There are several great techniques to consider when healing your leaky gut! Getting your gut health under control is all about looking at the bigger picture, and taking a holistic approach. We are complex creatures, but we all have the same basic needs.
This is part 4 of 4 about leaky gut. In this series of articles, I have answered the questions, among others:
"What is a leaky gut?" (part 1),
"Do I have a leaky gut?" (part 2),
"Why do I have a leaky gut?" (part 3),
"How do I heal my leaky gut?" (part 4).
The very first thing I recommend everyone to do is to sit down with a pen and paper and answer a few simple questions:
- What does my life look like? Am I living the life I dream of? Am I satisfied?
- What do my stressors look like? How do I deal with these?
- How often do I move? How do I exercise?
- What are my sleeping habits? Am I sleeping enough?
- What kind of diet do I eat? How does it affect me?
- How do I really feel?
Don't forget to write the date on the paper!
Writing down the answers to the above questions will help you to see if there is an imbalance somewhere in your life. Then ask yourself:
- Am I prepared to do something about the situation?
Because you are the one who is going to do the work! There is help available, I am trained to help people feel better, but my job and that of other coaches is not to do the job. Our role is to educate you and coach you so that you can make yourself feel better!
If you are willing to make changes in your life, what are your goals in making those changes?
For example, you might want to get rid of a swollen stomach, or you might want to get rid of aches and pains in your body, or you might want to feel energetic again.
I recommend everyone to remember where they started their journey from. To go back to the paper with the answers to the above questions. It is only then that you can compare where you are after a certain time compared to where you started.
Just as it usually takes a long time to break down your health, it also takes a relatively long time to rebuild it. I suggest that you start working on what feels easiest to change. You will get faster results and more inspiration to keep going. You should also not change too much at once. Then it's easy to fall back into the same old habit.
For those of you who have been following my project "Healing Leaky Gut" last month know that I have chosen to work with the diet. Diet is the cornerstone of our health! You are not just what you eat, but what you absorb. This is so incredibly important to remember when you have a leaky gut and thus an impaired ability to absorb all the nutrients in your diet. I have done an elimination diet for 30 days where I excluded the worst allergens we normally have in our diet. It wasn't too difficult for me as I'm already gluten and (almost) dairy free. It occurred to me today that I've been at it for 46 days now, and I don't feel like I want to change that much. I've found a way to eat that makes me feel good! But I still have some of my problems and of course I wish I could eat dairy again without feeling fatigue. So my next step is to continue to exclude products that negatively affect my health and introduce supplements that help my leaky gut heal.
But diet is only one of four parts and you have to work on all four parts, eat, sleep, think and move to regain balance in your life and thus also be able to heal your leaky gut. If you exclude working on any or all of the parts, you won't be sitting very steady in your chair!
If it is too big a step to change your diet at this point and run a super strict 30 day elimination diet, you should at least start writing a food diary, so you can see on paper what you eat and drink. Then you can start with small changes.
The other legs of the chair are how you sleep, think and move. I have already described these parts in detail on my website. It's about taking care of yourself to reduce stress and increase recovery. Make sure you sleep 7-8 hours a night, move 30 minutes every day and have goals in your life!
An overall major new goal could be to understand your gut health and heal your leaky gut to see how good you can actually feel! But your sub-goals need to be more concrete, so you can tick off and set new exciting goals when you've achieved your first one. For example, I'm going to follow a strict elimination diet for 30 days and see what happens to my swollen belly. Or I'm going to go to bed on time (lights out by 10.30pm) every day for 10 days and see what happens to my afternoon fatigue. Or I'll go for a short walk every night before I go to bed for 14 days to see if I sleep better at night. Whatever it is.
We humans are complex creatures, but we all have the same basic needs. Make sure you fulfil them! Give yourself a great diet, a good night's sleep, exercise that you enjoy and set goals for what you really want to achieve! Don't compare yourself to others, just compare yourself to yourself!
I hope the above advice makes you realise that it is you who builds your health from the inside out and you are the one who will experience the result! You are the one who needs to check in with yourself every day to make sure you are taking steps in the right direction. And you are not alone, there are coaches like me, who can help you if you don't know where to start and when you need support along the way!
Good luck!