How does nervous system capacity affect women’s health more than weight loss?

Nervous system capacity — the body’s ability to process stress, regulate emotion, and adapt to its environment — is the foundation of sustainable health behavior. When capacity is low, women cannot consistently adopt health-promoting behaviors, regardless of what they know about nutrition or how motivated they are. Weight loss does not build this capacity. Increasing it does — by improving interoception, emotional regulation, and the intrinsic sense of safety needed to make lasting behavior change possible.

Transcript – Ep 455 – Nervous System Capacity Women’s Health

[00:00:03] Stephanie: Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food Podcast, my sisters. I’m your host, Stephanie Dosier, and today I’m gonna answer the question, what do I think is the most important quote unquote thing that matter to women’s health?

If I had to put my finger on one thing, what would it be? And that’s where the podcast title come from, my answer to that question. So a little bit of context here. I am teaching a course right now called Self-Coaching Lab, where I teach people how to use the self-coaching framework in the context of their health coaching practice.

[00:00:43] And during the q and a, one of my student asked this question and the answer that came out of my mouth created a jaw dropping moment in the audience. And when I saw their reaction to what I just said, I’m like, oh my God, I gotta write this down. Like I’ve gotta do a whole podcast episode on that. So here we are recording this podcast episode right now, and my answer was, nervous system capacity, way over the size of our pants.

[00:01:19] I believe that that’s the number one thing that not only matters to women’s health, but that we miss completely. So this is what we’re gonna talk about today. But before we get started, since this is a Coach Corner episode segment. If you wanna dive in more into the coaching skill and the beyond, the food coaching methodology, I would recommend that you go grab the Coach Corner Vault.

[00:01:50] It’s an on-demand library of over 50 mini training on eating behavior, body image, mindset coaching, and even some on business coaching. And you can go to www dot Stephanie Dosier dot com slash Coach corner now ready to dive in into nervous system capacity.

[00:02:12] Why do I believe that nervous system capacity matters way more than the size of our pants. If you’re new here, I just wanna contextualize this, that I have been practicing nutrition counseling, coaching for the last 10 years and I have practiced exclusively using a non-diet coaching approach to nutrition and health for the last 10 years.

[00:02:45] Plus, I have lived experience of 25 years of disordered eating, of dieting, and trying to shrink my body. So that context laid in. So over a thousand client working through the non diet approach, plus my own 25 years, I can tell you that increasing the nervous system capacity will have way more impact over women’s wellbeing and health than reducing our body size.

[00:03:19] I’m not gonna make a case here as to why intentional weight loss isn’t effective long term, because that is not the purpose of this episode. So if you’re landing here and you’re like, what is she talking about? Perhaps this is not the best episode for you to start on. You may want to go through the last hundreds of episode and you can better understand why intentional weight loss in 2026 hasn’t been demonstrated as an effective tool to improve wellbeing because we do not have the understanding the tools to reduce the size of the body to lose weight and keep that weight loss long term.

[00:04:08] And even GLP one has proven to be non-effective once the medication has been stopped. So all that together to say if you want to improve someone’s health and wellbeing, health promoting behavior, have a much greater impact and sustainability long term. So you’re likely here because you’re either have a personal experience in your own life that, hmm, this whole weight centric approach to health, not effective because of what I just mentioned.

[00:05:00] Perhaps you have gone through like me a personal journey of un dieting your life, like changing the way you think about food, the way you are, your eating behavior. You perhaps even deep dive into the world of body image and you started to think about health more from a place of health promoting behavior than just a weight centric approach. Or perhaps you’re a professional in the field and you’re like, yeah, I need to dive into how to apply this at a higher efficiency rate than my practice.

[00:05:30] So we’re gonna leave the world of intentional weight loss behind us, and we’re gonna deep dive into the impact of the nervous system on our health and wellbeing. So when I talk about nervous system capacity, what do I need? So first of all, what is the nervous system? The nervous system is your brain. It’s your entire spinal cord from the base of your neck all the way down to your tailbone and the thousands of nerves that emit from that spinal cord throughout your whole body, from the tips of your finger to the tips of your toes, and that’s your entire nervous system.

