Overcome the Barriers to a Healthy Gut
The insights that helped me finally heal my gut after a five year journey
Around 73% of young Americans struggle with ongoing gut issues and few receive proper guide on how to brings their guts back into balance | Photo from PeopleImages-Yuri+A on Shutterstock
How It Started
Most of us take our guts for granted. As long as we can put food in our mouths and carry on with our day, we don’t give them further thought. It’s often only when the gut is in trouble that we finally pay attention.
I started paying attention to my gut when I was 24 and digestive issues crept up on me. The first warning signs were lingering bloating and fatigue after meals, followed by changes in my breath and skin, and finally stiff joints that soon turned into painful arthritis.
While it only took a few months for my gut to break down, it took me the entire second half of my twenties to fully heal my gut. In the process, I learned first-hand about food sensitivities and intolerances, gut dysbiosis, candida, chronic inflammation, and how deeply stress can impact the gut. Despite everything I learned from my own experience, I struggled to put the pieces together and fully heal until I was 29.
The most important lightbulb moment I had in my healing journey came while I was studying to become a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. As I studied lectures on digestion, I began to see my gut as a complex system for the first time. I realized how the parts of the gut interact with each other, the immune system, and the nervous system.
I felt like I finally had an “owner’s manual” for my body.
To this day, I’m incredibly grateful to nutritional therapy for the understanding it gave me of what conditions the gut needs to heal — and what blocks it from doing so in most cases. In the end, I distilled the key points into a series of lessons that have guided me and those I work with to gut healing — and which I hope can help you on the same journey.
Barrier #1: Focusing only on where symptoms are occurring
Lesson: Support the health of the entire digestive tract, before and after where symptoms occur
One of the most important lessons I learned about digestion is that when an issue occurs in the process — whether reflected by bloating or heartburn or constipation — it’s best to view the symptom in the context of the whole process.
To understand why, let’s look at the common symptom of bloating after a meal, which happens when the digestive system struggles to digest food and ends up fermenting it in the intestines, creating gas. There are many possible contributing factors that can lead to bloating, such as:
Eating in a state of chronic stress, which interferes with proper digestion and signaling in the gut
Eating too large a portion of food too quickly
Chewing insufficiently and putting more strain on the stomach and intestines to digest food particles
Insufficient stomach acid and enzymes to break down food
Eating excess fried or processed foods
Undetected food sensitivities and intolerances preventing certain foods from being digested.
Poor food combining, adding stress to the digestive process
…Or more likely, some combination of all of those factors, as shown in the chart below.
A visualization of the healthy (right) process of digestion and how it can be disrupted at various stages (left) | Credit: Wikimedia Commons and text from author
The mistake many of us make when we experience digestive issues is to assume that if a symptom occurs in one part of their gut, that is the only area we need to address to fix the problem. When we have gut dysbiosis, we take probiotics; when we have heartburn, we take an antacid. Though these fixes may help in the short-term, they rarely resolve the issue completely.
In reality, the best way to approach a digestive problem is to support the entire digestive process — especially steps prior to where the issue occurs. In the case of constant bloating, this could mean testing for food sensitivities and intolerances, taking supplements like digestive enzymes and Betaine HCl to support digestion, being mindful of relaxation and portion size before eating, and adopting a diet with fewer heavy or processed foods.
By incrementally supporting each stage of the digestive process, it’s not only possible to resolve the root causes of most issues, but to create new habits that support long-term health and energy.
Barrier #2: Ongoing chronic inflammatory reactions
Lesson: Give your gut a break and cut out inflammatory triggers completely while it heals
One of the biggest misconceptions around healing, especially for those with food sensitivities and intolerances, is “a little bad food every so often can’t do much harm.” When I speak with people who have food sensitivities and ask if they’ve tried an elimination diet to help their guts heal, I often hear: “Well, sort of. I don’t eat as much <bread/milk/cheese> as before.”
Unfortunately, most people with gut issues don’t fully realize the difference between acute and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation is what we all experience when we have small cuts or injuries that heal quickly. In contrast, chronic inflammation is slow-acting, low-grade and damages not only the gut but the body as a whole.
