Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Nervous System Work Your IBS & Digestion NEEDS That NO ONE is Talking About with Kimberly Snyder

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: What Is “Heart Intelligence”? The Heart–Brain Connection Explained Breaking the Attention–Stress Loop Why Heart Rate Variability Matters Chronic Stress, Inflammation & Recovery How Stress Impacts Digestion and IBS Why Food Isn’t Always the Problem Improving Heart Rate Variability Naturally Meditation, Breathwork & Nervous System Regulation Interoception, Intuitive Eating & Gut Health Check in with today’s amazing guest:  Instagram: instagram.com/_kimberlysnyder Website: https://mysolluna.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/kimberlysnyder References: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.020 https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3071 https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2016.02.032 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2008.08.004 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2017.00258 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763   Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase:AmazonBarnes & NobleAmazon KindleApple BooksGoogle PlayKoboApple Books (Audiobook)Audibleabbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters:Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books:Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-BookProtein 101 E-Book👋 Follow me!Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchenBlog: abbeyskitchen.comBook: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ 

Your brain is thinking, oh no, I'm going to mess this up. And then the body responds by increasing the heart rate and making breaths more shallow or tensing your muscles. And then your brain interprets the body cues as, oh, my God, something's really wrong. I am anxious. And then your attention just like locks into those body sensations. And you start hyper fixating on your heart rate and your breathing and your feelings. And that loop just like reinforces itself. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantled.

diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Today's episode sits at the intersection of psychology, physiology, and spirituality as we explore how our emotional and physiological states interact to influence our risk of disease. Joining me today is host of the acclaimed feel-good podcast, nutritionist and author of the new book the hidden power of the five hearts, Kimberly Snyder. In today's conversation, we're looking at the science of the heart brain connection, the role of heart rate variability and autonomic flexibility, and how our emotional state affects our physical sensations, especially when it comes to the gut and our ability to eat intuitively. We'll also get into the concept of the attention, stress,

loop, how it relates to anxiety and IBS, and what the research says about practices like meditation and breathwork in helping us regulate those systems. If you've ever felt a disconnect between what your brain craves and what your body wants, this episode is absolutely for you. Let's get into it. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us. It was so nice to be featured in your podcast, and I'm just really excited to be chatting again today. Oh, thank you so much, Abby. I'm really excited to speak to you as well. Okay, so I just want to hop right in here. When you talk about heart intelligence, can you talk a little bit about what you mean in like physiologically measurable terms?

Yes. So as someone who's been on a whole journey with my own eating and wellness and working in with clients for so many years, when I came upon heart coherence and heart intelligence, Abby, it blew me away because it's so useful and practical in our everyday lives. So we really see the world through our nervous system. So if our nervous system is dysregulated, it's almost impossible to truly come into our intuition, to really intuitively eat, to know when we're really hungry, when we've had enough. And so we'll get into this more. But the power of heart intelligence is syncing up your heart, your brain, and your nervous

system. Very simple tools. So what this means is we start to feel centered, clear. We know what our bodies actually need. We're grounded. we're here in the present moment and it can make an enormous difference in our day-to-day nutritional habits, our lifestyle habits, our energy, our vitality, our hormones, so many different measurable outcomes.

Yeah, the heart is really so amazing. You know, it actually has this intrinsic nervous system. You talk about this in the book with over, you know, 40,000 neurons that we know communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system and this like bidirectional pathway. And so, you know, the brain signals to the heart and the heart signals to the brain and those signals reinforce one another. And, you know, I was thinking about this as reading your book. You know, I've had anxiety my whole life. And, and for years, I got like deeply entrenched in what the literature kind of calls this attention stress loop. And I'm sure a lot of my listeners may identify

with this where your brain is thinking, oh no, I'm going to mess this up. And then the body responds by increasing the heart rate and making breaths more shallow or tensing your muscle. And, and then your brain interprets the body cues as, oh my God, something's really wrong. I am anxious. And then your attention just like locks into those body sensations and you start hyper fixating on your heart rate and your breathing and your feelings. And that loop just like reinforces itself. And the anxiety builds.

It's so hard. Was this a loop that you had been stuck in and that inspired your work in this space? Oh, yeah. I also had anxiety for many years, Abby. I also had eating disorders in high school. I was bulimic or sort of bulimorexic for years. And for me, food became an outlet for stress. And then there was, you know, gild if I ate too much.

And then now I can reframe it as not really being able to metabolize life. So you can imagine when I came across the heart after many years, Abby, I thought, wow, this is interesting. And first of all, we can say as moms and parents, when we get pregnant, what's the first thing? What's the first thing that comes is the heartbeat? It's not, the brain is not formed first. So we know there's some magic in the heart. And as someone who loves to read about spiritual text and loves to meditate, you'll hear the heart talked about in all spiritual traditions across the world.

