Lemme be honest with you – if you want to be on the fast track to being healthy and feel absolutely fantastic, you need to improve your intestinal health. This should be your first priority, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Your intestinal health affects everything from your mood, your energy levels, cognitive function, and weight, all the way to your outer appearance, as the skin and gut are intimately connected.
How can all this happen just from the gut? Mainly due to inflammation. Controlling inflammation is the key that unlocks a more vibrant life, and the way to control inflammation is largely through improving intestinal health. Everything you consume affects your body’s level of inflammation, either positively or negatively. Think about it – all the stuff you cram down your gullet comes into contact with you via your intestines – all the irritants in food, all the artificial dyes and colorings, all the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, everything is in direct contact with the largest organ in your immune system, your intestines. It makes sense that if you’re eating crap, you’re going to feel like crap as well.
Further, the digestive system is your “second brain”. Called the enteric nervous system, this second brain not only has 100 million neurons, as many as your spinal cord, but also produces a bevy of neurotransmitters which have a huge effect on how you feel.
You want to have more energy, a better mood, less brain fog, lose weight and have better skin don’t you? Thought so.
Your Gut – What Went Wrong
In a perfect world, your gut would be in tip top shape – it would digest the food you put into it, absorb the nutrients and speedily discard the waste products. Sounds easy right?
It should be, but we’ve messed things up in the modern world. Rampant use of antibiotics have completely destroyed our beneficial intestinal flora, leading to overgrowth of bad bacteria like candida or contributing to SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth. A lack of fiber further gunks things up, as fiber is the food for beneficial bacteria in the gut, and helps to sweep debris out of the intestines.
Intestinal hyper-permeability, or “leaky gut syndrome“, is another way intestinal health can go way wrong, as certain irritants, be it undigested food sitting in the intestines, candida or constant exposure to gluten, can actually cause the intestines to become more permeable than they should be. This allows microbes, undigested food particles and toxins to escape the digestive tract and enter the blood stream, where they further cause damage and feelings of malaise.
Lack of fiber, water and magnesium can cause constipation, something affecting some 63 million Americans. Artificial dyes, chemical pesticides, aluminum and plastics leached from cans and bottles.. All these things irritate the gut and affect your energy levels and moods.
The list goes on – Crohn’s disease, Celiac’s disease, lack of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, parasites… A lot can go wrong. The good news is, it’s easy to fix. Read on.
Healing Your Gut, Step 1 – Fasting
It doesn’t matter who you are or what your current health status is, everyone can benefit from periodic fasting. While intermittent fasting has it’s benefits, prolonged fasts are the type recommended for improving intestinal health.
Think about this – when was the last time you gave your digestive system a rest? Here you are, shoveling food into your face all day, every day, and demanding that your digestive system break all that food down, absorb the good stuff and eliminate the bad stuff before you start eating more food. Can’t a homie catch a break?
All joking aside, a 3-7 day juice fast is the most therapeutic technique I know of for boosting health. 24-36 hours after you cease consuming food, the body begins the process of autophagy, where it starts to clean out cellular junk, detoxify, and even destroy old, worn-down cells and replace them with shiny new ones. The intestines get a chance to purge built up waste products (lovely), and get some much needed rest. All the organs and glands in the body get revitalized and re-calibrated. After the initial discomfort of not eating, the body’s energy levels skyrocket as it is no longer expending massive amounts of energy breaking down, absorbing and excreting foodstuffs, and turns to stored body fat as energy.
Fasting is powerful stuff, and after my first couple of 3 day juice fasts, the rosacea on my face and the persistent rash on my chest cleared right up. Spring is the best time for a prolonged fast, as the weather is warm and it gives you a chance to clean out some of the junk stored up from winter, a time of year when most people eat heavier foods to stay warm. Spring is the time nature provides us with the most detoxifying foods as well – sprouts, grasses, dandelion and nettle greens are all very powerful and natural detoxifiers, and if you have access to them and a juicer, all the better.
