Signs Your Gut Needs Healing and How to Improve Gut Health

A healthy gut means your overall health is good, you have energy, glowing skin, and healthy digestion. When your gut needs healing your body will tell you through signals, things like low energy, acne, and a sluggish digestion. The good news is there are several ways to go about improving gut health. Here are signs your gut needs healing and how to improve gut health. (post includes affiliate links; full disclosure statement available {here})

Gas and Bloating

Gas is a normal part of digestion and fermentation in the gut, it’s when you have more gas producing bacteria strains that can cause more fermentation, trapping gas and causing uncomfortable bloating.

Regularity

Gut balance plays a major role in regularity, there’s going too much or not going enough. When out of balance the gut can have an over growth of bacteria, causing going too much, which can lead to more gut imbalance. When you’re not going enough, this can be a result of not having enough good bacteria in the gut.

Skin Health

An imbalanced gut will show in the skin, whether in rashes, acne, or allergies. The gut directly impacts the skin, in what’s called the gut-skin axis. The skin has it’s own microbiome and the gut is what balances the skins bacteria.

Sugar Cravings

When your gut has too much bad bacteria it will crave foods that it thrives off of foods like sugar. If there’s too much yeast in the gut this can lead to sugar cravings.

Sleep

Not getting the necessary amount of sleep has been shown to disrupt the gut bacteria, leading to tiredness throughout the day.

Weight

Studies of the gut microbiome in lean and overweight individuals found that those overweight had less diverse bacteria in the gut as compared to those who where leaner. There are certain types of bacteria that can contribute to weight gain, this is because bacteria helps break down food and the way your body absorbs nutrients.

Immune Health

The gut directly influences the immune system. When you have a healthy gut the immune system is healthy. There’s about 70% of the immune system in the gut. When the gut is imbalanced immune function can be affected.

Ways To Improve Gut Health

Once you know you have a gut imbalance, you can then focus on the ways to improve it. There are several things that can help to get your gut health back on track:

Eat A Clean Diet

A major cause of gut imbalance is a poor diet full of sugar and processed foods. These foods directly effect the balance of bacteria in the gut. You keep a healthy gut by eating foods rich in fiber, healthy fats, and leafy vegetables.

Prebiotic foods, such as asparagus, flaxseeds, artichoke, and jicama help to feed the good bacteria in the gut. Some may benefit from removing gluten and temporarily limiting FODMAP food while healing the gut.

Probiotics

Probiotics help to balance your gut bacteria by giving you good bacteria to fight against the bad bacteria in the gut. Research has shown that taking probiotics can help support digestive health. They help with gas, bloating, and regularity.

Eliminate Food Triggers

Everyone has different trigger foods that they specifically need to avoid when healing the gut. Once you identify and eliminate what food sensitives you have, you can then optimize your gut health. A way to identify food triggers is to eliminate common food triggers for 30 days then slowly reintroduce them, seeing how you feel as you add then back in.

Daily Movement

Getting some movement daily plays an important role in getting your gut balanced. Research shows exercise can increase the amount of bacteria in your gut contributing to bacterial diversity.

Reduce Stress

Stress disrupts the gut, leading to immune reactions that contribute to gut imbalance. It’s important to get stress under control, things like meditation, exercise, good sleep, and supplements can help with stress.

Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is when you only eat during certain periods of time, 12 to 16 hours. This may help aid in gut health by getting things back on track. It is believed that giving the gut a break can reduce inflammation, shed water weight, and reduce bloating.