A True Life Story (Anorexia, Orthorexia – Mental Disorders Related to Food Intake)

Scientists believe—and in a certain sense they are right—that the key to health could lie in the microbiome. However, the microbiome needs to be seen in the broader context of the entire ecosystem. All diseases are psychosomatic. What does that mean? That their root lies in the mind, which is full of invisible, non-physical fears that manifest in the physical body in the form of stress. The body responds to the mind, and a thought or feeling of fear automatically triggers a stress response in the body. The brain doesn’t recognize what is real and what isn’t, and therefore every fearful or mentally threatening thought is perceived as real. The brain is a chemist that mixes a chemical cocktail of stress hormones, which are then distributed through the bloodstream to the cells. The cells receive this information from the blood and respond accordingly. This is how the infinite intelligence of the body works—something we still know very little about, yet even that little we can already use to our advantage.

Let’s test these statements in practice through the story of a participant in the documentary “Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut”, who is, in fact, a pastry chef. And not just any pastry chef—a Michelin-starred one. Amazing, right? A dream come true. Who among us wouldn’t want to be a pastry chef and receive a Michelin star!? Most of the time, though, we only see the glamor and not what’s hidden beneath the surface—fear, stress, pain... which all led to illness. All of that was the price for image and perfectionism.

Let’s be wise and learn from her story, so that we don’t have to experience the same or something similar under different circumstances.

MAYA – The Life Story of a Pastry Chef with a Fear of Food

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut

When I eat something that’s not a vegetable, my stomach starts hurting, which makes my work incredibly difficult.
Cooking and food are simply in my blood. I’ve been doing it since I was little. It’s my passion, my art, and my career.
I got my first Michelin star at the age of 23. Eater named me the "sexiest chef." It’s absurd that that’s even a thing.
But you feel the need to maintain an image of a cute, tattooed gothic pastry chef. I was under tremendous pressure and I let it spiral out of control.
I struggled with severe anorexia for a long time. But now it has turned into a different eating disorder: orthorexia.
I’m obsessed with health and the most optimal nutrition. Basically, I eat a lot of vegetables and add elixirs and supplements that, according to the internet, I probably need.
I cut a lot of things out of my diet and then tried to reintroduce “joyful foods.”
But when I eat sugar, pork, butter, and the like, I get bloated and feel like throwing up for three or four days.
It’s a struggle because I’m trying to repair my relationship with food.
When you feel like your body has betrayed you, it’s hard to cope with that.
I would really like to know what I should and shouldn’t eat. What’s specifically healthy for me?

When I eat something that’s not a vegetable, my stomach starts hurting, which makes my work incredibly difficult.

MAYA – Recommendation based on gut microbiome testing from a stool sample

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut

Tim Spector: During the testing, we found that you're doing pretty well health-wise. Definitely above average. All that vegetable intake, week after week, hasn’t gone to waste.
Maya: Awesome. I also struggle with an unhealthy relationship with food. I’ve always restricted myself a lot when it comes to eating.
Tim Spector: Maya, a lot of people, just like you, think that eating a healthy salad with broccoli every day will keep them healthy. It’s not as healthy as we once thought.
Jack Gilbert: The more diverse your diet, the richer your microbiome will be. The more types of bacteria will live in your gut.
Tim Spector: And that allows you to better cope with allergies and intolerances. It’s not about restricting yourself. It’s about expanding the selection of foods you can eat.
Maya: I think the problem partly lies in the fact that I have a psychological block with certain foods. For example, pork. Sometimes it doesn’t sit well with my stomach. Can this be overcome, or will I never eat bacon again?
Jack Gilbert: Don’t say that, that’s dreadful. It’s a struggle, isn’t it?
Maya: Yes.
Jack Gilbert: I think microdosing might help you, if you started eating it in very small portions and gradually worked up to bigger ones. That could help.
Maya: I seriously like the idea of microdosing chips. It makes me really happy. I was truly moved by it. But it has been quite a long, tough journey.
I really got excited about the idea of microdosing chips. I’m changing my diet little by little. And it’s great. Sometimes I eat three chips a day and it doesn’t bother me. Even though the thought keeps running through my mind—am I eating right, or is my brain chemistry changing somehow?

"During the testing, we found that you're doing pretty well health-wise. Definitely above average. All that vegetable intake, week after week, hasn’t gone to waste."
What Tim Spector said confirms our point: the key to health isn’t the microbiome, but the mind. The test results confirmed that MAYA has a healthy microbiome. Yet she still experiences health issues, which are not rooted in her diet but in her fears and stress. The root of her issue was and remains psychosomatic. Her physical condition was a result of physiological stress. She lived in constant fear of maintaining her image.

"Eater called me the most seductive chef. It’s absurd that something like that even exists, but you feel the need to cultivate an image of a cute tattooed gothic pastry chef. I was under immense pressure and I allowed it to spiral out of control."
Creating and maintaining an image means constructing an imagined identity tied to the fear of losing it in the eyes of others. As a result of the stress her body endured, she eventually became ill.
"I suffered from severe anorexia for a long time."
She had a mental illness linked to food intake, but its core was her self-perception and fear of how others saw her. She did everything to be slim and eliminated many calorie-rich foods from her diet.

