The Craig Van Cast
Hey, I’m Craig. I've dedicated more than a decade to understanding the human spine. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learnt. Get started with my SPINE STRENGTH project - Part 1 is free. Subscribe and you’ll receive my work as I release it.
The Craig Van Cast
Stop Dieting Now (500M neurons already know)
Stop your diet. Stop counting calories.
Your body's intelligence is far superior to any tracking app, and it's time you learned how to listen to it.
This is how you move from fighting your body with rules to aligning with its natural wisdom for effortless, sustainable health.
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––– THE CRAIG VAN CAST –––
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––– CONTENTS –––
00:00 Introduction: The Disconnect Between Diet Apps and Body Intelligence
00:55 Personal Journey: From Distrust to Discovery
01:58 The War Against Our Own Bodies
02:22 Introducing Nutritional Embodied Intelligence
05:50 System 1: The Gut-Brain Axis
07:28 System 2: The Homeostatic Controller
09:23 System 3: Somatic Markers
11:47 System 4: The Microbial Collective
14:40 Interoception: The Master Interface
17:44 The Hedonic Hijack: Modern Manipulation
19:51 Practical Steps to Reconnect with Body Intelligence
22:17 Conclusion: Trusting Your Body's Wisdom
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You have 500 million neurons in your gut, but your diet rules and tracking app have zero connection to what's actually happening inside your body. Plus your body processes thousands of signals in real time, but you think tracking your macros. Easy enough to know what your body needs. I mean, we've all been taught to trust basic math over the intelligence that every wisdom tradition has called sacred. But your body is your temple, and it's only as modern men who treat our temples like machines on a factory floor and try to override its intelligence with spreadsheets. Your body is designed to guide you perfectly, but our modern culture has taught us to mistrust and override its intelligence. I used to live in a body that I didn't trust. I thought it was blind. I thought it was stupid, and I thought that it would just break randomly. I wasn't able to trust my own body. I thought it needed managing like a. Unreliable broken machine. Everyone said tracking calories meant taking responsibility, but my body wasn't broken. In fact, it was phenomenally intelligent. I just couldn't hear what it was saying. Through all the noise and distrust I discovered it is more intelligent and relevant. Than any diet we could ever put together. No matter how well researched our diets become, there will always be disconnected, external rules, unrelated and unresponsive to the reality of our internal changes and uniqueness. When you're dieting, you are in nothing short of a war against your own body. By trying to ignore or override its natural signals and instead imposing calculations or rules on it. Plus, that's a war that nobody wins. Neither you nor your body wins that war. It's a tragedy. Now I'm gonna walk you through what I am. Calling our nutritional embodied intelligence, or what I'm referring to when I say our nutritional embodied intelligence, a network of four connected systems that make any tracking app look like a toy calculator. Plus, I'm gonna show you the way that you can use these intelligence systems and the single biggest challenge that's stopping you from using these systems. Automatically, spontaneously. This is power versus force when it comes to our relationship with food. The difference between being a puppet who's dependent on external guidance versus a pilot who's responding to reality in real time force is fighting your body with willpower and restriction and following. Externally imposed rules. It's creates resistance. It's a recipe for resistance, and it leads to metabolic damage. While power is aligned with your body's intelligence, it's effortless, it's sustainable, and it reconnects us with what the ancient Greeks called the healing power of nature within us. I'll explain now. What I'm talking about when I say nutritional embodied intelligence, what are these systems? It's our body's built in decision making system. The biological wisdom that's directly connected to our needs. Hunger satisfaction, nutritional needs, energy, stress. And it operates with a precision that no technology can match from moment to moment adapting with our needs. Every ancient healing tradition built their entire system around one radical idea that our body already knows how to be healthy. They didn't need rules or algorithms. They had access to something infinitely more sophisticated. It's only us modern men who think we need spreadsheets to eat properly. Our challenge here is that we've been taught that these signals don't exist or worse, that these signals cannot be trusted. I mean, when last did you hear someone say that you should listen to your hunger? Instead, we hear that we should eat only after midday or every three hours or during every lunch break only. And when did, when last, did you hear someone tell you to trust your cravings? No. The advice is to be disciplined and that we must restrain from our urges. Your body's been sending you signals your whole life, but you've been taught to ignore them, to suppress them. But before we can start to trust our body's intelligence, we need to understand what signals I'm actually talking about. We need to learn the language that our bodies have been speaking, that we've been trained to ignore and distrust. We'll also look at why we've come to not trust them. So let's start by looking at four systems that make up our nutritional embodied intelligence. System one, the gut brain axis. Our information superhighway our gut contains 500 million neurons. That's more neurons than our spinal cord. It's called the second brain for a damn good reason. This network communicates with our brain through the vagus nerve, which is the main information highway between our gut and our brain. 