Are you struggling to maintain a healthy diet or lose weight despite your best efforts? Your gut health may be the missing piece of the puzzle.
Your gut is home to trillions of microorganisms that play a critical role in your digestion, immune health, and mental health. Recent studies have shown that your gut health can also significantly impact your diet and weight loss efforts. Don’t believe us? We’ll break it down for you.
Your Gut Health and Your Diet
Your gut health has the ability to majorly impact nearly every other aspect of your health. It is connected to bodily functions like digestion, hormonal processes, immunity, and even your nervous system. In many of these areas, the connection with your gut health goes both ways, and that’s especially true when it comes to your diet—what you eat impacts your gut health and your gut health impacts what you eat.
How Your Diet Impacts Your Gut
Your gut microbiome is the home to trillions of bacteria, and these bacteria are generally categorized as good or bad. The good bacteria are known to be helpful—they positively influence many bodily functions. Meanwhile, the bad bacteria can be harmful for your health if their colonies are allowed to grow large enough. Because of this, the key to a happy gut is maintaining a healthy balance of good and bad bacteria within your gut microbiome. While there are a number of different factors that can influence this balance, one of the most impactful factors that is within your control is your diet.
The various strains of microbes in your gut thrive on different types of nutrients. For example, many types of bad bacteria love sugar and yeast, which means when your diet is full of those compounds, the colonies of harmful bacteria grow because those microbes are getting an abundance of their favorite snack to feast on. On the flip side, beneficial strains of bacteria do better with things like fiber, probiotics, and polyphenols, which means when you are getting these nutrients from your diet, you are supporting the health and growth of all those helpful types of gut microbes.
Because of this, it’s possible to influence the composition of your gut microbiome by making shifts in your diet, and, to make things even better, researchers have found that changing your diet can alter your gut microbiome in as little as 24 hours! These fast changes in microbiome composition are often temporary, which means that the changes you make likely need to stick in the long term in order for them to have a lasting impact.
How Your Gut Impacts Your Diet
Changing your diet can be difficult, especially if your appetite seems bottomless or your cravings are never-ending, but we want to let you in on a little secret—some of those obstacles are likely being influenced by your gut.
If your gut is imbalanced, it can cause both food cravings and a change in appetite, which can also lead to weight gain in the long run. The science around this connection s complex, so we won’t dive into all the details today, but here are the three main things you should know:
- The vagus nerve, which is a major part of the gut-brain axis, allows your gut and brain to send signals back and forth and initiate hunger cues. When this nerve is overstimulated, it can lead to an increased appetite and excessive eating.
- The microbes in your gut have their own food requirements and preferences, and they are not receiving adequate amounts of the necessary nutrients, they go into survival mode. This can lead to one of two things—they can either initiate mechanisms that can damage your gut or they can secrete proteins that initiate cravings for certain foods.
- These bacteria also can alter your taste buds and produce neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which can enhance your cravings and reward your brain when you give in to them.
Tips for Boosting Your Gut Health
Ready to get your gut health in check? Whether you want to reduce digestive discomforts, stick to your new diet, reach your goal weight, or generally support your overall health and wellness, here are some steps you can take to nourish and support your gut.
1. Change Your Diet
After everything you just learned, this is an obvious first step. If you want to positively influence your gut health, the best place to start is with your diet, but keep in mind that you don’t need to do a complete overhaul overnight. You can start small by taking steps like cutting back on sugar, adding an extra serving of vegetables to your daily meal plan, eating fermented foods every day, or increasing your fiber intake. Taking even one small step that will help you change your diet will not only make it easier but will also make you more likely to stick to the change, which will be better for your gut in the long run than the pendulum swing that many of us often fall into when it comes to diets.
2. Take Prebiotics and Probiotics
Probiotics help seed your gut with good bacteria while prebiotics feed and nourish those bacteria so they have a better chance at surviving. There are many natural sources of prebiotics and probiotics that you can include in your diet. For example, fermented foods like kimchi, kombucha, and pickles are known to be rich in probiotics while foods like garlic, onions, and bananas are known to have natural prebiotics. Additionally, you can also provide your gut with the probiotics and prebiotics it needs by adding a natural probiotic supplement to your daily routine.
3. Exercise Regularly
Both your gut and your weight loss journey will benefit from engaging in some sort of physical activity regularly. Just 30 minutes of exercise at least 3 times a week can have positive effects on your mind, body, and your gut. Your exercise routine doesn’t have to be intense. Even activities as simple as walking, hiking, or yoga can have a big impact.
4. Get Enough Sleep
When your body experiences a sleep deficit, it can increase your stress levels, which in turn can negatively impact your gut as well as other areas of your health. If you’re looking to improve your gut health, take a look at your current sleep schedule and see if it could benefit from being changed. Ideally, your schedule will allow you to get between 7 and 9 hours of restful sleep each night.
Get the Essentials of Gut Support
Your gut is truly at the core of your overall health, and it can use all the support it can get to keep up. If you want to restore balance to your gut and give it the daily support it needs to thrive, a good place to start is by adding a gut-supporting supplement like Essentials to your daily routine.
These daily gut-health packets contain all the probiotics, prebiotics, enzymes, and superfoods your gut needs to keep you feeling your best. Plus, you can try this powerful product risk-free with our 60-day money-back guarantee, so you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain!