How to make your gut healthy

Welcome to Active Human’s 6th newsletter.

By now, you know, we are improving the 6 pillars of our well-being and learning and working on them one by one.

6 important pillars are:

1. Exercise - More movements spread across the day

2. Nutrition - Focus on balanced nutrition

3. Sleep - Improve and have consistent and more deep sleep

4. De-Toxification - Hacks to keep the body detoxified

5. Lifestyle diseases - Prevent and reverse lifestyle diseases

6. Brain chemistry - Build a positive and abundance Mindset

You would be amazed to know your GUT is linked with all the 6 pillars of your well-being. If your gut is not healthy, how much balance diet you eat, things will not get absorbed, exercise will give you more fatigue and stress, Sleep quality will be low and infact you can have insomnia, because of leaky gut toxins will keep circulating in the blood and start hampering thyroid, adrenal and many organs, the possibility of building lifestyle disease will be high and brain chemistry will be hampered because of inflammation and toxins. You get the message.

So, today’s newsletter is about “How to make your gut healthy”.

It’s a 21-day process, 6 months back I tried but then I lost track after 15 days. This time with you, I will be doing it for 21 days.

Initial 5-6 days you will feel no difference and then a little better, and after 21 days you will see some good differences in your energy levels, skin, digestion, bloating, brain health, and Inflammation.

This protocol is simple and has 3 steps:

1. Remove: Remove the irritant from your food and lifestyle and remove the overgrowth of pathogens.

2. Support: Support good gut health with calming and nourishing food.

3. Reintroduce: Reintroduce some food one by one to see which one is irritating.

Remove:

1. Just for 21 days, we will not eat Gluten, Dairy, Egg, Peanut and Soy products. These are known irritant foods for our Gut. I am not saying they are irritant to you also, but just for 21 days, we need to minimize the inflammation in the gut.

2. We will not eat packaged food like cookies, chocolates, and any highly process food (it gets very difficult to read the back label and then judge what is safe and what is not). It is just a matter of 21 days so we stick with wholesome food.

3. We will avoid refined sugar. For sugar cravings fruits, dates, and dry figs are allowed. But if you get a thick white patch on your tongue in the morning, chances are you have fungus in your gut, so avoiding all sugar is important to kill bad fungus in the gut.

4. Don’t take artificial sweeteners either, They kill good bacteria in our gut. Only stevia is allowed.

5. In the morning, on an empty stomach, we need to take one Moringa and one Neem leaf tablet or capsule each. Both are excellent anti-microbial herbs that remove pathogens naturally and detox the liver. Pathogen overgrowth is inflammatory in our gut. I bought it from Isha Life and you can get it from your brand too. It’s a standard product.

6. In the night, post 1 hour of dinner or 1 hour before sleeping, We need to drink Gut Cleanse herbal Tea: Take 1 teaspoon of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, and fennel seeds each and boil them in 300 ml of water for 15 mins on slow flame and then sieve it drink it sip by sip. This works well because it calms down the inflammation and improves bowel movement. An incomplete bowel clearance increases pathogens in our gut and builds up toxins in the body.

Support:

1. Our main job is done when we eliminate food that irritates the gut lining and when we remove pathogens. Now for food, for 21 days we need to eat food that does not cause inflammation but rather supports our gut lining and its microbiome.

2. Many gluten-free grains are available in the market now, for me brown rice works best. If you can eat cooked and then cold rice that is better because then its starch converts to resistance starch which acts as a prebiotic for gut bacteria.

3. We need to eat 4-5 kinds of vegetables and fruits each day, and we need to vary them. The idea is to cover 30 kinds of veggies in a week. and This is doable, we can eat 2 cooked vegetables in a day, 2 kinds of fruits, and 2 salad vegetables like cucumber, carrot, onion, radish, and tomatoes. Vegetable and fruit fiber is the best way to correct microbiome dysbiosis in our gut. Any other method is a pure scam.

4. For taste buds can include Tomato and Garlic chutney with your meal. Garlic is an excellent source of fiber.

5. Non veg food is allowed but portion needs to be such that it should not cause constipation. Try for fish rather than red meat. We need omega 3 from fish to reduce inflammation in our gut.

6. For the evening snack, opt for roasted salted Fox nuts or Gram.

Reintroduce:

1. After 21 days of improving your gut health, it is time to reintroduce the food that we eliminated.

2. It takes 2 days to figure out if any food is causing inflammation in our gut. So, Introduce one food item at a time, have it for 2 days, and observe your bloating and abdominal tension. if all is well, try to introduce the next one but if you find some discomfort, remove that food again and wait for 2-3 days for inflammation to settle down and then introduce the next one. This way you will figure out your inflammatory food items. For me, it came out Dairy and Mushrooms when I did an elimination diet.

It is a simple protocol but the results lie in the commitment, our gut lining gets hampered over a time period and repair will also happen slowly. So don’t be in a rush to quickly see results.

Let’s do this for 21 days together and let me know the results. Our gut health is very important if we want to become Active Humans again.

See you, Next Saturday,

Manish Bhagwani,

Human → Active Human

Research papers:

Moringa anti-microbial herb: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0254629919305381?via%3Dihub

Neem Leaf anti-Microbial herb: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9717/11/6/1644

Isha Life Moringa tablet: https://ishalife.sadhguru.org/in/moringa-tablet-drumstick-leaves-100-pcs

Isha Life Neem tablet: https://ishalife.sadhguru.org/in/neem-tablets-60pcs-good-for-daily-detox