Gut Check: Why Your Gut Health Matters And What To Do About It (Ep 13)

Let's dive into the gut and the symptoms it shows when out of balance. There are so many things we can do do to improve our gut health let's run through some options together in this episode. Gut health impacts our mind, our skin, our lungs and even our hormones.  

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Transcript

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Yes. Welcome to the Holistic Health Sisters podcast of Wellness and Real Life Sisters Hannah Carr and Sarah King from the Holistic Health Collective. In this podcast, we're going to be sharing our passion for, of course, holistic health, but also spirituality, healings, hormone, plant medicine, seasonal living, our love of nature, and our love of community. So we are gonna invite you to take a pause and take a nice deep breath. And join us on a path of healing, of self-discovery and self-love, and of stepping into the brilliance of who you really are. This is a podcast for the seekers out there. Those of you who know there's more to life than just surviving or going through the motions, and you want more, more health, wealth, happiness, love, compassion, connection, trust, surrender, and more faith, and you want that for others too. So we can make this world a better place for us all to go and grab a cup of ceremonial grade cacao and join us as we explore what moves through us, that which is divinely led, so we can all move from fear to walls, more faith. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Why your gut health matters and what you can do about it. Hello, welcome to the podcast with me, Hannah Carr, this week, and I'm speaking through the lens as a naturopathic nutritionist and we are looking at gut health. So whether you are dealing with bloating or brain fog or mood swings, or you just can't take that tired all the time feeling, guess what? Your gut may be trying to tell you something. And in today's episode, we are going to decode those signals. So we're gonna be talking about why compromised gut health. Really matters because it messes with your body. And your brain and your hormones, and we are gonna be talking about what you can actually do about it. So let's get into it. So you may have heard that the gut is known as the second brain. So your gut isn't just about your digestion, it's actually home to trillions of bacteria and collectively known as your gut microbiome. And this little universe in your belly helps with everything from digesting food to producing neurotransmitters like serotonin. Yes, that's the happiness chemical. And that's why so many people call your gut your second brain. But this is the problem when your gut's out of balance, this is what is called dysbiosis and your whole body feels it. So let's talk about some of those symptoms. These are some of the red flags that your gut is trying to let you know is trying to catch your attention. We can see all symptoms in the body is the way the body is trying to. To communicate with us'cause it can't do it in words. So digestively, it may be bloating, constipation, diarrhea, heartburn. And actually let's just dive a little bit deeper into constipation. What would be considered really normal. You wanna be going, moving your bowels at least once a day. But what's considered normal is that you move your bowels every time you have a meal. So if you're eating three meals a day, it'll be normal. As long as you're not loose as long as it doesn't seem like it's diarrhea. Moving your bowels every time you eat. It would actually be considered really normal. Let's move into some other symptoms as well. Chronic fatigue and poor sleep is actually linked to gut health, but so are skin problems. If you've got eczema, psoriasis, acne, even just dry, flaky skin, this is very much related to the gut health. So is the body trying to detox for you? It's trying to help you. It's trying to push toxins out of the skin. But mood issues. So anxiety, depression, irritability cravings, especially that for sugar, auto-immune flareups or inflammation. And then there's other signals as well. So if you've got a hormone imbalance, which I'll talk more about in a moment. But actually if you've got anything to do with the lung, so any problem with the lungs at all asthma, maybe you've had pneumonia, maybe you have a reoccurring cough. Maybe you've had bronchitis maybe more than once. All of these are signs that get actually needs to have some healing as well. So why does this happen? It's when the number,'cause we have good and bad bacteria throughout the whole body, and it's about keeping that in balance. It's not completely eliminating the bad bacteria about, but about keeping it in balance. So when the bad starts to outnumber the good, then your gut lining can weaken. And this can lead to something called leaky gut. And this is when it's like when the lining of your gut is more like a sieve, okay? Instead of let's say a piece of fabric. And the particles sneak into your bloodstream. So this could be food and it starts to trigger inflammation all, all around the body.'cause it's not meant to be getting into the bloodstream, it's meant to be going through the digestive system. So here, oh, let me just go back to hormones. Actually. Here are some symptoms from the hormones as well. So if your