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Is your GUT influencing your quality of life and happiness?
The health of your gut is involved in symptoms like skin conditions, joint pain, fatigue, depression, food sensitivities, allergies, constipation, migraines and auto-immune diseases.
A leaky gut can have a huge influence on your well-being, on your happiness and can cause a multitude of symptoms.
Many people unknowingly suffer from a leaky gut and live without the knowledge that it can be healed with the resulting uplift in happiness and overall health.
We have amazing bodies, biological complex machines. They truly are a miracle. Our bodies are continuously working for us, keeping our internal environment in homoeostasis, a carefully crafted state of biological balance. We take for granted that when we cut ourselves, the body heals; when we eat, the body digests; post digestion, the body applies resources to where its needed; we breathe without conscious thought; we feel and have emotions. Everything is done for us auto-magically! Simply amazing.
And because of this, we take it all for granted and expect the biological balance of this complex bio-machinery to just sort itself out, whatever we throw at it. But in time, with the incremental damage we inflict, the body starts to give us signals, asking us to pay attention. Like a neglected car that won’t start some mornings, or that tap that leaks from time to time. Its ok some of the time, so why take action, right? We often ignore the signs or just expect it all to be ok tomorrow. I personally have ignored my bodies subtle and louder screams for help, and it took a long time before I started listening and nurturing the only body I have.
There are many different ways in which the body can talk to us. We may feel fatigued or exhausted and coffee seems to be a good way to keep us going. We may have back pain and a pill might do the trick. Our body can become tense or constricted because we are nervous. We feel emotional and use food or TV to distract ourselves or use that glass of wine to dampen the feeling. All these strategies are stopgaps and they will work temporarily, but they only band aid the issue. You don’t know what’s under the plaster until you look. For myself one of my biggest strategies was and still is, food.
So now, with this biological machine in slow disrepair lets get an understanding of how this occurs, what are the signs and how we can peel back the band aids to see what we can do.
Let’s look at how our body works with what we feed it with. Think of our digestive system from our mouth opening all the way to the other end and compare this to a hose, everything we put in there is actually not inside the body, its in the hose. There is a barrier, the gut wall, that picks and chooses what is allowed into our body and what isn’t. You can understand that, if over time, wear and tear occurs, little holes would appear in the hose so that the protective barrier system is compromised. Now molecules like antigens (toxins or foreign substances) can pass through the gut lining, which may induce an immune response in the body. This immune response may have been happening for years without people realising and it can cause various symptoms in different people.
This is a leaky gut, a hose with holes.
The proper name is Intestinal Permeability and it describes the control of material from inside the gastrointestinal tract through the cells lining the gut wall, into the rest of the body.
How does our gut become leaky?
The balance of our microbes is important, as the good microbes help produce vitamins, ferment fibre, and prevent pathogens from taking over. What shifts this balance is usually what we subject our body to, such as chlorinated water, soft drinks, alcohol, herbicides, antibiotics, sugar and stress. Then we have other products that we ingest that directly damage our gut wall. Some of these are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, foods that cause immune reactions (gluten, dairy), endotoxins from gut bacteria and animal foods, free radicals from processed or fried foods.
So what we eat does matter and what we drink does matter. On top of this we have stress that effects our internal environment. How we talk to ourselves does matter. How we talk to others does matter. The quality of our relationships is very important. The mind and the body work together, not as seperate units. What affects one, directly affects the other.
Lets pull off the band aid and try to understand your symptoms. Are they from a leaky gut? A simple leaky gut test from the privacy of your home does just this. Once you know the underlying cause, a protocol can be set up to heal the gut lining naturally with foods and some supplements.
I love the way our bodies function and that it is always here to support us. Did you know that about 80 to 90% of your feel good hormone, serotonin, is manufactured in the gut! So if you want to feel good, treat your insides kindly, nurture your body from the inside out and you will be rewarded 🙂 Remember our bodies are always working for us and if we just fuel it with whole natural foods, it will bring us back to that delicate equilibrium of happiness.
Do you want to find out if your gut is influencing your health and happiness?
Are you ready for change?
Chantale is offering 20% off all consultations in December
Don’t use the same strategies again and again if they don’t work, try a different approach with lasting results! It’s time to redefine your relationship with food, so you can feel happy and at peace with the body you have and the food that you eat.
Book NOW contact Chantale PH: 0410 263 425
info@chantalehorst.com