Leaky Gut and Autoimmunity: How to Heal and Reduce Flare-Ups

In this episode of Limitless Health, Kate explores the critical role your gut plays in regulating your immune system and how it may be the key to alleviating autoimmune symptoms. They discuss how issues like leaky gut, inflammation, and food sensitivities can exacerbate autoimmune flare-ups and provide actionable steps to start healing your gut for improved well-being.

Key Takeaways:

•Gut Health and Immunity: 70-80% of your immune system is in your gut. When your gut is inflamed or imbalanced, it can trigger autoimmune reactions, leading to symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and chronic pain.

•Recognizing the Signs: Bloating, gas, and digestive discomfort are indicators that your gut may not be functioning properly. Paying attention to these signals is crucial in managing and reducing autoimmune symptoms.

•Actionable Steps to Heal Your Gut:

•Food Journaling: Track your meals to identify patterns and potential triggers.

•Elimination Diet: Remove common inflammatory foods (e.g., gluten, dairy, seed oils) to help your gut recover.

•Gut-Supportive Foods: Incorporate bone broth, collagen, and probiotics, but monitor for any symptoms that may indicate sensitivity to these foods.

•Stress Management: Techniques like yoga, EFT tapping, and spending time in nature can help shift the body into a healing state.

•Microbiome Balance: Learn how supporting the beneficial bacteria in your gut can reduce inflammation and regulate immune response.

Upcoming Event:

Don’t miss our upcoming Free Webinar: “How to Take Control of Your Autoimmune Health Naturally”. Amanda and Kate will guide you through more in-depth strategies to heal your gut and manage autoimmune symptoms effectively. Click here to register.

Call to Action:

If you or someone you know is struggling with autoimmune symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, or pain, this episode is for you. Listen in to gain valuable insights and start your journey toward better health. Share this episode, subscribe, and leave a review!

Links Mentioned:

•Register for the Free Webinar

•Visit Our Website

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*** This podcast is for information purposes only. By providing the information contained herein, we are not diagnosing, treating, curing, mitigating, or preventing any disease or medical condition. Before beginning any type of natural regimen, it is advisable to seek the advice of a licensed healthcare professional.  

*** This podcast is for information purposes only. By providing the information contained herein, we are not diagnosing, treating, curing, mitigating, or preventing any disease or medical condition. Before beginning any type of natural regimen, it is advisable to seek the advice of a licensed healthcare professional.

Transcript

  Did you know that 70 to 80 percent of your immune system is actually in your gut? If you've been struggling with autoimmune symptoms, your gut health might be the missing piece to the puzzle. In today's episode, we're talking about how gut issues like leaky gut, inflammation, and food sensitivities can be making your autoimmune symptoms worse and what you can do to fix it.

We believe in growth and continuous learning. We believe in educating and sharing knowledge. We believe the body is miraculous and is able to heal with the proper nutrition and support. And we believe the right mindset is key to your success. I'm Amanda Golightly, and I'm Kate McDowell, and this is Limitless Health.

Live well, naturally. The connection between your gut and your immune system is huge. In fact, the gut is often the root cause of autoimmune flare ups. So if you're dealing with symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, or chronic pain, improving your gut health could be a game changer. At the end of this episode, we'll tell you about a webinar that we have coming up soon.

It's called how to take control of your autoimmune health naturally. And in this webinar, we'll dive even deeper into how you can start addressing gut health to improve your symptoms. So, your gut plays a major role in regulating your immune system. This is something your doctor will never tell you, or mine certainly never did when I was going through this.

And when your gut is healthy, it keeps your immune system balanced. It helps fight off infections, but when your gut is inflamed or damaged, it can trigger an autoimmune response that leads to even worse autoimmune symptoms. It can trigger an autoimmune response, which can lead to even worse autoimmune symptoms.

Many people don't realize that issues like bloating, gas, digestive discomfort are actually signs that the gut isn't functioning properly, and this can directly impact your immune system. So start paying attention. Pay attention to how your body reacts to different foods, and keep a food diary that can be really helpful in identifying patterns and triggers and what your body's actually responding to.

