What if I told you your symptoms don’t matter?
And I talk a lot about root cause… But what if we never find it?
The truth is, no matter the disease process, you can have a positive effect when you know what steps you need to take.
And the good news is, I’m going to teach you why the gut drives disease and what happens when you prioritize your gut health first.
It starts with addressing the underlying lifestyle factors that drive disease.
These are the root of your health condition. And it includes things like stress, poor diet, toxins, lack of sleep, poor relationships, common nutrient deficiencies, lack of exercise, trauma, personal care products, and poor digestion.
You may never know the exact root of your health condition, but these factors could be working together or independently to drive certain disease processes. When you work on all of them simultaneously, you will typically see disease conditions begin to heal.
Addressing the root cause is what drives functional medicine practices and how it’s different from conventional medicine. You will get down to what is causing or driving a specific disease process in the body.
The focus should be on the cause or roots of the disease – not the symptoms of the disease or the labels.
If you only focus on the label or diagnosis, you miss the roots.
Different Disease States
For the most part, we all start out pretty healthy. Then we move along through the 4 different disease states.
Immune Activation
Disease typically starts with some sort of immune activation in the form of an allergy, infection, or even stress. This activates an immune response. And if these factors are not resolved at their root, the disease will progress.
Pre-Symptomatic
After the initial infection, or even a major stressor resolves itself, our bodies will still compensate for the disease in our body. Symptoms may not show up in this stage. That’s why it’s called the pre-symptomatic phase.
Symptomatic
If the stressor is not taken care of, it will eventually lead to symptoms. This is typically when you may start to seek help.
If you’re in this stage right now, I’m here to help reverse your disease state back to a healthy state. Learn how I can help you here.
Break Down
The final phase is when the body begins to break down. This is typically when you receive the diagnosis and start taking prescribed medications. In worst case scenarios, you may have to remove an organ (i.e. appendix, gallbladder).
How To Get Back To A Healthy State
My goal is to help you get back to a healthy state as quickly as possible. And if you’re already healthy, I want to show you how to prevent disease. An ancient, but relevant quotes states:
“All disease begins in the gut.” – Hippocrates
If all disease begins in the gut, then all healing must begin in the gut as well.
It’s important to assess the underlying conditions and contributors to your symptoms by looking for hidden stressors. The best way to do this is with a comprehensive investigation that carefully looks at your history. Often, I recommend partnering with someone like myself to take you through functional lab tests.
These tests investigate the cause and identify healing opportunities for your hormones, immune system, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system.
When these areas are restored, health returns.
Why The Gut Drives Disease
Today, I want to focus on why the gut drives disease. You don’t have to have gut symptoms for the gut to cause problems in the rest of the body.
Some people have obvious symptoms of indigestion, gas, bloating, pain, or irritable bowel type symptoms. Those are certainly signs that something more serious is to come.
But the gut is our external world’s first entry point into our internal world.
What Can Happen If You Consume A Toxic Diet
Our gut contains huge quantities of bacteria and fungus. Many times, we even see parasites and viruses in the gut. All these should remain in balance and live in harmony – this is a key requirement.
The problem is… The things we are exposed to on a regular basis can interfere with this balance.
This is how you can take an antibiotic and never feel the same afterward. The problem with antibiotics is that they are non-discriminatory – meaning they take out all the good and bad bacteria (bugs) in our gut and leave no good bugs to bring you back to health.
Your gut bugs drive the food choices you make.
If you find yourself craving sugars and sweets, those bugs in your gut that thrive on this may be the cause. The bugs eat first, and you get to eat what’s left over. This is important because you drive your cravings by the food choices you make.
When you feed the good bugs, they thrive. When you feed the bad, they unfortunately thrive and overwhelm the good bugs.
How Your Gut May Be Overwhelmed By Stress And Toxins
Outside of antibiotics and consuming a toxic diet, the gut can also become compromised over an extended timeframe from stress, other toxins, medications, pesticides and herbicides, gluten, sugar, and anything else that weakens the gut lining or causes an inflammatory response.
In our gut, we have a barrier that allows nutrients to pass into the bloodstream that keeps bigger and badder particles out. These tight junctions hold the cells together.
When the gut becomes compromised from those things mentioned above, the tight junctions become loose. Food particles and other toxins then pass through the intestinal lining into the bloodstream.
When this happens, it activates an immune response.
This causes you to feel tired and sluggish after meals, but you likely won’t make the connection that it’s related to your gut health.
How Food Sensitivities Impact You
Over time, you’ll start to develop food sensitivities because the foods you consume pass through your blood circulation. This causes the body to elicit an attack and ideally a response because these foods do not belong in circulation.
Ultimately, this creates a long-standing immune response where the body ends up attacking its own tissue. This is where a lot of autoimmune type diagnoses begin.
If you fall into the category with disease processes, such as Crohn’s, colitis, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, celiac, or other autoimmune type conditions, this is the process your body went through to get you there.
The Causes And Outcome Of Developing A Leaky Gut
Leaky gut leads to food and chemical sensitivities – not allergies. There’s a big difference.
Leaky gut weakens the immune system because of constant exposure to the very thing that is weakening the body… Toxins from your gut.
If you don’t correct your leaky gut, you will inevitably experience autoimmune conditions.
What Your Gut Villi Do For You
Your villi[1] are responsible for absorbing nutrients into the body, and they are destroyed with conditions like leaky gut. This is why making dietary changes alone may not be enough to put out the fire.
If the villi are destroyed, you won’t be able to absorb your nutrients (even if you’re consuming the right foods).
Why You Don’t Want To You Create A Toxic Environment in Your Gut
As you age, the acidity of your gut will change as you consume the wrong diet and encounter stress. This buildup creates an environment pathogens like to live in. When these pathogens see an environment they want to stay in, they set up shop. These are things like parasites, as well as opportunistic bacteria and fungus.
Such pathogens can lead to a host of health issues that may or may not express themselves with gut-related symptoms.
This is why many people can take probiotics or fiber supplements, yet feel no difference (or even feel worse). If there’s an overgrowth of bacteria and you don’t take care of that issue before adding additional probiotics, you may be adding fuel to the fire.
What Happens When You Work On Your Gut First
When you work on the gut first, you’ll see change take place all over your body.
Many people go through a lot of protocols but don’t see anything shift.
This is why it’s important to understand that you must follow a systematic approach when working to heal the body naturally. For example, if you don’t open up the drainage pathways before working on the gut, you risk causing a host of issues.
This is the reason why many people get sick when following a cleansing protocol. Their drainage pathways don’t allow the body to expel the toxins produced by these pathogens. If the drainage pathways are partially, or completely closed, the toxins have no way to be expelled.
In a case like this, all you need to heal is a sequenced, very precise protocol that will help you remove inflammatory foods, open up detox pathways, move your body more, and reduce stress.
Adding a bunch of pills and potions alone will never fix your problem.
What’s more powerful than what you add is “what you remove.”
If you give your body what it needs, it will intelligently remove what it doesn’t need.
Now that you know why the gut drives disease, it’s time to plan how to reserve your gut health back to its healthy state. Learn how I help professionals like you here.
[1] Villis are small, finger-like projections that extend into the lumen of the small intestine that absorb nutrients from the food you eat and then shuttle those nutrients into your bloodstream so they can travel where they’re needed.