges with ease?
This episode examines how combining Human Design with Functional Nutrition can help you build resilience from the inside out. Discover how understanding your unique Human Design Type and refining your nutrition choices create a powerful synergy, allowing you to handle stress, recover faster, and sustain energy even in the most demanding times.
Listen to the Episode:
Mentioned in the Episode:
Episode 291: Understanding Stress Through the Lens of Human Design Types
Episode 297: Leveraging Human Design for Better Sleep and Stress Recovery
Healthy x Human Design: Decode Your Health Using Human Design
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“A resilient body requires stable energy, and stable energy is how you optimize how your body functions – maintaining hormone balance, supporting immune function, having healthy digestion – it all comes down to energy stabilization – its really what being healthy is about. So, if your goal is to build resilience, you cultivate it by nourishing yourself so that you have the clarity of mind to follow your Strategy and Authority. And a nourished mind and body is a well-fed mind and body.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello there, friend. Welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast.
I recently had a conversation on the idea of “perfect health.” Personally, I think “perfect health is unrealistic, and the pursuit of perfect health sets us up for failure, and in a way, is unhealthy in and of itself.
What I aspire to is resilience, which is what we’re going to discuss today.
The dictionary defines “resilience” as, “the ability of a person to adjust to or to recover readily from illness, adversity or major life changes.”
To have resilience, there must be self-awareness. This is where Human Design – the framework for building self-awareness – comes in.
The ability to be in tune with your body - to recognize the signals it sends, to have the ability to listen to it and understand when and how it might be out of balance so that you can tend to it in a way that meets your unique needs and what you need -- not what you’ve been conditioned to believe you need, or how things are “supposed.” This is self-awareness and when you understand this, this is how you can cultivate resilience.
It requires you to be in tune with the nuances of how your body and brain functions and how your energy inherently flows.
Nutrition is critical to this process because how you nourish your vessel – your body and your brain also nourishes your mind, spirit and energy.
While there’s an aspect of Human Design on Digestion and the Primary Health System through the Variables, today, we’re going to keep things simple and take a functional approach of “backing things up and focus on how to marry Human Design and nutrition through your Human Design Type - just how we did in Episode 291: Understanding Stress Through the Lens of Human Design Types and Episode 297: Leveraging Human Design for Better Sleep and Stress Recovery.
So, if resilience is defined as the ability to adjust to or recover from an illness, adversity or major life challenges, in the context of Human Design, it’s like deconditioning.
You build resilience by deconditioning yourself from external influences that formed and shaped you in ways that aren't inherent to your design. So, when we're conditioned, we're operating in a way that’s adverse to our true selves. Let’s peel back the layers and take a deeper look into what this looks like.
Generators and Manifesting Generators are the doers, the builders, the creators – the ones who get things done. They build resilience by consistently renewing their energy.
If this is you, you bring the energy needed to make big things happen. And while you have a lot of this energy, you’re still human and need to balance it with rest so you can keep yourself renewed. So, how do you do that? How do you balance rest? By learning to say no.
Your Strategy is “to respond” but not every opportunity is meant to be responded to with a “yes.” Follow your Authority to know what the correct opportunities are for you to accept.
Now Projectors, you know that regular rest plays a critical role in your ability to be resilient and avoid burnout. However, it’s one of those things that’s in theory, is easy to know but not always easy to practice, because let’s face it, we live in a world, in a society, that’s built for Generators and Manifesting Generators.
So, for non-Sacrals to live in alignment, it requires being “different” – living your life in ways other than the expected norms. Society as we know it isn’t a place that sets up non-Sacrals to succeed.
So, we Projectors have to have hyper self-awareness to understand that we’re different, that our energy operates differently from the majority of the world and to be accepting of this – heck be proud about it!
My fellow Projectors, our role is to see the things that no one else sees and as such to offer our gift of efficiency and optimization – how to do things better, and that includes how we use our energy.
But we must recognize that our energy is cyclical and the way for us to optimize it is to rest, regularly – however that looks like for you, as long as it leaves you feeling recharged and renewed so that we can bring our perspectives to the table every single day.
Like Projectors, Manifestors are also non-Sacrals and make up even less of the population than Projectors – a mere 10%! The key for Manifestors to cultivate resilience is to understand the importance of conserving energy in order to take the right actions.
Manifestors, your Strategy is to initiate, but to do so requires that you inform before acting; not doing so can lead to blindsiding people which creates resistance to your actions, angering you – wasted energy.
