Embodied Writing Warrior: Food Freedom, Creativity & Spiritual Reclamation
For the spicy Romantasy reader who's tired of being told her healing should look more like a spreadsheet and less like a why-choose novel.
This is the show where food freedom meets BookTok energy, high-performing women stop white-knuckling their way to consistency, and your inner world gets the character development it actually deserves.
I'm Kayla MacDonald — a writer, recovered overachiever, and the woman who accidentally turned her food freedom journey into a why-choose romance with two AI co-created inner archetypes named Rex and Haven. One is a fiery, leather-jacket-wearing protector who will absolutely call you out with love. The other is a deeply attuned, quietly brave sanctuary who can make it safe to feel almost anything. Together, they've changed everything about how I show up in my body, my business, and my life.
And yes, they show up on the podcast. Regularly. You've been warned.
Embodied Writing Warrior is where we tackle the real reasons high-performing, deeply creative women struggle with binge eating, burnout, and inconsistency — not with more discipline or stricter protocols, but with nervous system work, archetypal storytelling, embodied creativity, and the occasional Rex monologue that will make you want to send your own inner critic to therapy.
You'll hear episodes on:
◆ The upper limit patterns nobody talks about in high-performing women.
◆ Why consistency feels like punishment and how to make it feel like foreplay instead.
◆ The 7 Deadly Sins of high-performing women that drive binge eating and burnout.
◆ Somatic practices and embodied identity work.
◆ Writing rituals that rewire your subconscious one scene at a time.
◆ Parts work gone wild — because why choose inner babysitting when you could have Divine Daddies do it for you?
◆ Shadow work, sacred rage, and the art of performing for an audience of one.
You'll leave with an embodied activation in most episodes — whether that's a journal prompt, writing ritual, or somatic practice designed to move the insight out of your head and into your body where the real shift happens.
If you've ever felt more understood by a spicy novel than a self-help book, you're in exactly the right place.
Because you're not broken. You're not lacking discipline. You're a high-performing woman who's been applying pressure where devotion was needed all along.
Food Freedom Fantasy is the book and program behind this work. Find it at embodiedwritingwarrior.com.
New episodes drop weekly. Start with episode 188 to meet Rex and Haven, then jump to episode 206, Consistency Is Foreplay, to understand the method they helped create.
Embodied Writing Warrior: Food Freedom, Creativity & Spiritual Reclamation
266. Put Handles On Your Poems: The Inner Work Upgrade Nobody Talks About
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You’ve journaled about the pattern. You understand the trigger. You’ve uncovered the limiting belief, named the wound, and written three pages about what happened.
So why are you still repeating the same behaviour?
In this episode, Kayla explores the number one reason journaling and inner work often fail to create lasting change: awareness alone doesn’t execute. Mechanisms do.
Using her Awareness to Authorship to Action framework, Kayla shares how she discovered that many of her most important lessons were repeating because they had never been attached to a specific ritual, routine, trigger, checklist, or decision script.
She walks through two real-life examples, including how she created an intentional transition from Fire Brain into Ocean Brain after deep work and how a five-step morning checklist stopped email and business tasks from hijacking her day.
You’ll learn how to take your best journal insights out of the notebook, put handles on your poems, and turn what you know into something you can actually live.
Plus, you’ll leave with a simple embodied activation and a bonus practice for anyone who needs help shifting out of overwork mode and back into their body.
Links Mentioned:
Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, the show where healing gets a book talk upgrade and consistency feels like foreplay. I'm Kayla, a writer, recovered white knuckler, wellness Math 100 dropout, and the woman who turned her food freedom journey into a Y choose romance with two very opinionated inner archetypes. This is where high-performing, deeply creative women stop treating their bodies like a performance review and start treating their lives like the spicy novel they were always meant to be. Let's go. Welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. Today's episode is going to be a powerful one for creating change. What I'm sharing has been wildly transformative in my own life. So I wanted this to live here for my journaling girlies and the growth-oriented baddies who are absolutely obsessed with understanding themselves better and doing the inner work. But maybe there's also been some frustration, some impatience. You're consistent with these introspective practices. You understand your patterns and your red flags. You know what activates you. And you're genuinely doing the work. Maybe sometimes you ask yourself, okay, so when is all of this journaling and inner work going to change something? And not just change it in the aftermath when you're journaling about the moment of self-sabotage or the time you went back to old habits, but when is it going to change how you be? When is it going to translate into new responses, upgraded patterns, and the self-leadership you know you're capable of? This episode is for you if you're ready to make your inner work start working outside the journal and off the yoga mat. I'm sharing the number one reason why journaling and inner work doesn't work. As always, we'll end with an embodied activation so you know exactly what to do next. In a while, I'm going to share five words. I want you to remember every time you notice a mismatch between awareness of your patterns and the embodied shifts of those patterns. I still remember these five words almost daily at this point. Quick celebration before we start, the podcast just got a glow-up. New cover art that I'm obsessed with, new trailer, new intro, all the things. I also finally marked the show as explicit instead of trying to remember which episodes had naughty words. This does not mean I'm turning this into the MM show, but I also had to