Here’s how to succeed at your first fast – choose two days that you don’t have much to do, when you preferably aren’t working. On the first day, eat a larger breakfast and a larger lunch before noon. Then consume nothing but fresh juices, teas and water until noon the following day. This gives you a full 24 hours of fasting, and you’ll be sleeping through the worst part, when hunger and fatigue would be peaking. The following week, repeat the process above, but extend the fast until dinner time. The third time you fast, try to hold out a full 3 days – so if you start your fast at noon on Friday, you wouldn’t eat again until noon on Monday. Keep in mind that by halfway through the second day, any feelings of fatigue and aches should disappear and be replaced with mental clarity and energy, and you likely wont even be hungry. It’s important to break the fast with very light foods – fresh fruit, preferably soft ones like bananas and melons, and soft, steamed veggies are best.
If you’re like me and enjoy a cup of joe in the mornings, you can use Dandy Blend during a fast, a blend of roasted chicory, beet and other detoxifying herbs that tastes surprisingly good. Wheatgrass, beet, dandelion, celery and cucumber are excellent choices to juice while fasting, although you can get by using just a combination of apple and grape juices too. Make sure you’re not only consuming citrus juices, as they are too acidic to be the only juice on a fast.
I highly recommend using Healthforce’s Intestinal Drawing Formula during your first few fasts for a few reasons. First, it adds bulk to your stomach, helping to ease a bit of the hunger and encourage bowel movements. Second, it’s loaded with natural demulcents, or substances that gel up and help to heal and soothe the intestines. Finally, it has Zeolite clay, Activated Charcoal and Volcanic Bentonite clay – these natural substances bind to toxins and irritants and help draw them out of the body, very useful during your first few fasts as your body will be purging toxins left and right. I highly recommend using the pills, as the powder tastes like, well, clay.
After your first few fasts, the Intestinal Drawing Formula is optional, but it’s also a great thing to have on hand for anyone with a highly irritated digestive system, as the demulcents are quite soothing. You can always add in some Vitamineral Green for enhanced detoxification during a fast as well. Aim for 3-4 three day fasts per year, as a minimum.
Step 2 – Eliminating Irritants
Figuring out what your trigger foods are can take a bit of work, but it’s critical to find out if you have certain foods that irritate your digestive system. For many people it’s gluten. Next in line is unfermented soy products, and for millions of people it’s processed dairy. MSG and artificial sweeteners do a lot of damage as well.
The best way to suss out suspected food irritants is to do an elimination diet. For one whole month eliminate all gluten, processed soy and processed dairy from your diet. Not only are you likely to lose a few pounds, you’ll likely discover that you have more energy. After the month without the offenders, slowly add each one back into your diet and notice how it makes you feel. If you start getting brain fog, stomach aches or fatigue, you’ll know that it’s an irritant for you.
While I don’t have any food allergies or intestinal irritants per se, I do feel better the less gluten, unfermented soy and highly processed, non-organic milk products I use. If you’re following a whole foods, plant-based diet, these will naturally be minimized.
Step 3 – Smart Eating Strategies
Both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine say all disease originates from a faulty digestive system. In Ayurveda, an energy known as Agni rules over the digestive functions. Agni is a type of “fire” that breaks food down into it’s smallest components, which are then absorbed and utilized by the body, getting turned into Prana (energy), Tejas (radiance, relating to metabolism) and Ojas (strength or vitality, the equivalent of TCM’s Jing). However, if Agni is depleted or malfunctioning, it can’t fully digest food and results in an accumulation of Ama, or toxins, which leads to disease. This is an amazingly accurate description of how the digestive system actually works, and how many diseases arise in the first place.
Personification of Agni
Ayurveda stresses the importance of doing all you can to keep the flames of Agni fully stoked, or put in modern terms, to keep all your digestive juices and enzymes fully stocked, and there are many ways to do so.
First and foremost, don’t over eat! This is the quickest way to accumulating Ama in Ayurveda and the quickest way to deplete Jing and shorten your lifespan in TCM. Following the Japanese idiom “Hari hachi bu”, or eating until 80% full, goes a long way here.
