Good gut health means that you have energy, feel great and can be at your best.
Gut health is central to healing. Your ability to digest and absorb all the nutrients that your body needs is crucial for it to work effectively. Your gut acts as one of your barriers to the outside world and when it’s not happy it will send you symptoms which need to be dealt with.
A common symptom of gut issue is indigestion and bloating. These are signs that the body is out of balance or in a state of unease. The occasional flare up is not a cause for too much concern, but symptoms appear as a ‘love letter’ from your body, and the sooner these symptoms are investigated, the sooner the root cause can be found.
To understand your gut issues better there are simple steps you can take.
Step 1: Awareness
Become aware of the symptoms that you are experiencing. You can do this by completing a lifestyle and symptom diary.
For example: chart 2 workdays and 2 weekend days
Step 2: Acknowledge the connections without judgement
Is there something that you can see coming through in the chart? What are the patterns. Our lifestyles and the foods we consume can affect how the bowels work.
Step 3: Take Action
- The biggest contributor to gut symptoms is the effect of increased pressure or stress on the gut. The nervous system is the connection between the gut and the brain and if your body feels that it is under ‘threat’, it has an inbuilt system to keep you safe. One of these safeguards is a reduction in food digestion, so you can get indigestion. Another, it can slow the bowels down, so you get constipation. It can also affect your immune system decreases your ability to fight off infections.
To support your sympathetic nervous system there are simple changes you can make:
- One small step is to sit down and eat.
- Take a breath and do 4,7,8, breathing exercises before you put anything in your mouth.
- What you eat can be affecting the gut. Have you noticed something in your diet that seems to be upsetting you? We are careful at the practice with eliminating foods; we prefer you are having a balanced plate of food before eliminating anything. However, sometimes it is necessary as the body is not able to digest it, the main culprits being, gluten, dairy, and sugar.
- The gut has a vast array of bacteria that can really help and support our health and wellbeing. For them to work optimally, improving our intake of colourful vegetables is the third top tip. Always try to work towards getting the rainbow of fruit and vegetables each day.
Tell us what you see in your diary, and which step you decided to take. We will be talking more about this at our next free webinar, 11th November 7pm. Please register here: