Do you suffer from chronic gut pain or loose/constipated stools?

Our body is a complex organism that is better related to a symphony or choreography than a machine. If a member of the orchestra or the dance is not moving in synchrony with the other members, the entire performance can fall apart.

If you imagine your gut in this way, you'll see that as the rogue dance moves off in the wrong direction it pulls other dancers with it.

When dealing with gut imbalances like digestive pain or loose stools, we want to look to the gut and treat it like we would an erring song or dance. Fixing it requires still working within the rhythm and cadence of the song, healing the performance over time and at the correct pace.

When Assessing Chronic Gut Imbalance We Should Look At:

1. The Color and Consistency of the Stool

• The color of the stool, whether there is visible food, digested or not, if there is mucus in the stool, if there is fresh or old blood present, and the ratio of loose to solid tells us much about the cause of the imbalanced stool.

If your stool is loose and clear like water then you know to look into how well your large intestine and colon is removing and returning water into the stool. Foods like Ginger and Probiotic Yeasts like Saccharomyces Boulardii can be great remedies for helping solve this hydration imbalance.  If the stool has undigested food in it, this can mean that you should work with your small intestine for remedy as it is ejecting food too quickly. If there is mucus in the stool than your large intestine and colon should be focused on, as they will produce mucus to help lubricate a stool on its way through. If your stool is irregularly dry or heavy it can over produce or under mix the mucus. If there is fresh red blood then you may have hemorrhoids or other abscesses that are being torn or inflamed to the point of bleeding. If there is old blood that appears browner and digested, then there may be a more serious issue higher in the digestive tract. 

Always consult a trusted and capable expert on the above symptoms. We suggest finding and working closely with a capable, healthy, and caring Naturopathic Doctor, Doctor of Orthopedics, Chinese medicine practitioner, or Ayurvedic Practitioner as they tend to have more time and care to offer than traditional Allopathic doctors. 

2. Measure the Timing of the Loose/Constipated Stool Against the Time of Day and the Time of our Last Meal

• Does the imbalanced stool happen just after eating another meal? Does it happen in the mornings?
• Does it happen after breaking a fast?
• Does it happen randomly, or the majority of the time?

Learning the answers to the above questions will help you to narrow down what the cause of the loose stool is. For example, if you get loose stools daily within an hour of eating than you probably have small intestinal inflammation/imbalance. Or if you only get it once and a while, usually after not eating food in 12+ hours, you’ve learned that for you, longer fasts are best broken with something other than solid food, ie. broths, juices (low sugar), blended foods are best for your breakfast to maintain digestive health. Also, these more liquid rich broths and juices and smoothies can help soften a generally constipated constitution.

3. Is There Pain to the Touch Around Your Belly Button, or any of the Four Quadrants of Your Abdomen?

• Pain upon palpating generally means inflammation is present in the gut, gut lining, and/or nerve endings that land in your organs. Generally this should be treated by repairing the gut lining (aka fixing leaky gut) with diet and probiotics, lowering stress that gets trapped in the gut nerves with meditation and exercise and practice of yoga bandhas, and proper fasting/eating timing.

Feeling pain when you press into your abdomen is a sign of inflammation, though it can be ‘normal’ in chronic situations, it is not healthy. 

Pain in the digestive tract can be tricky to narrow down to a location and pinpoint its cause because not all of your organs contain acutely active nerves that are designed to send you a pain response from their location, so the organ that is inflamed will send a pain signal to somewhere else in the body where it can be expressed more easily. 

This is call “referred pain”, and happens when, for example, someone has chronic low back pain but it’s not their back that actually the cause, it’s their intestines referring the intestinal pain signal into the nerves, where it lands in the person’s spine. This is also seen in liver or gallbladder inflammation (indigestion, gallstones, etc), where the person with the inflamed organ will feel pain in the shoulder, collar bone, right hip joint, psoas, or stomach. Strangely, the pain is felt elsewhere from the point of imbalance when dealing with referred pain. Learning this about your pain and inflammation can liberate you from chronic conditions.

So, remember the chronic pain around your body can often times be linked to an origin imbalance in the gut.

Sometimes the nerves themselves are inflamed and need to be massaged topically, with castor oil patches, or squeezed internally through abdomen bandhas to help them clear their inflammation.

Other times you need to clear your liver, pancreas, or spleen that have become bogged down with poor diet, stress, parasites or season changes. Ginger, Turmeric, Cinnamon, Dandelion leaf, Moringa, Blueberry, Pumpkin seed, etc can be helpful depending on your circumstance and constitution for remedying imbalance in these organs and augmenting their ability to communicate properly.

Drinking enough water, getting good exercise in nature regularly, taking a probiotic, and practicing meditation are great places to start.

4. Are you Taking a Regular Probiotic? Does it contain Beneficial Yeasts? Does it contain Prebiotics? Does it contain SBOs (Soil Based Organisms)?

• If your diet contains too much sugar or processed carbohydrates your microbiome can suffer, becoming a breeding ground for disruptive microflora and fauna. If you have taken antibiotics ever (and recently), you may need to reinoculate your gut with helpful micro-organisms. If you’ve recently been exposed to pesticides or herbicides you may need to rebuild your microbiome as they too can kill the helpful bacteria inside of you.

