Healing Your Gut through a Low Carb Lifestyle - Funky Fat Foods

Haven’t heard our podcast yet? At Funky Fat Foods we are on a never-ending quest to find the best ways to optimize our health, wellness, and fitness. We firmly believe that anyone can achieve their health goals with the right knowledge. We always want to learn more about how to live a healthy lifestyle. Since we know that there’s no one-fits-all solution when it comes to a healthy lifestyle, the guests in our Funky Fat Podcast are top fitness and nutrition experts and professionals that help us explore, search, and understand bio-individuality and what works best for each of us.

In today’s article, we want to do a little recap of our last episodes so you can have the notes from the top moments for the latest episodes regarding healthy eating, a low-carb diet, gut health, and more! Our goal is to help you optimize your health and feel like the best version of yourself.

Gut health: a journey for less bloating and better skin

In this episode, Kristen Stavridis, a Nutritionist BSc specialized in Gut health, talks about her health journey and how she was able to heal her bloating, weight, and acne issues by improving her gut health.

As you may know by now, the definition of healthy and a healthy lifestyle looks different for everyone and every journey is different for each of us. It’s important to find a diet that helps us and that works for us.

In case you feel like there’s some imbalance in your body, like constant bloating, hair loss, stomach pain, heavy digestion, skin issues, etc. What you’ll probably need to do is work on your gut health. Most of our immune system is located in our gut; we tell you all about it in this Gut Health article. So if your gut is not healthy, probably your overall health will be affected. When you’re aware that you need to heal your gut, you need to face some lifestyle changes. You should start by changing your diet.

Some suggestions she gives to have a healthy gut include stopping eating processed food, dairy products if you notice that they hurt you, some kinds of supplements (as they’re not all good for you), sugar, alcohol, etc. You should be more focused on drinking more water and consuming more whole foods such as fibrous fruits and vegetables, non-processed food, healthy fats, clean snacks, and the right amount of healthy non-processed protein. Also, you should take prebiotics and probiotics to help your gut heal and start to feel better.

Another great way to improve your gut health is to try intermittent fasting. You don’t have to do it every day, you can find the formula that works for you. This will help your body cleanse, eliminate excess toxic waste, and reset your microbiota.

How a low-carb lifestyle can help with hormonal balance and fat mass loss

In one of our past episodes, we had the pleasure to have Noor Struik join us. She’s a low-carb nutritionist, and with Louisa Mesquita, founder of Funky Fat Foods, they shared their journey starting and following a low-carb diet. This helped them both because they weren’t happy and comfortable with the way their bodies felt and even though the healing continues, their improvements are beyond what they expected.

Louisa suffers from PCOS, and before starting keto (and later low-carb lifestyle), she used to follow a high-carb diet. As she explains during the episode, while following this type of diet plan, she had severe symptoms and rough times with her imbalanced hormones. However, when she decided to switch to a ketogenic lifestyle and later to a low-carb diet, all of her problems and symptoms disappeared.

It’s important to remember that whenever we need to do a change in our diet we don’t have to go into diet culture and just focus on calories and weight loss. This is a tremendous mistake as it can have negative effects on our health such as a cortisol increase (stress) which then causes the opposite effects of what we’re trying to achieve. We have to keep in mind that this is a lifestyle change and it needs to be sustainable in time, it needs to be enjoyable and you need to fully embrace this new lifestyle, not see it as something temporary.

Focusing on a low-carb lifestyle is for everyone, it just depends on the goals of the person who’s doing it. Even athletes can follow it, and they’ll see a decrease in their injuries, the inflammation, and how well they recover. It’s important to pay attention to how certain foods and macronutrients affect your blood glucose and your body in general, this will make it easier to make healthy choices and to know what works best for you.

Also, instead of just limiting the carbs you should focus more on increasing your healthy fats and protein intake. That way, by increasing those two macronutrients and focusing on the positive and on what to have more you’ll notice that there’s not that much space in your plate for carbs, so you don’t even have to focus on limiting the carbs if you prioritize the right foods. This will make limiting your carb intake easier.

We want to emphasize that you don’t have to be perfect on your keto or your low-carb journey. Just start. Start small and make sure you’re moving towards a goal or certain outcome. If you want to start, but feel so overwhelmed by aiming for everything to be perfect, you’re not going to move or make any changes. As we’re saying, start small, start skipping the sugar out of your diet, and make that the first step. By doing that, your blood glucose will be much more stable and it’ll be easier to make healthy choices. And from there it’s going to be easy to take the next step.

We have plenty more episodes in our podcast that you can listen to on Spotify or Apple podcasts. We talk about health and how to live a healthy lifestyle, and also interview professionals in health, wellness, and fitness to know different ways in which we can achieve optimal health.

 

Listen to all of our podcasts here