Episode 4: Why Nurses Can’t Lose Weight in Survival Mode

Jess Vee, NP (00:02.094)

Hello, my beautiful nurses. Let's just rip the bandaid off. If you've gained weight over the last few years, if your scrubs are tighter, if your belly feels inflamed, if the scale won't budge no matter how disciplined you try to be, you are not broken. But your nervous system might be. And no one is talking about that.

We talk about calories, we talk about macros, we most certainly talk about GLP-1s, we talk about intermittent fasting, we talk about discipline, but we do not talk about survival pathology and physiology. Nurses, you are living in a survival physiology. Let's zoom out. If you've listened to episode one through three, you know that in episode one,

We talked about how the healthcare system is broken and how nurses are absorbing that brokenness. In episode two, we talked about how processed food addiction is neurobiology, not weakness. And in episode three, we talked about how insulin resistance is real, especially in shift workers. Today, we connect it all because nervous system dysfunction sits underneath everything.

Nurses live in fight or flight. Picture your shift. Alarms, phones, family members, charting, admissions, discharges, someone circling, someone crashing, someone coding, someone complaining. You haven't peed, you haven't eaten, you're running on caffeine, your shoulders are tight, your jaw is clenched.

That is sympathetic dominance. Fight, flight, fix, perform, over and over and over and over. The sympathetic nervous system was built for acute danger. Running from a tiger, not running a med search for. Okay? But your body doesn't know the difference. It only knows threat. And when your body senses threat, it protects.

Jess Vee, NP (02:19.182)

Cortisol is not your enemy, but it does become one. When you're in chronic fight or flight, the HPA axis activates, cortisol rises. Now cortisol in the short term, helpful, but chronically elevated cortisol, different story altogether.

Research shows chronic stress and elevated cortisol are associated with increased visceral fat, especially in women. Not because women are weak, because stress shifts fat storage centrally. Your body stores energy near vital organs when it senses instability. That belly weight you hate? It might be protective physiology. Cortisol also...

raises blood sugar, increases insulin, increases cravings for high fat, high sugar foods, breaks down muscle and disrupts sleep. So you get this cycle. It's stress leads to more cortisol, leads to more insulin, leads to fat storage, which leads to more stress. And then someone tells you,

God forbid your doctor tells you, well, you just need to eat less. You need to eat less and move more. Weight loss is not a willpower event, okay? It is a hormonal event. And hormones respond to nervous system tone.

Shift work is metabolic sabotage. Now layer night shift on top of that? Kali. Artificial light at 2 a.m., caffeine at 3 a.m., cortisol spiking at the wrong time, your melatonin's all suppressed, sleep is fragmented. Research on circadian misalignment shows insulin sensitivity drops, even if calorie intake stays the same.

Jess Vee, NP (04:30.562)

That means your body processes food differently simply because your rhythm is disrupted. This means you could technically be eating the same things you were before you had a weight issue. And then all this goes on. Add sleep deprivation to there and you got chaos.

Sleep restriction further then increases ghrelin, your hunger hormone. Grelin, ghrelin. Grelin belly, ghrelin. Your hunger hormone. It also decreases leptin. Leptin is your satiety hormone. So after a night shift, you're hungrier.

You're less satisfied and you're more likely to crave fast energy, not because you're out of control, because your biology shifted. And instead of teaching nurses this, what do we do? We shame them. We shame them for not being good enough or strong enough or having enough willpower, for being a bad example, for not practicing what you preach.

You know what the missing link is? The missing link is the vagus nerve. Let's talk about the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is your parasympathetic anchor. It manages rest, digest, heal, repair.

When vagal tone is strong, you digest well. You regulate inflammation, you stabilize blood sugar, and you feel calm. When vagal tone is weak, inflammation rises, digestion suffers, insulin signaling worsens, and cravings increase. Chronic stress lowers vagal tone.

Jess Vee, NP (06:29.068)

Low heart rate variability has been associated with insulin resistance in future metabolic disease. So, if you are constantly activated, you cannot efficiently enter fat burning mode. Because fat burning is not a survival priority. Safety is. You cannot punish a body into parasympathetic mode.

to teach it safety. And nurses, nurses, we carry stored stress. Let's get uncomfortable for a second. Nurses carry trauma, not always big, dramatic trauma, but most certainly always accumulated trauma. Death, codes, grief.

Abuse. Moral injury. System betrayal. Suppressing tears to keep moving or popping into the linen closet. You swallow it. You compartmentalize and you keep performing. But the nervous system keeps the score. Chronic vigilance becomes baseline.

Baseline vigilance becomes elevated cortisol. Elevated cortisol becomes abdominal fat storage. And then, and then what happens? You blame yourself, right? You be blaming yourself. What if your weight gain is not failure? What if it's adaptation? I say this time and time again, your body is smart.

It protects you in the only way it knows how. Our bodies were not created for this rat race, for this quote unquote American dream. How many times have you been in the middle of a big painful shift and sat and thought, you know, I come here so that I can pay my car payment so that I can have a car to come here. Rat race, dog, it's not good for you.

Jess Vee, NP (08:53.664)

Now, what are you going to do next? You're going to try to diet. You're going to try to willpower your way through this. But I'm to talk about why dieting backfires when you're in survival mode. This is where it gets edgy. Okay. Aggressive dieting is a dysregulated nervous system. the aggressive dieting in the presence of a dysregulated nervous system can backfire.