hormones are out of balance, gosh, there's so many symptoms with hormones out of balance. But you may know for a lady listening to this may be a little bit about PMS as you're leading up to your period. You may know that your hormones perhaps are a little bit out balance, but we work with lots of women in the perimenopause. So it could be anything from hot flushes to brain fog to weight gain around the middle. And so many other symptoms as well. But what we really need to balance is these three main things that we need to look at when we want to balance our hormones. So often when we work with women, they dive straight into one specific hormone. So for example, they may know that their estrogen is too high or they progesterone is too low, or maybe they've not got enough testosterone in the body and they wanna take a deep dive on that hormone. What we find as holistic practitioners. Is that all of the hormones work like a symphony, right? So if one is out of balance, it actually has a knock on effect to all of the other hormones. So what we really want to be balancing is some of the master hormones, things like cortisol, and when we bring these into balance, then. Other hormones will naturally be more balanced without concentrating on them specifically. So what we find is a three-pronged approach, if you like, which is, first of all, looking at liver health. Actually it's all of these three in no particular order they all need looking at. But liver health. So if you've got symptoms like you're feeling very angry or irritable or impatient. That could be a sign that your liver needs a little bit more support or you're having the liver can show up with the head and the eyes. So if you're having any conjunctivitis, any dyes, any dry eyes, any headaches, any reoccurring migraines, these are all signs that the liver may need a little bit more support. Or if you're feeling sick or nauseous a lot, that's also another sign. Blood sugar levels. So that's the second prong approach that we need to look at. Blood sugar levels and balancing them. Naturally through food, through lifestyle changes and here's some symptoms that the blood sugar. Maybe at a balance, and that might be that you get a little bit jittery that you feel hangry. So like when you need to eat, you need to eat now. And it's like very, you get very impatient with that and it really needs to be quite immediate. It may be that your energy crashes as well, or perhaps for some of our clients, they might wake up in the night really hungry or really jittery. That's like a major blood sugar crash in the evening throughout the night. And then the last one, what we're talking about today is the gut health. So when all three of those are looked at and you are doing general things like having a good diet, hydrated enough balancing your stress levels, often your hormones are gonna be working a lot more like clockwork. And us not needing to look at one specifically, but just balancing the whole body. And that's what we're trying to do with a holistic approach to health is we are not looking to fix one particular problem. We're looking to get to the root cause and bring balance back to the body. So let's talk about gut health specifically. What can you do? How can you fix it? What we want to do is we want to restore the gut health. So the first thing that you may need to do is it's very difficult to heal or bring balance back to something when you're constantly causing a problem. So let's say, for example, let's use an analogy here. Let's say you have a cut on your arm. And you keep scratching it every day. It's like the body can heal itself, the body can produce a scab, and that will naturally fall away and the skin underneath will be repaired. The body can do that, but it couldn't if you kept scratching that every single day and you like made that wound bigger, right? So if you made that wound bigger, the body can't heal. So this is the first thing that we may need to remove and it. Maybe temporarily some inflammatory foods. So the typical ones are things like sugar, junk, food, dairy for some people as well, gluten for others and excess alcohol. Or for some, for a period of time it may be any alcohol at all. So alcohol is a poison for the body. It causes a lot of inflammation. It's full of sugar. So we need to find out what is it that is inflammatory for us. And you may know. So I'll give you a few examples here. Perhaps you, add a lot of sugar one night, or perhaps alcohol, that's your form of sugar. And the next day after you'd eaten that or drunk that your gums might have been inflamed. Maybe when you brushed your teeth, your gums felt tender. Or when you spat out into the sink, you had some blood, right? That's a sign of inflammation. Or maybe one evening you have a pizza. Let's say you're a little bit reactive to gluten. Let's say you had a pizza or a pasta dish. And the next morning you notice some joint pain. I don't think I said that in the list of gut healing symptoms actually. But joint pain is one of them. There's a long list. It goes on and on. But joint pain definitely can give us an indication that the gut needs a little bit of healing. So let's say your fingers felt like a little bit more stiff as you're holding the steering wheel the next day, and they didn't before. So you're getting ideas of what may be an inflammatory food for