Cassandra "Caz" Stark

If there’s anything I’ve researched even more than my obsession with mental health, it is food.

I love food.

And for the most part, my love of food has brought me a lot of complicated feelings about it.

Tons of people are aghast at how much I eat in one sitting. Many people rattle off cliches like, “You just have one of those metabolisms…” or they feel the need to point out that whatever I am doing isn’t healthy. People intervene in the name of love to tell me I need to eat a meal, despite the reality that I just ate them under the table.

On the flip side, society lets me know that size doesn’t matter if your skin doesn’t naturally glow, you aren’t perfectly white or perfectly brown, your curves aren’t symmetrical, and so much more.

Talk about BS (belief systems)!

I used to absorb every opinion and take it personally. I’d stomp away from dinners, mad at judgments and comparisons flying in all directions. I felt wildly misunderstood. I wanted to scream that my metabolism is actually shit, and I’m constantly fighting to regulate it. My genetics are anything but working in my favor. I was not raised eating the way I choose to eat now, so no, it isn’t just a blessing of learned behavior. And sure, iceberg lettuce might be mostly water, but it is serving me so much more and so much better than that bag of Cheetos!

Stark would remind me every time, “It isn’t about you.”

Well. Ya. I get that. But I didn’t feel that.

I had to learn it differently. I had to learn this deeply in order to let it go and begin a secure relationship with every jagged curve, pooch, puff, wrinkle, freckle, bone, or lack thereof. I had to get real with myself in order to stop having a mental breakdown if I walked less than 8 miles that day.

At the end of the day, this has little to do with how I feel about my body and a lot more to do with how I feel surrounding myself with people who do not see me, hear me, or know me, and aren’t open to understanding. Before now, I felt FUCKed. I felt immense responsibility for the people who came to me for advice and then took none of it just as I felt immensely invalidated and piss-and-vinegar levels of anger over yet another person trying to tell me how “easy” this is for me.

I let it go. Repeatedly.

On quiet days when I wasn’t triggered, but instead, I was remembering how overwhelmed I became over what someone else was/wasn’t doing for themselves, I got real with that, and I worked through it in my BeMo. A lot. Several time. Every time.

Eventually, I had a deep, full, big picture and fully detailed understanding that: you are what you absorb.

At first, this was literally on the surface.

Years ago, moving back to the U.S.A. after five years as an ex-pat, I couldn’t bring myself to walk through any of the “health” isles in any oversized, waste-store (I mean… grocery store). My taste and smell receptors were so turned on from years of eating non-GMO foods in a very different culture, that I would have an instant gag reflex just trying to buy shampoo or a vitamin. Never had I ever realized how much SUGAR America sells. *Yay, capitalism* Are you kidding? Why are we selling teeth health and then making sure that all the toothpaste has sugar-smelling flavors? Why do we have 180 different shampoo options (and I feel like I’ve looked at all of them) without a single one boasting actual, natural ingredients? I stuck to my Australian hair, skin, soap, and moisturizer products. Because ya, on the surface… you are what you absorb.

That was the beginning of my surface understanding of toxins and choosing what I do and don’t want as a part of my life. Trust me, it gets deeper.

After that, I noticed that I quickly lost 20 pounds. At first, I was stoked! I had been trying to lose those 20 pounds for years! Except, my size really didn’t change much at all. Ok. So. Ya. 10 pounds = approximately 1 inch in size. But 1 inch typically constitutes an entire dress size! I was not changing clothes. What was changing was my muscle mass. Drastically and almost instantly. Sure, I moved to Washington, DC, from Sydney, Australia. The weather was hot and humid, and I was learning how to run in it. I’m not a runner, but something about returning to my roots on the East coast made me post-traumatically attached to Mr. Steven’s track team. I was also eating more than ever. If you’ve been to DC, you immediately understand why. Washington, DC, is like the secret foodie capital of the world! It wasn’t until after we moved away from DC that I started to realize why I lost all that weight so instantly. Rejoining the American level of hustle meant taking on a serious amount of extra stress. I wasn’t learning to run to lose weight. I was desperately trying to place my anxious energy into something more positive, only to find myself 5 miles and 6 cups of coffee in by the time my coworkers arrived at their desks on the West Coast. Working for a new startup, Stark often didn’t arrive home before 8pm. Did I take that time to nourish myself? Read a book? No. Not really. I took the opportunity to clock that 13th hour of the day. We’d eat late, struggle to get up early and find ways of surviving the grind through hours of television and weekend eating marathons. Hmm. You are what you absorb.

Long story short, my cortisol levels (stress hormones) increased over the next few years as an Executive at one start-up spin-off after another. I was too stressed to gain weight. I was too stressed to get back my muscle. I wasn’t energetic. In fact, I wasn’t even happy. Doing half of what I used to do began to feel impossible. Muscle pain. Back pain. And I can’t even begin to describe how bad my sleep became.

In hindsight, I was absorbing so much more than I realized.

I was absorbing a lot of judgment and discouragement as a woman Executive. I was absorbing so many inappropriate workplace conversations that I felt like I was the crazy one for not accepting that this was somehow normal. I was absorbing the responsibility of my fellow career women coming to my office in tears. I was absorbing all of the BS (belief systems) of what it “should” mean to have this title, this pay, this career, this partnership, this chance, and more. I was absorbing the weight of having the “family job title.” I was absorbing being told what a blessing this all was and how this is better than anything I’ve had before while feeling my absolute worst. I was absorbing an almost abusive level of emotional whiplash from realizing the people I trusted and went to bat for over years of a working relationship are actually the people talking massive amounts of unsupportive shit about me behind my back. So ya, I could eat well. I could cook healthily. I could get out in the sun, absorb that vitamin D, and attempt to ground myself in prickly grass. But I was still stacking on new medicines in an attempt to feel or be capable of “normal.” I was still flying off the handle – aiming all of that absorbed shame and blame directly at Stark – often fighting for hours in the middle of the night. You don’t care what you say or who hears you when you feel nobody is listening, caring, or understanding.