"I cut a lot of things out of my diet and then tried to reintroduce 'foods for joy.' But when I eat sugar, pork, butter and the like, I get bloated and feel like vomiting for three or four days."
Maya had a distorted mirror. She couldn’t see the amazing person—a fantastic pastry chef doing a job she loves—but only an imagined version of herself she was never satisfied with. She lived for others, not for herself.

"But it has now turned into another eating disorder—orthorexia. I’m obsessed with health and the most optimal nutrition possible."
She first suffered from anorexia, and now she suffers from orthorexia. Both diagnoses are mental illnesses with physical symptoms. Essentially, she lived in constant fear. Her illness was mental because the mind is ill when it is filled with fears. Fear is the trigger for the stress response, so without realizing it, her body was operating in constant stress, making healing extremely difficult.
But it’s enough to eliminate fear, remove stress from the body, and the body will heal itself. If we remove the cause—the trigger of the stress response, which is always fear—we’ll be able to eat everything again and support our health with proper nutrition.

It’s true that it’s easier for a healthy person to advise the sick. We acknowledge that people who already have allergies or intolerances don’t look for the cause, but only for the foods they can eat without getting sick.
By removing the cause, which is always a subconscious fear program triggering the stress response in situations where there is no real threat to life, we create the conditions for the body to activate its healing—self-repairing, self-healing, and self-cleansing processes—so we can eat everything again.

"I think the problem partly lies in the fact that I have a psychological block with certain foods."
In Maya’s case, the psychological block is nothing more than fear of eating anything other than vegetables.
"When I eat something that isn’t a vegetable, my stomach starts to hurt."
Fear that she’ll feel sick if she eats anything besides vegetables. At this point, she lived in a false belief that everything else was harmful and would give her a stomach ache.

If she realizes that what she believes is a lie, she can change her belief and its consequences. We always act according to what we believe.
If she believes she can eat everything, she will be able to.
Maybe not immediately, because the microbiome also needs time to adapt to new types of food, but gradually, yes.
By understanding the causal relationships, she can remove the mental restrictions of fear from her mind and, by changing her belief to a health-promoting one—that the body was created to eat everything—she can truly begin to eat everything again, step by step.

But that’s easier said than done.
The subconscious mind, where our fear-based programming resides, is a million times stronger than the conscious mind.
It’s not enough to simply say, "Tomorrow I won’t be afraid and I’ll start eating everything." It doesn’t work like that.
It’s a journey of transformation. The most effective path is to reprogram your fears—but that’s internal work, and not everyone is ready for it.

That’s why a simpler and more accessible approach is the path of conscious change—for example, by overcoming fears through small amounts of food we are afraid of, fearing it will make us sick.

"We think microdosing might help, if you start eating it in very small portions and gradually work your way up to larger ones."
That might help.
"Try incorporating smaller portions into your meals, and if you give it a few months, over time you might be able to eat a much wider range of foods."

"Microdosing chips really appeals to me. It makes me happy. I was totally moved by it. But it’s been quite a long, difficult journey."
Microdosing helps her overcome fear, even though background fear programs still activate—worrying whether even small doses of food might harm her body.
"I really got excited about the idea of microdosing chips. I’m slowly changing my diet. And it’s great. Sometimes I eat three chips a day and it doesn’t bother me. Even though I keep wondering whether I’m eating right or whether my brain chemistry is somehow changing."

Maya’s path to healing leads through the removal of fear from the mind by understanding that there is nothing to be afraid of. She didn’t feel sick because of what she ate, but because she was afraid of the food and imagined in advance that it would hurt her stomach. From a mental projection of future stomach pain, a “physical” stomach pain emerged. The thought materialized into pain. The body reacts to the mind and follows it. This is a beautiful example of the nocebo effect—when we believe a negative lie, the body responds based on that negative belief. As we’ve said before, the brain is just a chemist, and every thought is real to it. The body adjusted its physiology to the imagined pain, and that’s why when she ate what she feared, her stomach actually started to hurt—on a physical level. But not because of the food itself. That pain didn’t exist on the level of the body’s processes; it was only suggested on the mental level. Maya’s entire problem is psychosomatic. If she removes fear from her mind, she will once again be able to eat everything, because the body, free of stress, functions in an open, growth-based mode—as it was designed to. In an open state without fear and stress, the body no longer has to respond to negative thoughts full of fear and pain—because there are no more.

Let me share one more real-life example of how the body reacts to the mind. While writing this post, I witnessed the same kind of body-mind reaction we’re talking about here. I made English breakfast for my daughter, which included sausages. After she had eaten them, she asked me: “Daddy, weren’t those sausages spoiled? They tasted a bit strange.” As a joke, I replied that maybe they were, because I thought they tasted weird too. She immediately felt nauseous and ran to the bathroom. This is a perfect example of how the body reacts to the mind. If I had told her that I bought them yesterday and that they are supposed to taste exactly like that, she would have stayed completely calm. It might not have been a culinary delight, and she probably wouldn’t eat them again, but she certainly wouldn’t have gone to throw up. This is exactly what Maya experienced—her body reacting to the thought of stomach pain with actual “physical” stomach pain.

