How Exercise Can Improve Your Gut Health Naturally

 

Click Here to Find Out How to Naturally and Permanently Cure Leaky Gut Syndrome

If you’re suffering from any sort of health issue, Leaky Gut Syndrome or other, then you have no excuse not to exercise. But we’ve become such a sedentary society that the only time that most of us are not sitting is when you’re walking to and from your car.

Yes, we sit in front of the TV. We sit in front of the computer. We sit at the table…

And most people who go to the gym sit down on the gym equipment!

All that sitting has a negative effect on your digestion.

How Exercise Effects Your Gut Health

Few people stop to consider that exercise has a much bigger impact on your gut health then you might realize.

Below I’m going to cover just a few of the effects that exercise can have on your digestive health.

Exercise Improves Constipation

Weight bearing exercise has been shown to be a necessity for you to properly eliminate your bowels. When you perform weight bearing exercise on your feet, your abdominals are forced to stabilize your spine which creates pressure within your abdominal cavity.

And it’s this abdominal pressure that is responsible for simulating many of your internal organs to help you move the food you eat through your digestive tract. So without the right kind of exercise, you can easily become constipated!

Exercise Balances Blood Sugar and Hormone Production

You might not realize it but this is something that I stress in my Leaky Gut Cure program. You absolutely must balance your blood sugar if you want to heal.

This is because your blood sugar has such a drastic effect on your stress hormones and the production of cortisol in your body. And over-production of cortisol will turn off your body’s natural ability to heal, your gut included.

Exercise alone has been shown to help balance blood sugar and other hormones within the body.

And it’s a great way to accelerate the positive effects that you’re already getting from your diet.

Exercise Improves Liver Function

We’ve discussed in the past that whenever the gut is impaired, then the liver becomes dysfunctional. And exercise can also help take some of the stress off the liver and to help it detoxify more efficiently.

For starters, exercise can help get blood moving throughout your body and to your liver more efficiently.

But aside from blood flow, your skin is actually one of your most important detoxification pathways in the body. So by working up a sweat, you are helping your body to eliminate toxins which can help take some stress off your liver.

Exercise Boosts Immune Function

Science is really only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the complexity of the immune system because there are many different components involved.

But there have been plenty of studies on the direct effect of exercise and immune function. And it has been proven time and time again that moderate exercise can significantly improve your immune function and decrease inflammation within your body.

But the body is so complex in nature that these 4 simplified examples of how exercise can have a positive effect on gut healing is really just a small snapshot of what is really happening within your body when you exercise.

The key is to make sure that you’re taking advantage of the benefits of exercise because it’s not only a major contributing factor to your overall health but it can literally help accelerate the gut healing process.

Watch this video to learn how this exercise can improve your gut health naturally –Yoga For Gut Health | 18 Min. Yoga Practice | Yoga With Adriene

Bio:

Karen Brimeyer is a nutritionist, functional medicine practitioner, and health consultant. She has helped over a hundred personal clients heal their leaky gut, digestive problems, lose weight, and resolve their chronic symptoms and conditions.

She is the owner of Optimal Self-Healing in Tampa Bay Florida, a private nutrition and health consultation business and author of the Leaky Gut Cure program.

Karen has worked with a wide variety of populations from new moms to athletes overcome their health problems and achieve optimal health.

Karen found her passion for nutrition as a teenager. While striving to achieve optimal health by following the widely accepted diet and nutrition tips of the media and conventional medicine, she found her own health declining rapidly with the development leaky gut which led to digestive problems and chronic fatigue.

Unwilling to accept her situation, she set out to determine the truth about health which led her through her own research as well as studying and working with some of the best holistic doctors and holistic practitioners in the fields of nutrition, functional medicine, and life coaching.

She has since applied her knowledge with herself to overcome her own leaky gut and achieve an unprecedented level of health and wellbeing. Her happy and healthy pregnancy and now two-year old son, TJ, are a testament to the health she has achieved.To find out more about this program, click on Leaky Gut Cure

Why You Should Treat Depression and Anxiety Effectively with Exercise

 

Click Here to Find Out How to Naturally and Permanently Cure Leaky Gut Syndrome

Depression and anxiety are just a couple of the many symptoms associated with Leaky Gut Syndrome. But they are major symptoms nonetheless. But what if you could simply treat depression and anxiety with exercise?

