How Your Gut Affects Your SKIN
I may be a broken record, but it is an important thing to remember: Almost everything in your health can be traced back to your gut! Your gut is the epicenter of the body, with an entire brain functioning here, your Enteric Nervous System. When mayhem is happening in the gut, mayhem ensues in the body. This includes your body's largest organ, your skin. A more inflamed gut may = more inflamed skin.
Your skin is a barrier keeping toxins out, and it is also a detoxifying organ. If you have an overload of toxins or inflammation in the gut, this can show up on the skin as acne, psoriasis, rashes, eczema, or rosacea. The state of your gut will likely show on the state of your skin.
Your symptoms are SIGNALS
Inflammation is not BAD, it is essential for good health. Consider the pain, swelling, heat, and redness that is built up when you scrape your arm, this is your inflammatory or immune response in action. The issue with skin health or gut health is not that inflammation is present, but rather the over abundance of inflammation is where our body starts to scramble, staying in a constant state of high alert and healing, rather than optimally functioning.
So before you drop more $$ on new skincare routines, it may be time to pay attention to the food entering IN to your system!
How to Support Your Gut for Healthier Skin
Food FEEDS the bacteria in your gut. There are good and bad bacteria in there, building a hopefully thriving microbiome! When we are imbalanced via food, stress, or toxins the bad bacteria 🦠starts to take over.
Prioritize consistent bowel movements. This is making sure that the body is detoxifying and helping eliminate excess toxins!
1. Increase fiber through fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. This helps increase bowel movements and digestion, so that you can expel toxins more consistently. Cleaner gut = cleaner skin!
2. Focus on ANTI INFLAMMATORY foods: omega 3 fatty acids, colorful, antioxidant rich fruits and veggies that also protect against UV radiation, herbs and spices. Specifically antioxidants like beta carotene (carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, etc..) protect the skin against UV radiation and can make it brighter.
3. Listen and learn food sensitivities and inflammatory foods for your own body, consider decreasing foods that feed the poor bacteria in your gut. We teach all about this in the KYPO Program, but the goal here is to understand how your food is interacting with your body. While there are definitely foods that create inflammation in every body, like refined sugars, hydrogenated oils, processed foods, fast foods, etc, there are also foods that do or do not work for you. If your gut health is struggling right now or you are in a more stressful season of life, you may have a lot more food sensitivities than normal. Food sensitivities are not a life sentence! They are simply your body reaching out asking for more support and for you to turn down the inflammation dial!
Instead of creating random food rules, start asking yourself, "what instructions are these foods giving my body?"
4. Work to increase water intake to 1/2 your body weight in oz, and through hydrating foods like tomatoes, celery, melons, fruits, etc! Hydration is not just found in water. True hydration is found from water + electrolytes. Think about when you sweat, you are not just losing water, you are also sweating out essential minerals like sodium, potassium, etc! So restoring it only with water is not as nourishing as your body may need. Along with the sources above, I encourage adding in coconut water if you need more hydration support!
LET ME PROVE IT TO YOU with other KYPO clients!
and if YOU need support in your health journey, reach out today, I would love to build this with you!