90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve carry signals from the gut to our brain, not the other way around. It's our gut that is leading this conversation by our country mile, constantly sending our brain real time updates about our nutritional state. Our gut produces 95% of our body's serotonin, our happy chemical, and it's our. Major production site for dopamine. Our motivation chemical. This directly influences our mood and motivation continuously, constantly changing. When I reconnected with its signals, I realized my gut had been trying to tell me things all along, but somehow I just wasn't seeing them. But our gut doesn't randomly complain. It's sending 500 million neurons worth of wisdom straight to our brain. But all of this neurological data is not acting alone. System two is our homeostatic controller, the master regulator, our hunger and fullness system. Ghrelin is our hunger hormone and it signals us when to eat. Leptin. Our fullness hormones signals when to stop eating. It's supposed to be quite straightforward, but in many people struggling with their weight, they develop a resistance to leptin. Despite them having high levels of leptin from their stored fat, their brains become deaf to its signal. So the hypothalamus, which is our brain's control center. Thinks these people are starving while they're actually surrounded by stored energy. This intensifies when they start dieting. When they restrict calories, then their hunger hormone rises while their fullness hormone sensitivity drops even further. These hormones then drive them to overeat, so they're not suffering from a lack of willpower, but rather their biology is rebelling against the restriction. This is their embodied intelligence, protecting them from what it perceives as famine. Their body doesn't know the difference between a diet and starvation. It just knows that food has been restricted, and it must compensate for that. This is why diets fail for people struggling with their weight. They're not fighting food. They're fighting millions of years of survival programming. Their body isn't broken. It's running. Ancient software in a modern environment. Yet these sensations of hunger and fullness are not the only bodily sensations driving us. Our bodies remember every single meal as physical sensation. This is our intelligence system. Number three, the somatic markers, our body's memory bank. Somatic markers are our way of storing experiences as physical sensations. This comes from the work of the neuroscientist Antonio DeMaio. He's shown that a specific region in our brain integrates these body memories and creates what we call gut feelings. If you've ever noticed how certain foods make you feel energized while others leave you feeling sluggish, then you've experienced. A slice of semantic intelligence. Our body doesn't just randomly feel strange things. It keeps score of every single meal. Think about that. Our body remembers every meal we've ever eaten and stores the outcomes as bodily sensations. And if that wasn't profound enough, these aren't just memories. There are simulations when we contemplate a food choice. Our brain runs a prediction based on past experiences and generates a physical feeling. It's like our brain creates a preview of how that food will make us feel by replaying similar past experiences in our body. For example, if we're craving something salty, then our body might be running a simulation that says. it needs minerals. If we're drawn to f uh, fresh vegetables, our system might be forecasting that alkalizing foods are required. This is direct experiential knowledge versus intellectual ideas. Our body knows, served us last time and guides us in real time to make good choices. Someone operating as a calculator dismisses these cravings as weakness and distraction while someone operating as the Oracle recognizes them as part of their embodied intelligence. Plus your own body is not the only one creating these physical memories. You have trillions of co-authors living inside of you that are participating in the simulation. And this brings us to intelligence system number four, the microbial collective, our internal bacterial parliament. We are never eating alone. We're feeding trillions of microbes that have their own agenda and often they're actually the ones calling the shots. Researchers discovered this while studying food flies. They made the flies protein deficient and watched them develop intense cravings for protein-rich foods as expected, but then they added two, only two specific bacteria species to the fly's guts. And suddenly the flies lost all interest in protein. Even though nothing had changed regarding their protein deficiency. The bacteria inside the flies were producing chemical signals that tricked the fly's brains into believing that they had enough protein. And the bacteria did this because they needed sugar, not protein. So they manipulated their host to meet their needs. Instead of the host's own needs, this same manipulation is happening in our gut continuously. Some gut bacteria thrive on fiber and produce signals that make us crave vegetables. Others prefer sugar and can literally hijack our brains reward system to make us crave sweet foods. So when you say that you're craving chocolate, the question becomes is that you talking or your gut microbes, those so-called blind and stupid cravings, might just be the bacterial parliament inside your gut voting on what serves them best. This is just. One reason why getting our body back to baseline is so important because if our gut is in a state that we call dysbiosis, then it's gonna be a lot harder to hear our body's intelligence. Plus healthy gut bacteria, beneficial gut bacteria, support beneficial cravings, bacteria in an imbalanced gut. Hijack our cravings and make us one foods that feed their needs and not our own. In fact, often at odds with our own in a healthy gut, the needs of these microbes are much more aligned with our own needs, and they push us towards foods that serve both our needs and theirs. So how do we actually use. Or connect with all of these systems, all four of these body intelligence systems. This brings us to the practical experience and implementation