I’ve mentioned it before that when you perform the right kind of exercise that your body needs, you will actually feel better after your workout as opposed to worse. And this is because of all of the changes that take place within your body, including your brain.

Exercise elicits the release of many “happy” hormones within your body including natural endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. And these hormone levels will remain elevated for hours after your workout.

Research has even shown that exercise can effectively treat depression and anxiety, the same or even better, than the leading commonly prescribed antidepressants. In fact, at the conclusion of the 4-month study, the group that used exercise to treat depression and anxiety was shown to have fewer relapses than the group that used the medication.

Plus, the exercise group received many other additional health benefits from the exercise during the process.

But when was the last time you heard of a doctor who prescribed exercise to treat depression and anxiety instead of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drugs?

The Downside of Using Antidepressants to Treat Depression and Anxiety

By far the most common type of antidepressant is known as the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI).

Some commonly used SSRI’s include:

• Zoloft
• Prozac
• Lexapro
• Paxil

For starters, these antidepressant drugs are being used widely for anyone experiencing even minor symptoms of depression even though research has questioned the effectiveness.

When compared with a placebo for cases of mild or moderate symptoms, the benefits were minimal to non-existent. However, depression continues to rise and doctors continue to prescribe these same drugs to treat depression and anxiety where there is little validity in doing so.

How SSRIs Work to Treat Depression and Anxiety

While it is very well understood that a lot of depression can be contributed to a lack of certain neurotransmitter hormones such as serotonin, conventional medicine refuses to look at why your body might be lacking in serotonin to begin with. Instead they opt to take the more difficult route of forcing your body’s little serotonin stores to work overtime.

(Serotonin is the key hormone that stabilizes our mood, feelings of well-being, and happiness. This hormone impacts your entire body. It enables brain cells and other nervous system cells to communicate with each other. Serotonin also helps with sleeping, eating, and digestion.)

In a normal functioning brain, serotonin is readily used and then recycled (the reuptake process) before being made available again for use. And when serotonin is abundant your brain can use it freely without running out.

But when your brain is deficient in serotonin, then it is not readily available for use when your brain needs it. So SSRIs can be used to effectively block or inhibit the recycling or reuptake process in order to keep the little serotonin that your brain does have active and working for a much longer period of time.

One of the biggest adverse effects of using SRRIs to treat depression and anxiety is that you easily become dependent upon these drugs which can make them very difficult to get off of.

 If one were to stop taking the medication abruptly, then serotonin levels would drop even lower than where they were to begin with as the overworked serotonin would no longer be available for use. This can lead not only a drastic change in mood but also a significant worsening of your depression and anxiety.

Not to mentioned the multitude of side effects from these drugs including…

• Long term sexual dysfunction
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Insomnia
• Decreased bone density
• Tremors
• Tinnitus
• Suicidal tendencies
• Renal Impairment
• And the list goes on and on…

Naturally Treat Depression and Anxiety

One of the biggest benefits of using exercise to help treat depression and anxiety is that it’s one of the safest and most effect methods available.

Oftentimes, people want to jump straight into taking various supplements which have been shown to improve neurotransmitter production without considering the possibly side effects or looking at the obvious first.

Your body is designed to move so these natural hormonal and chemical processes that take place during exercise are a healthy and normal process. And regardless of your state of health, exercise is a must.

But when SSRIs are involved, it’s important to work closely with your doctor to get off of them as both your health improves and your dependence on them lessens. SSRIs combined with neurotransmitter supplementation can be a dangerous combination as it can lead to an overdose in serotonin known as Serotonin Syndrome.

Whether you treat depression and anxiety naturally or otherwise, you have no excuse not to incorporate exercise into your everyday activities to reap the benefits associated with your mood as well as the many additional health benefits that exercise provides. This is just one more reason why exercise should be an integral part of any Leaky Gut healing program.