That's what I'm trying to say. You can try, you can try. But if at your baseline you're in that vigilance fight or flight, yeah, it's gonna backfire. Severe calorie restriction, well, it raises cortisol. Overtraining also raises cortisol. Skipping meals while you're already stressed.

raises cortisol. I am not talking about fasting here. That is a whole nother course topic book mastermind. It is also a big piece of everything I do or at least a part. But skipping meals while you're already stressed, skipping meals unintentionally raises cortisol. So what do you do next? You try harder, right? You restrict more. You push.

push through long workouts, your body resists because you know it thinks it thinks you're in famine during a war or something. You cannot out discipline survival wiring. You have to down regulate it and you can do this.

without leaving your career. Now some people have to find a different job. Some people just have to find a different job. If you've been waiting for a sign or for somebody to give you permission to seek a chiller ass job, roll with it, okay? This is your sign. Let's talk about...

Jess Vee, NP (11:00.674)

the paradigm shift that we need to move towards if we want to get out of this hellhole situation. Here's the reframe. Weight gain in nurses is often protective physiology. The body stores fat when sleep is unstable, blood sugar is unstable, stress is chronic, trauma is unresolved, and inflammation is high.

Fat storage is not moral failure. It is metabolic adaptation. And the solution is not shame. It's actually regulation. What regulation actually looks like? I mean, this is not about just bubble baths and lavender. Okay, this is physiology. Regulation looks like stabilizing blood sugar before aggressive fasting.

Eating protein consistently. Anti-inflammatory fats, magnesium support, omega-3 support. Getting outside, getting outside light in your eyes. Sunlight. Protecting sleep like it's your medicine. Taking a beat, slowing down, breathing before your meals.

tiny inputs repeated consistently because small signals of safety shift the cortisol patterns over time. And when cortisol stabilizes, insulin improves, inflammation drops, metabolic flexibility returns, and weight loss becomes accessible. Not like forced, but actually accessible.

Once you release your nervous system from that vigilance mode, once you start sending these tiny signals through these tiny actions and these conscious choices, it's like the thumb is let up off of you. Your metabolism and your nervous system allow your body to access that fat burning mode.

Jess Vee, NP (13:23.02)

because it starts to understand that you are not in survival mode. It's a lie from the devil. The devil that is the rat race. The devil that is the hospital system. Why? Why do I care about all this? Why am I even here? I'm going to tell you why I created my, I created shift proof metabolism, which is

which is a supplement and guide because nurses need something realistic, right? Not a bikini body detox, not a 75 day challenge, not some, you know, meal plan.

They need physiology guidance. inside of the Shift Proof Metabolism, which is a, it's a 55 page ebook that I am giving out as a freebie to just spread the word about this information a little deeper. It's really hard to convince people that they're not broken. It's really hard to convince people that they are not at fault and that they shouldn't be in a shame situation.

But I want to convince people that the problem is not simply what you're eating and what you're doing. It's not calories in, calories out. It's physiology. So inside of this shift-proof metabolism guide, I talk about insulin resistance markers more deeply, talk about hormones of concern, inflammation, nurse-specific circadian damage, and foundational supplement education.

And I also talk about nervous system first metabolic repair. It's not magic. The approach to getting from where you are to where you want to be. is not magic. It's foundational. So. You know, I've talked about insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction in the previous episode, and. Now we've talked about the nervous system.

Jess Vee, NP (15:33.953)

And I really want you to take this all of this information into consideration. I want you to you know, you can review the resources that I've listed in the show notes. There's going to be the resources, the research resources that I've used to support the information that I've provided here.

And if this episode stirred something in you, like if it riled up something inside of you, well good, good. That means you're waking up. Not to another diet, not to another challenge, not to another shame spiral, but to the truth.

Your body has been protecting you. Your nervous system has been doing exactly what it was designed to do in an unsafe environment. And now you get to teach it something new. It's exciting actually, really, truly. You need this paradigm shift. You get to teach your nervous system safety, stability, consistency, and regulation.

And just don't forget that healing is not dramatic. It's not extreme. It's not punishing. It's steady. And you, you my love, are more than capable of steady. Download Shift Proof Metabolism and start with regulation. Start with physiology. Start with safety.

And if you're ready to go deeper, you already know where to find me. Proactive wellness dot net info at proactive wellness. Send me a message on any social media. Proactive wellness. Jessica Velosa, Jess, VNP. I am here because I have this. can't ignore it. Drive to dive into this information with nurses. I can't ignore it. It is distracting me from my regular life because it is

Jess Vee, NP (17:44.737)

passion that is driving me. It is a calling and it's also my personal origin story. I have gone through all of this and healed it myself and that is that is the information that I use to formulate all of the courses and the information that I the coaching that I deliver.

So if you're ready to go deeper, find me, dog. And I want you to know, you're probably gonna get annoyed, because I keep saying this, but you are not broken, okay? There's not just something wrong with you. You are a nurse who has been surviving, and now we need to do that shift. We need to take that paradigm shift.

And we need to heal because I say it every time. Surviving over thriving is not sustainable. Survival mode will drag you down to the bottom. And until you help your system regulate, until you help your nervous system regulate, nothing will change. Surviving over thriving is not sustainable. So I want to let you know.

that it is time for you to stop pretending that this is all about willpower. Let us stop pretending that nurses are lazy. Let's stop pretending that night shift doesn't wreck biology. The system is not built for your health. It's built for productivity, okay?

your body adapted to survive it. The weight, the inflammation, the exhaustion, it's not weakness, it's physiology. And when you understand physiology, you stop shaming yourself. We are not dieting our way out of nervous system dysfunction. We are regulating our way out of it. And if you're done blaming yourself, go ahead and download my freebie, hop on to anything.

Jess Vee, NP (19:51.64)

that you any different level that you'd like to go deeper with me, or just keep listening to the podcast and share it with people that you know and love that might benefit from it. Please leave me a review and some notes. Let me know if there's a topic you would like me to cover. Let me know what you think, okay? We are building something bigger here, something different. I want you to know.

from deep down inside of me that I love you already. And I'll see you next time.