[00:06:02] So it’s both in a world of mental health and emotional health, right? It’s that the unit in your body that allows you for your cognition and your emotional processing into your body. So that’s the nervous system. So what is the nervous system capacity. It’s the ability of your body and all these elements to handle your external and in an internal environment.

[00:06:34] So it’s the way by which your body process, external trigger. Like other people’s words, emotions, stress, incident accident. And it’s also how your body process your own thinking, because your thought creates your emotion. That creates your behavior. So your nervous system capacity is what will have you processing your own thought and perhaps even have the capacity to change the way you think and your belief system.

[00:07:10] So that’s the nervous system capacity, and I want you to think about it as muscle. That’s the best analogy I give to my student, is your nervous system capacity is like a muscle. The more you work it, the more capacity it has, the more you specifically do exercise to train it. Just like you will train your quad muscle in your leg, the more capacity it will have. And the less burden it is, so the less overwhelm or the less trigger you put in the nervous system, the more capacity it will have.

[00:07:49] Now one thing that’s important to understand in the concept of nervous system, way more important than the size of your pants, is also the very nuanced difference between health as what society describes it, and diet and wellness culture impose it to us versus wellbeing. So health is often physical health, and it’s also something that is measured by a metric.

[00:08:20] The way I like to think of health is our, it’s how our body adapts again to the external environment that can be measured through those metrics, right? Blood pressure blood marker, et cetera, et cetera, where wellbeing, health is part of wellbeing, but wellbeing is much broader. So wellbeing is, yeah, it’s your physical health, but it’s also your state of happiness, your state of satisfaction, your direction, and your purpose in life so you can be healthy in a low state of wellbeing.

[00:08:57] Okay, wellbeing is centric to weight neutral health, or perhaps if you’re more familiar with health, at every size framework. Okay. One of the, the difference between a weight centric health model and a weight neutral health model is how we consider health a k a wellbeing, and a weight neutral framework. We think of the wellbeing as the health as total wellbeing, so mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual.

[00:09:25] Where in a weight centric model of health we’re mostly concern with physical health, and in many cases, the provider of a health or weight centric approach to health are hill equipped or completely inequipped to actually provide health or wellbeing beyond physical health.

[00:09:56] Now, how does it show up? Or how can you determine when someone, or even yourself have a low nervous system capacity? And I’m gonna give you a lot of example, very specific to our niche, which is a non diet approach for health or weight, neutral approach to health. And one of the way by which low nervous system capacity presents itself is body image, right?

[00:10:20] Our relationship with our body, when someone is very concerned. The opinions of other people. What are people gonna think? What are people gonna say about their body? They have a fear of most often present as a fear of failure in controlling their body when they’re afraid of gaining weight, when they’re afraid of not maintaining their weight loss, and they have this need to figure out how to do things right. I saw that in my first few years of practice in nutrition, where people were ready to pay me to get to learn the quote right way of eating so that they can control their body.

[00:11:19] So body image, perfectionism around food so that they can control their body. And if we think about the, the eating sphere or arena of our practice. Low interoception awareness, right? So the ability to sense our hunger full and satisfaction cue is rooted in this low capacity to sense the inner world, and that’s what the nervous system capacity is built upon your capacity to feel the inner world.

[00:11:43] Uh, when we think about mental and emotional wellbeing, right? An inability of complete or overwhelm, I don’t wanna say complete, but overwhelmed by emotion. Completely taken off track of their goal because of their emotion resistance to learning new tools in order to achieve their goal. Exhaustion. Very high reactivity, right?

[00:12:18] We often see that with, like, when you think about being in a session with a client face to face, you will see that through like the body cues of your client. You say something and then poof, like right away they get straight up or they make all these facial expression, like there’s a high level of reactivity. If you think about health behavior, these are the people who are constantly starting and stopping, starting and stopping in their behavior.

[00:12:40] They’re constantly repeating patterns. Even though they have this like deep desire to change, they’ll say something, I don’t know why, but it’s just like I keep starting over or I keep doing this thing. A sense of helplessness, a sense of despair. These are signs of a low capacity in the nervous system.

[00:13:14] Now, why does it happen? Chronic stress, long period by which they have required from their nervous system to deal with high external trigger. So that’s what is commonly known as long period of chronic stress like these demanded from their nervous system, mostly unconsciously, a lot for a long period of time. And literally the nervous system is in a way, in an imagery, think of it as exhausted, right?

