The Metabolism Keeps the Score

How your nervous system, your stories, and your younger self shape every hunger, craving, and change attempt you make

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.

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Most people approach metabolism like it’s a math problem or a hormone puzzle. Eat less. Move more. Track the macros. Balance the hormones. Fix the gut. Optimize the thyroid. Hack the cortisol. Everyone assumes that if they can just solve the metabolic Rubik’s Cube, their body will finally behave.

But metabolism is not a calculator. It’s not a furnace. It’s not a hormone factory.

Metabolism is a stress-sensing and responding apparatus… a system whose primary job is to assess the world and answer one question:

“How safe am I?”

Your hunger, cravings, energy, sleep, digestion, inflammation, and fat storage are not random. They are downstream consequences of how your nervous system interprets your life.

And the nervous system does not interpret your life logically.
It interprets your life emotionally… through stories written long before adulthood ever arrived.

To understand this, let me take you back to the moment my own story started writing on my physiology.

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The Night on the Baseball Field

I was seven years old, standing alone on a dark baseball field. Everyone else had already been picked up. The coach was gone. The parents were gone. There were no cell phones. I didn’t know how to use a payphone. I didn’t know how to get home. I didn’t understand logistics or miscommunication or adults managing multiple kids.

All I understood was this:

I am alone. And I am not safe.

The nervous system doesn’t write essays. It writes headlines.
It wrote one in me that night:
“You can be left.”
“You are on your own.”
“You have to protect yourself.”

That headline became a Misguided Unconscious Decision—MUD.
Not trauma.
Drama I wasn’t equipped to interpret.

And once MUD is written, it becomes the lens through which the hypothalamus reads the world for decades.

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The Big Idea

Everyone Thinks It’s Calories… It’s Not

People talk about metabolism like it’s a calorie furnace. Boost it and you burn more fat. Slow it and you get stuck. But metabolism is much closer to a thermostat wired to a security system.

That system sits primarily in the brain, in the hypothalamus. It’s constantly sampling information:

Food availability.
Light cycles.
Temperature.
Movement.
Social signals.
Threat cues.
Emotional tone.
Internal stories.

And it sends that readout to the pituitary, which then broadcasts a cascade to the adrenals, thyroid, ovaries, or testes. That’s where cortisol, adrenaline, thyroid hormone, sex hormones, hunger hormones, reproductive hormones, and immune signals come from.

Your metabolism reflects your perception far more than your behavior.

If your nervous system believes the world is unpredictable, unsafe, or overwhelming, the body will shift into metabolic rigidity:

Hunger rises.
Cravings intensify.
Sleep fractures.
Energy swings.
Digestion misfires.
Fat storage increases.
Recovery drops.

Not because you’re broken.
Because your body is trying to help you survive a world it thinks you live in.

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Your Hypothalamus Is Driving the Car

The reason calorie rules and hormone hacks usually collapse is simple:

Your hypothalamus doesn’t care about your goals.
It cares about your safety.

If the nervous system detects unsafety, it will override every conscious plan you make. Hunger will increase. Cravings will get louder. Motivation will evaporate. Energy will tank. All of this is protective.

What drives that “unsafety”?
Not the present moment.
Not your adult logic.
But old MUD written when you had no context, no emotional regulation, no coherence, and no power.

This is why adults behave like scared children under stress:

The physiology belongs to adulthood.
The perception belongs to childhood.

And perception determines metabolism.

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The Lions That Never Leave the Grass

To truly understand this system, picture the two of us on safari. The truck breaks down. The guides leave to find help. We’re standing in tall grass on the African plains, and off in the distance, we see lions. They aren’t attacking us. But they’re watching.

What happens?

Hypervigilance.
Muscles tighten.
Breathing accelerates.
Heart rate spikes.
Digestion slows.
The amygdala takes over.
And the hypothalamus fires a hormonal storm to keep us alive.

This is appropriate.
This is danger.

Now imagine the guides return, we get rescued, and we are back near the fire at camp.

The body relaxes.
This is safety.

But humans experience a third state:
Safeness.
Not just the absence of danger, but the nervous system’s internal permission to relax.

Here’s the problem:
Most adults are technically safe but do not feel safeness.
Their bodies behave as if the lions never left the grass.

That is what MUD does.
It makes the world feel filled with invisible lions.

And metabolism responds accordingly.

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How Children Become Strivers, Seekers, and Soothers

Once MUD settles into the nervous system, people adapt. These adaptations look like personality types, but they are actually survival strategies.