you. So for a period of time, you may need to reduce or completely eliminate these foods that are causing the problem to allow the natural healing to start happening under. The other thing under removing is if you're not getting enough sleep or you are very stressed. So stress and lack of sleep are things that are really like enemies for the gut. So it may be that you need to remove or reduce that stress or get some better quality sleep or even some more sleep. The next thing is that you may need to replace some things, so this may come in the form of digestive enzymes. You may need to increase your stomach acid. You may need to add some bitters to your diet. You may need to add some more nutrient dense foods that are really got lots of fiber in high in fiber. I'll just put a little caveat in here if you're having any kind of, flare up with the gut. It may be that at that time your body doesn't need fiber, or if you're not used to eating a lot of fiber, you have to introduce fiber slowly so the body doesn't like too many changes too quickly. It finds that hard to adapt to. Go slow when we are making changes. But generally for most people, we've got health. They need to bring more fiber into their diet. So more fruits, more veggies. And this is what we're replacing. So we're replacing some of the empty calories. Think bread, pasta, what else? Even things like nachi, pastries, all of that kind of food for the more nutrient dense whole foods. Once we've gone through those steps, we actually need to start to build up the good bacteria. So there's lots of ways that we can get good bacteria into our guts. One of my favorite ways is to eat a wide variety. So you could have a little bit of a goal. We've actually done this I think we've done this last year in our membership, women's health membership, the holistic health circle. We had a month where we was trying to eat 30 different fruits and vegetables a week. Now that might sound like a lot, although if you are aiming for five a day, five fruits and vegetables a day, which is the minimum. That we should be aiming for. That would already be 35 a week anyway, but it would be 35, 30 different fruits and vegetables and easy ways that you can do this is even if you have like lemon in your water in the morning or you added some ginger or turmeric to your water, that would all count if you added spices and herbs. So I've just had a plant-based chili as a. Today as I'm recording this and in there went in, I think we had cumin, coriander, smoked paprika. Chili. So that's already four Okay. In that dinner. And then I added some black beans, so that's a legume. So that would actually count off one of those as well. So that was already five in that dinner without any side dishes of vegetables as well. So all of those can count. The other ways that we can build up the good bacteria is by eating fermented foods. Now there's a lot of sort of caveats with gut healing. So with this one, with fermented foods, if you're high in histamine, so if you react a lot, if you have a lot of allergies or you have hay fever, you may need to be following a low histamine diet. But generally, for most people, add these things in and see how your body reacts. So all recommendations is based on your particular body and you don't know until you try. So never follow any advice that anyone shared or recommendations or suggestions, and follow them blindly. Always listen to your body. Pay attention to how your bowels are reacting, how your bloating feels, how your energy feels, how your sleep is, how any aches and pains are in your body. Like how are these foods reacting for you, particularly if we're bringing new ones in, but it's fermented foods that can build good bacteria. So think Sauer cow, crouch, kimchi, kafi. I love a bit of kombucha. Now when I studied naturopathic nutrition, these were all new words to me. I didn't know any of these, so some of this may be going over your head. So if you're new to this world and new to Natural Healing Hall. Stick healing and this is all feeling a bit too much. Just take from it the simple things. So if you could improve your sleep, do that. If you could know that you could reduce your sugar, do that. But it may be that you're doing those things already and you know what fermented foods are and you know what the good sauerkraut is. It's not the one in the supermarket shelves that are on the shelf. It's the one that's in the fridge. It's the fresh stuff. And kfi. You can either have the dairy one if you tolerate that well, or you can have the water one as well. You can get that from companies like Abel and Cole online or health food shops, or you can make your own. And the other way to repopulate the gut is by taking a high quality probiotic. So you are, you've then got a good bacteria in. The next thing that you want to do is start to repair. And repair is nourishing the gut lining. There's lots of different ways to do this, and it would be different ways for different people depending what they need. But things like collagen, bone broth and zinc are all things that can help to repair the gut line in. But so are antioxidants. So foods that are high in antioxidant. You may know that we absolutely love ceremonial grade. Cacao have it every single day, and that is so high in antioxidant antioxidants, but so are berries. And I particularly love if