photo credit: VinothChandar

The phrase “Trust your Gut” doesn’t apply to weight loss.

That’s because the little-known but widespread condition known as Gut Dysbiosis is telling millions of people to improperly digest their food, eat the wrong foods, and ultimately prevent effective weight lost.

It’s amazing that such a widespread problem goes so widely undetected, especially since the long-term effects can be so significant. 

Do you know there’s flora inside your gut?

Perhaps some of the mystery surrounding “Gut Dysbiosis” stems from the term itself.

“Dysbiosis” is an unfamiliar word to most people.  Dysbiosis is an imbalance in the microbial environment of the gastrointestinal tract (GI).  Inside this environment, you have trillions of bacteria and yeast – called flora – living in your GI tract.

The flora serves a variety of functions, including improving digestion, eliminating waste, maintaining proper body chemistry and optimizing immune status.  The flora helps your body make and absorb the nutrients it needs while breaking down toxins and helping excrete waste products.

Dramatic “shifts” in the flora can create dysbiosis.  These shifts are caused by a variety of factors, including many medications (especially pain medications, antibiotics and antacids), infections, illnesses, alcohol, chronic stress, foods, chemicals and pollutants.

Flora imbalances can cause weight gain

Once these imbalances occur, Gut Dysbiosis begins.  People can suffer from a number of gastrointestinal issues, such as acid reflux, gas, bloating, and indigestion.

Incomplete or improper digestion occurs.  Your body then signals for more food, which again is not properly digested.  You don’t get the full value from your food, which can cause you to eat more to satisfy your needs.

Even if you’re eating the right foods, this inability to break down food correctly can leave you nutrient deprived.    The more this occurs, the more weight your body will gain.

Gut Dysbiosis sets the stage for food sensitivities

Gut Dysbiosis can also lead to food sensitivities.

Food sensitivities should not be confused with allergies.  Allergies are caused by an IgE (immunoglobulin E) reaction in the body that can cause anaphylactic shock and death.

Food sensitivities are also caused by immune reactions to foods, they are just not IgE mediated-allergies. Food sensitivities can be caused or created because of improper digestion, damage to the gut lining, or immune dysfunctions.

Food sensitivities can cause a number of symptoms, including a runny nose or congestion, energy or mood fluctuations, joint pain, indigestion, and headaches amongst others.  The reactions tend to surprise people; they can’t believe it’s the result of food.

The body begins to crave the invader

Once a food sensitivity begins, the body reacts, although in a rather unexpected way.  It actually begins to “crave” bad foods.

Remember, food sensitivities are an immune reaction.  Your body is producing antibodies to fight off the antigens in foods it can’t handle.   The more foods you eat that your system doesn’t like, the more antibodies your body will produce.

If those antibodies have no antigens to bind with, it will leave you feeling miserable.  You’ll then want seek out the foods with the antigens, just to suppress those ill feelings.

This is the root cause of your craving for bad foods.  It’s why it’s so common to crave foods you just ate, including carbohydrate-rich and sweet foods, such as desserts.

More misinterpreted signals

When you eat a food you are sensitive to, a number of changes occur on a biochemical level. First, the ingestion of sensitive foods can cause neurotransmitter imbalances, particularly in serotonin. This can cause cravings not only for the food you just ate, but also for carbohydrate-rich and sweet foods (like deserts!).

In addition, the body often releases endorphins when a reactive food is eaten.  This is akin to the ‘calm before the storm’ as your body ramps up its defenses to fight the foreign invader – in this case, the food you just ate.

Our body misinterprets those signals.  We want to feel ‘more’ of that endorphin rush, so we run back to the foods to which we are intolerant.

Finally, eating foods to which you are intolerant causes the body to produce more cortisol.  This causes the uptake of serotonin and other chemicals into the brain in preparation for ‘fight-or-flight’.  Again, we misinterpret this signal and run back to the foods that give us this natural ‘high’.

At this point, not only is your body improperly digesting the right nutrients, it’s begun to crave all the wrong ones.

The result is weight gain, especially around the belly.  Because Gut Dysbiosis can cause bloating, it’s not uncommon for people to lose 2-9 inches around their midsection once they’ve discovered the offending food(s).

Gut Dysbiosis recovery:  Test, identify cause, repair the damage

Complicating the issue is the fact that these reactions occur hours to days after the offending food is consumed, hence the common term ‘delayed onset food allergies’. It makes the food sensitivity difficult to identify without testing.

To effectively break the Gut Dysbiosis cycle, you need to identify the cause, remove the cause, and then repair the damage.

A number of different methods can be used to identify the cause.

• You can eliminate all the most common foods that cause sensitivities, and then reintroduce them back one-by-one.
• You can undergo a number of blood tests that can identify your specific intolerances – a much faster process than slowly working through the common foods that cause intolerances.

Once the culprits have been identified, the repair process begins.  By altering the diet and speeding the healing process through supplementation, we can eliminate Gut Dysbiosis.  Over time, the flora can be rebuilt, and the offending foods slowly reintroduced into the diet.”