Strivers go outward.
They cope by overperforming: more work, more discipline, more money, more achieving, more projecting “I’m fine.” Perfection becomes armor. Productivity becomes safety. They try to outrun the lions by outrunning themselves.

Seekers go inward.
They dig for meaning, motives, wounds, and causes. They read the books, attend the workshops, explore the psychedelic retreats, do the breathwork, chase the insights. They try to intellectualize the lions away.

Soothers check out.
Food, alcohol, scrolling, sex, shopping, porn, weed, TV—anything that turns the volume down. It’s not laziness. It’s the only strategy that reliably quiets the internal threat system.

Strivers try to control the external world.
Seekers try to decode the internal world.
Soothers try to escape the whole thing.

But all three are simply MUD wearing different clothes.
And all three create metabolic consequences.

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MUD: The First Identity You Never Chose

MUD forms through a simple equation:

Sympathetic activation + immature meaning-making = a lifelong story of danger.

The sympathetic system activates (heart rate up, stress hormones surge), but the child has no context to interpret why. So the nervous system makes a fast decision that feels true forever.

This happens with:
The baseball field.
The volatile parent.
The shaming comment.
The unpredictable household.
The emotional inconsistency.
The dismissal.
The betrayal.
The humiliation.

Not trauma in the capital-T sense.
Drama repeated until it became identity.

MUD is the box your nervous system believes you must live inside to stay alive.

And metabolism behaves according to that box.

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Where Metabolism Actually Breaks

When MUD is active, the nervous system gets stuck in two patterns:

Hypervigilance (Striver physiology):
Overtraining
Overworking
Overthinking
Overdoing
Chronic sympathetic arousal

Collapse (Soother physiology):
Fatigue
Shutdown
Avoidance
Numbing
Compulsive self-soothing

Both create metabolic rigidity.
Both distort hunger, cravings, sleep, digestion, and hormones.
Both create weight gain or weight instability.
Both can coexist in the same person across different seasons.

Seekers oscillate between both states—chasing self-improvement and then needing to escape it.

This is not lack of willpower.
This is physiology obeying old perception.

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Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain

To change metabolism, you must change the nervous system’s story about stress.
And to change the story, you need two ingredients:

Activation (entering the sympathetic system on purpose)
New meaning (while the system is open)

This is the foundation of memory reconsolidation.
It is not visualization.
It is not affirmation.
It is not mindset work.

It is entering the same physiological doorway where the original MUD was written… and rewriting the interpretation.

You do not need perfect memories.
You only need the emotional imprint.

When you are in an activated state—via movement, breath, or deliberate arousal—you bring awareness to that old story or pattern. The younger part of you shows up, and your adult self finally has a chance to speak into the scene:

“You weren’t actually abandoned.”
“You weren’t the problem.”
“You weren’t unsafe forever.”
“You didn’t deserve that.”
“You did nothing wrong.”

The nervous system updates.
The hypothalamus recalibrates.
Metabolism begins to relax.

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How You Teach Your Nervous System It’s Allowed to Relax

Most people use exercise to punish their metabolism.
But the most powerful metabolic interventions are nervous-system interventions.

Short, intense, individualized bursts of movement—exercise snacks—teach the hypothalamus that activation isn’t deadly. It’s stimulus without threat.

Morning light tells the brain:
“Life is predictable. There is order. You can settle.”

Slow, controlled exhalations and humming activate the vagus nerve and tell the body:
“The lions are gone.”

These are adaptogens—not herbs, not supplements, not hacks.
They are pattern disruptors for the threat system.

When done consistently, they restore metabolic flexibility, ease cravings, stabilize hunger, improve digestion, deepen sleep, and regulate mood.

Not because they burn calories.
Because they untie knots in the nervous system.

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What Real Metabolic Change Actually Is

Real metabolic transformation begins when your nervous system stops preparing for danger that isn’t there.

Your metabolism was never the enemy.
It was the bodyguard protecting the child you once were—
the child alone on the baseball field,
the child hearing lions in every rustling leaf,
the child who did not have the context to understand the world.

When that child is finally reassured, honored, and integrated…
your metabolism can stop bracing
and start adapting.

That is the beginning of metabolic flexibility.
That is the beginning of identity change.
That is the beginning of safeness.

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PS: If you’re ready to stop getting derailed by the same identity patterns and become the kind of person whose metabolism, mindset, and nervous system finally work together, explore my Next Level Human coaching program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching

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