So, you can more efficiently use your energy by following your Strategy – initiate and inform because using your energy efficiently creates resilience – lessen the resistance and things that you need to bounce back from.
Reflectors, you can build resilience by being adaptable to your environments. Your designs are open and you’re going to be exposed to external energies – that’s a given, but you can be flexible and selective about the environments that you put yourself in.
You might be thinking, “okay, this is great information, but what does nutrition have to do with this?”
Well, the common theme here - and what Human Design is all about, is energy. And, how you feed yourself will also determine whether you’re optimizing your energy and using it efficiently, or not.
A resilient body requires stable energy, and stable energy is how you optimize how your body functions – maintaining hormone balance, supporting immune function, having healthy digestion – it all comes down to energy stabilization – its really what being healthy is about.
So, if your goal is to build resilience, you cultivate it by nourishing yourself so that you have the clarity of mind to follow your Strategy and Authority. And a nourished mind and body is a well-fed mind and body.
We all have different ways of best nourishing ourselves according to our designs and our bio-individualities. How you choose to do it is up to you, BUT there are nutritional commonalities that everyone needs to be nourished. If you work in tech or business, you can think of this as the “minimum viable requirements.”
One of those requirements is blood sugar stability. Your blood sugar must be balanced to maintain energy stability, which means it’s a minimal requirement for cultivating resilience. Blood sugar instability results in sugar highs and then energy crashes, moodiness, feeling hangry (hungry + angry), and when this happens chronically – all the time – well, that’s how chronic illnesses develop. An imbalanced blood sugar is one of many root causes of many chronic diseases.
Another minimum requirement for nourishment is having healthy digestive function.
Part of your immune system is in your digestive system so if you want to have a healthy immune system and hormone balance, you need a healthy digestive system. In other words, when you maintain healthy digestion, you also support your immune function, which is why gut health, i.e., having healthy digestion is one of the basic approaches to functional nutrition.
This is where Human Design and Functional Nutrition meet. Everything is connected.
Functional Nutrition is about peeling the layers back because this is how you uncover root causes, and when you look at commonalities of root causes, you often will find amongst other things, blood sugar imbalance and poor digestion, which causes chaos and disruption.
So, to address these problems remove the things that cause it – that disrupt blood sugar and impair the digestive process. These are things like highly processed foods, foods with high fracture corn syrup, foods with hydrogenated oils – foods that have little-to-no nutrients that fuel inflammation.
Remove those things and replace them instead with whole foods, anti-inflammatory foods, nutrient-dense foods that are rich with vitamins and minerals. Foods that keep your blood sugar balanced, support healthy digestive function, which also supports healthy immune function, that will NOURISH you with essential vitamins and nutrients that your body needs – at minimum – to function well – to optimize your energy so you can cultivate resilience.
You know what it feels like to feel poorly, to be hangry, to be sick. You can’t think clearly. You have brain fog. You're tired all the time. You just don't have the energy to function as you normally would and/or how you’d like to show up.
So, following Functional Nutrition and the belief that “everything is connected,” not only is aligning to our designs how we cultivate resilience but marrying it with how we take care of our physical selves as well.
And while its sexy to look for “the one thing”, the “secret to,” the advanced areas of Human Design like the Variables and getting into the weeds on nutrition, the reality is that if you just back to the basic fundamentals of following your Strategy and Authority, keep whole foods, moving your body, drinking water – highly underrated, prioritizing sleep – how much better will you feel just doing these things?
I get it – I wanted to know all about my Incarnation Cross and what was my Human Design Digestion – and please don’t get me wrong, these are fascinating to learn and absolutely a part of who you are – no shame in wanting to know these things, but until you learn how to follow your Strategy and Authority, how can you follow these other things?
It’s the same with nutrition. You want to find out the latest superfoods, find out if you have the MTHFR gene, want to biohack your health, but can you truly say that you’re doing the basics of eating whole foods, drinking water, exercising regularly and prioritizing sleep?
Because often what you think you’re doing isn’t what you’re actually doing.
And how can you expect to run before you can walk?
Here’s a couple of tips to build a “minimum requirements” healthy plate:
- Make sure your plate has sources of healthy fats, fiber and protein.
- When you sit down to enjoy a meal, look at your place (or bowl) and ask yourself, “will this meal make nutrient deposits into my nutrient savings account?”
If the answer is no, then understand that when your meals aren’t nutrient-rich, your body will have to make a withdrawal from the nutrients you already have stored, i.e., your nutrients savings account because nutrients are the minimum requirements your body needs to function – not function well, not function optimally, but just to function.
