Gut Health Impacts Your Overall Health

A little over a year ago I was struggling with fatigue, poor performance in the gym, hunger all the time, stomach pains and discomfort, and coming down with frequent colds. Despite having a healthy diet and exercise routine I felt terrible. Fast forward a few months to last September and I ended up in urgent care due to debilitating stomach and back pains, coupled with nausea. After being treated with anti-nauseous medication I was discharged with no rhyme or reason to what the source was, except maybe it was food poisoning. I have had food poisoning before and that wasn’t it. Since I was a teenager, I have always struggled with gut issues off and on and could never get the help I needed to fix it completely. Sure, I would have times where I was feeling better, but never “healthy” like I should be given my nutrition and exercise routine. After being discharged from urgent care with no help of any kind I decided to seek out a naturopath to get to the root of the problem.

The naturopath I met with ran some tests and found that I had two different parasites, h-pylori, an inflammation marker of 315, (50 and below is ideal), I was excreting 30% of the fat I was consuming, and my antibodies were almost non-existent. That makes a lot of sense as to why I was hungry all the time, getting sick often, performing like garbage in the gym, and ALWAYS tired.  After following a diet and supplement regimen within a couple months I started to feel like myself again. After 7 months of treatment I retested and even though I wasn’t completely healed things were A LOT better. H-pylori and both parasites were gone, my inflammation number went down to 3, I am almost absorbing all the fat I’m eating except 6%. However, my immune antibodies were still low, and my good and bad bacteria was still uneven. Now just a few months later I feel like a completely different person. No stomach pains, no fatigue, I have avoided several colds being passed around, and I’m physically capable of doing things I couldn’t dream of a year ago. Making PR’s in lifts, climbing mountains, running Spartans, and feeling like I should have for a long time.

The reason I am sharing my story is in hopes that someone else who is struggling can finally get the help they need. Your gut health impacts everything else, and it doesn’t matter how great your diet is, and how often you exercise you can still fall susceptible to gut dysfunction. Food intolerances, stress, environmental exposure, genetic disposition, it all can wreak havoc on your digestive health. If you are suffering from any of the following: extreme fatigue, frequent colds, poor physical performance, bloating, gas, stomach cramps, headaches, skin irritation, mental fog, insomnia. Then I encourage you to seek out a naturopath to get you on the journey to a healthier life, I wish I would have done this years ago. I learned that I have food sensitivities to both dairy and gluten and it was eating these two items that got me into the bad place I was, on top of stress and chemical exposure (xenoestrogens).

Now I avoid dairy and gluten, follow a mindfulness practice, have gotten off hormonal birth control, only use clean beauty and cleaning products, and buy all organic food, as well as keep up with a well-rounded supplement plan.

Here are the top signs of underlying gut dysfunction:

1. Digestive issues like bloating, gas, stomach discomfort or diarrhea.  In large, this is due to the health; both number and diversity, of the bacteria living inside your gut, intestines, stomach and colon otherwise known as microbiome. Symptoms such as bowel irregularity or gas occur when the balance of bacteria is not right.
2. Sugar Cravings. Scientists have discovered that gut bacteria actually secretes special proteins that are similar to hunger-regulating hormones; leptin and ghrelin. These types of bacteria try to get us to eat foods that they thrive on like sugar so they secrete the proteins to make you crave sugar more and more. Scary.
3. Chronic Bad Breath. Having less-than-optimal gut flora can make you vulnerable to health conditions linked to bad breath such as kidney infections and poorly managed diabetes. So bad breath is a sign that gut flora isn’t optimal.
4. Moodiness, anxiety and depression. A compromised gut will affect your ability to use serotonin and vitamin D within your body. The majority of serotonin and about half of your dopamine is made in your gut. If you have leaky gut, your body will lose much of the serotonin and dopamine it produces.
5. Diabetes. Scientists have concluded that one possible cause and effect between intestinal bacteria and diabetes is that certain bacteria incite an immune response. Within the intestinal bacteria population, there are microbes that form toxins that enter the gut and then cause inflammation throughout the body. This inevitably impacts liver and fat cells that affect overall metabolism and insulin sensitivity.
6. Autoimmune Diseases. There is growing evidence that increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut) plays a role in various autoimmune diseases including celiac disease and type 1 diabetes. Scientists now believe that besides genetic and environmental factors, loss of intestinal barrier function is necessary to develop autoimmunity.

These are just the big red flags. There are other symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, joint aches, hypothyroidism, food sensitivities, constipation, getting sick often, brain fog and memory issues to name a few. The point is gut issues can be the root cause of a whole host of symptoms. I encourage you to seek out a naturopath to help you investigate what’s exactly causing these symptoms and get you on the path to recovery. Scientists are finding out how much a healthy gut impacts the health of the entire body, and should not be overlooked!