In today’s world, almost everyone should be regularly rebooting their microbiome with a probiotic. This is to combat the biome-icides that surround us everywhere we go. Just as good micro-organisms can thrive inside and on us, so can bad ones. 

Unhealthy levels of Candida Albicans a detrimental yeast, Clostridioides difficile, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Helicobacter pylori Bacterias, unhelpful viruses (fyi there are good viruses too that help maintain balance in your microbiome) need to be replaced with healthy micro-organisms.

Soil Based Organisms (SBOs) like Bacillus Coagulan, B. Subtilis, and B. Clausii; beneficial yeasts like Saccharomyces Boulardii; and probiotic bacteria like L. Acidophilus, B. Breve, B. Longum, and Streptococcus Thermophilus, are fantastic for choices of probiotics because they not only reinoculate you with healthy probiotic bacteria, but they provide the ‘leader’ or ‘team captain’ strains that help you properly create the hierarchy and raw materials needed to create and assimilate the phytonutrients, antioxidants, and short-chain fatty acids your body needs to thrive.

Getting your microbiome healthy ensures that you have healthy mitochondria, healthy immune response (Like the IgA response), a robust and flexible gut lining, proper water absorption, reduced pathogen presence and impact, better serotonin creation, less inflammation in your gut and all around your body, less severe seasonal and chronic allergies, and vibrant genetic expression.

5. Learn Your Peristalsis (Advanced) - As it relates to Your Digestion, Your Breath, and Your Mind.

• This is the rhythm of our digestive tract squeezing our digesting material downwards and out. It can be repaired by diet changes, taking a probiotic, getting good exercise, and managing your stress.
• Is your peristalsis being interrupted (by stress, inflammation, over-eating, or under-eating?).

• If interrupted, your small intestine can dump too much of it's liquified contents into the large intestine too quickly, or too slowly, or its rhythm can become inconsistent and incomplete, leading to diarrhea or constipation. Also, your intestines can lose the integrity of the peristalsis and become mutely paralyzed, or slowed and ineffective in their rhythms. Factors like the rhythm and depth of your breath (and even your thoughts, as they turn into signals in the nerves and sources of chronic, somatic stress) play into the efficiency of your bodies rhythms. 

Learning to watch your peristalsis rhythm will help you develop a relationship with it and your digestion as a whole, helping you to learn what disturbs it (stress, over-eating, etc) and how to remedy the problem over time. For example, by learning that the peristalsis tends to stall out at the beginning of the colon, you can look for common causes of this like dehydration. Or, for a second example, learning that your tendancy towards constipation is paralyzing the integrity of the peristalsis teaches you that you need to take the burden off of the gut by eating lighter, in less volume or in number of meals daily, or in combination with more water retaining components like magnesium.

By developing this relationship, you will learn what your unique needs are.

By learning where your peristalsis is blocked you will get closer to uncovering the source of your dis-ease or imbalance, you will develop a relationship with your nervous system, and be more likely to respect the impact of your diet choices and the leverage of power your microbiome holds over your health.

But, the peristalsis is not the only important rhythm in your body. You have many key rhythms starting from the most obvious of heartbeat, breathing, sleeping, and eating to the less obvious ones of breathing (yes I listed it here too), cerebral-spinal fluid, nerve signaling, lymph drainage, and hormone circulation.

All of these rhythms dance together to create the symphony of your body, provide a good house for your mind and soul, and choreograph the entirety of the quality of your life.

The easiest and most important place to start with understanding this rhythm is by re-training yourself to breathe through your nose, deep and slow, raising the abdomen on your inhale, and lowering it on your exhale. Now, this is a whole other topic and it deserves a deep dive of its own (that you can read here soon in this blog), but suffice it to say for now that good breathing regulates all of these functions and is the best place for you to start if you’re ready to heal your microbiome, your stool quality, and beyond.

Superfoods to consider taking when healing your loose stools:

As mentioned above, probiotics are a must. You need a SBO heavy blend, and remember variety is your friend. A varied and complex microbiome is a flexible and responsive one. So take a high strain count, high CFU count probiotic like our Vibrant Biome 28 & 58 Billion.

Further, getting anti-inflammatory herbs like ginger, cinnamon, and black pepper into your diet is great and all of them are found in our Golden Bliss Formula.

Powerful greens like Moringa (amazing levels of vitamins, minerals like calcium), Dandelion Leaf (fantastic at supporting your digestion with prebiotic fiber and detox augmenting bitters, ginger (again, can’t have too much of it), Nettle, Parsley, Holy Basil Leaf, and more, provide not only the prebiotic fiber your microbiome needs to thrive, but the raw material your bones, hair, skin, and nails need to thrive. You can find it all and much more in our SupraGreens formula.

Finally, detoxing and boosting your immune system go hand in hand. Getting potent phytonutrients and antioxidants is vital to having a body that properly circulates healthy prana (Vedic name for Chi, Qi - also known in the west as life-force energy).

Skip the lab made isolate supplements, as they don’t contain the entourage of other elements your body needs to properly absorb, build, and utilize the micronutrients you need to thrive. Instead, go for whole-foods like Superfruits packed full of not just vitamins like Vitamin C, but prebiotic fibers, and anti-oxidant rich colorful compounds. This includes Camu Camu Berry, Acerola Cherry, Goji Berry, Blueberry, etc, all contained in our Superfruit C Formula, with 600% RDA of vitamin C.