Read the Transcript:

Hello there, friend! Welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast; I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

We’re now 16 days into the new year - how's it going?

I’m feeling good and hopeful for this year. It's a milestone year for me, and past milestone years have always been good for me and brought lots of excitement and growth, so I’m hopeful this year will do the same.

I was recently reading something that used the word “exhilarating.” If there's one thing that I want to feel this year, it is exhilaration. Exhilaration means feeling happy, excited, satisfied, fulfilled – simply joyful, so I want more moments of exhilaration, and I wish the same for you too.

Before I get into the meat of today's episode, I want just to remind you the first thing on my roadmap of new offerings that I have planned to bring to you this year will be released soon! You can sign up to be among the first to receive over on the show notes for this episode at livefablife.com/279 for Episode 279. It’ll also be right on the front of my website.

It’s a deep dive into my approach to health through the frameworks of Human Design and Functional Nutrition, which brings me to the topic of this episode.

At the core of Functional Nutrition and Human Design is awareness – specifically self-awareness, because to practice bio-individuality and know what’s right for our unique selves, we have to have the insight for it. And how do we gain this personal insight? By developing self-awareness.

So, today, let’s discuss how to honor our body signals and listen to our authority to help guide us on managing our health.

When I say “listening to our body signals”, I don't just mean our physical bodies, I mean all of it - minds, bodies, and emotions. How do you listen to it?

In preparing for this episode, I dug into the podcast archives to one of the very first episodes - Episode 010, which was released in October 2017 - almost seven years ago. It’s titled “How to Listen to Your Body.”

At the time, I was two or three years into health coaching, and Human Design wasn't even on my radar. My focus was exclusively on my niche of blood sugar regulation and digestion, so the episode was on how to listen to our bodies in context.

One of the foundations of Functional Nutrition is tracking, and I don't mean using MyFitnessPal and counting calories. I mean collecting data to analyze and hypothesize to connect the dots.

In Functional Nutrition, we use a tool called the Food Mood Poop Journal. I introduced the Food Mood Poop Journal in Episode 010, and back then even had a popular challenge on how to use it.

It’s a tool to guide you in tracking what you eat and how you feel because what you eat affects how your brain functions, which is connected to your emotions – thus, your mood. So, track what you eat, how you feel, and how you poop because poop is an important diagnostic tool that provides a lot of information on what's going on inside your body.

So, my clients use this when trying to understand more about what’s going on with them to contextual symptoms and even share it with their healthcare teams. I have them track for 3-5 days – it’s not this long-drawn-out thing, but of course, it varies from person to person.

We then take the data they collected and put our detective hats to make correlations between what they ate, how they felt, and how their body functioned – food, mood, poop.

This focuses on body awareness but lightly touches on mental and emotional awareness, but in the spirit of bio-individuality, how can we contextualize that more?

Let’s have a bit of storytime.

In Episode 010, I shared my history with long-distance running. It wasn’t something I started doing until I was in my 30s. The first time I had an injury, I didn't know how to deal with it because I’d never had a sports injury before. I pulled my hamstring while training for the inaugural Seattle Rock and Roll half marathon. I wanted my doctors and physical therapists to give me a timetable of how long it was going to take for the injury to heal and when I could resume training again. Was I even going to be healed in time for the race?

And all they told me was, “Listen to your body.” I didn’t even know what that meant. So, I read Runner's World magazines and all the running blogs and asked the running community on Twitter (this was back when Twitter was cool) – I asked everyone, and they all said, “Listen to your body.”

It was maddening because I didn’t know how to do that. How could I tell the difference between what my body was telling me versus what I wanted to hear – what I wanted it to tell me?

I had no connection to my body. Even though I was working out and training, I didn't have that deep, insightful connection with my body, let alone my mental or emotional health. In hindsight, that was a pivotal point in my health journey, all the way back in 2009.

As you may have heard me previously share, I broke my toe in October. I dropped a 15 lb. dumbbell on it. I had to wait seven weeks to see a podiatrist, who I then saw in December. He examined my toe and said it was not quite there yet but to keep doing what I’d been doing. He had me schedule an appointment for six weeks later but said that if it felt okay before then, I could cancel it, to which I asked, “How will I know that it’s okay?” I've never had a broken toe, let alone a broken bone, before, so how will I know when it's okay to start resuming things like yoga and running?

And what did he say, “Well, just listen to your body.”

