Do you make your day-to-day activities depending on how you feel that morning?
Do you have to change plans with your family and friends depending on if you’re having an acute flare-up of abdominal pain, bloating, or diarrhea?
Or, are you afraid to make plans knowing that you’ll most likely have to cancel… again?
When you have a chronic digestive disease like Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), or Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), just making it through the day is a huge challenge. There are days that you feel 100% and can truly participate in all aspects of your life. Then there are the days when you wake up with dread and just know that today is going to be a bad day.
In the first blog post in this series, What is Chronic Disease and How Can a Certified Natural Health Professional Help, we talked about chronic diseases as conditions that last a year or longer and how they can affect other areas of your life. The impact of stress, managing your lifestyle choices, and nutrition are key pieces of combating any chronic disease.
We also talked about inflammation and the digestive system (AKA the gut), and how together they play a huge role in your overall health and the impact they have on chronic diseases. What is inflammation?
Although these Chronic Digestive Diseases vary in severity and symptoms, they all have underlying connections. Let’s take some time to look at a few simple ways to improve your gut health whether you have Irritable Bowel Disease or Crohn’s Disease.
5 Ways to Improve Your Health When Dealing With Chronic Digestive Disease
Remove
Remove any stressors that are negatively impacting your gut. That includes foods you might be sensitive to (see below) and parasites, yeast, or bad bacteria overgrowths in your gut.
Doing an Elimination Diet to find out what foods you are sensitive to with the guidance of your Certified Natural Health Professional is a good starting point. Sometimes specific herbs or medications are needed to get rid of an infection in the gut.
Replace
Replace what is lacking. Decreased digestive acids and secretions are a missing key component. Under your provider’s supervision, you might add things like digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acids, and bile acids. Low levels of these digestive components directly affect proper digestion and absorption. This can impact diet, medications, and other factors.
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Re-inoculate
It’s very important to help the good bacteria of your gut thrive and flourish. We can do this by eating probiotic-rich foods or taking supplements containing “good” bacteria, such as Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus species. Eating high-fiber foods provides prebiotics to help nourish these healthy microbes. Restoring Gut Health After Antibiotics: A Comprehensive Guide
Good bacteria, or probiotics, are very beneficial and should be highly abundant in the gut. Antibiotics kill off both good and bad bacteria. This causes an imbalance in probiotics in the gut and the rest of the body. Probiotic supplements are needed to reestablish your gut with healthy microbes.
Repair
When it comes to repairing the gut, we need to look at key nutrients that might be needed. These may have left the gut compromised because they might be missing from our diets. We need to take the time to rebuild the gut with the healthy building blocks that have been lacking. Zinc, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, amino acids, omega-3 fish oils, and glutamine are some of the common nutritional deficiencies that are needed for repair. Surprising Signs That You Might Have a Vitamin Deficiency
Re-balance
Stress, sleep, and exercise are all important lifestyle choices that we need to take into consideration when working to let any part of the body heal and rebuild. These lifestyle choices can help or hurt your overall health, and finding balance can promote optimal health of your digestive tract.
Chronic Digestive Disease Insecurity with Food
If you have been diagnosed with a Chronic Digestive Disease or just know something more is going on with your gut health, you may have experienced sudden belly bloating, pain, cramping, nausea, or diarrhea shortly after eating. It might even feel like these symptoms come out of nowhere and attack!
If that’s the case, you may have likely started looking at the foods you eat.
What is a “safe food,” and what might “trigger foods” be for you?
You might not have even considered that certain foods can make you sick or trigger a flare-up.
The uncertainty of how you could feel after eating can cause you to feel insecure about eating and even lead to avoidance. And you likely don’t want to have a flare-up while you are on a date or a road trip.
Digestive Health Can Impact Other Chronic Diseases
A properly functioning digestive system is critical to good health. Problems with the digestive tract can cause more issues than just stomach upset, gas, bloating, and diarrhea. Digestive health can impact other chronic health conditions that might seem unrelated to digestive health, including autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis), skin problems (such as eczema and acne rosacea), heart disease, and other diseases.
If you are looking for a more holistic way to help improve your digestive and overall health, take the time to work with a Certified Natural Health Professional.
So What’s Next?
In our next article on Chronic Diseases, we will be talking about Autoimmune Disorders and how you can feel better and thrive with the help of holistic and natural health practices. The final article in this series on Chronic Diseases will be on Type 2 Diabetes from a holistic perspective.
Start Natural Health Support for Chronic Digestive Disease
Do you feel like your day-to-day life is dictated by your chronic digestive disease? It might even be affecting parts of your life that you do not even realize. With natural health practices, you can get to the root of the problem and start to heal your gut. From there, your Certified Natural Health Professional will help you create the healthy lifestyle that you need to start thriving. Get started on your fight against chronic disease at Krehbiel Natural
Health by following these steps:
Reach out to Krehbiel Natural Health.
Schedule your first appointment for natural health support.
Learn how to truly heal your gut.
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To Your Thriving Health! ❤️
Gwen Krehbiel
Certified Natural Health Professional
Certified SHAPE ReClaimed Practitioner
Certified Facial Analysis Practitioner
Certified ZYTO Practitioner
Medical disclaimer: This information is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking medical treatment. Medical conditions require medical care.
Before working with Gwen, I constantly canceled plans because of my digestive flares. Now, I’m more in control of my symptoms and finally feel confident about managing my gut health! Sarah M.