Last updated on January 18th, 2019 at 09:59 pm
Improving your gut health can have enormous health benefits – weight loss, clear skin and happy brain are some of the major ones! This post is about some often ignored habits we need to work on and develop in order to have a healthy digestion. These are 7 habits that can restore your gut and rebuild your microbiome. This article isn’t specifically about a healthy gut diet – because this is very individual as different foods work for different people.
Who Cares About Gut Health?
At one point last year I was so sick of people talking about gut health. Gut health this, gut health that, inflammation…your gut is inflamed, your brain is screwed up and now you’re depressed. It’s all in your gut.
Everywhere I read how I need to get these probiotics ASAP if I wanted to stay alive. It all seemed so scammy.
So I avoided writing about gut health for a long time. And I was fine with it.
But recently, I decided to do my research and really get back to the basics. Like why is a healthy gut important? What’s the big deal?
So let’s start with the very basics. Let’s start with the one thing we need a healthy gut for.
Digesting food.
But then let’s research more, what is food, really? Well, according to my highly accurate research on the Google, here’s what it is.
You see food is basically fuel. We need food to maintain life.
But Food Is Useless, Unless…
we can break it down. If we were unable to break down the food we eat to its very very tiny components called nutrients, it would be useless.
The body, our cells, need nutrients to function right. They need them for energy, for the ongoing maintenance inside the body, for us to be able to walk, talk, think, do anything.
Now, if you were to just throw a piece of broccoli at a cell without breaking it down to its nutrients, a cell wouldn’t know what to do with it.
And here we are. Evolution came up with a solution (omg that rhymes), far greater than any nutritionist or pharmaceutical company could ever do. Your gastrointestinal tract, or GI tract. That system inside your body is responsible for so many things we never think of while eating those burgers at McDonalds (or anywhere else).
The major to do of the GI tract is to take the food we buy, cook or plant, extract the nutrients from it and make those nutrients available to the body along with water and electrolytes, so your body can live.
If that’s not happening, if we’re not getting those nutrients, the body would not have anything to work with and we’d be literally falling apart.
Therefore people aren’t that dramatic with their claims that most diseases start from an unhealthy gut (although, it’s still a little dramatic). If your gut isn’t working right, your body will not get the fuel it needs every day to maintain itself.
Some health issues that come with an unhealthy gut include:
- obesity
- anxiety
- depression
- acne
- chronic inflammation
- inadequate immune function
- cardiovascular disease
How to heal your gut for weight loss, better skin and healthier brain
Now let’s take a look at some basic and free things you can do to improve your gut health.
1. Chew
Somewhere along the way we forgot that our mouths have a more important function than just talking and tasting food. The oral cavity is the first part of your digestive system. It’s where we break down that food using our teeth, the tongue and lots of saliva. Between 0,75-1l of saliva/day to be exact and fascinating. That saliva is an important part of the digestive process – it contains natural desinfectants (like IgA and lysozyme) and enzymes that help break down the food, so that it can be then further processed in the stomach.
If you don’t chew your food and don’t break it down to a very smooth consistency – the next parts of the gastrointestinal tract – your stomach, small intestine and large intestine are going to get in trouble and have to work harder to try to digest and absorb something from that piece of carrot you didn’t chew.
Now, I’m not perfect with this and I don’t chew nearly enough. But once I read more on this topic I started doing it. I said I will chew each bite at least 15 times (I noticed on average I chew 4-5 times, so that’s a big step for me).
You know what happened?
1. I don’t want to eat so much – it gets boring.
2. The things that taste good when you actually chew them more than twice are fruit and vegetables. Not kidding, try to chew a cupcake 15 times. It’s disgusting.
3. I can’t stuff my mouth with so much food. In order to be able to chew and not choke, I need to eat smaller bites – which again helps eat less. And well, if you read this article, you already know – helps you live longer.
So if you want to improve your gut health for weight loss, better skin and healthy brain – I highly, highly recommend to start chewing more. Start with 10 times, then go up. My goal is 30.
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