Preventing overeating can be difficult at first, but is easily corrected with a little practice. Focus on sloooowwiiiingg doowwnnnnn when you eat. There’s roughly a ten minute time delay between your stomach becoming full and your brain realizing that fact. Take a bite, set down your fork, chew thoroughly, and take a second to really taste the food. Many people recommend chewing each bite anywhere from 30 to 100 times – frankly I find this to be a bitch, but I do recommend chewing each bite of just one meal 30 times, not only to prove to yourself that you’ll feel full before the meal is done, but also to show how much more energy you’ll have when your food is properly chewed and ready for digestion.
Many yoga postures, through all the bending and twisting, improve the secretion of digestive juices and enzymes. A favorite method of mine to improve Agni is using digestive bitters. Using digestive bitters was a common practice throughout Europe, and many countries around the world still make it a habit to consume a very bitter/pungent substance prior to meals – think green chutney as a condiment with Indian food. Very bitter foods increase the amount of bile released, helping to digest fatty, heavier foods.
Salt is a simple and effective way to increase digestive powers. Salt is mainly comprised of sodium chloride – the chloride in salt helps to increase the hydrochloric acid of the stomach, the main acid involved in the dissolving of foods. Lightly salting your meals with a natural salt such as Himalayan salt or Celtic sea salt can go a long way.
Spicy, pungent foods also improves digestion – ginger, black pepper, red pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, cloves and many other spicy herbs increase the flow of digestive enzymes and gastric juices, as well as increasing peristalsis, the rhythmic movements of the intestines that expel waste. They also improve circulation, enhance detoxification and many boost the metabolism, so add some spices to your life.
Making lunch your biggest meal of the day is a great way to improve digestion as well. Your metabolism is naturally highest around 12-2 pm, making lunch a great time to digest your bigger, heavier meals. Breakfast should be just enough food to last you to lunch, while dinner should preferably be the lightest meal of the day, maybe just soup or a salad. It’s also important to have a light dinner before 7 so that your stomach is empty come bed time – if it isn’t, your liver won’t get the time it needs to detox as it’s busy processing food, and the insulin released from dinner will impair many a metabolism regulating hormone. To top it all off, your digestive powers are greatly weakened as you sleep.
Both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine recommend not consuming cold foods, and not consuming too much liquid around meals. Cold foods are said to “shock” the digestive system – while I can’t find any hard facts on this topic, I have felt that I digest warm foods better. Avoiding liquids near meals makes perfect sense, however. Lets say you were trying to melt some object with a bunch of acid – would it melt better if you added just acid, or if you diluted the acid with water? Liquids dilute the digestive juices and enzymes that help to break down the food you eat, so try to limit liquids around meal times. However, a shot of espresso, glass of red wine or some kombucha all help to actually improve digestion, just don’t over do it.
Make sure to consume plenty of fiber as well. Not only is fiber the food for probiotics, but it helps to sweep out undigested bits of food from the digestive tract. Keep that colon clean!
Finally, if you’re consuming a very large meal, say at Thanksgiving, or consuming something you know you’ll have a hard time digesting, make use of digestive enzymes. These make a HUGE difference in how easily and quickly you digest and absorb food.
Step 4 – Pre- and Probiotics
I already touched on the importance of probiotics here – long story short, they improve digestion and assimilation, improve mood and decrease stress, improve immunity, and even create new nutrients for you, some that help you to even lose weight. No discussion of digestive health is complete without paying due to our little friends in our gut. I suggest this brand here for daily maintenance, as well as consuming a wide variety of fermented foods in order to get a variety of probiotics, foods such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, miso, natto and fresh pickled veggies. It’s important to also provide prebiotics, the food for probiotics, in the form of fiber, or through supplementation.
You are a reflection of your digestive health. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel after a few fasts, upping your fiber intake, using bitter and spicy herbs to improve digestion and after regular use of probiotics. Watch as your mood improves, your skin clears up and your energy levels skyrocket. And remember, this is an ongoing process! Don’t think just because you fasted once you don’t have to ever again, or that you don’t need any probiotics after your first bottle. Trust me when I say improving digestive health is key to feeling amazing, and it will be easy to keep at it.