At that moment, all those past moments of figuring out how to listen to my body came back to me -- experimenting and doing a little bit more every day, then jotting down notes of what did, how it felt in the moment, and then how my body responded to it later.

So, when it felt like a good time, I started doing 10-minute low-impact workouts. I use Apple Fitness Plus, which has HIIT and kickboxing workouts. However, every workout, no matter the modality, always has a modifier – someone who modifies the moves to make it a bit easier and safer.

So, I experimented by doing short 10-min cardio workouts, following the modifier to make them low impact – instead of jumping jacks, I did tapouts. And each time I did one of these workouts, I asked, “How far can I push myself today?” I recorded what I did, how I felt, and how my body responded – much like a Food Mood Poop Journal and then used that data to then inform what my next steps are.

So, like I said at the start of this episode, we're 16 days into the new year, and if you set any goals or things you wanted to stop or start doing, how are they going?

In Episode 276 I talked about following your Authority to intuitively know the correct course for you at this time in your life. Let’s dive into Authority and intuition for a moment.

Intuitive eating is such a fantastic thing. It's a kind and compassionate way of honoring our body’s needs, rather than following a fitness magazine’s advice of limiting yourself to a certain number of calories per day or what your BMI is supposed to be.

But intuitive eating only works if you know how to follow your intuition.

How are we supposed to follow our intuition if we’re disconnected from it or were never connected to it in the first place?

I’ve seen how “follow your intuition” is commonly taught, and taught in the same way. Where’s the bio-individuality? If we're all unique, why would our intuition work the same way?

Our intuition is here to guide us in decision-making.

In intuitive eating, we decide if we’re hungry in the moment, or is this what my body wants right now? In Human the correct way to make decisions is by following our unique Authority. Your Authority is your intuition.

I often see intuition taught by following our feelings. But that only works if you have an Emotional Authority. I have a Splenic Authority, so making decisions based on emotions doesn’t work for me.

Intuition doesn't work universally works the same way for everyone. Following your Authority is how you follow YOUR intuition.

I did a seven-episode series on Human Design Authorities, interviewing people who have each of the seven Authorities. If you haven’t listened to it yet or want a refresher, I’ll link to it in the show notes.

But to do a quick rundown:

Emotional Authorities have a defined Solar Plexus center. If this center is defined in your design, you have an Emotional Authority, and you’re meant to follow your feelings. You experience high and low emotional waves, so you’re best meant to make decisions when you’re in between a wave and in a calm, cool, and collected state.

Next in the order of operations is the Sacral Authority. If your design has the Solar Plexus Center undefined and the Sacral Center defined, you have a Sacral Authority. Side note: the only people who have this configuration are Generators and Manifesting Generators.

People with a Sacral Authority are meant to follow their gut. This is common advice we hear given to everyone, but it’s not correct for everyone – it’s only correct for those with Sacral Authorities.

The gut response is a physical reaction – butterflies - that you feel in your belly. It’s binary, so ask yourself “yes and no questions.” Rather than asking, “What should I have for lunch?” ask, “Should I have soup or a sandwich?” This is how a Sacral Authority follows their intuition.

Next in the order of operations is the Splenic Authority. I have a Splenic Authority because I have Undefined Solar Plexus and Sacral centers, but a Defined Spleen Centers.

The Splenic Authority is all about primal instincts – an inner knowing that we can't always explain with logic or justification. This is how I follow my intuition. I don't overthink things. I don't make pro-con lists. I don't follow my feelings because I can’t always trust my emotions because they’re prone to influence when I’m around others.

So, returning to my toe, if I’m following my Authority and intuition, I instinctively know what it can and cannot do today. It might be, “Today is not the day to push it, I need to back things off and do some seated yoga,” which is what I did today.

Like I said, back in 2009, when I was first told to “listen to my body,” I didn't have any intuitive connection to it, I lacked body, mind, and emotional awareness in relation to it. I also didn't know Human Design, and in hindsight, I floundered.

But now that I have this framework to contextualize it, I trust my decision-making abilities. That's what Human Design has done for me - it's built up my confidence in my ability to make the correct decisions.

So next is the Self-Projected Authority, those with Undefined Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Spleen Centers but Defined G-Centers, who follow their intuition by sharing their thoughts and getting them out there. It doesn’t matter if they’re speaking to another person or a voice recorder or what the other person even thinks; the tone they use reveals their truth.