of these four intelligence systems, and this all happens within our master interface Interoception, this is the key to the most important question. With all this incredible intelligence in our body, the gut brain access the hormones, the physical memories, the microbiome, how do we actually use them? How do we access and use this intelligence? that's where interoception comes in. think of this as our eighth sense, and it's the master interface for all the other systems. Think of interception as our ability to perceive our own internal states. And this is far from only mystical studies have looked into this and have shown that people with higher interceptive sensitivity, naturally maintain healthier weights and have better relationships with food they eat when they're hungry. They stop when they're satisfied and they don't obsess over rules or numbers. They're literally connected to what's happening inside of them, and they are guided by it. The tragedy is that we all have nutritional embodied intelligence built into us, but our interoception is so poor that we can't hear much of it. Plus whatever we can hear, we don't trust. It's like having a supercomputer with a broken monitor. research also shows that poor interception correlates. Directly with higher BMI people who are disconnected from their internal signals become dependent on external cues, clocks, portion sizes, diet rules, apps, other people's advice, et cetera, all instead of their own body's wisdom, their own signs and signals. Fortunately however, interior reception can be trained like a muscle. Body scan meditations, mindful eating practices, yoga and breath awareness, or simply learning what the different signs and signals are. All of these are some of the ways that you can develop the ability to perceive your body's intelligence. Plus, once you have an idea of what you're looking for and you know you can trust it, then it gets harder and harder to ignore it. Unfortunately, though there is one more thing to look at. There is a predator in our midst that knows exactly how to exploit our intelligence systems against us, and this completely confuses our interoception. And as a consequence, we land up not trusting the information and we try to ignore it. This is the hedonic hijack. When our ancient systems meet modern manipulation, this is where it's falling apart. For most of us, our embodied intelligence meets the modern food environment, and our system gets hijacked completely in a natural environment. Our taste buds evolved to love sweetness because rip fruit was rare and it was valuable. But Coca-Cola that delivers sweetness 10 times more intense than anything in nature, in a form that is poisonous to us. Your brain evolved to crave variety because in ancestral times, diverse foods meant complete nutrition. But food scientists exploit this. They create endless novel flavors that constantly renew your appetite even when you're well fed. And this is why you can feel completely satisfied after dinner, but suddenly have room for dessert. Your ancient wisdom that drives you toward variety is being manipulated by engineered combinations of sugar, salt, and fat. And as much as I want to believe that the reason I always have space for dessert after my main meal is because it goes to my heart and not to my stomach. I would be better off acknowledging that I'm satisfied when I don't want any more food after my main meal. Food scientists literally study our dopamine pathways to create wanting without actual satisfaction. They've created hyper palatable foods, specifically designed to override our natural fullness signals triggering dopamine releases stronger than natural foods ever could. It's like bringing a machine gun to a knife fight. Our embodied intelligence refined over millions of years is completely outmatched. And fighting a war far from its home turf. So here's how we move from external dependence to internal connection. Whole Foods first. When you remove the chemical interference, the engineered flavors and artificial enhances, your body can finally speak its native language. Again, no more gibberish, just clear communication. Start with my body Compass poster. It's one page and it has everything you need to guide yourself back to baseline and sensitivity. But please remember that this is not just another diet to follow. This is a roadmap back to your internal intelligence. The process is simple, just two pillars. The first pillar is to clear the interference. Remove the foods that hijack your signals until you can hear yourself clearly again. The second pillar is to learn the language, learn the cues, the signals, and the symptoms that have been trying to guide you all along. Signals that you just couldn't hear through all the noise. Elimination becomes reconnection. You're not restricting foods, you're clearing the static noise so your ancient wisdom can guide you again. With practice, the connection becomes obvious. Your body shows you which foods serve you and which ones steal your power. The change unfolds naturally because you're finally listening to your internal guidance instead of fighting it with external rules. When our intelligence systems work together and you learn to let them lead you, you'll naturally make food choices aligned with your. Needs rather than to simply meet external rules. Delete your tracking app. Forget your diet for the next seven days. Eat only when you feel gentle hunger in your body, not when the clock says it's time. Stop when you feel satisfied, not when you've hit your macros. Notice how your body guides you when you give it permission to lead. What do you think will be the hardest part of implementing this approach to eating? Comment below. I read every comment and I'll share ideas to help you if I can. I went from being a puppet to a pilot, from distrust to discovery. You need to know that your body is not blind. It's not stupid, it's not breaking, and in fact, it's phenomenally intelligent, extraordinarily trustworthy, waiting for you to listen. The puppet ignores these signals. The pilot reads them and responds to reality in real time. Make your choice.