[00:13:37] In our field, diet trauma. Like I had an episode on that. If you scroll down the, the feed, one of the most recent, I’ve did multiple episodes on diet trauma, but the most recent I think is 4 27. I did it with a colleague of mine. Her name is Julie Dill, where we unpack both of our perspective on diet trauma, and it could be physical through long periods of starvation, undereating, disordered eating habits. Even eating disorder. In the case of Julie, she deals with eating disorder and for me it’s more disordered eating.

[00:14:00] Long period of feeling unsafe in the body. So the constant back to the long chronic stress exposure, like if you quote unquote hate your body, right? And you’ve been living in a space in a body for years and often decades that you ate, that is low grade chronic stress. And that leads to a low capacity nervous system because you’re constantly demanding to deal with that feeling of unsafety in your body.

[00:14:26] Lack of sleep, trauma, past event in your life. They may not be quote unquote determined as a trauma, but past experience in your life that you keep replaying in your mind, right? What I call a unmanaged mind where you are having thoughts in your brain that you don’t want to have and you don’t know how to change them, and that creates a whole bunch of emotion and anxiety into your body, and you’re constantly having to deal with that.

[00:15:18] Now, why is that? Why is that impeding our ability to have a produce health promoting behavior? If we’re not focused on the weight centric approach to health, we’re focused on improving our health promoting behavior. How does having a low nervous system capacity has such an impact? Well, it prevents us learning new health, promoting behavior. It prevents us adhering to our desired health promoting behavior to be somewhat consistent of our health promoting behavior.

[00:15:45] It impedes the behavioral structure. It impedes us putting a structure in place, both in our mind and our body or emotional body in order for us to produce the desired behavior that we want and it produced when we’re not able to create an environment for a productive behavioral structure, then we fall into coping behavior.

[00:16:11] When we are overwhelmed by our emotion, because we have a low nervous system capacity, we have to deal with this overwhelm, and that’s when coping behavior will come in. That’s when people will if you think about disordered eating, that’s when people will start, having compulsive eating behavior. That’s when people will will have emotional eating, binge eating.

[00:16:49] That’s when people will bluntly avoid doing the thing for their health. They’ll avoid doing their movement behavior that they want it to have. They’ll avoid, downregulating at night to prepare them for a good night’s sleep, right? They’ll avoid coping behavior because they’re overwhelmed by their emotion because they have a low nervous system capacity.

[00:17:00] Now when you do have a greater capacity in your nervous system, one of the most powerful thing that it does for you and your wellbeing is feeling safe, having an innate intrinsic feeling of safety. Which means that you believe you can handle things that are coming to you because you’re intrinsically feeling safe.

[00:17:28] And if you correlate that to body image, right, when you feel safe in your body, you can actually have the space and the resources for you to engage in health promoting behavior and engaging in a relationship of respect with your body. And while you’re doing that, when you have a greater nervous system capacity, you are able to feel stress, to feel frustration, and still move forward.

[00:18:03] I teach a coaching concept called reaction versus responding and how we can move from reacting to our emotion, to responding to our emotion. And that shift of being able to re react versus responding is via the nervous system capacity. So you are able to feel stressed and still move your body. You are clear. You understand the external environment. You understand that you’re having emotion right now and you’re still clear on where you’re going, and you’re still taking action towards your goal.

[00:18:31] You have a purpose. You’re moving towards your purpose, and you’re taking action to create your goal. How can we build up our nervous system capacity so we can deploy health-promoting behavior and improve our wellbeing and our health?

[00:19:01] Number one thing is understand the concept of neuroplasticity, which is the ability of your nervous system to be dynamic. It’s not the ability of not having emotion. It’s the ability to move through your emotion and neuroplasticity is an inborn, call it a skillset, an ability that your body has.

[00:19:23] However, when it’s not used, it kind of think of it as a dial on the stove, it goes down to a one or to a low setting. It never goes away. Neuroplasticity never goes away. But the more you demand from it, the more active it is for you, the more productive it can be for you. So if you are not in a place where you constantly demand from your nervous system, from your brain, from your emotional wellbeing to cope and having tools and deploying tools and, and doing the things I’m about to teach you in the last part of this podcast, it’s gonna be more challenging.