When it comes to food sensitivities or intolerances, the principle of “everything in moderation” is not very helpful. When we continue to eat things that trigger our immune systems — even in small portions — the inflammatory reactions often last for days and cause systemic damage during that time.
If you’re working to heal your gut, take note of which foods trigger inflammation or discomfort. Order a test for food sensitivities and allergies and cut out common inflammatory triggers such as fried food, processed snacks, alcohol, and excess sugar.
Carry out a true elimination diet and give your gut at least 3–5 weeks without triggering further damage on a daily basis.
Barrier #3: Continuous stress during digestion due to lack of supplemental support
Lesson: Give your gut supplemental support in the form of digestive enzymes or Betaine HCl
One of the biggest challenges of healing the gut is that it’s not only responsible for digestion, but for nutrient absorption. That means when it is damaged, it struggles both to break down food for energy and to get the nutrients needed for its own repair.
For example, when your stomach and small intestines are damaged, as is common for people with food allergies or regular bloating, they are unable to produce enough stomach acid and pancreatic enzymes to properly break down food. They are also unable to get the nutrients required for their own repair. For example, zinc is needed for stomach acid production in the stomach but if the gut struggles to absorb zinc, less and less acid will be produced in the stomach, leading to deficiencies in other nutrients and a further breakdown of the digestive process.
For that reason, a damaged gut can create a vicious cycle of continuing damage.
For that reason, supplements such as digestive enzymes and Betaine HCl are incredibly valuable in supporting normal digestion so the gut does not experience further damage while it’s healing.
Barrier #4: Stress and continuous eating prevent the gut from healing
Lesson: Give your gut the right conditions for healing
Two of the biggest gifts you can give your gut for healing are time and relaxation.
A major shift in my own gut healing came when I combined an intermittent fasting program with a program called DNRS recommended by my doctor for rewiring the nervous system’s stress response.
Intermittent fasting gave my gut uninterrupted time for healing each day and longer fasts allowed my body to enter autophagy and enter into a deeper state of gut healing. Simultaneously, re-training my stress response through periods of breathwork and DNRS helped my nervous system enter a parasympathetic state and allowed me to relax more deeply. When the nervous system is in a parasympathetic — or rest-and-digest — state, blood is sent to the gut and healing is most effective.
Therefore, be mindful to avoid habits like snacking throughout the day or fasting during periods of high stress, which can block the gut from getting in the right state to heal. The combination of nervous system training and fasting is so powerful because the gut heals best when it’s both a state of relaxation and has time free from digestion.
Barrier #5: Looking for a single strategy or a silver bullet
Lesson: Take iterative steps over a small time and adapt your strategy as your gut heals
There is no single diet that will help all people heal their guts. Different genetics, health conditions, stages of life, and environments make each person bioindividual. The same person may even require different dietary strategies for different stages of healing.
I learned this first-hand. In my first stage of healing from Lyme disease, I cut out sugar, processed foods, and multiple foods that triggered immune reactions. I could only eat cooked foods that were easy to digest and took a large number of supplements. After a year, I was able to take fewer supplements and eat some raw foods. Today, I’m able to eat a full range of foods — including sugar and foods that previously triggered arthritis — though I now choose to keep my diet as light as possible.
While I was healing, I tried every diet fad from Paleo and Keto to veganism and found that no single diet was right for me during the entire healing process.
What I learned is that gut healing is a marathon, not a race. Approaching gut healing with the mindset of making changes that result in 10–20% improvements every few weeks is far more sustainable and likely to succeed than searching for a single silver bullet.
Making small, iterative shifts will not only give you hope and keep you on track, but attune you to your body in a way that will stick with you long after healing is complete. So if you are in the middle of your healing journey, make a list of the top three symptoms that are bothering you — e.g. bloating, heartburn, or poor sleep — and begin to identify new habits that can offer 10–20% improvements over a period of a few weeks.
Whether it’s cutting out fried food, drinking a liter of water each day, or deciding to practice breathwork before bed, choose a small habit and give it time to work. Before you know it, the small habits will build up and you’ll not only have a healthier gut, but a whole new body and lifestyle.
