Holistic Life Navigation

Luis and Camille riff on GLP-1s. They are not a silver bullet, nor do they teach you how to relate to food, but they can be a great temporary auto regulator and bridge while a new food relationship is built.  In an era of overfed and undernourished people, Luis and Camille talk about how to get nutritional needs met. Resmaa Menakem speaks about culture vs strategy. Diet culture is a strategy. Our...

Stress is a short term experience that results in elevated adrenaline that often manifests with higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, muscle tension and anxiety. Certain foods can increase our fight-or-flight stress hormones, putting our body on a hormonal rollercoaster, while other foods can increase our capacity for peace.  Luis’ book, Food Therapy , has more of the philosophy and practic...

Luis and Nicole Sachs dig into the depths of pain. She believes pain is caused by fear, and the meaning we assign to the pain, keeping the nervous system in fight or freeze. If we think something is wrong with us, a stress response results, because we become our own threat.  Nicole lived in her own cage of pain, fear and shame until she found Dr. Sarno’s work. He believes back pain is due to bottl...

Feeling anxious? Your body might need to down-regulate.  Feeling depressed? Your body might need to up-regulate.  This modulation of finding balance can be achieved in two ways, through a simple supportive practice Luis offers, and through food. Food affects our biology 24 hours a day. What we eat can activate us into a fight-or-flight response, effectively inducing stress. Or, we can consciously...

PSA: psychiatry does not have any case reports of diseases that are validated! This shortcoming of the DSM is why Luis dropped out of psychology and instead chose holistic psychology. As Luis sees it, behavior is not a fixed identity.  There is no biochemical data proving “mental disease”. What we can track is neurotransmitters, like seratonin. 50-90% of these are made in the gut. Cue nutrition. F...

He lost 10 pounds in a month. She lost 125 pounds in 4.5 years.  Why? Because they didn’t focus on the weight. Camille and Luis focused on tending to their nervous systems so that their bodies could shift from fat storage mode to fat burning mode.  Camille credits her shift to focusing on ease, energy, and flow. She also focused on reducing her adrenaline overload, then she worked on reducing her...

Michaeleen Doucleff joins Luis for an effervescent meeting of minds in this joyful podcast. A reporter and an author with a Ph. D. in biochemistry, Michaeleen’s knowledge base is vast and fascinating. In 2021 she published Hunt Gather Parent , and in March 2026 she published Dopamine Kids . Luis credits her work as changing his family’s life because of fundamental parenting shifts she shares that...

Camille Leak, Grey Doolin, and Luis chat about protecting their peace amidst dysregulated political times. With the privilege of their safety, they are attuning to what is true for them and where their agency lies.  So many are glued to screens, attuning to someone else’s story and suffering, bypassing the okay-ness of their own reality. This attunement to suffering doesn’t always resource them to...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Join Luis for a quick chat about the taboo art of cancelling plans. Once loath to cancel, Luis revels in the deliciousness of cancelling when his body needs to.  Most of us live from our desire, or conditioned desire, and push our bodies past capacity to keep our schedules intact. But true integrity lies in our alignm...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Luis welcomes back Nicole LePera to the podcast to chat about her new book, "Reparenting the Inner Child." They discuss what it's like being real and messy in the public eye, and the role the fawn response plays in that experience. They explore how the inner child shows up in daily life, how tending to...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Neuronutritionist Timothy Frie joins Luis today. Tim learned early in his studies that the neural pathways of appetite and food-seeking are the ones most impacted by stress, and that stress increases nutrient demand. He connects the threads for us on how he followed this curiosity, healed his body and disordered eatin...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Kickin’ it old school, Luis does a solo meander around the topic of belonging. Videoless podcasting, as he is today, allows his vision the enjoyable option to focus on whatever it wants, like the ant walking on a nearby plant. (Fun HLN fact, Camille decided she wanted to learn from Luis when she saw his reaction to a...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Dopamine, amino acids, hopelessness, and beans! Let's dive in with Luis and Camille as they explore burnout and freeze alongside ADHD.  If we get our dopamine from ultra processed foods, devoid of micronutrients, lacking L-Tyrosine, we do not replenish the building blocks to make more dopamine. We find ourselves...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book "How do I stimulate myself to get through life without burning out and getting sick?" Today Luis explores this question, sharing what he wrote in a recent newsletter. He also discusses other upcoming offerings, where you can learn more in a nuanced, somatic environment. You can watch the replay of the webina...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Throwback to when Camille’s weekends contained 16 bottles of wine, and a day contained 80 cigarettes for Luis. Wine and cigarettes respectively calmed and stimulated their neurodivergent brains into surviving.  They no longer need wine or cigarettes because they live in alignment with their interests and capacity: par...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book We aren’t gonna tell you how to fix ADD/ADHD. (Spoiler alert, you or your loved one don’t need fixing.) We are, however, going to teach our 6-month group on how to relate to ADHD, in yourself or in someone else. The actual problem is a societal standard our brain wasn’t designed for.  In this podcast we are talking ab...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book At the age of nine Luis was diagnosed with ADHD. He never medicated with pharmaceuticals: instead his drugs of choice were coffee, cigarettes, and a stimulating diet. Over the years Luis has learned how to reduce the stimulants needed to keep him engaged.  ADD/ADHD is when there is not enough dopamine getting to the b...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book In this replay episode, we explore ADHD or RITC -- a Radical Inability To Conform. Luis shares with us his own childhood experiences with ADHD, Tourette's syndrome, and nervous ticks. Often people are prescribed medications to suppress these conditions but Luis questions what would it mean to allow ourselves to r...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Our favorite biochemist, Karen Hurd, joins us again to discuss how stress fuels disease. Chronic levels of stress, be it from food, relationships, physical exertion, thought patterns, or the environment, all tax the adrenal glands. Karen tells us how and why this happens. With taxed adrenals we are left feeling burnt...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Kymber Maulden joins us on the podcast today. Fertility isn't just for women who want to be mothers, it is a sign of health in menstruating females. Trauma stresses and rapidly oxidizes the body, causing it to need even more nutrients and therefore be in metabolic debt. This draws on resources contributing to low...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book The new Food Pyramid is released in the United States, turning the old one on its point. Regardless of how you feel about the administration it is released under, the focus has shifted from carbs and demonizing fats to centering protein, vegetables, nuts, beans and healthy fats. Camille reminds us that it is a guideli...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Luis and Camille banter as they dive into the concept of the Self in somatics. Along the way Luis offers 3 practices to work with finding the Self as witness. This witnessing allows us to be with a sensation or state and feel it rather than avoid it. It also helps us dis-identify from the state. From there we can expe...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Luis and Tasha talk about beauty standards, eating disorders and their role in Tasha's life. She used food as a way to control her appearance and fit into beauty standards. Her hormones tanked. Out of desperation she began the complicated journey of taking control of her own health. In 2020-2021 she found herself...

PRE-ORDER the upcoming book now: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/the-book Meet Linda Erman, Luis' Somatic Godmother, Art Therapist and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. About a decade ago Luis decided to go back to school for psychology. Instead of school his own body's resurgence of symptoms led him to Linda and her Somatic work. Linda herself found SE in her 50s. SE carefully t...

Curious about how Luis teaches? Here is your window into a nutritional teaching about stored trauma, visceral fat, and inflammation.  Stored trauma in the body sets off a chain reaction resulting in elevated insulin, putting the body into fat storage mode. Visceral fat becomes an endocrine organ producing protein molecules called cytokines that create an inflammatory response. This process primes...