[00:19:55] So the first thing is to be aware of neuroplasticity and then to learn tools and engage in those tools so you can build up the ability of the body to the nervous system, to be dynamic, to go high, to go low, to go high, to go low.

[00:20:25] Nervous system capacity. If you think about it as a wave of up and down on a graph, it’s the ability between the highs and the low, and the more capacity you have, the shorter the period is between the high, the activation or the deactivation of the nervous system. It’s not about being neutral all the time, it’s about being capable of being high, regulate yourself back to baseline, and then come back up and down. That’s what nervous system capacity is, is the, the flexibility of the highs and low, your nervous system.

[00:21:10] So what can you do? The number one thing I do with all my client and I teach is investigate your belief and your thinking about your ability to change, in this case, the ability to change your nervous system capacity. You have to believe that you can do it. You have to help your client believe that they can do it. And my favorite tool to build up nervous system capacity to build up neuroplasticity, to build up your capacity of activating and deactivating is using your emotion because they’re present many, many times in a day, constantly for the rest of your life.

[00:21:46] I use the emotion in order to teach nervous system regulation tools. One of my favorite tool is the concept of riding the wave, right where we learn to process emotion. Now, this is critical for you as a coach if you are practicing a weight neutral approach to health. Your scope of practice needs to broaden beyond just nutrition or fitness. It needs to broaden to mental and emotional wellbeing, including how to process emotion. And this is one thing that cannot be learned only from intellectual, the or curriculum based notion. It needs to be lived and embodied.

[00:22:56] So when I talk about riding the wave, I’m talking about a seven step process that allows you to process an emotion, and it starts with labeling the sensation of the emotion into the body. So literally as you’re having an emotion naming. Tightness in my chests, emptiness in my stomach, wave of heat, like hot flashes, like you’re scanning, you’re going inwards into your body and you’re noting how a sensation, which by the way is the precursor to an emotion, shows up in your body and you’re labeling it and you’re scanning your body, labeling the emotion, and then naming the emotion.

[00:23:26] The nervous system capacity plays into your capacity to stay present with the sensation in your body for a longer period of time. And at the beginning we titrate. We do what we call minimum baseline. So we stay with the sensation we’re feeling one second, and then the next time, or maybe two days later, three seconds.

[00:23:51] Three second, we stay with the tightness in the chest. I’m feeling tightness in the chest. I’m stressed, I’m feeling tightness in the chest. And then we’re like, you’ll, if you are not practiced that, you’ll feel the urge to distract yourself to grab your phone and start scrolling or to start biting your nail or to do any other coping behavior that you may have.

[00:24:13] Building your nervous system capacity is staying with the sensation longer and longer and longer, over weeks and months of practice. That’s what it means to build your nervous system capacity, using your emotion. There’s many other technique that are present on how you can do this. That’s how I teach it, how I practice it, how I work with my client to do it.

[00:24:40] Using the concept of writing the wave in self-coaching. So if you wanna take the next step for this and you wanna do it from a perspective of looking at free resources, you can look back at podcast 423 where I talk about how to reflect on trigger using the self-coaching model. Download the coach Corner vault.

[00:25:06] In the coach corner vault, there is a mini training on how to control your emotion. I was being sarcastic that day, but by I, I put a click Make title on how to control your emotion. It’s really riding the wave that I talk about it. The second thing I want you to bring into your practice is self-compassion. It’s being able to look at your nervous system from a place of curiosity instead of judgment.

[00:25:27] And if you are ready to invest in learning this process with me, I would recommend that you come into the groundwork, which is the space where our work with people to do personal work using the methodology of the beyond the food method. And if you’re a professional and you’ve done your personal work and you’re ready to learn very specific skills to coach other people, that would be the non diet coaching certification.

[00:26:00] And that’s what I had for you today and that’s why the size of our pants doesn’t matter compared to the capacity of our nervous system, and it will be, have way more impact on your wellbeing and your health. It was a pleasure being with you. I’ll see you on the next podcast.

[00:26:19] Stephanie: If this resonates with you, the next step is the groundwork, my Beyond the Food Foundational Program for Health Professional, ready to go beyond the food and rethink how they approach nutrition eating and health behavior starting with themselves. You can go to www.stephaniedodier.com/groundwork and join us now.