Yesterday we looked at the importance of supporting some of your body’s primary detoxification organs with a well-rounded detoxification superfood like fermented spirulina. This tackles the toxins and pollutants that hijack your body’s ability to heal itself.
Tomorrow we’re going to look at how to fix the second factor in health: how to give the body what it needs to repair itself.
Today we build the bridge: making sure that what you give your body can actually be absorbed and put to use.
Because most people have severely compromised digestion, which means their bodies aren’t getting the nutrients from their food. This common condition is most well-known as leaky gut.
Leaky gut is responsible for a whole host of acute and chronic conditions, including:
- Allergies
- Asthma
- Autism
- Autoimmune disease
- Eczema and psoriasis
- Inflammatory bowel disease
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS)
- Type 1 diabetes
So how do you know if you have a leaky gut? What is it exactly, and what can you do to address it?
A Quick & Simple Guide to Healing Leaky Gut
What is Leaky Gut & Why Should I Care?
Leaky gut syndrome is a condition of permeability in the lining of your intestines that allows toxins, microbes, opportunistic organisms and undigested food particles to escape the digestive tract and enter the bloodstream.
When this happens it causes inflammation throughout your body and can lead to a variety of diseases.
While you may have heard me talk about leaky gut before, and how vital it is to address, I want to speak here to the importance of healing leaky gut at the same time that you focus on detoxification, which we learned yesterday is the first key to reclaiming health.
You see, to aid your body in detoxification and rid your organs of an overwhelming toxic load, your body needs to be able to utilize important vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other nutrients. If you suffer from leaky gut, your body’s ability to absorb and utilize these detoxification aids is severely compromised. You could be loading up on all sorts of superfoods and nutrients and yet your body is still starving for what it needs.
Additionally, leaky gut allows into the bloodstream toxins from foods that would normally exit the body safely. This adds dramatically to the toxic overload your body may already be experiencing, and if the amount of new toxins entering the body are greater than what your body can safely cleanse, any effort at detoxification will be of little help.
If you’ve tried strict diets rich in nutrient-dense foods… or you’ve diligently detoxified your body and still suffer from fatigue, illness or weight gain, then you know first-hand how leaky gut can undo all your hard effort and dedication.
Ironically, if you struggle with weight gain or weight retention, it’s a fair sign that your body might actually be starving.
That’s why this short course is so important for solving the challenges most people experience when trying to transform their body or health. You can’t just focus in one area. You have to support the body across all three levels of health:
- The body’s ability to cleanse/release toxins
- The body’s ability to digest properly for maximum absorption of nutrients
- The body’s building blocks (giving it what it needs to heal itself once it can use those building blocks).
Healing leaky gut is the bridge that allows the body to both successfully cleanse and also build or repair itself.
How to Tell You Might Have Leaky Gut
The truth is, most people will suffer from leaky gut from time to time. Many people have chronically compromised digestion, however, which is when leaky gut becomes truly dangerous to your health.
There are several symptoms of leaky gut. The more symptoms you have, the more severe your leaky gut is likely to be.
- Bloating
- Food sensitivities
- Thyroid conditions
- Fatigue
- Joint pain
- Headaches
- Skin issues like rosacea and acne
- Digestive problems
- Weight gain
- Syndrome X
Repair Your Gut to Bridge Your Body Back to Health
You often hear me say that it all comes down to your gut. And it does. Healing your gut is the only true bridge back to health, vitality, a lean, strong body and a long life free of disease.
By doing this one thing, you place the control of your health back into your own hands, because once you’ve healed leaky gut you can be confident that your body will receive what you give it and release what you no longer want.
The best way you can get started is to honor the body’s healing process as an incremental change. Healing occurs in tiny increments. Though it often seems abrupt, seasons change incrementally from warm to cold and back to warm. In tiny increments the Earth moves until one day we’ll notice the days growing longer and tiny green buds are on the tree outside your window. You body will naturally begin to change as well, when you support its incremental shifts on a daily basis.
Here are four simple actions you can take to assist the healing process, step by step:
- Correct Digestion by eating and drinking probiotic-rich foods. Cultured veggies, young coconut kefir, and probiotic liquids increase colonies of friendly bacteria in your intestines.
- Create energy to cleanse, heal and rebuild by strengthening your adrenals and thyroid. We have been discussing the details of this step throughout this mini course.
- Conquer any infections by only eating foods that are probiotic-rich, sugar-free, wheat-free and casein-free, as well as our recommended fermented foods. When you do this, you’ll create a strong immune system plus the energy you need to restore all systems of your body back to health.
- Focus on detoxifying your elimination organs (which we covered in Day 1 of this course!).
A question we are often asked is, how long does it take to build a strong immune system? How long will it take me to heal?
If you are suffering from infections like candidiasis or conditions such as chronic fatigue, cancer, Acid Reflux, Crohn’s, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and autism, you cannot expect instant healing. The impurities and toxins that have built up in your system over the years cannot be eliminated all at once – they must leave through an orderly step by step cleansing process.
Many of us are impatient people. We’ve never been taught the principle of step by step or to respect its wisdom. Our health suffers as a result. For example, unwilling to take the time to get over a cold and runny nose or ride out the aches and pains of the “winter flu,” we take painkillers and antibiotics as a “quick cure.” Drugs have negative side effects but they also override and suppress your body’s attempt to become stronger.
Drugs stop the cleansing process, which the body uses to get rid of illness: drugs drive disease deeper into the body, giving the potential for an even more serious illness later. But if we allow nature to take its course, cleansing and healing will take place, step by step.
