260. Boring Devotion: The Food Freedom Skill High-Performing Women Actually Need

What if the reason consistency feels so hard isn’t because you’re lazy, broken, or undisciplined… but because your nervous system is addicted to intensity?

In this episode, we’re talking about boring devotion: the capacity to keep showing up for the simple, mundane, repeated reps that actually create lasting transformation.

If you’re a high-performing creative woman who thrives on breakthroughs, drama, chaos, big emotions, and all-or-nothing momentum, this episode is going to be deep medicine.

We’ll explore why so many women only trust transformation when it feels intense, how chaos keeps you distracted from your purpose, and why boring devotion might be the missing skill that makes food freedom, fitness, business growth, and identity change sustainable.

Inside this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why your nervous system may need the “exhale” of normalizing your goals 
•  How boring reps create real identity change over time 
•  Why dramatic transformation isn’t always the healthiest or most sustainable path 
•  The five stages of grief that can happen when you stop chasing breakthrough chaos 
•  Four embodied ways to build boring devotion 
•  How to pour your intensity into the vision while letting the discipline stay simple 
•  The mantra: “My discipline can be boring, so my vision can be wild.”

And, of course, we’ll talk about how Food Freedom Fantasy lets you bring magic, story, and a little spice into the boring reps without needing chaos to feel alive.

If you’re ready to stop yo-yoing, rushing, spiraling, or waiting for one more breakthrough to save you, this episode is your invitation into steadier, sexier, more sustainable devotion.

Links Mentioned:

• Grab Your Free Know Your Hungers Assessment Kit
• Learn More About Food Freedom Fantasy
• When Food is Love - Geneen Roth