There's this universal power of this heart energy. We see in the image sacred heart of Jesus Christ, in the Buddhist heart sutras, every religion, every spiritual tradition, the Egyptians didn't take the heart out of the mummies. So there was this ancient wisdom really saying, hey, there's something special about the heart. So fast forward to today, I came across some research a couple of books ago from the Heart Math Institute that was actually published in tandem with the American Journal of Cardiology. Thank you very much.

And it was talking about not only does the heart have its own intrinsic nervous system, but this is the primary nervous system when we settle in here. We ground in here with very simple techniques. It helps to regulate our overall sympathetic and parasympathetic. nervous system. So 400, maybe probably 500 research papers later, it's showing that the heart, working with the heart, can help to elevate your hormonal health, your immunity, your digestive health. I mean, there's so many aspects of the research part that we're saying, I was saying, I mean, wow, this can help people so much. I think naturally we, in our society, we, you know,

we're meant to be kind and loving and centered in our heart. But then there's so much, you know, oh, the heart is mushy, it's over-emotional. That's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about a very centered nervous system. We're talking about how we can use the heart's wisdom and practical ways, again, to elevate our health and create so much more clarity in our lives. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system.

And, you know, one of the physiological measurable outcomes of, you know, this loop we've been talking about is that, it can basically we want to lower our heart rate variability or the variation in time between heartbeats. Why is having a kind of low heart rate variability a problem when it comes to our overall health? You just mentioned like our gut health and our digestion, our immune system, all that kind of stuff.

Well, in a simplified sense, really what we're talking about is resilience, right? And being able to handle different situations as we move through life and not feel like, that overwhelm and that up and down so much. When we're centered in ourself, it means that no matter what life brings us, we can take a moment and pause and deal in a common sense way with what's in front of us. Instead of having those huge feelings, which can often parlay into food cravings,

into binging, into guilt, into just so many unhelpful lifestyle habits as we move through. So we know that trying to correct something or battle something at the same level doesn't work. So the problem today when anxiety hits is many people are told, well, just think positive thoughts or don't think that way or get your mind under control. But it's thoughts battling thoughts. It's the mind battling the mind. So it's really powerful about this work, Abby. And I wrote it. We wrote a children's book on this too for kids called Chilla Gorilla, Lanky Limer, Journey to the Heart.

The same year the hidden power, the five hearts came. out because I teach my kids about this and adults need it too when you come into the physical heart and you can breathe down into here very simple steps which we can share some of these tools getting out of the head you're going to a different physical place and then all the research shows that again this starts to create what's called coherence and what coherence means is better HRV patterns we actually did a research study with the heart with heart math where we took 28 people in the lab before. We did the heart-aligned meditation, which is only five to eight minutes if people do the full track, four to five times a week. And we measured them after a month. And what we found

was on average, their ability to get into coherence went up 29%. Right. So these are self-regulating tools that you can use before you eat while you're driving your car. If your kids are having, you know, I do this all the time, I'm doing the dishes and I need to calm myself. So it's a It's a tool that's with us. It's free just going into your heart, learning to create more coherence, more clarity, more calmness, which again benefits everything. Yeah, yeah. And just to provide some more context for my listeners, we know that a higher HRV or heart rate

variability is linked to better autonomic flexibility, which is what you said, how well we can adapt and shift between the sympathetic fight or flight state and then the parasympathetic rest and digest state. It's really our body's ability to respond to stress and then recover from it quickly. We all get into stressful situations, but we don't want to stay in that heightened stress because we know that chronic stress increases the whole body inflammation, immune function, long-term risk of disease. And I know a lot of your earlier work has talked a lot about digestion and gut health. And we are, that's something we talk about a lot on my channel because I have IBS and I have my whole life that I've known about. And this ties in here really well too because the gut is heavily

regulated by the autonomic nervous system. Can you talk more about the impact on digestion or IBS-like symptoms when we're stuck in that fight or flight state? Yes. So much to say here, Abby. I really see it as three brains. We have the gut brain. We have the brain in our head. And in between we have the heart brain. So the heart brain is in between and they actually all work together. What's interesting is in my work, Abby, I have something called the four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. And when I would work with clients, we kind of map it out or everyday people, I'd say, hey, put in each cornerstone what you're doing on a daily basis to benefit this part of your life. And a lot of people have a lot of things to say about

fitness. They have new tools. Maybe they're going in cold plunges or infrared saunas or doing whatever they're doing and then they had their diet dialed in. But when it comes to emotional well-being, it's like blank. And this is where the psychological becomes the physiological, like you said, with stress. We can think it's up in our head, but the cascade effect of stress, when we don't have tools to manage our emotions, it has a huge effect on many parts of our body, including digestion. And I can say when I was, you know, just anxious, had eating disorders, didn't matter how well I ate.