you can get them you can get wild blueberries. They are absolutely full of antioxidants. But green leafy vegetables are amazing as well. And then the next thing is you want to work on your lifestyle. So bringing a bit of balance into your life. So that's the simple things, but not always easy, but are you sleeping for seven to nine hours a night? Yeah. If you know that you're stressed in your life, if you can feel it in your body or your chest, or you're just feeling stressed out, maybe you'll feel it in your muscles. Maybe they're very tense, reducing stress, but also getting movement. And I'm not talking about pushing yourself too hard, but I. Movement that works for you and that is enjoyable for you. So that may be walking, getting time out in nature. Perhaps you love to get in the yoga studio or maybe you're part of our women's health membership, the holistic health circle, where we share feminine flow yoga in there. Perhaps you like your strength training and that works well for you, but. Bring balance to your body by making sure that you move it. They do say that sitting is the new smoking rate, is the next sort of big killer, if you like. And so many of us are sitting down for so many hours of the day. So can you balance that with getting movement as well? So the first thing that you want to do when to do it, is you want to start with the removal. First of all, cutting out those big things, cleaning up your plate, hydrating well, getting into the groove, the sleep. That alone could take two, two to four weeks, and then you want to move on to the replacement and then the. Getting the good bacteria into your gut and then repairing it. So that's the probiotics and the gut healing Nutra nutrients. And this can go on for months, right? And the Reba in bit where we're trying to get the right amount of sleep and we're trying to exercise and reduce our stress or keep our stress. I balance.'cause some stress is good for us. It's just when it's chronic and goes on all day, every day. So that's lifelong work, right? It's about keeping your gut happy long term, but this is why you should care, right? It's not. It is not just for these symptoms that I've spoken about, but this is your root health. Your gut health affects your energy. I've not even mentioned immunity yet, but. 90% of your immunities in your gut, it affects your weight. Do you know there's been studies where people have lost weight just through introducing more good bacteria and more variety to their diet, not cutting calories at all, not exercising more, just having a better balance of good bacteria in their guts. It helps your skin. So if you're looking to look, more younger or more, brighten your skin more, more vitality, or you are looking to clear up any skin conditions. Your gut's gonna help you to do that. It's gonna help you to balance your hormones. So whether that's perimenopause, menopause, post menopause, where maybe you're still cycling and you have PMT. And or PMDD, some women we work with have PMDD. The gut's really gonna help you with this. It is also gonna help you with your mood and your brain. So whether you want more focus, more concentration, you want a better, long, or short-term memory, the gut is gonna help you with all of this. So it's not just helping you get through the day, it's helping you feel clearer, calmer. More in sync with your body. So I'd like to share with you a couple of ways that we help women do this because information's one thing, but actually taking that information and implementing it into your life is quite another. A really simple way that we do that is inside our monthly membership, the holistic health circle. And I mentioned there that also for. Balanced hormones. You need the good balanced liver health, the blood sugar balance. And we've done that over the past couple of months in the membership. And then this month, at the time of recording this, we've just done our focus on gut health. And what we do is we break things down. We give you a challenge every single week over four weeks. This is based on feedback from our members telling us that they like this. It feels manageable. So with the gut health as an example, we've given them one. Small, easy thing to do each week, and then they share. We've got a close to Facebook group. They share inside the Facebook group how they're getting on with that, what their results are. And that spurs other members on, if you forget and then you're on Facebook one day and then you remember, oh, there you go. They're tracking this or they're doing that and they've had this result, it makes you want to do it as well. And I really think that when it comes to holistic healing, this is what's really important. Often we might be lone more the only person in our family or in our friend group who's really into it. And community can really give us the support and the encouragement to really make these changes and make us feel not so alone in the world, make us feel like we're not the only ones doing this. And then for those women who want to go a little bit deeper, I. About seven years ago now, I created a program called The Exhausted to Energize Method, and it was a way to balance hormones naturally through diet and lifestyle style over 12 weeks. So it's a three month deep dive into making some manageable changes every week from a diet and lifestyle