30-Jan / nutrition / 0 COMMENTS

This weekend I embarked on a journey…a digestive intensive journey. Yup, it was all about the thing that most people forbid to talk about, but that’s coming in another post. Yet the amount of people coming together to learn about this major part of the human body has been mind boggling, it’s really opened my eyes to the amount of practitioners out there wanting to really make a difference.

The importance of our gut to our overall wellbeing is impressive. It connects so many areas for us to function, like the obvious digestion to the immune system, from weight gain to mental clarity. Yes, even mental clarity! Next time you’re feeling a bit fuzzy in the head, ask yourself how your colon is doing

Following the meds approach has so many repercussions to our overall health yet for a lot of people, this is all they know. Since meds only attack a portion of the issue, the symptom, not the overlying problem the problems could become worse. See, the digestive system is such an integral part of our health that everything passes through it for digestion, assimilation, and secretion so anything that’s given gets pushed out and absorbed by other areas of the body that may not even require it…I’m not saying meds are evil and we should never take them, far from it but giving the digestive system some much needed maintenance for it to be able to handle things such as certain medications is what I’m getting at.

The small intestine is the one that gets the assimilation going, it further digests the food passed down from our stomach and begins extracting all of the nutrients it can find from the broken down food. If what is given is of no nutritional value, the digestive system works extra hard in an attempt to find what it can to extract and eventually passes it down as waste. Sounds easy enough, right? Not so fast. Without the nutrients and minerals necessary for all of this to work properly, this food could sit in the colon for days…even when ‘going’ daily. Why? It begins to stick to the walls since these walls aren’t fit enough to handle the waste.

Imagine the protein you’ve had, it putrefies. The carbohydrates, ferment. And the fats, turn rancid. That’s just gross!

If you notice, your gut actually tells you what it needs and what it really doesn’t like. We just have to be open to listen to it. Being the place that houses 100 million neurons, that’s more than our spinal cord, it really has a connection with our brain. Anxiety is derived from there, for example. So keep it clean and take it to ‘the shop’ at least once a month. One thing you can do daily for it is allow yourself at least one meal that’s filled with dark leafy greens, maybe some quinoa?

digestion