If I didn't have a way of dealing what was inside, it's always going to manifest. And what that means when your nervous system is completely dysregulated, first of all, blood flow circulation is pulled out of your GI tract. It's signaling to your body, hey, there's some kind of emergency or trauma here. we need to redirect energy for survival. Your body thinks it's trying to survive. So time and time again, this contributes to bloating, slow digestion, less secretion of digestive enzymes. I mean, the list goes on and on.

And so over time, we start to notice everything from an impaired microbiome to bloating. Again, just more gassiness, more heaviness. Everything starts to slow down. And in a similar, we're talking about survival. What's interesting, what's linked to Abby, is immunity. And there's a study in the book that measured five minutes of anger, which if we take anger and we really expand it out, not just full-blown rage, but impatience, irritation. So think about, I don't like this traffic that just showed up or why is it taking so long for, you know, this to happen, whatever it is. five minutes of anger, they measured the immunity antibody, and they found it was impaired for

six hours afterwards, just experiencing five minutes of anger. So it just shows how interlinked our emotional well-being is with our digestion, with our vitality, with our skin health, with how fast we age, all these different aspects. And I feel like it's the part of wellness that a lot if people don't pay enough attention to? It's so true. I mean, just thinking back to, you know, with digestion and IBS, it's like a lot of people are very quick to just blame the food for their bloating or constipation or their, you know, their indigestion when it's so often about the state of their nervous system when they're

eating. If they were in a more calm place and state while they're eating those more high fawn-map foods or whatever, they would be so much better off in terms of their symptom management. Can you now speak to some of the evidence-based ways that we can improve that autonomic flexibility and reduce our HRV to help to reduce the chronic stress so that we're reducing these symptoms, we can eat without pain, you know, we can get back in tune with our kind of body intuition or body wisdom when it comes to eating intuitively. You know, you kind of mentioned some of these things earlier with meditation, but maybe you can

kind of elaborate more on on what have you found has worked. Do you want, do you want to run through a practice, Abby? Do you want me to talk? Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, I'd love to kind of hear what a meditation looks like, a little sneak peek. Yeah, let's do a little snippet, and then we'll talk through the science and some of the steps as we go, so listeners can get a little bit of a preview. So we're going to go ahead and close our eyes, Abby. And of course, anyone who's not driving their car is welcome to join us as well or to come back to this. And straight away, we're going to put our awareness on our hearts. And what that means is your physical heart in the center of your chest. Some people like to touch their heart. That's not necessary unless you like to do that.

Just place your attention there. And what's amazing, Abby, and there's published research on this, this alone, putting your attention on your heart has been shown to help rewire your nervous. system, right? When I say simple, I really mean very simple steps. We're starting to use our will. We're starting to put energy into the physical heart and its intrinsic nervous system. Now, while we're placing attention on our heart, we're going to breathe in and out nice and slowly. I won't, there's a full coherence breath pattern in the heart aligned meditation. There's free tracks on my site in the book. We don't have to go into that now. For now, let's just focus on the heart and breathe in and out nice and slowly.

Imagine you're breathing into your heart. Taking a deep breath in, taking a deep breath out. That's it. Full focus on your heart. A few more cycles, just breathing in and out. So while you continue to do that, I will mention that this piece also has research on it. This is called heart-focused breathing. And this was a research paper published in the American Journal of Cardiology about this type of coherence breathing starts to create that regulation, that coherence, syncing up this triangle, heart, brain, nervous system.

So we're not just taking deep breaths and kind of looking around and scrolling on our phone. We are fully focused on our hearts, physical heart, also energetic. heart right here in the center of your chest. Now just for a moment, Abby, I'd like you to recall someone or something that makes you feel appreciation. Could be a loved one, could be your kids, could be this beautiful sunset you saw, you're a puppy. And appreciation is a mix of gratitude and thankfulness and awe. I just want you to do. I just want you to just self-generate that feeling by focusing on that loved one or thing, and you're just going to keep breathing into your heart and focus on that for just a few moments.

Let me go there, feel that expansive, tingly feeling right in your heart. And if your mind came in, just bring it back into that feeling of appreciation, one last moment, and then taking a deep breath in, and deep breath out. and we can start to open our eyes. I appreciate you. I loved that. I loved that. Honestly, I'm always looking for new meditations.