perspective, but also. So really looking at your roadblocks and your mindset. Often we tell ourselves, for example, that we haven't got time or this thing come up, or I couldn't do it perfectly, so therefore I didn't do it. And all of that on this road to holistic healing and natural health needs to become, needs to be overcome. So we need to have a mindset of imperfect action. That's one of our slogans that we use a lot. We need to do things. We don't need to do it perfectly often if we're trying to do something perfectly. It never ever gets done at all. So we want to do something imperfectly. So let's say for example, we were trying to eat 30. Different fruits and vegetables in a week for our gut health, and we only managed 10, we could choose to feel like a failure, and if we did, we'd probably give up because no one likes the feeling of failure and say, you wanna stop trying, but actually if the week before you've only done five, and this week you've done 10, that's a huge improvement and it takes many small baby steps to get to the goal of where you want to go to. So that's a huge celebration. And so during this three month program, what you do is you come to regular calls and you get support and feedback, and you get a mirror held up to you as well. So if you come with your excuses then we'll hold that mirror up to you as well, because most people who come on that program want that mirror held up to them. They're there for the personal growth. They're like, show me my blind spots. So if you went from five to 10 different fruits and vegetables in a week, then we'd celebrate that and we'd help you with that mindset of celebrating these small steps. So if you would like to find out more about getting some support on this journey and you want to make a real change and you'd love the community to help you support, do that. Check us out. You can go to our website, www dot Holistic Health Collective. It's all one word. Do co uk and you can join the monthly membership. From there, you can find out more about the Exhausted Energize at 12 month program on there as well. But in the meantime, another great thing that you could do for your gut health is to have breaks from eating. So this could look like intermittent fasting. The way that we speak about intermittent fasting for women is doing it in line with your monthly cycle. So if you are bleeding, you're probably gonna be a bit hungrier, need a bit more rest. Don't need to be doing long, intermittent fast at that time. But very likely you could still comfortably do a 12 and a half hour minimum fast overnight. For example, from. You finished eating at seven 30 at night and then you don't start until 7:30 AM the next day having a 12 and a half hour fast. And that really allows your body to rest and repair overnight. And the same with not snacking in the day. So it may be sometimes if you had a big gym workout or you've had a lot on or it's your bleed. You may need to eat a little bit more. Maybe on a full moon you notice that you feel a little bit hungrier, so we don't need to deprive yourself. But sometimes we just eat snacks just because they're tasty or we're bored or they're there, or we're just not being mindful and we don't actually need the snack at that time. And leaving longer breaks between eating can really help our energy. It can help our body really repair. It, yeah, it gives the body a chance to actually really. Do its job and not have the stress of constantly digesting. It takes up a lot of our energy, constantly digesting, and so to have those breaks can be really beneficial. So we hope that you have found this podcast episode helpful. We hope that you're gonna take something away from it. We encourage you to come and check out either the monthly membership, the holistic Health Circle. Or the exhausted to energize method, depending how much support that you need with your gut health right now. And I'd love to just encourage you just to have a pause and a think around like where your health is today and where you would love it to be in three months. Because so much can change for you in that time. We don't have to make huge changes, but you make a commitment to yourself and you start to make small changes that are. Manageable and that you can maintain, and this can have a huge impact on your health and this is totally possible for you. So make that decision today. If you're at the point when you feel like, yes, I do want better health, starting with your gut is a wonderful place to start and big changes really quickly. All right thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you a million times, Ava, for joining us on this podcast episode. You can support the show by giving us a follow on any podcast platform you're listening to this on. If you already follow up, then thank you so much and maybe share this episode. If you think of someone, someone comes to mind where you think they'd really benefit from listening to this. This is one way that we like to spread the love with our friends, is sharing podcasts or playlist. So let them know that we are thinking about them. So just send it on to them with a few words about why they might enjoy it. And if you'd like to check out any of our in-person events or retreats or our online offerings, head over to our website, www.holistichealthcollective.co uk. We'll see you in the next episode.