A Healthy Gut is The Hidden Key to Weight Loss

Guest blog by Luke Douglas from Ripped.me 

Our gut is home to 100 trillion microorganisms. The staggering number alone can cause anyone to panic, but only some will be surprised by the fact that this is completely normal. Yes, there are more bacteria in your digestive system than there are cells in your body, and keeping this number even is crucial to our health and improved lifestyle. In fact, a healthy gut is the hidden key to weight loss, and here’s why.

What are the basics?

You've probably heard the word "probiotic" tossed around for a while. In fact, you've probably ingested capsules of probiotic as part of the therapy to cure stomach issues. These are loosely defined as active microorganisms that provide health benefits once consumed into your digestive system.

This gut flora promotes regular gastrointestinal function, regulates metabolism and provides an additional layer of protection against infection. Furthermore, there is scientific evidence that patients with blood sugar issues have gut problems almost by rule.

How to maintain a healthy gut?

There is a great number of issues that influence the health of your guts. First of all, there is the matter of antibiotics and methods that process everyday food in the twenty-first century. This "sterilization" greatly influences the way your gut works. Additionally, foods rich in refined carbohydrates and sugars, diets low in fibers, chronic stress and chronic infections all contribute to a problematic gut.

The first thing you should do is modify your diet in order to avoid some of these issues. Of course, chronic stress is a bit harder to address; it takes time and maybe even professional help. The bulk of the changes is to avoid eating too many carbs, lessen the intake of sugars, and throw in a good deal of fermentable fibers.

Of course, since most of our foods are processed, you are probably not having an intake of beneficial microbial flora, therefore, adding a few high-quality supplements like Udo’s probiotics will certainly keep you covered.

What about weight loss?

On the one hand, the changes you’d have to make as far as your diet is concerned make an obvious impact on your weight. First of all, having most of carb intake removed makes for a perfect factor that contributes to losing weight. It works for most people.

Additionally, renouncing all sugar filled sodas and filling your diet with healthy smoothies and salad meals are not factors to be scoffed at, to say the least. However, there is an additional issue here that’s not addressed all that often.

At the beginning of this decade, studies done on mice have shown that the growth of bad bacteria in your gut leads to weight gain. This is due to the “vicious circle” dynamic – eating low-grade food leads to “bad” bacteria, which in return increase your craving for that bad food and slows down your metabolism. This is where the connection with diabetes becomes prominent – such metabolic mechanism usually leads to blood-sugar related health problems.  

To makes matters worse, this bad bacteria that has “voracious appetite” for bad food also causes inflammation, leads to liver problems, and helps develop insulin resistance. These should be reasons enough to start watching what you eat and introducing controlled probiotics into your diet.

The study has shown another extremely interesting thing – when scientists transferred the gut flora from overweight mice into the guts of normal mice, they immediately start eating more and developed the same metabolic problems over time.

However, this is not the end of it – the good gut flora could also be transferred from healthy mice into overweight mice, which helped regulate the diet of overweight mice and helped ameliorate some of their health issues. This means we are possibly looking at the new, medically sound methods to artificially create personalized probiotic therapies to help overweight people with health and weight issues.

What are the additional benefits?

It has already been mentioned stress is a hard condition to tackle. However, the 2015 study on 700 has shown healthy gut can at least help with social anxiety. A good source of probiotics has shown to contribute to easier engagement with immediate social stress.

Furthermore, a healthy gut can help improve sleep and protect against detrimental physical effects of stress even when you can't deal with it properly. Probiotics also help reduce the risk and impact of allergies in the long run.

Of course, it doesn't mean probiotics alone can make all the difference. Having a healthy gut is only one aspect of improving your lifestyle. Exercise, socialization, self-improvement and cultivating a positive outlook on life are all deciding factors that, when combined, make your life significantly better.

Guest blog by Luke Douglas from Ripped.me