Your busy life needs everything to run like clockwork. However, poor gut health can feel like a spanner in the works.
We know from experience how finely tuned gastrointestinal health is, how fussy it can be and what it feels like to irritate it.
Here’s some good tweaks to add your lifestyle that your gut will love.
1. Don’t drink with your meals
Resist the urge. It’s especially hard to resist chugging back water when you sit down to a meal dehydrated because you forgot to drink anything since your last meal.
Your stomach is a highly acid environment. It’s lined with hydrochloric acid, a powerful agent in breaking down everything you put in your mouth. Your mouth begins the breakdown of starch and saturated fats, and your stomach breaks down protein.
Digestion in the stomach can only happen in an acid environment. When you drink water with your meals, you are washing digestive enzymes away and watering down your stomach acid.
You don’t want diluted stomach acid. Weak acid doesn’t break down food properly and by the time it reaches the colon, the colon has to produce extra bacteria which weakens the colon wall. This is bad news for your gut health.
Water is essential of course; it forms the mucosal lining of your stomach. Just make sure to sit down to every meal hydrated. Stop drinking half an hour before your meals and don’t drink for an hour and a half after you finish.
2. Slippery elm is the ultimate gut healer
Never heard of it? You’ll be glad you have now.
It coats, soothes and stimulates rapid healing in the lining of the gut, helping it to form stools properly. It’s the secret key to a healthy digestive system.
It heals gastritis, Crohn’s disease, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. The time it takes to heal depends on how long you’ve been taking medication for. However, slippery elm provides relief and healing at any stage.
Here’s some top quality slippery elm capsules you can order now.
3. Gut imbalance and the acid/alkaline seesaw
The pH of your cells is very important.
How does this relate to your gut health?
What you’re eating affects every cell of your body, including your gut. Cancer, disease, mental illness and most other ailments you can think of thrive in an acid environment. Acid is great in your stomach, but that’s the only place acid should dominate.
Many aspects of lifestyle create an acid environment in your body – see more here. Here’s the acid forming foods to be aware of:
- Sugar
- Wheat
- Caffeine
- Alcohol
- Meat
- The grains, legumes and nuts not on the list below, such as rice, oats, walnuts.
Sounds like all the good stuff? Unfortunately, it’s doing us more harm than good.
Here’s the alkaline foods to balance us out:
- Dark green, leafy vegetables (eat these every day)
- Vegetables
- Fruit (unless you have a yeast presence)
- Legumes: lima beans, lentils and soy
- Grains: millet, quinoa
- Nuts: almonds and Brazil nuts
Consume 10-20% acid foods (only the grains, legumes and nuts) and 80-90% alkaline foods for the best pH balance.
Don’t worry, you can still have rice, oats and other nuts you love – just less of them.
4. Snacking isn’t helping you
Your stomach takes 3-4 hours to digest a meal. But did you know that your stomach values a 1 hour rest in between?
Leave 4-6 hours between eating and your digestion will be at optimum performance. Even people with diabetes can do this.
Those hunger pangs you feel are often a call for water, not food. Between meals is the time to get water into you.
5. Decide to say no to sugar
We’ve mentioned sugar a bit already. It’s hard to face as our cravings love it, but sugar has some nasty side effects.
Sugar feeds unhealthy microbes in our amazing community of gut bacteria. These bad microbes can tell when you haven’t eaten a doughnut in a while and give you cravings for more sugar. They multiply and irritate the mucosal lining of the intestines so that eventually food can escape into the bloodstream, a problem known as leaky gut.
Your body sees these particles as foreign invaders and attacks them. This is the reason for various allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Sugar destroys microbiota and th17, which are responsible for breaking down food and preventing obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Basically, it wipes out your gut’s best special forces.
Cutting out refined sugar is a significant life adjustment for most of us – the classic Western diet is practically swimming in it. But your gut will thank you for it.
Listening to your gut’s voice
Your body’s response is your personal guide. Play around with these tips to see what happens. From personal experience, I can tell you my gut is much happier.
These morsels of knowledge are the basis of new habits. It takes 21 days to form a new habit. Just think: 21 days from now, you could be feeling on top of the world.
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