The plan starts with a simple gut assessment to help you work out ‘what’s up’. You then follow a cycle of rest and food trials for the twenty-eight-day period, while recording your progress in a Gut-Health Diary. Plus you’ll get my own personal brand of enthusiasm, advice and dedication to help you every step of the way.
At the end of the plan, as well as feeling better, having a flatter stomach and losing weight, you’ll complete a 28-Day Review. The review is designed to be your ‘take-away’ from the programme, with a simple checklist of what to eat and what to avoid for your own personal gut health.
We can’t fix decades of ‘food on the run’ and ‘processed food mania’ in just one month. But we can help you make significant and noticeable changes in just four weeks. And with the tools that this programme provides, you can make better choices and continue to improve your gut in the long term.
We start in the Rest and Restore Phase, also known as the R&R phase, by cutting out damaging trigger foods. It can be limited but not boring with all the delicious recipes I have created for you to try. The diet is also low in sugar and as you will be avoiding processed food and eating three balanced meals a day, you will naturally lose weight and feel better.
Don’t worry if you feel more bloated or your symptoms get worse over the first week. You are asking your body to do an awful lot. In fact the first week is really about building up the good bacteria and strengthening the gut so you are ready to start afresh in week two. If at any stage you hit a blip and feel your gut health deteriorating, put yourself back on the R&R programme.
Then over the following three weeks, you test each problem food individually, recording any gut consequences as you go. In this way, you build up a detailed picture of your own personal sensitivities.
An imbalanced digestive system is like a polluted river. It’s grey and clogged with blockages. Years and years of pollution mean that the river is clogged up and the fish are few and far between.
Your gut lining is like a riverbank, muddy and bulging. The food you eat is like the water running through the river: it chugs along slowly, getting stuck and polluted. The fish are the good bacteria that have been killed off by years of ‘food on the run’.
During the 28-Day Gut-Health Plan, we are going to cut out all the pollution – the junk foods and trigger foods – so that the river runs clear. We are going to reintroduce the ‘fish’ by adding probiotics to our diet. Then our gut will be strong again, and with a strong, healthy gut, the whole body is healthy and renewed.
COMMON GUT PROBLEMS
The symptoms of an unhealthy gut include bloating, gas, cramps, food sensitivities and aches and pains.
If these symptoms affect your daily life severely, this is classed as a medical problem and people are often diagnosed by their doctors as suffering from IBS. But the majority of us haven’t reached that level. We’re struggling on, just managing, and yet slowly the symptoms become more frequent and gut health becomes more of a worry.
The plan aims to reduce your symptoms and helps you learn what foods you should avoid, what foods you can have in moderation and the foods of which you can eat as much as you like.
The symptoms we are hoping to address are:
1.Stomach cramps
2.Bloating and swelling of your stomach
3.Diarrhoea
4.Constipation
5.Excessive Wind
THE PATH TO IBS
The five symptoms – stomach cramps, bloating, diarrhoea, constipation and excessive wind – that are classed as gut-health symptoms are also the symptoms of IBS. Whether you have IBS or not is simply a matter of severity. There is no test that you pass or fail for IBS; it is just a question of how your symptoms affect your daily life. If you get severe stomach cramps overnight then this means that you don’t sleep well and your whole life is affected. This would be IBS. But occasional symptoms are annoying and we tend to just pick ourselves up and get on with it. The trouble is, year on year, your symptoms will slowly and almost imperceptibly get worse. You learn to manage them better, not complaining and just carrying on.
‘Whatever stage you are at, this programme aims to reduce your symptoms by a significant and measurable amount.’
The easiest way to discover more about the health of your gut is to use the Initial Gut Assessment Quiz (see here). This gives you a gut-health score on a scale of 1 to 10 and helps you to answer the question: ‘How bad is it?’ If you want to see the progress in your gut health during the programme you can take the quiz again at the end of the plan and see by how much your score has reduced.
The aim of this plan is to reduce your symptoms and hopefully get rid of some of them entirely. You will gain a deeper understanding of your body and its sensitivities, so you are less likely to trigger them. If you find foods that you are sensitive to, don’t worry too much as you will be able to eat them in moderation later on. Just in smaller quantities and less frequently.
DO YOU HAVE A ‘LEAKY GUT’?
What is a leaky gut?
A leaky gut affects the whole body. It’s caused by sections of the gut, normally joints or bends, becoming more porous and developing holes. Food molecules can leach through these holes and enter the bloodstream. The food toxins in your bloodstream set off your natural alarm system. A few undigested food molecules don’t cause a huge problem – your liver is called into action to deal with the toxins. But if the gut is very porous, the liver is quickly overrun and then these foreign bodies absorb into tissues throughout the body, causing them to inflame.
What causes a leaky gut?
Inflammation in the gut lining causes the microvilli filters that act as the barrier between our gut and our bloodstream to be swallowed up. The microvilli are like very fine hairs that protect the delicate gut wall from bigger undigested food molecules. If part of the microvilli are aggravated and inflamed, then those food molecules can get through the lining and become a toxin in the bloodstream.
This can be caused by:
A. Diet: refined sugars, processed foods, preservatives and refined flours. Too many toxins in the gut over many years means that the gut becomes inflamed as it just can’t keep up.
B. Stress: stress almost always results in a suppressed immune system. A weakened immune system cannot handle doing its normal job and gets overrun more quickly, causing inflammation.
C. Bad bacteria: if the bacterial balance in your gut is wrong, the ‘bad’ bacteria can take over and lead to inflammation.
How do you know if you have a leaky gut?
Instead of or as well as gut-health problems (stomach cramps, bloating, diarrhoea) you may get:
Multiple food sensitivities
Frequent colds and illnesses
Skin complaints such as eczema and rashes
Headaches, brain fog and fatigue
THE BOTTOM LINE
Your gut-health problems, aches and pains and food intolerances could all be intrinsically linked. Let’s start at the root of the problem, your gut, and see if we can understand it better. If we