If you’ve been doing everything else to lose weight without the success expected, then it’s worth taking a look at your gut health. It is also worth looking at which gut bacteria cause weight loss.
Gut Bacteria and Their effect on your weight
Fundamental to good gut health is Gut Bacteria. So let’s look further at their role in weight Loss.
We all know that exercise, a healthy diet and adequate sleep are all needed for maintaining a healthy weight.
Besides this, evidence is now revealing that your gut bacteria also needs 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 to 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 and more of the bad 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 Fat Burning 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 Weight loss
Evidence shows that a specific probiotic strain displaying benefit for the microbiome and body weight is Bifidobacterium animalis ssp lactis (B420™).
It is important to choose the right probiotic to positively influence the health of your microbiome. This will encourage 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.
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:
1. 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.
2. Eat a wholefood diet: filling up on fruits, vegetables, lean meats, legumes and healthy fats helps to naturally regulate your appetite and curb cravings. As a bonus,high fibre foods are the favourite fuel source of your good bacteria!
3. Avoid processed sugar and processed fats: excess calories from these sources are stored as fat, especially around your waistline. They also encourage dysbiosis within your digestive tract.
4. Hydration: plenty of water actually increases your energy levels and metabolism, and is vital for proper waste elimination.
5. Adequate sleep: eight hours per night is needed for a reason! It resets and balances your hormones required for a healthy metabolism and reduces weight-promoting
inflammation.
In addition to a healthy microbiome, if weight loss is your goal
talk to your Ringwood Naturopath about finding the best Weight Management
Program to suit you.
A holistic and sustainable diet and lifestyle protocol that helps you reduce cravings, lose fat, maintain muscle mass and increase your metabolism is highly recommended.
Make Your Microbiome Worth its Weight
With the best approach to weight management being a holistic one, consider your microbiome alongside your diet, exercise and sleep to comprehensively prevent gaining unwanted fat.
Improving the health of your microbiome will turn your gut into a weight management machine and help to keep your waistline
healthy!
Talk to Naturopaths at Your Wellness Centre
Contact us here
