Authors: Sara Hughes,Heather Klein,Eunice Hines,Una Soto
Tags: #Cookbooks; Food & Wine, #Baking, #Cookies, #Kitchen Appliances, #Slow Cookers, #Health; Fitness & Dieting, #Diets & Weight Loss, #Other Diets, #Diets
Chapter 3: Exercising your way to a Healthy Gut
There is no doubt that exercising goes quite a long way in many respects. One of the best ways to fight inflammation of your bowels for example is to engage in a good 30 minute jog every morning. This kind of exercise routine is used to facilitate movement enabling a better emptying out of food from the stomach. This kind of ability to cleanse the body properly is a great boost to the gut any day.
Another great exercise to help keep your digestive tract in shape is sit-ups. While the most obvious affect of sit-ups is on the outside, in achieving that much sought after six pack of abs, there are internal benefits of having this six pack layer of muscle as well. Because as well as strengthening the outside of your stomach you are also strengthening the inside muscle too, this helps to facilitate a much more robust digestive system.
Regular exercise keeps your blood flowing throughout your entire body including your digestive system. If you can keep yourself moving with regular exercise your whole system is flexible and streamlined in its action time. A consistent workout routine helps eliminate a sluggishly slow digestive system and keeps constipation and while it is streamlining your intestines it also manages to prevent frequent outbursts of gas and bloating you may have.
But you don’t have to necessarily begin a strenuous workout regimen in order to get great results on your GI tract, because one of the best exercises to have positive impact on the digestive system is that of Yoga. Simple yogic techniques can do wonders to affect the flow and circulation of energy in the body just through simple stretching techniques. It has been found that gentle twisting yoga poses can increase blood flow to the bowels causing a reduction in inflammation and the incidence of gastritis.
One of the best yogic techniques for this is called the, “Seated Twist”. All you have to do is sit on the floor, straighten out your spine and stretch your legs out directly in front of you. After you have made yourself at attention in this position for a few moments then bend your left leg to bring your left foot over to your right knee and then place it on the ground in front of you. Now you can take a deep breath and begin slowly twisting your upper back to the left as you breathe out. Hold his yogic pose for about 15 seconds.
Doing this sort of simple yoga exercise every day will help increase gastrointestinal blood flow and increase the strength of your stomach wall and intestines. These kinds of yogic poses done on a daily basis will show you a dramatic improvement of the overall health of your gut, even more severe conditions such as a malfunctioning pancreas have been shown to be effectively treated through the use of these basic yoga routines.
As you can see, even the most simple of movements can do wonders for the digestive system. It is the lack of this movement that can lead to many of the health problems that are so prevalent in the gut. Among these, lack of movement inspired illnesses the most frequent is constipation. Simply put, if you don’t move, you may find yourself not able to use the bathroom. This is a common affliction to many of us in the modern workforce.
Being hold up in cubicles typing on computers day after day does not allow for a whole lot of movement. But even if you do have this sedentary kind of lifestyle, even just taking short ten minute breaks during the work day to stand up, walk around and stretch can make all the difference in the world between totally stopping up the pipes in your GI tract and allowing things to flow normally.
When you exercise, no matter what kind of exercise you are engaged in, the physical activity that you produce causes your heart beat and breathing to temporarily increase which then works to tone the unseen muscles of the digestive tract which leads to good routine bowel movements. So taking into consideration all of the great benefits discussed in this chapter in regard to exercise, if you really want to improve the health of your gut and your overall digestive ability, you really should look into starting even a very basic exercise regimen. It doesn’t have to be anything major, just a simple walk in the park, or even just a basic Yoga move that will take you 15 seconds of your time, try to get yourself moving and you will see the results of a much more healthy and robust gut!
You’ve probably all heard the joke about the guy who was too nervous to use the bathroom in front of the other guys in the men’s room. Well, as much as we laugh at these awkward kinds of situations having such difficulties is a clear indication of anxiety, because the truth is, if we are stressed out enough our whole digestive system can completely freeze in its tracks. This sort of behavior is due to the fact that our gut is constantly being showered in stress hormones. And any change in the elevation of out stress levels
There is even a syndrome that is completely unique to a stressed out GI tract; known as “leaky Gut” this condition, spurned on by mental stress and trauma causes permeability in the intestinal wall. Normally the permeability of your intestines is controlled by a wide array of various forms of intestinal bacteria, these gate keepers of the intestines are however highly sensitive to stress. You probably never imagined that bacteria could get stressed out, but yes, it is true, even the bacteria that lines your stomach walls and intestines can sense when your stress levels are elevated and they react to it just as much as your heart, respiration or any other aspect of your body reacts.
Yes, stress affects everything, and even usually harmless microbes in the digestion tract may suddenly become pathogenic in response to stress. If this stress is prolonged for years at a time, this can lead to a very toxic situation and pathogenic can easily cross the threshold in carcinogenic and that old adage; “Stress Kills” can become a certain reality, and even if you don’t reach a level of stress that deadly though, stress also leads to a very troubled life. Stress is a natural part of the fight or flight response, and when you look at the digestive systems reaction to stress in that light, it is easy to understand why the whole gut seizes up and digestive activity freezes under stress. Fight or flight is a mechanism humanity developed out of sheer need of self preservation.