If you're just trying to do it kind of off the cuff, it's hard to remember, especially if you're going through autoimmune issues, what you ate this morning for breakfast, let alone yesterday, five days ago, ten days ago. So a food journal can be a really helpful tool here. When it comes to leaky gut, who's heard of leaky gut?

This is something I had no idea about before I actually went to nutrition school and got a better understanding of it, but leaky gut occurs when the lining of your gut becomes permeable. So essentially, food particles can pass through it. This allows harmful substances like toxins, bacteria, and undigested food to enter your bloodstream.

And when things that are in your bloodstream don't belong there, your immune system has to respond. Things passing through your gut lining triggers an immune response, which can make autoimmune symptoms worse. And so why is this a problem? Leaky gut is often a hidden root cause of autoimmune conditions, let alone other chronic health problems as well, because it leads to chronic inflammation, and it can make your immune system hyperreact, overreact, go a little bit crazy.

So for an actionable tip for this one, you can start repairing your gut lining by by removing food sensitivities, by removing inflammatory foods from your diet. And again, this is foods like gluten and dairy can be really inflammatory for people. Seed oils can be really harmful here as well. So that's like canola oil, margarine, these things that we thought, I'm an eighties baby.

So I thought that these were the healthier option back in the day, but now I completely realize how harmful they are to the body. They're very inflammatory. And so even foods that are generally considered healthy, if your body is sensitive to it, it's going to trigger inflammation and can worsen your symptoms.

So foods like eggs or nuts, If your body's responding poorly to it, it can trigger that inflammatory response. There's anything that can be a problem for you, and that's where your food journal will be really helpful to pay attention and see what are the things your body seems to respond well to, and what are the things that are causing problems.

So, consider doing an elimination diet here is the actionable tip I have for this step. We do root cause testing with clients and so with root cause testing I can test you and say these are the foods that your body doesn't like. These are the foods that we need to eliminate for now. But if you're not interested in doing root cause testing at this point, this is something that you can do for yourself.

You can do an elimination diet. You can pull out gluten, dairy. When I first did this, it was 2011, I did a paleo diet. So I got rid of all grains, all dairy, legumes, so no chickpeas, no peanuts. And when you think of grain, even corn is a grain. So it's really eliminating the foods that are common triggers for people, the common inflammatory ones.

I got rid of all processed foods. My multi grain Cheerios that I used to eat every night for dinner. Nope, those had to go, and I had to learn to cook for myself as well. So I'm not going to tell you that it's easy to do an elimination diet by yourself without support, but it is doable. It's somewhere you're going to have to play around with things and give your body a chance to recover if you're removing stuff.

This isn't something where you can just not eat it for a week. You can not eat it for a day and notice a difference. The whole purpose here is taking things out long enough that your body is able to heal and then reintroduce things back in later to see if there's any reaction or any trigger. Third thing we're going to talk about today, so your gut microbiome and autoimmunity.

Your gut is the home to trillions of bacteria that make up your microbiome. And these bacteria play a role in regulating your immune system. So when your gut microbiome is imbalanced, meaning you have more harmful bacteria than beneficial bacteria, everyone is going to have both. It's a mixture of both.

It's meant to be a mixture of both. But the problem happens when there's more bad guys. And this can trigger, trigger autoimmune flares. An imbalanced microbiome can lead to chronic inflammation and worsen your symptoms. And factors like poor diet, antibiotics, anti biotic, well,  is meant to kill the bad guys, but It's not.

It doesn't go in there and say, Oh, I'm just going to kill the bad guys and leave the good ones alone. An antibiotic use or chronic antibiotic use is killing off good guys as well. And if the bad guys are opportunistic, after the round of antibiotics, you could end up with an overpopulation of bad guys in your microbiome, which can lead to worsened autoimmune symptoms.

So the things that you can do, oh, stress, stress can also disrupt your microbiome as well. But when it comes to actionable tips for this one, so start supporting your, your good guys. We want to build that army up as much as possible because then it's going to have more of a fighting chance to keep the bad guys to a minimum so they don't go out of control.

And the things you can do to support your microbiome is eating real whole food. So vegetables is going to be a really big one here because fibrous vegetables are going to feed But I want to show you some general tips for eating for hearing loss. Your gut bacteria fermented foods can be beneficial here as well Some people respond poorly to that if you find you eat fermented foods and you have symptoms after that Maybe pull those out for a little bit Especially if it's someone who's dealing with master or with kind of a histamine response fermented foods can be a problem but if you tolerate them well.