Similarly, those with all the previous centers Undefined but with a Defined Heart Center have an Ego Authority. They follow it by speaking – talking things out until their true heart desires are uncovered.

With the Mental Authority, putting themselves in the correct environment is how they find clarity. It’s a rare Authority. Janelle Turner joined me in Episode 207, who shared that when she needs clarity to make a decision, she goes for a walk because being outside in nature helps her tap into her intuition.

And then the seventh Authority is a Lunar Authority and follows the moon cycle. Tanya Reyes joined me in Episode 202 for an excellent conversation, sharing tactical tips on how she does this.

So, following your Authority is how you follow your intuition, which is how you can learn to trust your ability to make the correct decisions for yourself and, as you do so, build your confidence.

This is how we build self-trust and self-confidence, and how we come to learn to love ourselves.

Yes, the other parts of our design reveal so much - we can have an Undefined Head center and get overwhelmed by all the ideas swimming in our minds. Add to that an Undefined Root Center, both of which are pressure centers, so your decisions can be influenced by the need to release pressure.

Speaking from personal experience, having Undefined Head and Root centers, I feel the pressure of things. In hindsight, I can see how I’ve made incorrect decisions purely based on the need to escape the pressure I felt.

You could also have a Defined Heart Center so that you might have made decisions based on your competitive drive, but if you don’t have an Ego Authority, that’s not the correct way for you to make decisions.

You may have been making decisions based on your open centers, the areas that you are influenceable, where you’ve absorbed the energies of the people around you.

As I’ve said, I’ve been influenced to make decisions based on the energies of others, whether it was from picking up their emotions, gut responses, or competitive drives, those decisions were not the correct ones for me.

This is why your Authority is so important, and it's crucial to get familiar with and build a relationship with it so that you can understand how to follow it and use that intuition to make the correct decisions in the correct timing.

This is how you listen to your body, honor the signals it sends you, and make decisions that are in the best interest for your health and well-being and you start by building awareness/

If you're dealing with health issues or symptoms, the Food Mood Poop Journal is the best tool to help you track patterns so you can understand what's going on and then put your detective hat on and connect those dots, then follow your Authority to guide towards the correct next steps for you.

Keeping a Food Mood Poop Journal has become second nature to me, but this year I'm also trying new tools to continue to build my self-awareness.

This year, I’m using an Astro journal. As I shared Episode 277 on astrological highlights for 2024, astrology I find fun and interesting. I don’t use it to inform my decision-making - I follow my Authority.

But I find it insightful to look and see how things unfolded. I find it interesting when the guidance for a current transit is to look back on what was happening, say, nine months prior. I’m always like, “Gosh, I wish I tracked what was happening nine months ago in my life.” So, this year, I got Astro Journal to do just that!

I also got myself a diary this year. Now, if you are of a similar age to me, then you may remember the old school diaries had little locks on them with keys. It’s where we wrote our most private thoughts and hid them under the mattress or something.

I recently did a Google search for a diary, but all that came up were planners, which wasn’t what I was looking for, until I found a really pretty one from Smythson.

It was a bit of a splurge, but as I said at the start of this episode, this year is a milestone year for me, and I want to document it, so I indulged and got myself a pretty Smythson diary that has a page-a-day for the entire year. If you want to see what it looks like, I posted a photo to my Instagram feed, and I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Maybe you have another tool, something else that you have – if you haven’t been using it, please start because tracking builds awareness to help you follow your Authority.

My new class, Healthy x Human Design, will go much deeper into all of this, with so much more. It will hopefully be coming out within a week or so of this episode airing.

You can find more information and sign up to be notified of its release either at the show notes for this episode, livefablife.com/279 for Episode 279, or over on the homepage of my website.

Oh, one more thing: I also started an Instagram channel. I created it a month or so ago because my 1 / 3 energy was curious, and had to give it a try. It doesn’t exactly work the way I envisioned, but I think there’s loads of potential to build a community there, and I’d love for you to join me as I figure it out. I’ll also include a link to it in the show notes!

So, with that, thank you so much for listening. I have always appreciated your time, energy, and attention.

And if you have any comments that you'd like to share thoughts on this episode, whether something resonated with you or you have something that you'd like to add, you can come over and find me on Instagram or leave a comment on the show notes. I love hearing from you.

With that. I'm going to sign off. I hope you have a great day, and we'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now!