Just think about it, one of your ancestors was picking berries in the woods, and then suddenly felt like he needed to use the bathroom behind the bush, but as he walks around the corner bumps right into a giant grizzly bear. As a result adrenalin kicks in and he is immediately in the fight or flight of his life; and guess what? As a result he doesn’t feel like he has to use the bathroom anymore! The fight or flight response was crucial for survival, enabling us during an emergency to shut down every single system in the body that was not mandatory to either outrun a threat or literally fight for our life.
The odds of bumping into man eating predators is rather slim in the modern world though, yet our fight or flight response remains ingrained in us, and often times these stress mechanisms can get out of whack to where just simple everyday hang-ups such as traffic jams and overbearing buses can trigger us in the same exact way the grizzly bear would have.
The only problem with these every day triggers is that they are not real emergencies, (at least in the sense of immediate physical survival) and since they are a part of our routine they don’t go away, and so as a consequence we routinely bombard ourselves with these stressors, causing our digestive system to routinely by afflicted as a result. It is because of daily stressors like this that so many people have conditions like peptic ulcers. A hellish kind of condition that can cause severe, often painful diarrhea with dark black stools as well as vomiting accompanied by sharp, stabbing stomach pains.
In order to prevent these Gut nightmare scenarios you need to find a way to get rid of some of the stress in your life. There is no doubt that we live in a stressful world, we may not be running from bears and lions but there are stressors there none the less. So the least you could do is try to limit the amount of stress you soak up on a daily basis. And you may find this somewhat comically, but it is the absolute truth, if you wish to eliminate much of the “unnecessary” stress that we humans are bombarded with, I would suggest turning off the news.
That’s right, all those horrible stories about ISIS cutting off the heads of Christians, and Donald Trump attacking everyone else, we don’t need it. The news that we download, watch, or read is sometimes enough to stress us out more than anything else. We live in a global society of instant information, but this information can overload and overwhelm us if we are not careful. I know it may be hard if you are a news junkie, but I would suggest trying to detox from stressful media at least temporarily to get yourself back on the right footing.
If that means putting down the tablet, newspaper or TV for a few days go right ahead. As I said, there is enough stress in our own individual lives without injecting the calamites of others who live hundreds of miles away, into our veins. The first step to stress relief is focusing on ourselves, so let’s give the media a rest a minute. And once we clear our mind from some of the unnecessary junk, we can then focus on developing some daily routines to help take the stress out of our lives.
One of the best stress relieving activities you could ever partake in is one that has been around for thousands of years; that of meditation. Whether you are a Christian and you enjoy praying, or a Buddhist monk engaged in transcends meditation, all of these actions involves going to quiet place and releasing stressful worries and concerns in a concentrated fashion. So just find that corner of the house and spend at least 30 minutes a day meditating on how you can make yourself feel good. Focus all of your positive thoughts and soon you will be running on much more than four cylinders and your gut will thank you for it.
Another important but often overlooked aspect of keeping stress levels down is to maintain your social networks. The more isolated we are the more stressed out we most likely will be, and studies have shown that social isolation can do much more than hurt our self esteem it can greatly reduce our bodies ability to maintain its systems properly, including digestion. I bet you never knew that
not
going to your friends New Year’s party would leave you with an upset stomach but it is true.
The more social contact we have the more oxytocin, a naturally inhibitor of stress hormone, is released in the blood stream and the more our stressors are subdued. Besides that laughter is the best medicine, and when do we laugh better than with a good friend? So let’s get our friends together and try to bust a gut laughing this New Years. So since being isolated is not good for you or your stomach, make a New Year’s resolution to ring in the New Year with style!
Most importantly though in relieving stress, you need to have a daily routine that you can use to get all of those harmful feelings and emotions out of your system. I always found that using creative means such as music or art to be particularly beneficial. But whatever your niche may be just found a way to use it and bust through that stress before you bust through your Gut!
As we get older, and pursue professional careers that take up most of our time it can become increasingly difficult to take care of our own personal health. We have routine aches and pains, we have discomforts that we have not even fully taken into consideration and as the days where on these routine pains and discomforts become some rather serious disorders. But we still do not have the time to deal with them so we grab the pain pills off the shelf of our favorite drug store and shoulder through a couple more years barely just getting by. If this sad picture I have just painted sounds like you, don’t feel bad, many of us have gone through this exact kind of scenario.
No one wants to be sick, but we live at such breakneck speeds anymore it is hard to even treat the most common ailments until they spiral completely out of control. We live in such a perpetual state of denial about our own health that sometimes it takes a lot of guts (pun fully intended) for us to even speak up and say that we have a problem. If this is you don’t feel bad in the slightest.
But also be aware that there is hope for you and you can make little changes in your lifestyle today that will have an immediate affect on your health tomorrow. Just by following the simple steps and measures highlighted in this book you will be able to make the small but necessary, incremental changes towards living a healthy life. If you learn to even just slightly tweak your diet your stomach will be improved tremendously.
If you develop even the most basic, regular exercise routine you will find that your own bathroom routine will be just as regular too. And as mentioned if you learn how to mediate and relieve some of the stress in your life you will be well on your way to improving it for the long term. We all have to start somewhere, and sometimes all we need is a little bit of encouragement to push us forward. I sincerely hope that this book provides you with that encouragement and leads you to a much happier and healthier Gut! Thank you for reading!