This is a blog which everybody should be talking about, but no body wants to talk about.
How often should you go?
Roughly speaking, you should have 3-4 bowel movements a day.
Lets say you ate breakfast at 7am so the train leaves the station at 7am, (toot toot), traveling at an average speed of 3 feet per hour. When you eat lunch at 12pm the breakfast train is already 15ft ahead (being a 5hr gap), toot toot.
As you eat dinner the breakfast train is now 36 feet ahead, on its journey to central station, and the lunch train 21 feet ahead of the dinner train(7hrs*3 feet/hr). These trains, travelling at a constant speed in a healthy bowel, should never catch up to each other.
When a train enters the station a train should leave the station!
So, if you are eating 3 meals a day you should expect 3 bowel movements.
Fibre is the train
Fibre helps to regulate this process, but think of fibre as the train, the food you are eating as the cargo and passengers.
What is missing is the driver.
The driver is your gut flora, but not only the driver, flora is the conductor, the ticket collector, the station cleaners,and the security at night.
Generally flora is everyone involved in the entire process of helping you get from A to B.
This is why the common advice to just eat more fibre sometimes ends in disaster. Too much fibre with a bad gut dysbiosis can cause bloating, wind, diarrhoea and constipation.
To re-establish your gut flora you need to eat fermented foods daily such as yogurt, kefir and sauerkraut.
The problem with a lot of these fermented foods is that if they are produced commercially they may have been made in a way where there arent many good guys left.
Making your own probiitic foods at home is gold and will always contain more beneficial bacteria.
If you are short of time, or it is just too difficult, try to find a brand that you know is reputable and wild harvested. Wild harvested tends to rely on the fermentation process being performed by local bacteria, rather than an introduced culture.
There is a recipe on the Blairharvey.org site that has up to 706 billion bacteria per cup.
That works out to be over 3 billion per teaspoon, this is substantially higher than most or all commercial yogurts I've seen.
Most probiotic supplements are 5-20 billion per capsule, this means my morning routine, consisting of a fruit salad and two cups of yogurt is equivalent to 70 probiotic pills. At the same time the fruit is delivering prebiotics to help establish my new flora.
Compared to a probiotic these bacteria are in their prime, full of life, buzzing with vitamins, minerals, protein, enzymes and 99% of the lactose has been broken down from the milk.(great for those with lactose problems)
Start slowly
There is a tendency to rush in, this can create a die-off, as the bad bugs start fighting the good bugs they produce by-products in the process. If you are only going to the toilet once a day you may want to start with 1/4 cup daily, wait a few days and increase it slightly.
You will know your flora is increasing as your bowel movements start to become more regular and your bloating disappears.
Aim for 1 extra bowel movement than you are currently taking at a time.
Be patient, good results will come with consistency.
As your flora increases you will need to feed them, to keep them healthy.
This is where fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes and pulses come in.
Natural, whole food that is predominantly carbohydrate based is their favourite.
Aim to eat more of these foods and remember to chew thoroughly.
Blending and juicing has been shown scientifically to break down both soluble and insoluble fibre, so eating rather than drinking is preferred, at least as recolinating your gut is concerned.
I will discuss the advantages/ disadvantages of juicing and blending in future blogs.
My name is Blair Harvey and I have had the pleasure of working at one of Australia's best Health Retreat's for the past fourteen wonderful years. Over those years I have had the delight of working with a spectacular kitchen team, we all have an immense passion for cooking good healthy food that is unique and tantalizing to your taste buds. Together we have not only developed our skills in cooking wholesome, nourishing and out right delicious foods, but we have been committed to broadening our knowledge of healing with whole foods and exploring the beauty of healthy living. Because of our enthusiasm in the benefits of foods and there healing properties I developed a blog to help us SHARE what we have learnt with the rest of the world.
You will find tasty gems of wisdom on health, food and healing, helping to expand your mind and revitalize your knowledge of healthy eating.