They do have active bacteria in there, and they can help build up your microbiome and probiotics. Same concept with that. So reducing sugar, processed foods can be really helpful when it comes to rebalancing your gut bacteria as well. Healing the gut is a critical step to managing autoimmune conditions, because by reducing inflammation and repairing your gut lining, And balancing your microbiome, you can help your immune system calm down and reduce flares and it prevents more from happening in the future as well.

So gut healing isn't just about what you eat. It's also about managing stress. It's about supporting detoxification and giving the body the nutrients that it needs to start doing what it's always trying to do. Your body is always trying to heal. And the two questions or the two things that we're always looking at is if your body is not healing, if you're dealing with health issues, What's getting in the way, or what's missing?

And so nutrition is a big part of the what's missing, but so is managing stress. And what's getting in the way also can be stress, all the toxins parasites, pathogens, anything in your system that causes it to not functioning properly are things that we need to address. And so actionable tip for this one, incorporate gut healing foods.

So things like bone broth, again, this is on the same line as the fermented foods. If you find your symptoms get worse around this one, That's going to be something you're going to have to avoid for a bit. Collagen is beneficial for the gut. And then support your body's natural detox process. So we want to make sure that we're drinking lots of water all the time.

I have a friend who has a great analogy that like makes me cringe and make me laugh at the same time. Who remembers going down a water slide when you were a kid?  Imagine doing that in your bathing suit or in your shorts or a water slide with no water.

When there's not water in the system, things don't move the way that they're supposed to, which is not a comfortable situation. Very similar to the water slide with no water. So we want to make sure that we're drinking plenty of water. You also want to make sure it's really good quality water. Clean water, not tap water.

My personal recommendation for a water source, distilled, the thing with distilled is they actually take the water out and leave the toxins behind. versus a filter that's trying to force the water through and clear up as much as it can. So my recommendation for water source would be distilled water. We also want to reduce our toxins exposure.

So again, toxic water is not going to be beneficial here. So that's a good place to start. But then this could be personal care products. This could be beauty products. Get rid of the Glade plugins in your house, swap it out to something essential oil based if you're looking for fragrance. Dryer sheets are a really big one.

I could talk, like, for days about toxic exposure, but just look for little areas where you can start. supporting this now so that you can work in the right direction and give your body a little bit of a breath of fresh air. And then managing stress through practices like deep breathing, like EFT tapping, like yoga, like going for walks in nature is my absolute favorite.

That's something that I made routine this year where every single morning, even if it's raining out, it helps when you have a dog. I take my dog to the provincial park, which is like a five minute drive from my house. And we walk, and that's very good for getting out of that sympathetic fight or flight stress mode into the rest and digest healing mode.

And so that's really good for the stress management tips as well. So today we've explored the connection between gut health and autoimmunity, and how leaky gut, food sensitivities, and an imbalanced microbiome can trigger or even worsen your symptoms. The good news? Healing your gut is one of the most powerful steps you can take to support your immune system.

And it's not that hard. It's something you can do. It's an actionable thing. And it's a place where I found it really useful because it was a place where I could take my personal power back. I didn't need somebody to tell me it was okay to do something or give me all the guidelines on it. It was like, you know what?

I can choose what I put on my fork. I can choose what I put on my plate and what I put into my body. And so that's one thing I really like about nutrition. Is it easy? No. But is it simple? Yes, it is. And it's doable for everyone. So if you want to learn more about how gut health impacts autoimmune conditions and what you can do to start healing.

Again, I invite you to our free webinar, how to take control of autoimmune health naturally in this webinar, we'll dive deeper into these topics and give you practical act actionable steps. You can start taking today to take control of your health. So head over to the show notes. I'll drop the webinar link in there so you can save your spot.

 So hopefully you enjoy this episode. If you know anyone who's dealing with autoimmune, who's frustrated, who would be interested in learning more, make sure you share it with them.

And then also head to the show notes and click to save your spot for the upcoming webinar. I look forward to seeing you there. Have a great day and I will see you on the next one.