It’s amazing to know that the body works this way. In the future, it’s therefore important to be aware that if we decide to eat something again that we were previously afraid of, we must not have expectations about how the body will react. And why? Because expectations resonate with the frequency of fear, and the mind is focused on the future outcome. Will my stomach hurt? Will it not? Well, it will. In such a fearful mindset, you will definitely feel stomach pain again because the frequency of fear associated with that food is present in the expectations—which are nothing more than thoughts of fear about whether something will or won’t happen in the future. It’s hard to explain in words.

Just as you learn to listen to your body through feelings, learn to perceive your thoughts and the feelings that stem from them. Pause and feel that feeling when you're afraid. Focus your attention inward. Tune into it. Become aware of it. Consciously observe it. Once you begin to notice it, you can start working with it. That will be the beginning of change. Then you’ll be able to ask yourself the question: What am I really afraid of?
At that point, you’ll understand that you are the creator, and everything happening to you is self-created. You’ll also realize that thoughts matter, and with that knowledge, you will be able to consciously influence processes in the body. What your thoughts are and how your body reacts to them will then depend solely on you.

CONCLUSION and LESSON from the story

Many people have already realized that the path to healing is not about suppressing symptoms, but about healing the root cause. And therefore, true healing is not just about diet.
Healthy eating and the decision to heal through food are consequences of a change in thinking.
We change our lifestyle into one that supports health, during which we begin to care more about the body and also about other aspects of our being, which—just like the body—need proper nourishment for healthy functioning.
So if we truly want to be healthy—or to heal—we must remove the cause, which is always some destructive energetic pattern stored in our subconscious mind, one that triggers the body’s stress response in situations that are not life-threatening.

All this information is fundamental and serves to deepen our understanding of the body and its processes through awareness of broader connections. The topic of health is very complex, but for awakening and understanding that we can consciously influence processes in the body, this basic information is enough for now.
If you want to learn more, get the books by Alexander Loyd – The Healing Code and The Greatest Principle in the World – which will take you deeper into the topic of reprogramming fear into love.
And why love? Because love heals, and in the frequency of love, you cannot get sick. Where there is love, there is no fear.
If this topic speaks to you, feel free to reach out to me and I will guide you through the world of using energetic tools that will free your mind from fear and your body from stress.
With this reprogramming, you will perceive not only life as a miracle, but your own life will become a miracle. You will be healthy, happy, and fulfilled...

This power to change our programs that trigger the stress response in situations that are not life-threatening belongs to us alone. No one else can do it for us.
Scientists, as well as modern medicine, tend to overlook stress as one of the main causes of all diseases. Everyone avoids this because they don’t know what to do with it. It’s invisible, and diagnoses are made based on physically visible symptoms of the body, which are actually only consequences of long-term stress.
But doctors can’t treat our programs—because they don’t know them. Today, diagnoses are given, not causes. It’s easier to diagnose based on visible symptoms and suppress them with medication or surgery.
That’s why the responsibility for our health lies solely with us.
We not only have the ability to heal ourselves, but also to consciously support the body in the proper functioning of its self-healing, self-cleaning, and regenerative processes.

We lived our lives—no one else.
Although we may not consciously remember many experiences, everything we’ve lived through is stored in our memories, resonating with a specific frequency.
The only path to healing is the path of self-awareness and internal work with ourselves and with the energetic models embedded in our memories.
Results come gradually when we remove fear from those memories.
Once fear is absent, we also remove stress from the body, allowing it to function as it was created to function.

Just look at how wounds heal.
If our body is not under stress and its self-healing and self-repair processes are unhindered, wounds heal very quickly.
But if they don’t heal fast and tend to become inflamed, these inflammatory processes are a message to us that our body is in a stress state and the immune system is functioning in a limited mode.
And this is something most of us have experienced.

The tiger nut is a true superfood, providing comprehensive nutrition for cells and promoting healthy body processes.
But even the benefits of tiger nuts won’t be fully utilized by the body if we don’t heal our minds.
Healing the mind means freeing it from fear, which triggers the stress response in non-life-threatening situations.
We live in fear—without even realizing it.
And if we don’t know that fear is the trigger, we cannot consciously influence the processes in our body or help it function properly.
We live in stress while at the same time trying to be healthy. But that’s contradictory.
We must first eliminate stress, and only then will everything we do for our health—what we eat, drink, exercise—truly contribute to our body’s well-being and overall vitality.

Finally, we just want to say what tiger nuts and TIGERNUT products mean to us.
They are a gift of life and a tool for fulfilling our mission—to help people on their journey to health by spreading the idea of a NEW CONCEPT OF HEALTH, where everything is interconnected, and we alone are responsible for the state of our health and its creation.