Watch this video – How to Treat Depression and Anxiety Effectively with Exercise

Bio:

Karen Brimeyer is a nutritionist, functional medicine practitioner, and health consultant. She has helped over a hundred personal clients heal their leaky gut, digestive problems, lose weight, and resolve their chronic symptoms and conditions.

She is the owner of Optimal Self-Healing in Tampa Bay Florida, a private nutrition and health consultation business and author of the Leaky Gut Cure program.

Karen has worked with a wide variety of populations from new moms to athletes overcome their health problems and achieve optimal health.

Karen found her passion for nutrition as a teenager. While striving to achieve optimal health by following the widely accepted diet and nutrition tips of the media and conventional medicine, she found her own health declining rapidly with the development leaky gut which led to digestive problems and chronic fatigue.

Unwilling to accept her situation, she set out to determine the truth about health which led her through her own research as well as studying and working with some of the best holistic doctors and holistic practitioners in the fields of nutrition, functional medicine, and life coaching.

She has since applied her knowledge with herself to overcome her own leaky gut and achieve an unprecedented level of health and wellbeing. Her happy and healthy pregnancy and now two-year old son, TJ, are a testament to the health she has achieved.

To find out more about this program, click on Leaky Gut Cure

Natural Constipation Remedies for Stimulating a Sluggish Bowel

 

Click Here to Find Out How to Naturally and Permanently Cure Leaky Gut Syndrome

It should be no surprise that constipation is a major problem among those who suffer from Leaky Gut Syndrome. It is a common occurrence anytime that your digestive tract becomes dysfunctional.

But the good news is that there are plenty of natural constipation remedies that can be very effective at helping you not only overcome constipation but to also help regulate your digestive tract and improve your health all at the same time.

Please Note: If you suffer from diarrhea which is also very common with Leaky Gut Syndrome, much of this still applies to you.

And most people seeking natural constipation remedies have been suffering from chronic constipation for many years. And this can have a significant impact on your health because if you are not removing your toxic waste then your body is reabsorbing it.

You are also creating a breeding ground for bacterial infections, parasites, and Candida. And this is part of the process that is creating inflammation and holding you back from healing.

If you study the lifestyle habits of many different native cultures around the world that are without the influence of all of the Leaky Gut Syndrome causes, you’ll find that they have perfect digestion and do not suffer from Leaky Gut or any of the degenerative diseases that are common among us today.  And under these conditions, it is commonly found that they have multiple bowel movements each day and typically one within 12 hours after every meal they eat.

So if you’re not finding yourself moving your bowels at least one to two times per day then you need to pay special attention to these natural constipation remedies.

Test for Bowel Transit Time

It should also be noted that even if you are going one or more times per day, you can still be constipated. Constipation is also a factor of your transit time. So, if you eat a meal and it takes two or three days before that meal reaches your colon and is eliminated then you are still constipated.

But you can easily test your transit time to ensure that it is in the 12 to 24-hour time frame which is considered normal.

Just follow these instructions below before using any of the natural constipation remedies in order to get a baseline of your transit time so you can measure improvement.

After your next bowel movement, you can either eat red beats or find an all-natural food coloring and add it to your meal.

Keep a lookout and see how long it takes before you notice the red coloring and note the number of hours between

The red coloring from the beats or food coloring will not be absorbed and will be noticeable in your stool.

Natural Constipation Remedies

There are plenty of natural constipation remedies out there but it only makes sense to start with the basics before you start adding fibers or other laxatives. These are probably the most common sources of constipation so they are the best place to begin.

Natural Constipation Remedies – Dehydration

Regardless of your level of health, the vast majority of constipated people in the world are chronically dehydrated. They drink all kinds of other liquids, many of which are diuretics and cause them to lose even more water.

A general rule is to make sure that you are drinking a minimum of half your body weight (lbs.) in ounces of water every day. If you weigh 200 lbs. then you should be drinking at least 100 ounces of water daily.

Natural Constipation Remedies – Sodium Chloride

It’s very common to avoid salt like the plague today. It’s been linked to heart disease amongst other health issues. And while this is somewhat true for highly processed and toxic salts, there’s another side of the story that you need to know.