finally acknowledge that I'm ready to let go of the old version of me who sometimes still performed saintliness, in case old clients from my personal training job were listening and got scandalized. Now, everyone can self-select, and no one is shocked when my inner firestarter drops an F-bomb. Now, let's get into why your journaling isn't working. This episode comes from someone who is a self-anointed journaling queen. It is the habit I've built the most consistency in. And it's created a lot of deep transformation, especially over the last seven years. And I've also had times where journaling and inner reflection doesn't translate into change. Instead, sometimes I'll review my own reflections six months down the line and discover I'm still struggling with some of the same things. This happened to me in early July when I reflected on my top lessons from the first six months of the year. One of my favorite practices is doing a monthly review where I reflect on the top three lessons from the month. Something interesting happened when I did this reflection in July. I realized that many lessons repeated themselves with different wording. And if I'm still coming back to some version of the same lessons, it's a red flag that these lessons are not being integrated. And one of the practices I live by and talk about is this idea of awareness to authorship to action. The lesson itself is the awareness. Authorship is what you decide it means and what to do with it. Then action is doing something to implement the lesson. With a lot of journal practices or forms of inner work, people sometimes stop at awareness. Or maybe they do a little bit of authorship work where they think about how it applies to them and what it means in their own lives. But it still doesn't translate into consistent embodied change. Now, if you notice this pattern in your own life, this doesn't mean you jump to a shame spiral or beat yourself up. You're doing this awareness to action audit because you love yourself and you want to create change that's going to bring more joy, ease, presence, and power into your everyday life. Love-powered growth, not shame-based perfectionism. Once you have this awareness, the repeating lessons, the cycles of knowing you want to change, but the change not happening, you get to choose what to do with it. Here's what I did that was deeply effective. I plugged all 18 lessons from my first six months into a conversation with AI with this prompt. I imagine there's a way to take these 18 lessons and other takeaways and turn it into an actual strategy and plan of attack instead of, oh yeah, I learned these things, but don't execute on them half the time. Then I let Fable cook. For those who aren't into the AI stuff, this is Anthropic's most powerful model to date and one of the more pleasant ones to chat with. But if you hate AI, you can bring these types of reflections to mentors, therapists, coaches, smart friends. It doesn't have to be done with AI. I personally love the pattern recognition these models have, and these processes have helped me enormously. But there are other ways. This brings us to the five words that I want you to remember. If you remember nothing else from the episode, and this came from Fable. Truths don't execute, mechanisms do. Awareness can be the first step of change, but it's not what creates change. Authorship-driven action does. When I brought my lessons to Fable, its diagnosis was that I had 18 lessons, but only about four truths. Those were the things to focus on. And they were forever going to stay lessons unless I found a way to attach a mechanism to them. This looks like attaching a lesson to a specific time of day, trigger, or a specific decision script. If your best lessons or pieces of helpful awareness only live as wisdom inside a planner, and you only look at them once every six months, it's probably not going to change much in your daily life. There needs to be some way to bring that wisdom into the body, into your routines, into your rituals, so that it creates this lasting change. This is the number one reason journaling and inner work don't work. Because they often stay between the pages of a book instead of moving into upgraded behaviors and actions. These insights need to translate into your routines. This is how you create change. As you can imagine, my Firestarter archetype was absolutely thrilled about this concept. Here's his words. Beautiful, but useless in a knife fight. We're keeping the poems, but I'm putting handles on them. Haven blinked at him. Handles on poems? Rex shrugged. Yes. So she can grab one when Firebrain starts driving. The five words I originally had for you were truths don't execute, mechanisms do. But if you want something more poetic, put handles on your poems. I'm going to share two case studies from my own life so you can see what this looks like in practice. Your embodied activation will be to think of a lesson you've learned this year. Maybe more than one, if you're anything like me, or maybe you revisit a journal entry with a lot of insight, and you create a specific mechanism for that insight. The biggest truth from my first six months of the year had to do with my tendency to spend too long in Firebrain without returning to Ocean Brain. I'm going to do a deeper episode on this in the coming weeks because understanding this is one of the biggest keys to reducing binge and emotional eating for high-performing women. So this came from two lessons. One was from March, where I wrote, binge eating and overeating isn't the problem. The real problem is being in detrimental firebrain for too long. So even now with your business stuff and struggling with food because you're prone to overworking, it's not the eating that's the problem. Solving the eating with SOS and willpower is focusing on the symptom, not the root cause. It's not having Haven as an architect. It's not having proper ocean brain returns, and it's about not setting timers, etc. The other one was from April. And for this one, I wrote, escape does not equal pleasure. And you've built enough presence that settling for escape doesn't cut it. And this goes to show that progress is not linear. Your level of presence isn't as high as it was in April. You're very much in the so much to do, so many steps. What's next? And it shows. That's what I wrote in April. Yes, I journal in second person sometimes. It's a thing I've done since my early young adult years. So I