I attended therapy sessions like white-flag markers in the midst of barely survived weeks (all the while knowing I was getting in trouble for leaving the office in an attempt to take care of myself). I kept telling myself what I “knew” at a surface level. I knew I didn’t sleep well. I knew I get triggered easily at night. Ok. All fun facts that are important to know, but I wasn’t doing the work to add to my Know-ing. I wasn’t asking myself why. I was placing why-energy in the hands of everyone else – continuing to live out to prove that no matter what I do, who I am, or how hard I work, I am a victim of something. At this point, it was a self-fulfilled prophecy caused by an unwillingness to embrace the discomfort of being any different from what I had always known. This mindset put me in a perpetual place of “need to.” I need to fix this. I need to get over this. I need to be nicer. I need to wake up earlier. I need to stay up later. I need to prep meals. I need to have a tough conversation with my boss. Ok, I’m doing this all. Why is it not working?

I’ll tell you why.

You are what you absorb.

As a believer in health – through and through – I have come to an intimate understanding of the three-dimensional relationship, so many of us have with toxins. From the inside out, we consume, we lather on, bathe in, and breathe things that are not good for us. Today, I am a lot more balanced from the outside in. Yes, it began on the outside, and I think for most people, it does.

On the outside, I don’t absorb toxins through my skin. I’m particular about my hair and skincare. I’m particular about what I clean my pans with. I’m particular about what toxins I allow into our home air. I’m particular about what I clean my home with. These things protect and promote healthier living.

But I also am careful not to absorb the BS (belief systems) being shot at me and the triggers of my own learned BS (belief systems) from what people do or don’t say. While the first part is necessary for health and balance, this part is the hard part. I had to really work through every trigger, every time in my BeMo Practice. As I created new, strong levels of safety for myself and consideration of myself, my subconscious naturally went deeper. I’m not there yet. I don’t think the work is ever done. But I have a full understanding, complete with months of crazy flashbacks and deeper realizations about stories that I thought I knew until I saw them in a new, secure light.

I no longer have to go around anxiously avoiding people because of their opinion or the work they aren’t doing for themselves. On the surface, I knew it wasn’t about me. That surface cliche did not help me understand how to stop making it about me. Time did. Using my practice to reprogram my subconscious and understand the why behind my triggers was priceless.

This moved me to the inside.

On the inside, I changed my gut health. I started a deep dive into what was and wasn’t good for me – understanding those surface bandaids that maybe kept me from exposing my scars, but weren’t actually healing the wound. This had just as much to do with quitting medicines, habits, and foods that were, in fact, worse for me than the help they gave me. This also meant quitting people who were absolutely not healthy for me.

Literally, I changed my health in order to be capable of absorbing the nutrients from the foods I ate. I increased bile production. I did a toxin cleanse periodically. I drastically increased proteins. I found what nutrients I was lacking. I set a strict time for eating dinner in order to protect my sleep to allow myself fewer mood swings in the here and now so I could use that same time and protected space to instead reflect on the moods and emotions of where I have been and what I have been through. Just like a physical detox, an emotional detox requires that those toxic memories come to the surface. My relationship with food turned to a primary focus on being able to nourish myself through this difficult emotional cleanse. My evening routine became my mental detox, preparing my soul in the same way a balanced, all-natural diet was feeding my body.

You are what you absorb.

But you are also up to three generations of absorbed health habits and trauma.

We carry so much with us.

To fully heal, we must do more than realize our here-and-now intake. Once we have created a safe understanding of the here and now, we can tap into what we absorbed as a child – the taste that was left in our mouths, our ability to make or form habits, and our beliefs of what we can/should/could do or the trauma around what it means to do “better.”

My feelings about my body and what I look like have little to do with who or how I am today.

So often, I’ve wondered why I had such much more confidence at such ugly-duckling phases of life than I do now. Well, here’s why. The why is that my relationship with my body has been complicated since I was four years old. My relationship with what it meant to have a body, what parts of my body were mine or were for others, what it meant to be pretty, who I was told to look like, and the way others ate around me, but somehow I was supposed to do it differently, the assumptions around class or appearance, the things I received attention for and the complications of being shamed, blamed, and verbally accosted for trying to do what I was told or taught was right without understanding the “time and place” aspects, and the absolute shame and radiating self-hatred that grew with repeated assaults not just on my body, but on my character, gaslighting me into believing I deserved all that was coming to me as it pertains to how I look which somehow, must be directly associated to the worth of who I am. Run on sentence much? Ya, it felt about the same way that it reads. Confusing.

Guess what? I don’t have that anymore.

I can tell the story without living it. I can experience a trigger without falling down a slippery slope of dissociative behaviors for hours or even weeks.

Detoxed.

My gut and my soul are far more in balance than ever before, but they aren’t there yet. My mind protects me from the finer details of repeated trauma and neglect until those details become necessary, just as our stomach passes through foods if we don’t allow what’s good to remain with us.

You are what you absorb.