WHAT IS GUT HEALTH?

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?

The state of your gut and digestive health could be sabotaging your body transformation goals making it incredibly hard to lose weight as well as gain any muscle - not to mention setting you up for a potential world of health problems in the not-too-distant future.

Within your digestive system (esophagus, stomach and intestines) you have millions and millions of individual bacteria. In a healthy, well performing digestive track these millions of microbiome belong to one of thousands of different bacteria strains. One basic job of the bacteria that colonizes our digestive system is that of breaking down food in the gut to a simple form that can enter the bloodstream and be delivered as nutrients throughout our bodies.

Straight forward, right? Well, it should be but for over 70 million Americans (and the biggest percentage of that figure are guys over 35) that’s not so. Many, many middleaged men have poor gut health, hosting an imbalance of good vs bad gut bacteria and causing major issues with how energy from the food they’re are eating is being broken down, utilized, and stored.

Body Composition Effects Effect On Sleep

A poor gut bacteria profile can impair your body’s essential function of absorbing nutrients, how and where it stores body fat, regulating your blood sugar and leading to drastic weight gain or muscle loss.

A huge percentage of your body’s melatonin (your sleep hormone) is produced in your gut. An imbalance in gut bacteria hinders the release of this hormone, playing havoc with your sleep, which in turn increases cortisol levels, ultimately decreasing hormones such as testosterone.

Mental Health Affects

90% of your body’s Serotonin (mood hormone) is produced in your gut. An imbalance of gut bacteria can affect serotonin production, negatively effecting your mood. Depression, anxiety, lack of motivation and other mental health symptoms/conditions can all start from an unhealthy gut.

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE A GUT HEALTH PROBLEM?

Optimizing gut health is a big part of what we look at with every individual Tailored Fit Alpha client and we do so by looking at this from a few different angles. Please understand that you could be doing everything right – training right, recovering right, nutrition right, BUT if your gut health is not on your side, it’s going make dropping body fat and gaining muscle a very, very slow and challenging journey.

Nutrition – At least 90% of the reason your gut is in bad shape in the first place is because of years of poor, unbalanced nutritional choices that have added up and are now taking their toll. So, the biggest and most effective way to get it back on your side is through nutrition. Basically, the road in is the road out of this problem. We need to feed the good bacteria and starve out the bad bacteria through the foods we eat to regain a favorable balance.

Lifestyle – How you’ve chosen to live your life up to now and the choices you’ve made along the way have all played a role in the state of your gut as well – it’s just that by middle age that we are feeling the effects of our choices.

How you’ve taught your body to manage stress (cortisol hormone) over the years, or more accurately perhaps, not managed stress, directly affects your gut health. This is not just emotionally induced stress either but also includes environmental and chemically induced stresses that have created inflammatory effects (i.e., medications, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics etc. taken over the years). These have all made their mark on your gut and therefore need to be taken into account in order to be able to create the right plan to get your gut health fully back on your side.

START WITH SOME BASICS RIGHT NOW

As mentioned above with each Tailored Fit Alpha client we go deep into optimizing a client’s gut and digestive health using various means available to us. Here are a few things to help get your gut on your side from a nutritional angle:

Okay, so you’ve probably got a bit of an idea on what testosterone is and the basic role it plays in your body but just to make sure we’re all on the same page with this critical MVP player that’s so vital to your health & transformation success check out the following.

Testosterone is the key hormone that regulates your sex drive (libido), bone mass, fat distribution, muscle mass, strength, production of red blood cells and production of sperm. As well as give you your drive and motivation, it is basically the dominant hormone that makes you ‘Man!’