Want to lose weight but have trouble despite regularly
exercising and eating healthy foods?
Starving yourself to lose weight isn’t good for your body, and a super hard-core exercise program may not be the answer, either. Although it often works in the short term, these are both extremes, and most people’s needs fall somewhere in between.
So let’s take a closer look at something that’s becoming a near epidemic in Western culture and may very well apply to your situation.
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a bacterial community to keep YOU healthy.
Yes, you have a village of microorganisms living inside you. It’s a symbiotic relationship, meaning you rely on each other for survival. This community is called your microbiome, and it lives in your gastrointestinal tract.
When this community is in balance, it helps you with digestion and absorbing nutrients so you can create energy for your body to use. It helps to keep your hormones balanced, so that you feel hungry when appropriate, but also satisfied when you should be. When it’s out of balance, stuff starts to hit the fan, and chaos ensues.
How does the gut microbiome get out of balance?
The overuse of antibiotics may be the most significant cause. Even if you don’t take antibiotics, you likely get them indirectly through the food you eat. Up to 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US are fed to livestock for various reasons. When eating meat or consuming dairy products, we unintentionally get the antibiotics too.
Antibiotics kill bacteria, and they don’t discriminate. So you lose the helpful ones, too. Unfortunately, the bacteria we call “bad” earn that label because they are so adept at repopulating. You get an overgrowth… An imbalance.
Chlorination and fluoridation in municipal water supply also have a significant impact on gut bacteria.
The resulting imbalance leads to inflammation, which can cause weight gain all by itself. It also causes a permeability issue in your intestinal lining, commonly known as leaky gut.
This leads to your immune system reacting badly to many foods that are generally considered to be healthy. This releases another negative cascade of events, creating more health problems.
As if this weren’t enough, the bacterial imbalance also causes a hormonal imbalance. This affects metabolism, mood, sleep, cognitive function, skin breakouts, and more. Hormones are responsible for those hunger cues you get, even though your brain knows that you’ve had plenty to eat.
And we are not done yet. Sometimes this imbalance can be a bit sneaky. You may not realize you even have digestive problems, because you don’t have the typical heartburn, gas, or bloating you most often think about. It is easy to believe you have a gut-related problem when you have a lot of gut-related symptoms, but while a disrupted microbiome can result in abdominal symptoms, it can also be to blame for so much more. Symptoms like skin rashes, acne, joint pain, and inflammation can all be caused by an imbalance of bacteria in the gut. This isn’t Vegas. What happens in the gut doesn’t stay in the gut.
So if you’re eating a reasonably healthy diet, and you still can’t lose that extra weight, why not try healing your gut? It just may be the answer you’re looking for.
Before you go…
At Best Life Functional Medicine, our primary focus is on uncovering the root causes of health issues. By explicitly addressing the underlying reasons related to gut health that may be hindering your body from shedding weight, we pave the way for healing and the effective loss of stubborn weight. Rather than prioritizing weight loss to achieve health, our approach centers on achieving overall health first, naturally leading to weight loss.
The Gut Restoration program I’ve developed is crafted to guide you in identifying and tackling specific gut-related irregularities that could be impeding your weight loss journey, while simultaneously promoting increased energy and mental clarity. Explore more and register today.