We need salt in our diets in order to maintain the proper electrolyte ratios and to maintain our health. And most people need much more salt than they are getting.

And one of the functions of salt is to help your body to better absorb and utilize water which also helps with dehydration. If your body can’t absorb the water you drink then it sure can’t use it to relieve constipation.

Natural Constipation Remedies – Your Diet

Your diet has a big influence over your bowels, transit time, and constipation.

Processed foods are a common cause of constipation because they disrupt the entire digestive tract as well as being low in natural fiber and void of essential nutrients. They also promote dysbiosis (a condition in which the gut bacteria become imbalanced) which greatly affects constipation more so than most people realize.

Food allergies are also something to take into consideration. A common symptom of food allergies is constipation so it’s best to determine and avoid the foods you are sensitive to.

Your diet should be focused around foods in their natural forms that are not processed and how Mother Nature intended them to be eaten.

While most people are stuck looking for a pill, powder, or miracle to fix their constipation, oftentimes the problem can be corrected with some simple lifestyle changes.

So it’s important to rule out the obvious and put these natural constipation remedies to use before you jump ahead of yourself and introduce anything additional to your daily regime.

Watch these 2 videos to find out about some natural constipation remedies –

Natural Stool Softener Foods to Stop Straining with Bowel Movements

Physical Therapy Exercises for Relieving Constipation, IBS Bloating and Abdominal Pain

Bio:

Karen Brimeyer is a nutritionist, functional medicine practitioner, and health consultant. She has helped over a hundred personal clients heal their leaky gut, digestive problems, lose weight, and resolve their chronic symptoms and conditions.

She is the owner of Optimal Self-Healing in Tampa Bay Florida, a private nutrition and health consultation business and author of the Leaky Gut Cure program.

Karen has worked with a wide variety of populations from new moms to athletes overcome their health problems and achieve optimal health.

Karen found her passion for nutrition as a teenager. While striving to achieve optimal health by following the widely accepted diet and nutrition tips of the media and conventional medicine, she found her own health declining rapidly with the development leaky gut which led to digestive problems and chronic fatigue.

Unwilling to accept her situation, she set out to determine the truth about health which led her through her own research as well as studying and working with some of the best holistic doctors and holistic practitioners in the fields of nutrition, functional medicine, and life coaching.

She has since applied her knowledge with herself to overcome her own leaky gut and achieve an unprecedented level of health and wellbeing. Her happy and healthy pregnancy and now two-year old son, TJ, are a testament to the health she has achieved.

To find out more about this program, click on Leaky Gut Cure

7 Safe and Natural Ways to Improve Your Quality of Sleep

 

Click Here to Find Out How to Naturally and Permanently Cure Leaky Gut Syndrome

We all need our beauty sleep, myself included. This is true especially in today’s fast paced society where sleep tends to be put on the back burner so that you can meet a deadline, watch a TV show, answer emails, etc.

But few truly understand the physiological importance of sleep. There are much more imposing implications to a lack of sleep than how beautiful you appear or how sharp you mind functions.

During your sleep cycles is when your body is most efficient at repairing damaged cells, including those cells that comprise your intestinal lining. And disrupting this natural healing process can stop even your best efforts of healing Leaky Gut.

In fact, your circadian rhythm dictates this healing process and typically between the hours of 10pm to 2am your body facilitates physical repair. And during the hours of 2am to 6am your body facilitates mental repair.

With that being said, here’s 7 safe and natural ways to improve your quality of sleep and help bring your health to new levels.

Heal Your Leaky Gut

When it comes to sleep, Leaky Gut and intestinal inflammation play a much larger role than you can probably imagine. In fact, most people don’t realize it but the majority of the neurotransmitter serotonin, your body’s natural antidepressant, is produced inside your gut.

When there’s inflammation present and you can no longer efficiently produce the necessary serotonin, you often see heightened anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders because your brain does not have the necessary chemicals it needs to function properly.

And no, it’s not just all in your head like your doctor may want you to think.

