Athena Perez came on the pod and dropped some of the most honest, unexpected wisdom we’ve heard in a long time. This is all real bodies, real talk!
“I get a choice. You can either be a prisoner to it, or you can make a decision to change the way you eat and finish what you started.” — Athena Perez
We had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Athena Perez — CrossFit Level 2 trainer, author of Lifting the Wait, founder of Scaled Nation Training, and one of the most radically honest humans we’ve ever talked to. She started CrossFit at over 450 lbs. She’s lost 257+ pounds. She’s written seminars that teach coaches how to actually work with larger-bodied athletes. And most recently? She did a 40-day water fast — not for weight loss, not for a cleanse — but to try to rewire her brain.
We told you this one hit different.
Here are the moments that stood out to us.
The Fast Wasn’t About Weight. It Was About Getting Answers.
Athena had been dealing with emotional eating her whole life. She could coach people through it. She could explain it. But when someone asked her how to cure it — she didn’t have an answer. And that bothered her.
So she designed an experiment. What if she shut the water off? What if she removed food entirely, not to lose weight, but to understand what was actually driving the relationship with it?
She didn’t plan for it to be 40 days. That decision didn’t happen until day 13 — inspired by a Marcus Luttrell post she stumbled across on Instagram, where he said a 40-day fast was harder than Navy SEAL training. And Athena thought: I’m never going to be elite on the physical side of CrossFit. But could I be elite in my mind?
So she went for it!!!
Days 3–7 Are Brutal. And Then the Food Noise Just… Stopped.
She was honest about how hard the early days were. Days three through six and a half felt like being sick on the couch — her body withdrawing from sugar and food, foggy and uncomfortable. But around day seven or eight, something shifted.
The food noise — the thing she’d struggled with her entire life — went quiet.
And what filled that silence surprised her. Suddenly she realized how much of her mental bandwidth had been occupied by food. What’s for dinner? What do I need from the store? What are we doing for lunch? When all of that turned off, she was left with her actual life. Her actual thoughts. And things started getting clear.
She documented everything -blood sugar 15 times a day, blood pressure, and every single emotional eating trigger. What was it? What time of day? What was happening? Patterns started emerging fast. Mid-morning. Mid-afternoon. The busiest, most stressful parts of her day. Food had been the coping mechanism — not because she was addicted to food, but because it had always been the thing that made her feel better, even just for a second.
The Real Discovery Came During the Refeed.
Here’s where it gets wild.
When Athena started eating again — carefully, conservatively, starting with broth and working her way up — she noticed something. Her heart rate spiked when she ate a rutabaga. Not a cupcake. Not pizza. A rutabaga.
She started poking the bear deliberately. Oatmeal. Sweet potato. Pineapple. Grains. Healthy stuff. Every time she pushed the glycemic index above about 45, the food noise came back. And every time she stayed below it, it didn’t.
That was the moment everything clicked.
“This is a biological response that’s connected to the emotional eating that’s happening in my brain.”
She’d spent her whole life being told the two weren’t connected — that it was in her head. Turns out? It was in her biology. And now she had data. Her data.
Knowledge Is a Blessing and a Curse… And That’s Kind of the Point.
This is where Sheena and Athena had one of our favorite exchanges of the whole conversation. Because here’s the thing about getting answers: now you have to do something with them.
Athena didn’t come out of the fast devastated that she couldn’t eat oatmeal anymore. She came out empowered — because now she chooses. She’s not hiding from information, not pretending she doesn’t know what she knows, not using confusion as a reason to stay stuck. She knows exactly how her body responds. And that knowledge belongs to her.
As Sheena said in the moment: “A big part of our job as coaches is helping people get to that place where they’re like — you have everything. You have the knowledge. Now everything’s in your control. You have the choice to go forward.”
That’s the whole game, honestly.
What Coaches Get Wrong When Working With Larger-Bodied Clients.
We had to ask. Athena runs a CEU-approved seminar specifically teaching coaches how to work with larger-bodied athletes because there are blind spots, and those blind spots cause real harm.
Her take on nutrition specifically? Food is a sensitive conversation and it needs to be approached that way. When someone comes to her and says “I made this meal and I know it’s unhealthy” — there’s something really important happening in that moment. They’re defending themselves before anyone even asks.
Athena’s point: both things can be true at the same time. You can say pizza tastes incredible and acknowledge it doesn’t support your goals. You don’t have to pretend you hate the thing. You don’t have to lie to your coach. You don’t have to come in pre-apologizing for your choices.
“Something can taste good and you don’t have to lie and say ‘I don’t like the taste of pizza.’ It’s okay to say those taste amazing — and have it also be true in the same sentence — but it doesn’t support where I’m going.”
That’s not a diet culture mindset. That’s autonomy. That’s exactly what we’re trying to build with every client we work with.
What This Means for You
If you’ve ever felt like your relationship with food is in your head — it might also be in your biology. And you deserve the space to find out.
If you’ve ever felt like you needed to justify your food choices to your coach — you don’t. A good coach creates space for both things to be true.
If you’ve ever hidden from information because knowing means you have to do something, we see you. That’s human. And also? You’re more capable of handling the truth than you think.
Athena Perez is proof that you can walk through the hard stuff, do the uncomfortable experiment, sit with the silence, and come out the other side with answers that actually belong to you.
That’s not a weight loss story. That’s a life story.
Find Athena on Instagram @athenamariebt and at athenamperez.com. She’s funny, she’s real, and she will make you think.
Ready to do your own version of the experiment? That’s what we’re here for.
📅 Work with Gwen: calendly.com/gwenholtan/coaching-strategy-call
📅 Work with Sheena: calendly.com/sheena-6