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, a show for women who refuse white knuckle wellness and create food freedom built for real life, where your fire gets pain knocked in. Fall in blessed with your own momentum and enjoy pleasure-led creativity. Because healing was never meant to be a full-time job. I'm Kayla, writer and help coach God Row. Now let's make consistency feel like foreplay. Welcome back, embodied writing warrior. Today, we're gonna start the episode with a quote from Janine Roth. If you hear this and it lands as deeply for you as it did for me the first time I read it back in 2013, this episode will most likely be deep medicine. This quote comes from her book When Food is Love. She writes, I knew that having a relationship with him would not be easy. But I wasn't looking for easy. I invent drama where there is none. I feel most at home with chaos. I thrive on intensity. I get frantic, never concerned. I get ecstatic, never glad. I get miserable, never unhappy. And I have refined the art of suffering. Now this episode is not just about dramatic romantic relationships. It's also about dramatic fitness journeys, dramatic creative or business journeys, dramatic growth journeys in general. Let's just say I know a little bit about all of the above. And one thing I've realized in the past few months, especially, is that high-performing creatives are often missing a critical skill that makes consistency achievable, sustainability possible, and the identity shift you're looking for inevitable. That skill is boring devotion. In this episode, I'm going to cover four ways that boring devotion changes the game. I'm going to talk about the five stages of grief a high-performing woman must go through before they reach boring devotion. I'm going to give you four ways to build the skill of boring devotion, plus one more bonus tip you will not hear anywhere else. And then we're going to close with a powerful mantra you can take with you. It has easily become one of my favorites. Let's get started. Boring devotion is developing your capacity to withstand the mundane because the end result matters that much to you. It's having the spiritual maturity to understand that not everything is going to feel like fireworks. And even when there's no fireworks, you're still going to do the thing, anyways. It's those simple daily disciplines compounded over time without giving your power away to the glamour of a flawless streak or a need for perfectionism. It's also continuing to do those daily disciplines, even when it feels like they're not doing anything. Where you're not seeing results from the external world, but you're so devoted to who you're becoming that you keep going, anyways. It's continuing to move from trust and faith without gripping to a timeline or needing rapid results. This is often a precarious balance, especially for high-performing creatives who resonated with the quote we started with. Many high-performing women only trust transformation when it feels intense, has a lot of breakthrough energy, or is highly emotional. And if this is you, you're not wrong or broken. We live in a world that glorifies the massive breakthroughs, the intensity, and the dramatic medicine journeys where one ayahuasca trip solves every one of your problems and suddenly you're a spiritually woke millionaire. And also, your intensity in the correct doses and powerfully is pure magic. But not every transformation has to be intense. When everything has to be intense and activating, it's going to demand a ton of energy. And this is exactly what causes a lot of the boom bust cycles where you're doing all the things, you're having the big breakthroughs, and then you're burned out and struggle to get out of bed. The solution here is to start practicing boring devotion. And here's why. First, from a nervous system perspective, your body most likely needs the exhale of normalizing the thing you're pursuing. If everything that you're going after feels high stakes and life-changing and fraught with drama, you're gonna spend a lot more time in fight or flight. Your body doesn't always know the difference between a goal you're putting immense pressure on yourself for, and between being chased by a predator. And spending enough time in fight or flight without recovery is one of those things that creates those cycles of binge eating and burnout. Boring devotion still allows you to work towards the thing, but you're able to let your system linger in rest and digest more often. So your nervous system can finally exhale. Second, let's be honest, some of the deepest healing is actually so boring. You don't always need a retreat or to pay $1,111 for that wildly sought-after energy worker or to have some drastic life-changing moment. Those things can be beautifully supplemental at times, but the real work of healing often comes from boring, consistent reps over time. The things you're doing on a day-to-day basis to create a new identity and build the life you desire. So the real skill is not how fast can I go or how intensely can I do something, but actually, how much boredom can I withstand. This is also one of the most powerful skills anyone can build in today's dopamine-laced world with the dysregulation casino that is social media and all the opportunities for instant gratification everywhere. Being able to step back from noise and speed and chaos is honestly kind of revolutionary. And it has so much power to improve your life. Third, boredom is required for an identity upgrade. I want you to think about anything you do right now that you attach your identity to. Could be writing, playing a sport, an instrument, or running. Those things are likely part of your identity because you've put in a lot of boring reps over a prolonged period of time. If you want to change your identity, you have to put in enough reps until that thing you're doing becomes normalized. And yes, then you don't get the exhilarating rush that you do when something is new of, hot damn, I just played my guitar every day for 30 days straight. But you get something better. You get the stability of something you desire becoming part of who you are. And fourth, if you're listening, you likely have a deep mission and purpose for your life. It's going to be very hard to achieve that purpose if your relationship with food and self-care and movement continues to be chaotic. We're gonna use food freedom and your fitness journey as our main example here because obviously food freedom, huge topic on this show. And when I walk you through the five stages of grief, I will use a food freedom example, but this applies to everything. A dramatic love life will also distract you from your purpose. A lot of chaos with spending or finances or having a turbulent workplace history where you're often getting fired or into conflicts with management. All of those things are going to be distractions. And this episode exists not to shame you or judge you for any places where drama has kept you distracted. So this is not about being weak or broken. The struggles with drama and chaos are not only cultural and systemic at this point, but for many people, they're often a response to growing up in chaotic households. Then you have these younger parts of you that feel like drama is actually needed to stay alive because it's familiar. And these younger parts aren't broken either. They just might need some safe adult figures to help teach them about boring devotion. Now, you can hear all of this and be like, okay, I get it. Boring devotion. Let's do this. And it's probably still going to be an adjustment. You'll likely go through the five stages of grief as you move out of breakthrough and epiphany chaos land. Because boring devotion asks you to grieve the fantasy that consistency and growth will always feel enchanted, dramatic, exciting, or immediately reflected back to you in your external world. And this is honestly quite painful to grieve when you've had the opposite experience most of your life. I'm going to share the five stages of grief as they apply to a food freedom and body transformation journey, but again, these could apply anywhere. So you might start with denial. You want to believe you're still just one breakthrough away from a quantum leap or a timeline jump. This is especially true if you've grown accustomed to big ups and downs in the past. This absolutely happened to me over the last eight months or so. After getting the leanest I've maybe ever been last June while training for a half marathon, I proceeded to have the humbling experience of gaining back 20, 25 pounds. And this was a combination of switching to more sedentary lifestyle because I'd left a very physically active job, a lot of stress, and admittedly, some of my old eating wobbles were turning. But I figured it was fine. I had tools, I had lost weight before, I would do it again, only