Why I abandoned dieting and learned to tend to my microbiome instead

Do you ever stare at the refrigerator and have no idea what to eat? Do you ever feel bloating or indigestion, brain fog, or even cravings for sweets, breads or alcohol after eating and wonder why?

I, for one, have been there countless times. I eventually started to dread every single meal because everything I ate seemed to only be making me feel like my body was full of lead and my brain was stuffed with cotton.

My blood sugar was out of whack, my digestion, my skin, my weight, my anxiety, you name it and it was suffering. Yet, I felt powerless to do anything about it because I had no idea which foods were causing me to feel this way.

The problem was I couldn’t seem to completely cut any food out of my diet for the life of me. Every time I tried a new elimination diet that removed various foods, as I’d been trained to do even in my nutrition training, I would only feel worse about myself and my food choices.

I still remember the moment I decided to go cold turkey on dieting or anything else that resembled limiting my food choices and I’ve never looked back.

At the time, I didn’t dare tell anyone that I made this choice. I was in the field of health coaching and nutrition afterall and these limiting diets were how I have been taught to advise others!

Despite making this personal decision in secret and not even feeling safe enough to share this with my clients at the time (though I would share wholeheartedly years later) I felt closer to my own integrity around food and better health than I had ever been.

That’s because, for every small health improvement I noticed that came with giving up a less desirable food, came a whole bucket of shame and reduced self-confidence when I achieved anything less than perfection.

This shame in turn, wreaked much more damage on my overall mental and physical health than any single food could ever do.

Now, years later, I hear this same story again and again from my clients as a health and wellness coach.

The game of musical chairs we often play with different types of foods and limiting diets when we are trying to improve our physical health can quickly start to feel more like a trap. More often than not, I hear stories of people feeling MORE powerless over their food choices and their own body after trying an elimination or other type of diet.

After my own personal experience with limiting diets, researching all about the microbiome and writing a book on the subject I’ve come to realized that a lot of our food sensitivities and digestive problems have less to do with the specific foods we’re eating and more to do with our bodies’ gut microbiome — our unique composition of microbes that reside in our intestines and makes up the most important part of our digestive system.

When we start to get certain bodily cues — like imbalanced blood sugar, brain fog, fatigue, indigestion (stomach discomfort) and even cravings for sweets, breads or alcohol — these are all indicators of an imbalance in our microbiome.

Do you think you are the one who craves certain foods? Or even the one who makes the choice about what you actually eat?

There are 39 trillion living organisms inside your body that are determining your food cravings based on the foods that they, themselves, need to eat to survive.

Your internal army of microbes can fight for you by improving your mental and physical health or you can have an entire army working against you by sabotaging your immune system, metabolism, detox pathways (liver), weight and inflammatory pathways (immune system).

These organisms are responsible for making 90% of your feel-good chemicals like serotonin and GABA, regulating your immune system and turning your food into the nutrients your body needs to have optimal energy, mental clarity, and sleep — to name a few.

The reason most diets fail is because our microbiome will fight back against any drastic overnight diet or exercise change. -A Gut Feeling, Heather Wise

Oftentimes, these sorts of solutions only end up backfiring on us. Why?

Only a fraction of our body’s microbes actually perform the vital functions we rely on them for. The rest are, shall we say, basically freeloaders.

These freeloaders feed off our excess blood sugar and love to eat sweets and refined foods. When their numbers start to grow however, it causes indigestion, fatigue, mental fog, imbalanced blood sugar, anxiety, depression and whole host of other health problems.

Theoretically, it makes sense that as long as we stop feeding the freeloaders their favorite foods (processed grains, sugars, and alcohol which creates the environment they thrive in) that their numbers would diminish giving our “healthy” microbes a chance to repopulate, right?

Wrong. This is where the lines of nutrition science and our more primal “gut brain” start to bump heads because those vast numbers of freeloaders are not going to go down that easy.

As soon as we stop eating their favorite foods these little moochers start to freak-the-hell-out. Secreting neurotoxins which make us feel horrible, and eating up all the sugars they can find just to survive which can cause drastic drops in blood sugar, causing us to feel ravenous (and more likely to grab a sweet treat), not to mention hangry, miserable, and well, you get the picture.

On the flip side, our healthy microbes are also constantly sending us cues when they are thriving by releasing feel-good chemicals that help us to relax, sleep, and focus.

Learning how to decipher these messages from both our healthy and unhealthy microbes is the key to lasting mental and physical health. When we start paying attention to these cues and making little pivots in the direction of improved biome balance, we can bring our system back into balance quickly and avoid long-term health problems while correcting current imbalances.

It really doesn’t take much, just a small amount of consistent effort over time in the direction of our microbiome’s health can completely correct an imbalance that’s been causing physical or mental health problems for a decade or more.

The only solution that is going to allow for a healthy internal ecosystem of microbes is to make a commitment to the long-game of slowly building out this internal garden landscape.

Practicing the skill of tuning into our body’s ecosystem is a skill that we can hone over a lifetime to regain control over our mental and physical health.

One of my clients, Suzy, struggled with depression and low self-esteem for much of her life and alcohol and sugar had always been her way of coping in the past.

Unfortunately, this way of managing her mental health had taken a huge toll on her gut microbiome’s health.

In the aftermath of giving up alcohol and now adding in gut-healthy sweets, prebiotics and a sustainable wellness routine, she had a new mountain to climb and that was healing her gut and getting her mental and physical health back on track. Her mood fluctuations and fatigue were disrupting her relationships, professional life and overall sense of well-being and she was motivated to recover her energy, health and motivation for life.

Suzy started to slowly develop her own biome-conscious health and wellness routine as a way to recover from her physical and mental imbalances she’d struggled with her whole life.

After working with me for just a little over a year, and making dozens of little pivots in response to the signals she was getting from her own body, she was sleeping through the night for the first time in a decade, shedding excess weight without counting calories (much to her dismay), and her inflammation and cholesterol were at an all-time low.

Not to mention, her mood had significantly brightened and she shared that she felt more optimistic about life and had more mental clarity than she had felt in decades.

There is quite literally an army of microbes that you have at your disposal to fight for you or against you.

And it is possible to train this army of organisms responsible for making 90% of our feel-good chemicals like serotonin to work FOR YOU, by calming your nervous system, allowing for deep, restful sleep, and reduced pain and inflammation.

If you’d like to learn more about how to train your own internal microbe community and tap into the inherent, primal wisdom of your body to develop and hone the skill of intuitive, biome-conscious eating and living, check out my Gut Feeling Program.