Improving your gut health doesn’t necessarily mean taking the latest fancy, expensive probiotic or making drastic changes to your diet. While sometimes a gut healing protocol with therapeutic supplements is needed to bring your gut health back to balance, it isn’t always the case. Sometimes you can work on healing your gut by adding in a few habits or modifying some of the things you are already doing.
The good news is, when you work on these habits, you are not just helping your gut health, but you are working on your whole body health too. Digestion and good gut health are one of the main foundations I work on with my clients to achieve holistic health and balance in the body. So much of our health journey can be linked to our gut health. It’s a fundamental piece of our wellness puzzle and it affects EVERYTHING. It affects not only things like how we get nutrients from our food so that our bodies can function as they should, but it impacts our immune health, skin appearance, our brain health, energy levels, mood, and more.
Here are 6 ways you can work to improve your gut health without breaking the bank and are worth trying before diving into deeper protocols with an experienced practitioner.
Hydrate. Making sure you are drinking enough pure, filtered water is huge for digestion to work properly. Water is one of the main components in keeping your food moving down the chain through the entire digestive process. If the body is dehydrated, by the time the food makes it down to the large intestine, things can get a little challenging. The large intestine absorbs the remaining water from your waste and preps it to exit the body. If there isn’t enough water by this point, your waste will become too dry and hard to pass, causing constipation. A good general baseline is to drink about half your body weight in ounces per pound of body weight.
Nourish the body with minerals. The body requires adequate amounts of minerals like potassium, sodium, calcium, and zinc in order for the digestive process to function as it should. The irony is that oftentimes when your gut health isn’t doing so great, your ability to take in and absorb these minerals is more challenging, leading to deficiencies. Making sure you are eating plenty of mineral-rich foods will allow the process of digestion and nutrient absorption to work better. Foods to eat in abundance include fruits, root vegetables, meat, organs, bone broth, seaweed, beans, nuts and seeds, and raw dairy. Also, make sure you are eating enough real and/or sea salt daily, adding it to your food to taste and sprinkling it in your water if you are not taking electrolytes.
Feed your good gut bugs with prebiotics and probiotics. Our digestive tract is home to a whole host of bacteria. Some are beneficial and some not so great, but we want to help support and feed the good bacteria by eating pre and probiotic-rich foods. Oftentimes, by eating these foods we can crowd out some of the bacteria that are causing the problems in the gut. Prebiotic foods include things like mushrooms, onions, garlic, plantains, bananas, artichoke, asparagus, cooked and cooled potatoes and rice. Probiotic foods include sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha.
Work on stress management / calming the nervous system. The gut and the brain communicate via our nervous system. When the body (and brain) is in a chronically stressed, sympathetic dominant state, it creates two main issues for our gut health. One is that our digestion is meant to happen when we are in a relaxed or parasympathetic state so it will not function properly if we are stressed. Being in a chronically stressed state is also not great for healing. When you are stressed, the body is not prioritizing healing functions at all, it is prioritizing your survival and the focus is on that. It is really important to incorporate daily practices to calm your stress signals and get you out of the chronic sympathetic state. This might look like spending time in nature, meditation, prayer, breathwork, journaling, and more. Find what will work for you and make it a non-negotiable.
Focus on your dental health. This might not be something you’ve thought of before, but our mouth has a microbiome too, just like our gut. If there are issues going on in the mouth, they can easily migrate down to the gut and vice versa. It is important to maintain good oral hygiene habits like regular dental visits and cleanings along with daily brushing (my favorite is Boka), flossing, and water picking. Eating a predominantly whole foods-based diet and addressing mouth infections and overgrowth will also have a great impact on your oral microbiome which will only impact your gut in a positive way.
Move your body daily. When we move we encourage regularity in elimination, aka gut motility. Regular movement also supports digestive function like the movement of lymph and other fluids produced and used by your body. Our lymph plays an important role in digestion as it’s involved in the secretion of stomach acid which helps to break down protein, digestive enzymes, and bile which helps to break down carbs and fats respectively. Without these functions working properly you may experience stomach aches, heartburn, gas, bloating, constipation, or loose stools. Movement and exercise may also increase microbial diversity. Microbial diversity refers to the amount and different types of beneficial microbes living in your gut. Research suggests that having a wide array of microbes in our gut makes our microbiome more capable and resilient. Walking is a great form of movement and additional exercise is icing on the cake!
If you’ve tried these strategies for a while and continue to struggle with your gut health, let’s chat.
Curious to learn more about your symptoms and where in the digestive process things may be going wrong, but are not ready to work with me? Check out my FREE Gut Assessment. I provide some additional tips for troubleshooting certain symptoms.