to find myself plateauing last September. Denial said, I don't want to deal with this part. So I'll just stop weighing myself for a few months and it's gonna take care of itself, right? As you might guess, it did not. Then I reached the second phase of anger, and it was anger at both myself, anger at my body, and also certain voices I'd listened to that made me feel bad for caring. Like my drive to return to my previous level of fitness was like a trauma response or internalized misogyny. As you can imagine, that anger created a lot of drama. The bargaining came after. And this part is so important, especially if you're someone who's into the manifestation world, understands nervous system regulation, and knows how powerful it is to do somatic work with the physical body. So I knew that a dysregulated nervous system could create more stress in the body. And I'd been in the health coaching field long enough to know that for a number of physiological reasons, stress can make it harder to lose weight. So I very dramatically tried to bargain my way out of dysregulation. So it looked like more breath work, more somatic practices. And then the nervous system regulation became less about care and more about maybe this will be the magic thing that makes the stress go away so my body can change again. But if you're doing embodied practices from a disembodied, controlling place where you're trying to get a certain result, that's likely going to create more stress and pressure in the system. So that's going to continue leading to the opposite of what you want. And it's going to keep you in a place of drama and chaos. Only now it's just inside your own mind as you frantically try to find the perfect regulation protocol to give you the rapid breakthrough. Then eventually you might move into the stage of depression. The feeling like nothing is working, the despair, wondering if you're always going to stay stuck. Here's the thing about this stage, though, it's probably not truth. It's probably your system's last attempt to hold on to the chaos before you move on to acceptance. Acceptance is where you make peace with boring devotion. You accept that something's gonna take longer than your ego might like. You accept that it's gonna take more boring identity-building reps over time. But you also become willing to stay stubbornly bored long enough to get where you desire to go, especially if it's permanent this time. Over these past few months, I have done a lot to reduce the drama from my body transformation journey. I am the most consistent and stable I have ever been with my habits. Even my husband, person who knows me best, has seen me go on many a pizza vendor, has said recently, this time feels different. You're not volatile like you used to be. You're showing up differently now. And since he knows me best, this is very high praise. So for me, acceptance was acknowledging a few important things. First, I was basing the pace of my current progress on inaccurate and potentially unhealthy markers. Because here's the truth: the past month has felt like a slow month for progress. I've called it a plateau a few times, but I'm still down over eight pounds since the beginning of this month. And yes, my husband made fun of me and was like, I don't think you know what a plateau actually means. But what I was doing was comparing my rate of progress to my door-building era, where yes, I could lose three to four pounds a week sometimes. But also, I got sick multiple times a year. When training for my half marathon in 2023, 2024, I got the sickest I've ever been. And then training for my half marathon last June, my period was weeks late. And that entire time I worked there, I could not prioritize strength training, especially not upper body stuff. My shoulders were like overhead presses. Yeah, you can maybe do five of them with 15-pound weights, and it's gonna hurt. So back around my race last year, one of the guys from my work was like, Hey, how come you're so skinny all of a sudden? Kayla then was like, Aw, he noticed. Kayla today looks back at pictures of that race day and goes, actually, I think he might have been concerned. So, losing weight or any kind of transformation that happens dramatically is not always the healthiest or most sustainable. Second, I was also telling a limiting story about my current rate of progress. So back during my personal training days, I felt like weight came off easier. But looking back, I realized, yeah, it seemed like weight came off easier because I would binge eat multiple times every week or every month, and then I'd have the rapid weight loss afterwards that was basically just water weight. So I've had to make peace with boring devotion. I've had to decide that the creative projects I have planned and the dreams I have for my life do not have room for the yo-yoing, the rushing, the food turbulence, or the big dramatic transformation. It's going to be steady, boring, and it's gonna stick this time because it's becoming who I am. This brings us to how to actually do this. My first tip is to avoid suppressing or shaming your inner drama queen or inner teenager, because on some level, she believes the drama is necessary for survival. So let her speak. Journal from her perspective. From there, you can start to lovingly share with her: hey, actually, this boring devotion thing is gonna be better for us in the long run, and we're still gonna be okay. You want her on your team, not pushed into the basement of your subconscious where she's just gonna keep creating chaos on a more unconscious level. Your second embodied activation, and maybe the most important one, is putting in your boring devotion reps. This is where you take the walk, do the task, prep the healthy food when you least want to, when it feels like nothing is happening or not happening fast enough. So it can be super helpful to define some of your own boring devotion reps. Maybe for you that is walks, meditation, meal prep, mindful eating. So maybe you define two to four boring devotion reps you want to practice regularly because deep down, you know these things will get you where. You want to go. Maybe not at the speed of light. Maybe not dramatically. But they will get you there reliably if you do them consistently over a prolonged period of time. Your next embodied activation is to practice boredom on purpose. Maybe you practice just doing nothing for five minutes to start. Or maybe you start doing more drives or walks where you don't have a podcast or music playing. Not every single one, but some of them. And start to reframe this boredom as peace, as stillness. You might actually find that you love having less stimulation. For example, I used to think I could not possibly run without music. That sounded so boring. Then I joined a running group where you don't really wear headphones because you're on trails and there's dogs and bikers and all that stuff around. And you know, I actually love it. I still run with music a large amount of the time, but I don't have to every time anymore. Next, I really love this tip for all of us high-performing women. Pour the intensity and drama into your vision, but let the discipline be boring. The reps you're putting in might be repetitive and mundane, but where you're going doesn't have to be. This is that beautiful tension between drive and strive versus soothing and contentment. Firestarter versus sanctuary energy. You still get to be excited about who you're coming. You get to be excited about what doors will unlock when you build the consistency, energy levels, and fitness you desire. So that firestarter energy is going to keep you going. And also lean into the sanctuary energy of, and we are safe and stable in the pursuit of this big vision because here's what we do on a daily basis with presence and also gratitude, because you get to do these things to create the big vision, even if they feel boring sometimes. That brings us to the mantra I am kind of obsessed with right now. Feel free to steal it if you love it as much as I do. It's this my discipline can be boring, so my vision can be wild. Yes, and this got written in my planner immediately. And my final little bonus tip for you. So the discipline is still boring, but the hot inner archetypes helping you build that discipline are anything but. You can learn more about Food Freedom Fantasy by clicking the link in the episode description. And beyond that, I just hope this episode has helped you think about progress and momentum a little differently, and I will catch you in a future episode. Take care. Ready to stop outsourcing your inner knowing and crack your own code? Grab my free gift, Know Your Hungers. Discover the five hidden blocks behind your food struggles, and get a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Visit embodiedwriting warrior.comslash gift or click the link in the show notes.