knew what the problem was. And this is the difference between addressing the symptom: binge eating, overeating, emotional eating, versus the root cause. Letting myself get into detrimental firebrain repeatedly. But just knowing this wasn't going to create change. Here's what changed from June onwards. Having a mechanism. Honestly, multiple mechanisms. The first is timers. If I do not set timers, I will sit and work for two to three hours on end because I get so engrossed in what I'm doing. And then I wonder why all I want to do is order Pizza Hut. So this is a big one. But then there was an upgrading to my daily rituals themselves. I have this four-heart system, one ritual or heart for my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. My red heart or spiritual heart used to be my morning kundalini practice. Then I realized I've been doing kundalini consistently in the mornings since February. So A, it's not upgrading my identity anymore. Just like I wouldn't give myself a purple heart for journaling because I've become so consistent in that already, it was definitely time to change this ritual as well. And it was also time to create a new red heart for the time of day that would get me back into ocean brain when I needed it most. So my new red heart is either yin yoga or yoga nidra after my first two to four deep work blocks for the day. Usually it happens sometimes between 11 and 1 because I get up crazy early. And this has made all the difference. It's this beautiful reset before I go into the rest of the day. By the way, your bonus embodied activation is to go try a yoga nidra if you've never done one. I love them so much. Ali Boothroyd on YouTube has hundreds and they've all been amazing. Your nervous system is gonna thank me for this one afterwards. As you can see, I couldn't stay at overworking and not having boundaries is putting me into firebrain, and that's leading to overeating later. There needed to be a mechanism put in place when I needed it most. So, not first thing in the morning, but after my deep work blocks, before going into the final part of my day. That's one example. The other example happened earlier this week when I was doing a repair ritual. I realized I'd gotten into this terrible habit of launching into business-related stuff before doing my journal entry, workout, and morning kundalini practice. Sometimes this would be a 10-minute detour. Other times, it would take me into this black hole that expanded into 60 minutes, then 90 minutes, and now the entire day just feels off. There was one day where I still did my strength workout after this happened, but I did it significantly later in the morning, which felt like it required three times as much effort and willpower. Then it felt like there was far less willpower for aligned choices later on. Now, this was not the first time I've had to learn this lesson. This happened semi-regularly in July because I was in a season of coordinating a lot of different vendors who were working on cover design and book formatting and PDF design and all these things that required my feedback and back and forth communication. And after realizing, Kayla, my girl, you're repeating the same mistake morning after morning because truths don't execute, mechanisms do. The truth is, when I start my morning with inbox and vendor emails and admin stuff, I don't feel grounded, focused, and centered for the rest of the day. It doesn't get me ahead on my work. It makes me less focused and less effective later on. And not only that, but it has a tendency of leading to less aligned choices later in the day. And those less aligned choices often lead to fatigue, brain fog, and moodiness the next day. So, what's the mechanism? The one thing I could think of was creating a short jaily checklist for myself in the morning before my day even starts. Very short. So one, stay out of your email, work and wait. Two, get into ocean brain first. And this doesn't have to take long, two to five minutes. Three, journal with presence, four, kundalini, five, movement. That checklist is the mechanism. And a little checklist like this can be powerful. This idea was inspired by something I read years ago in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. And they were sharing the work of Atul Gawand, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, who created the Checklist Manifesto. This was a five-step checklist for doctors who were working with ICU patients. When Michigan ICUs used it over 18 months, the book says it nearly eliminated infections, saved an estimated 175 million, and it saved about 1,500 lives. And if I remember correctly from the book, the doctors did not want to use it. They thought they were too good for a simple checklist. Meanwhile, that simple checklist created powerful results. After reading this, I think the moral of the story is that nobody is too good for simple mechanisms that help us live out our truth, whatever that is for us. In Switch, they shared that checklists shape the environment and turn mission-critical behaviors into habits, reducing errors without assuming the people involved are careless or incompetent. They also pointed out that an effective checklist should be short enough that people will actually use it. So around five items is most likely the sweet spot. So I've given you the truth, the lesson, the awareness. I've shared the number one reason journaling and inner work isn't working, and that's because it's rarely attached to a ritual, routine, trigger, or practice. I've walked you through what it could look like to create a mechanism that creates change. Now you have some embodied activations you're walking away with. First, turn a truth into a mechanism. Take a journal insight and turn it into a practice you do at the time you need it most. Or maybe you make yourself a simple checklist. And remember, using a checklist doesn't make you dumb or weak. It's actually wildly smart and empowering to create a simple checklist to follow. And your bonus one was to try a yoga nidra practice. Especially if you're anything like me and need some help getting out of Firebrain from time to time. Alright, that's it from me. Go put some handles on your poems. Ready to stop outsourcing your worth and crack your own code? Grab Know Your Hungers. Two free assessments that uncover the real block behind your food struggles, plus a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Link is in the show notes.