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.
Simply put, bloating is just excess intestinal gas. The feeling can range from uncomfortable to pretty painful. It usually resolves on its own after a period of time after eating, but if you’ve got something going on with your digestion, it is probably coming back pretty regularly. Most of the time bloating happens because of some sort of dysfunction in the gut, but it can also happen when you have a food sensitivity or intolerance, or for women, around their menstrual cycle.
Constipation is SUPER common, but it isn’t normal. I was always told that a bowel movement every day isn’t that important, but once I learned about how digestion works and what the body’s objective is in pooping (removing waste and toxins from the body!) I realized that we really should be pooping every day, at least once a day and up to two or three times.
The health of your digestive tract isn’t just about the food and drink we are consuming. Digestion is one of the most important and resource-intensive processes our body goes through on a daily basis and requires a lot more than just eating the right foods. A lot of things have to be going right for our gut to be strong and functioning how it should.
One of the easiest and BEST ways to improve your digestion and overall health is to consume fermented foods daily. I recommend eating fermented foods to all of my clients. Depending on what you’ve got going on digestively, you may have trouble with them at first. If this is the case for you, let’s work together to see what is going on and get you to a place where you can tolerate and enjoy these magical superfoods.
A lot of factors influence the amount of stomach acid and digestive enzymes our bodies produce. As we grow older, our bodies naturally produce less stomach acid and digestive enzymes, but this is also a function of our diet and lifestyles as well. Digestion can become impaired due to a number of different issues including stress, excess sugar and alcohol consumption, nutritional deficiencies, or allergies and food sensitivities.
HCl is a critically important part of digestion. It is a gastric secretion originated in the stomach that enables the body to break down proteins (into amino acids to be used for neurotransmitters), activate important enzymes and hormones, and acts as the first line of defense against pathogens, parasites, and bacterial overgrowth in the gut. Given that HCl is such a critical part of the process at such an early stage, not having enough can really wreak havoc on the entire digestive chain.
You might be surprised to know that symptoms of low stomach acid include heartburn, indigestion and bloating. Conventional wisdom has led us to believe that these symptoms are caused by too much stomach acid and doctors commonly provide us with prescriptions for antacids, H-2 receptor blockers, and proton pump inhibitors all of which are designed to reduce or block stomach acid. Most of the time, people with these symptoms actually have low stomach acid, and not high. These drugs end up masking the problem instead of actually trying to help it and often make the problem even worse.
Other symptoms of low stomach acid and other digestive aids may include a desire to eat when not hungry, a sense of fullness after meals, flatulence, constipation and diarrhea. Our body also produces bile to break down fat, which originates in the gallbladder and other digestive enzymes which are produced by the pancreas. So how do we best support our bodies to allow them to naturally improve your body’s ability to get this digestive fire going?
Here are my suggestions to naturally and easily stimulate your digestive juices and get the process working like it is supposed to without adding another supplement to your diet.
Prep your body for digestion. This will stimulate the production of gastric juices and send signals to your digestive tract to know that food will soon be coming down the hatch. Here are some good options:
Drink warm water with lemon. Half a cup of warm or room temperature water with a squeeze or two of lemon should do it.
Drink apple cider vinegar. Take one to two teaspoons diluted in about a half cup of room temperature water. The key here is, raw, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar (preferably organic).
Take bitters before meals. Bitter flavors stimulate the digestive flow, increasing the production of saliva and salivary amylase and triggering stomach acid and other digestive juices. Take about ¼ teaspoon of bitters before your meal (or suggested serving size) straight or diluted in a half cup of water. Make sure to use real bitters (my favorite is Urban Moonshine) that are made from organic ingredients and don’t contain fillers or additives. These days I keep the travel-sized bitters in my bag and use it on the go. Instead of the dropper, it is in a convenient spray able bottle. I use my larger bottle to refill the travel bottle when it runs low
Breath. If you are stressed out, you will not properly digest your food. Aim to always sit down to eat, with minimal distractions. Try taking 5 deep belly breaths before you eat can help to switch your body from a sympathetic “fight or flight” mode to a parasympathetic “rest and digest” mode.
Chew, chew, chew. Digestion is a very demanding task for the body and actually requires a great deal of energy. Saliva contains digestive enzymes, so the longer you chew, the more time these enzymes have to break down your food, making digestion easier on your stomach and small intestine. Shoot for about 30-40 chews per bite. This may seem like a lot, but your food should be liquid before it goes down to the small intestine.
Put that fork down. Between bites that is. This will encourage you to slow down and keep calm. It also makes for more mindful eating where you will be able to taste your food better, enjoy the process and also check in with your hunger cues to avoid over-eating.
Keep water drinking to a minimum. Drinking too much water or other beverages with your mail can dilute your stomach acid and other gastric juices. Aim to take small sips and aim to drink more water away from mealtime.
These strategies are great for supporting your digestion and will allow the process to function in the way that it is meant to. Try these out for a few weeks and let me know how it goes! Many of my clients notice big changes in their digestion by incorporating these habits. You might see less bloating and gas and better (and more consistent!) bowel movements.
If you’ve tried these strategies, but continue to struggle with digestive symptoms, let’s do a deeper dive into the root cause of your discomfort. Schedule a session with me and let’s get started!
Sources:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gerd/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20361959
https://nutritionreview.org/2018/11/gastric-balance-heartburn-caused-excess-acid/
Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You by Jonathan V. Wright
Nutritional Therapy Association FNTP Curriculum