But when your serotonin levels are low, it negatively affects your sleep.

Diet, Diet, Diet

First and foremost, if you’re not eating the right diet for you then you will likely have sleep issues at some point in time. This is because a poor diet leads to problems with blood sugar stabilization and regulation.

And when you sleep at night and go for so long without eating it’s quite common for your body to become hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) since your body relies on the food you eat to maintain this balance.

And because your body must regulate your blood sugar levels in order for you to function and survive, your body will wake you up in order to persuade you to eat and raise your blood sugar levels back up to normal.

Get Some Sun

Some people’s sleep issues stem from a deficiency in the hormone melatonin. This might stem from a deeper serotonin deficiency which is common with Leaky Gut Syndrome as mentioned above. Or your body might not be converting the serotonin you do have into melatonin efficiently.

Regardless of your sleep, you should be getting at least 30 minutes of sunlight per day which is necessary for you overall health and wellbeing. But this 30 minutes of sunlight will also help stimulate your pineal gland which is responsible for producing the melatonin you need for sleep.

Avoid Alcohol

Aside from the fact that alcohol creates inflammation within your gut and is one of the many contributing causes of Leaky Gut Syndrome, it does have an effect on your sleep as well.

Alcohol consumption affects your brain in such a way that does not allow you to reach a deep level of REM sleep which is necessary for psychological repair and to keep you thinking sharp and straight.

Put Down the Remote

Odds are that you’ve become accustomed to watching TV at night. Many people are, so you’re not alone. But you have to understand that even though you’re sitting there in your lazy-boy, your brain is being hyper-stimulated by the constant flashing and changing of scenes on the TV screen. And this hyper-stimulation elicits a stress response within your body.

And to make matters worse, you watch the news before bed where you learn about all the horrible things that are wrong in the world. And after all of this, you try to fall asleep while fearing for your life at the same time.

By simply cutting out your TV time and stop watching the news, your brain will not be over-stimulated which can help alleviate stress or stimulation related sleep issues.

Avoid Caffeine

This should go without saying but so many people are having coffee after dinner or for dessert. But with coffee containing caffeine, a natural stimulant, it can have lasting effects through the night if taken too late in the day.

So be sure to never drink coffee after 3pm.

Dim the Lights at Night

Your body is designed to function based upon the natural rhythms of your day. When the sun comes up, it stimulates cortisol production in your body which in turn wakes your body up from sleep naturally.

And throughout your day to when the sun sets, your cortisol levels taper off which puts your body back into a relaxed state and preparing you for sleep.

But when your house is brightly lit at night, this can promote your body to continue to produce cortisol while it should be suppressing it. And this can be enough to keep you up at night.

So dim your lights at night to help lower your cortisol levels and make your sleep easier.

Want some more safe and natural ways to improve your quality of sleep? Watch this video – Sleep Hygiene: Train your Brain to Fall Asleep and Sleep Better

Bio:

Karen Brimeyer is a nutritionist, functional medicine practitioner, and health consultant. She has helped over a hundred personal clients heal their leaky gut, digestive problems, lose weight, and resolve their chronic symptoms and conditions.

She is the owner of Optimal Self-Healing in Tampa Bay Florida, a private nutrition and health consultation business and author of the Leaky Gut Cure program.

Karen has worked with a wide variety of populations from new moms to athletes overcome their health problems and achieve optimal health.

Karen found her passion for nutrition as a teenager. While striving to achieve optimal health by following the widely accepted diet and nutrition tips of the media and conventional medicine, she found her own health declining rapidly with the development leaky gut which led to digestive problems and chronic fatigue.

Unwilling to accept her situation, she set out to determine the truth about health which led her through her own research as well as studying and working with some of the best holistic doctors and holistic practitioners in the fields of nutrition, functional medicine, and life coaching.

She has since applied her knowledge with herself to overcome her own leaky gut and achieve an unprecedented level of health and wellbeing. Her happy and healthy pregnancy and now two-year old son, TJ, are a testament to the health she has achieved.

To find out more about this program, click on Leaky Gut Cure