This Is Your Body on Trauma: How to Nourish Safety, Resilience, and Connection with Polyvagal-Informed Nutrition

This Is Your Body on Trauma is the first book to teach readers how to use nutrition to heal underlying trauma that presents in physical symptoms. It features a unique do-it-yourself approach, allowing people to completely customize their care plan.

Trauma is pervasive, and recovery usually involves extensive talk therapy. What is often overlooked is using nutrition as a way to restore a sense of safety and self-trust. Research shows between 75 and 90 percent of physician visits are due to the wear and tear on the body from stress hormones. The gut is often our first indicator that something is awry; it is the watchtower raising the alarm, and the existence of trauma can create a negative feedback loop with the brain that leads to several quite common gut-brain axis complaints, such as anxiety, depression, IBS, and pain.

More than “just” a nutrition book, This Is Your Body on Trauma helps people make connections between what is going on in their mind and body with a unique 360-degree integrative approach to mental health. Using a unique, customizable approach, readers are given a series of experiments based on recommendations, formulating their needs and providing actionable solutions to lessen the perception of stress with nutrition. This book will help people who have experienced traumatic events as both a child and an adult, those who experience chronic stress, as well as people who have experienced food trauma heal and manage the physiological impacts of that trauma throughout their lives.

• The experiments provided in the book can be done in collaboration with a therapy or nutrition provider.
• This book is the only one that discusses not only nutrition for trauma (what to eat), but also applies it in a trauma-informed way (how to eat to avoid triggers).

For Meg Bowman, nutrition is a vocation. She’s quietly (sometimes loudly) disruptive of diet culture BS and enjoys helping her clients and supervisees find their power. As co-founder and licensed dietitian nutritionist at Nutrition Hive, she sees clients with eating behavior, mental health, and GI challenges using a weight-inclusive functional medicine lens. In her job as co-founder and clinical supervisor at Clinician’s Incubator, she provides case consultations and mentoring for nutrition professionals.