I'm definitely going to be trying that and the next time I feel myself dipping into that feedback loop we were just talking about where you know, you feel something unusual in your body. And it's so common with GI, with IBS. You know, any single time you're like, I feel like I'm. you know, going to be constipated today. And then guess what? It is a self-fulfilling prophecy

because you get yourself in that head. So this is a really great way to kind of stop that in its tracks. Yes. So it's not thoughts that are going to change our physiology, Abby. It's feelings, which are energy and motion. So this is on page 29 of the book. I know you love your science, Abby. So I want to show you. And participants in our study happen to look at their HRV pattern. and they saw these differences, including, I have some funny stories to tell you about a couple of the amazing doctors that were in our study. But first, you can see these smooth, beautiful sign-like ways of appreciation. It's not just, oh, fluffy, it feels good.

But these heart-based emotions are increasing coherence. They're deeply calm, deeply centered. So when you start to feel tingles, let's say you're thinking about one of your sons or whatever it is. I'm a boy mom, too. We talked about my podcast. it actually is rewiring your nervous system. There's a purpose to this.

It's creating very physical changes. And again, back to the anger, you can see even a little bit of irritation. It's creating those very discordant, chaotic patterns. And that is IBS. That is low energy. At the end of the day, we say, why am I so exhausted? It's not just from your step class or your bar class, whatever you're doing, and picking up the kids.

It's because all day long, you're a moment. emotions are completely unhinged and it's creating so many different stress hormones in your body and everything's going bananas. That is the big reason we're exhausted. Yes. Oh, I feel that so, that's that's burnout 101 right there. Yeah. And like you said, we've got so much evidence to show that slowed breathing, meditation, so important to helping to interrupt that attention stress loop, you know, because you stop reinforcing that this is a dangerous signal, right? You stop interpreting the racing heart as a threat. You activate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, which then increases our HRV over time. So I'm so excited about, you know, that I now have

another tool in the toolbox and so many other people, I'm sure will benefit from this as well. So thank you so much, Kimberly. This is fantastic. I will, of course, be leaving, links in the show notes for your new book, The Power of the Five Hearts and your podcast, the Feel Good podcast. So thank you again so much for joining me. Thank you so much, Abby. I hope if anyone listening benefits, if anyone has struggled with anxiety or trying to meditate in their head, the heartline meditation only eight minutes, I think is for all of us with busy minds. And it's been proven in science to work. So thank you so much for speaking with me. It's been a real pleasure.

This episode really pulled together so many of the conversations that I've had with psychologists and physicians here on Biteback, and it really expands on a topic that we often talk about in the context of rejecting diet culture, intuition. Because when we talk about intuitive eating, we're really talking about learning to trust and respond to internal body cues. So things like hunger, fullness, satisfaction, and how foods make us feel, rather than relying on external rules. But as we've explored today, that's not always as simple as just listen to your body. Because what we often call intuition may actually be interception,

or our ability to sense and interpret internal bodily signals like heart rate, gut sensations, and past experiences, and integrate them into a kind of rapid, unconscious pattern recognition process. Research suggests that brain regions like the insula, play a key role in translating these signals into emotional experiences, meaning our gut feelings are very, very real, but they're being interpreted by the brain, and that interpretation isn't always very accurate, especially in states of stress or anxiety. And this is where things get really relevant for both intuitive eating and gut health. So conditions like IBS are now understood

as disorders of gut brain interaction, where there's this constant bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain. When someone is stuck in a chronic stress or fight or flight state, it can actually alter gut motility, sensitivity, and signaling, while those uncomfortable gut sensations send signals back to the brain that can amplify anxiety and reinforce that feedback loop. So when someone says it's all in your head, it's not only dismissive, it's also missing the point. These are very real physiological experiences shaped by a dysregulated communication loop between the brain and the body. And bringing this back to intuitive eating, if your internal cues are being filtered through stress, anxiety, or heightened sensitivity, it can make it really,

really hard to trust those internal signals. That doesn't mean intuitive eating doesn't work. It just means that sometimes we need to support the nervous system first so that those cues become more reliable and easier to interpret. The good news is that research suggests that stress-reducing practices like slow, diaphragmatic breathing, mindfulness meditation, and gentle movement can help to interrupt that cycle by calming the nervous system, improving vagal tone, and shifting how the brain interprets those internal signals. Over time, these practices can improve autonomic flexibility and heart rate variability, helping the body move more easily out of that stress response and making it easier to reconnect with hunger, fullness, and other internal cues in a more grounded

way. If you're someone struggling with IBS, anxiety around food, or feeling disconnected from your body, I want you to know that you are not broken. Your system may just be a little disregulated. And that is absolutely something that we can work with. And I've got lots of great episodes that dive deeper into the psychological strategies for IBS and building a healthier relationship with food. So I'm going to be linking to those in the show. notes. But if you like this episode, I would love if you'd give bite back a five-star review, subscribe so you do not miss out, and share this with a friend who needs a little science and sanity in their feed. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.