How to heal your gut

There is a formula, a step-by-step process, to be followed when healing your gut that delivers consistent results time, after time.

Have you tried to improve your gut health with restrictive diets, probiotics from the chemist and ad-hoc solutions you’ve found on the internet? But not seen great results..

For anything more serious than a bit of indigestion, these ad-hoc changes, without a plan, or rarely enough. Dietary change alone won’t do it if the cause is not dietary which is common (read on my friend to learn more..).

Many people I talk to do not see results they hoped for as they haven’t done the right lab-testing, followed a process or haven’t seen the process through to completion, or haven’t done the steps in the right order for them (it varies from person to person).

In this article, rather than providing yet another how-to on the internet which may or may not work for you, I intend to simply share with you that there is a step-by-step formula which when followed, reliably improves gut health. I will briefly talk you through each of the steps and how you can get extra help to progress further..

Your gut contains a complex eco-system of bacteria, viruses and yeast, collectively called your gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome affects every aspect of your health and wellbeing: Everything form your cravings for certain foods, your skin, your mood and brain fog, to how you think and feel.

Our diet and lifestyle, and the world around us, often cause our gut microbiome to become out of balance over our lifetime. This imbalance is known as gut dysbiosis and is associated with intestinal inflammation and leaky gut.

Gut dysbiosis is a common cause of bloating, reflux, nausea, cramping, food reactions, diarrhoea and constipation, and explains why dietary change is often not enough. The wrong types of bacteria and yeast, or bacteria and yeast in the wrong part of the gut, can cause gut issues that aren’t necessarily fixed when we change our diet.

To recover, we follow a step-by-step process that improves the environment of the gut. There’s two important things to note about this process

1. There is a framework for this process which everyone should follow – I will outline this framework here. There are several steps in this process and they all need to be followed to see results.
2. This framework absolutely needs to be personalised to your personal situation, environment of your gut, and personal preferences. There is no one-size fits all fix for this. Personalisation gets you the best results as quickly as possible without unwanted side-effects.

At Fairfield Nutrition, we’ve put the steps together into our  program, The Gut Freedom Formula, which we use with our client’s with great results!

The Gut Freedom Formula

The Gut Freedom Formula addresses the deep connection between the gut and ill health. It provides a step by step approach to heal your gut, stabilises mental health and improves your overall wellness.

Here is a very brief summary of the steps:

• Assessment of your gut so we can personalise the process
• Eat Food that allows your gut to heal. Support your digestion.
• Restore a healthy gut microbiome as imbalances here are a major cause of gut conditions
• Moving from Surviving to Thriving as being in survival mode can trigger your gut
• Resilience with diet and lifestyle for long-term health to prevent gut issues returning
• Support and Accountability – I’m a believer in the power of having support of a practitioner along the way

The first step is the most important: A thorough assessment of your case to identify the underlying causes and triggers of your gut issues.

When we think of assessment, we may tend to think of lab testing. And while testing is valuable, and there are some amazing tests available to practitioners, assessment includes far more than this.

A thorough assessment should include the taking of a personal health history, particularly focussing on when the complaint first started, a thorough analysis of symptoms, as well as getting to know the person presenting so that we have a good idea of what works for you and your lifestyle.

This in-person assessment combined with lab testing allows the formula to be adapted to the individual. This is essential as gut issues can have many causes including food reactions, poor digestion, bacteria overgrowth of the small or large intestine, yeast overgrowth, slow/fast food transit time etc. etc. Each of these causes will require a personalisation (variation) on this formula to see the best results.

What you are eating, and when you eat it, can have a huge impact on your gut. Diet is often the single most important change you can make to reduce your symptoms.

The right diet usually reduces your symptoms, so you feel better. For example, recent research found up to 86 percent of people with IBS (1) saw improvements in their symptoms while on a low FODMAP diet.

Although it can lessen symptoms, diet rarely cures gut issues permanently. This is because diet usually  isn’t the only driver of gut issues for an individual. Diet can however, increase the effectiveness of the other steps in the formula.

It’s also very very important to make sure you are digesting the food that you are eating (it’s not just what you eat, but what you absorb). To do this, you need to chew your food well, and have the appropriate amounts of stomach acid and digestive enzymes to break down your food. Inflammation in the gut can also hamper absorption of nutrients, and you may become deficient in nutrients such as iron, Vitamin D, and Vitamin B12.

In the gut, the wrong types of bacteria and yeast, or too many bacteria in the wrong part of the gut, is often behind irritable bowel, bloating, diarrhea and constipation. This is why often dietary changes alone aren’t enough.

There are many tools for rebalancing the gut microbiome; The two primary ones being probiotic therapy and the use of anti-microbial herbs. I usually recommend using a combination of specific types of probiotics as this has proven to be the most effective in clinic.

The gut microbiome is shaped by our lifestyle, including stress, sleep and exercise, and so these all need to be included in holistic and effective plan.

Many people notice that psychological or emotional stress worsens their gut issues. We now know stress impacts the gut through the gut-brain connection including the nervous system, hormones and inflammation.

Balancing the nervous system an important part of the recovery process as being stuck in fight or flight can switch off digestion and cause a worsening of symptoms.

This process is about moving from just surviving to thriving and it’s probably the most far reaching step of the formula as it invites us to transform our relationship with the way we live our lives.

Balancing stress with activities that are deeply restful, and encourage joy in your life is always useful. A good way of finding these activities is to think back to the activities you used to love doing, maybe as a child or in your younger years, and then re-connect with these activities. You may find they add joy to your life and relax the stress that is held in your gut.

Now, we work on resilience so your gut issues are less likely to return. We can do this because we’ve identified the underlying drivers of your gut issues. At this stage, we also re-introduce foods that were removed from your diet (testing for reactions as we go) as diversity of foods eaten is a foundation of a healthy diet.

We can support the healing of a leaky gut through diet and lifestyle, and find a way of eating and lifestyle that support your health long-term and encourage you and your gut to be resilient.

The Gut Freedom Formula provides a powerful path to resolving gut issues. It includes the all-important assessment of your case, including lab testing, that allows the program to be personalised to you and your needs.

The next step is to learn more about the program and the best way to do that is to watch the free webinar by registering below..