And when you don’t feed yourself nutrient-rich foods, it’s going to have to make a withdrawal from what you already have stored to survive. And when you make too many withdrawals without any deposits, eventually you go into overdraft because your bank account is empty.
And running on empty is not resilient.
You could use this “savings account” analogy for sleep and rest, for not being in alignment with your design – really for anything. Making withdrawals without deposits will leave you in overdraft – depleted, under-nourished. That’s what being in survival mode is – surviving, not thriving. That’s not energy optimization, that’s not cultivating resilience.
I know all about this because I experienced it first-hand.
In the first few years of health coaching, I was excited, ambitious and determined to create a variety of offerings for clients – challenges, group coaching programs, workshops, etc. Having an Undefined Head Center, there was no shortage of ideas.
But each project took time and energy – physical, mental and emotional energy.
Now, in addition to an Undefined Head Center, I also have an Undefined Root Center – so I have both pressure centers undefined.
And I placed a lot of pressure on myself to be able to create these challenges, programs, and workshops, in hindsight, under unrealistic arbitrary deadlines. So, I put myself under a lot of pressure, without understanding (because this was pre-Human Design times) that I don’t function well under pressure, and the irony of it all was that I survived rather than thrive trying to make those offerings happen.
Looking back, while I produced good work, it wasn’t my best work. I think had I been rested and given myself the opportunity to feel renewed and recharged, the output of my labors could have been better – it was good but could have been better. But I didn’t set myself, a Projector, up for success by prioritizing rest or eating the most nutrient-rich meals. Did I feed myself junk? No, but I can’t say they were the most nutrient-rich either – at least not in balance with the lack of efficiency in how I used my energy.
So, earlier this year, when I set out to create the five programs that I offer now, I vowed that I would not put myself through something like that again. That I would honor my Projector design and not operate like an Energizer bunny. I committed to myself that I would take breaks, that I wouldn’t sacrifice meals, exercise, sleep and social time.
Now that I had an awareness of Human Design, and understood the nuances of my design, as a Splenic Projector, I promised myself that I would give myself the time and space to create my programs in a way where I didn’t compromise my energy and resilience.
Having boundaries and parameters in place to stay the course, I believe, led me to creating some of my best work. I’m really proud of the five programs I’ve created but most of all, I’m proud of how I did it. I avoided burnout and worked with energy rather than creating stress by working against it.
You can too.
If your goal is to “get healthy,” then that must also include building resilience. And resilience is achievable when you aim to optimize your energy and use it efficiently – and I can’t think of a better way to do that than by combining Human Design with Functional Nutrition. They go hand-in-hand.
If this is something you’re curious about and want to explore more, start by understanding your design, and then also, how are you feeding yourself? How are you nourishing yourself?
How are you supporting your energy?
Is your blood sugar regularly balanced? How’s your digestion? Do you understand digestion? Gut health is buzz words, but do you understand the digestive process?
Your homework for today is t:
Observe how you align to your Human Design Type and how you follow your Strategy and Authority. Start with the very basics. Please don’t be dismissive of this. If you’re a regular listener, then likely, you’re very familiar with your design, but honestly – how well are you following your Strategy and Authority? I have to check-in with myself all the time to see how well I’m following my Strategy of Waiting for Invitations and my Splenic Authority.
Take a step back and look at how you’re actually eating, sometimes we think we’re eating a certain way but in reality, we’re not and we may not even realize it. Does your plate have sources of fat, fiber and protein?
How well am I nourished?
Because when you’re well-nourished in body, mind, and emotions, that’s when you have clarity and resilience.
Now, I'd love to hear from you. Practice some self-observation and come back and share with me what you find.
And if you’d like to hear more – well, we touched a little bit of all of the five programs that I’ve created – Human Design Essentials, Energy management, Eating for Energy and Digestion, so I’ll link to these programs in the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/298, but I recommend you start with my free program, “Healthy x Human Design” because there are resources included in that program that will help you walk through the self-observation exercises I’ve assigned to you today.
The resources will help you decode your Human Design, and also how to bridge the gap between what your eating, how you’re feeling and how your body is functioning.
These resources, which I use with clients and that I use myself, will help you not only gain context, but also bring these things together for more clarity on where you are right now and what you can do to cultivate resilience and get you to where you want to be.
As always, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time, energy, and attention and I’ll see you right. back here again next time. Bye for now!
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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