Gut Bacteria and their Effect on your Weight

If you’ve been doing everything else to lose weight without the success, then it’s worth taking a look at your gut health.

We all know that exercise, a healthy diet, and adequate sleep are all needed for maintaining a healthy weight.

Fundamental to good gut health is Gut Bacteria. So let’s look further at their role in weight loss.

Besides this, evidence is now revealing that your gut bacteria also need to be healthy because it dictates how your body regulates and maintains its weight!

This collection of 37 trillion organisms (mainly bacteria) within your digestive tract is known as your microbiome or gut microbiota.

Your Microbiome: Fat Burning or Storing?

While each person’s gut microbiota is unique, clear trends show the gut bacteria in a lean person is different from that in an overweight person.

Healthy gut microbiota in a lean individual is seen as having a diverse range of beneficial bugs, with very few ‘bad’ microbes that disrupt the health of the gut.

Once the gut microbiota is in this healthy state, these good bacteria send messages to the body to maintain its weight within a healthy range.

This means it could prevent weight gain.

Alternatively, the gut bacteria in an overweight person is often shown to have less of these good bacteria.

This imbalance in the gut is a condition known as “dysbiosis”.

In a state of dysbiosis, bacteria begin to act differently: extracting more calories from food, storing more energy as fat, and triggering inflammation within the gut itself.

All of these factors result in the body storing more fat, especially around the waist (known as visceral fat).

Increasing Your Good Bugs

Therefore, supporting your microbiome to be as healthy, diverse, and free from bad bacteria as possible may be a crucial step in maintaining a healthy weight.

Probiotics are a potent way to positively influence the health of your microbiome, as they work by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria while reducing the growth of unwanted microbes.

However, it is very important to select the right probiotic strain for your needs, as different strains have different actions and health benefits.

A specific probiotic strain displaying benefit for the microbiome and body weight is Bifidobacterium animalis ssp lactis (B420™).

Evidence shows it improves the health and diversity of the microbiome, decreases the inflammation caused by dysbiosis, and reduces energy uptake from food.

Which together results in overall reductions in weight gain – helping to keep your waist trim.

Your Trim and Terrific Toolkit

Beyond probiotics, employing key diet and lifestyle strategies is also imperative to maintaining ideal body composition:

Regular exercise: such as walking, yoga, swimming, and weights.

This helps to burn fat for energy and can reduce high levels of hormones such as adrenaline that promote weight gain.

Filling up on fruits, vegetables, lean meats, legumes, and healthy fats helps to naturally regulate your appetite and curb cravings.

As a bonus, high fiber foods are the favorite fuel source of your good bacteria!

Good Gut Health in Weight Loss