Healing Your Gut: Insights from a Health Coach

I’m slowly starting to have more coaching conversations with people about their health for Health on Your Terms, and I’ve noticed a theme come up around gut issues and diet.

It was synchronous timing that I also had the best kind of gastroenterologist appointment myself last week, where I received a clean bill of health - no inflammation or markers of any kind to indicate that I ever had Crohn's disease, an Inflammatory Bowel Disease that I was diagnosed with around 15-ish years ago.

So I wanted to share a few REALLY IMPORTANT things I’ve focused on over the years to heal my gut to the point that led me up to this moment of confirmation at the doctor’s office.

Diet

I start with this one because it is where I started, and where most people seem to start because it seems to make so much sense. What you put in affects how you digest and eliminate right?

This felt like the biggest one in the beginning. The fact is our SAD is not really conducive to human health - anyone with a modicum of common sense understands we weren’t meant to eat pizza, hamburgers, and fries and expect to feel and perform our best. But I took this to the extremes with SO many “healing” diets, to the point where anything I ate felt like I was probably damaging myself and the psychological fear around eating simply became another stressor and source of fear in my life.

While yes our food has the potent ability to be medicine, even eating well can be practiced to the point of too much zealotry and cross over into being harmful. Personally, I stayed in behaviors of restriction for too long, thinking the “cleaner” I ate, the better off I’d be. It’s a rational first step - but not one to get stuck on.

The sooner you can find the BALANCE between eating foods your body needs and also enjoying how you eat or generally taking all the negative charge out of eating, the better. Our diets shouldn’t be another bludgeon for criticizing and beating ourselves up.

Stress

This one is less concrete, more amorphous, and harder to “diagnose” in any meaningful way so that you can actually know the sources well enough to know what to do about it. While stress isn’t necessarily bad and no stress is literally impossible, it’s consciously or unconsciously living in a CONSTANT state of stress that was a big part of what was keeping me sick.

Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn

I no longer stay in a chronic state of stress. Or stew in frustration and anger for most, if not all, of my days. There was definitely a period of time - sh***y job at CIS where I felt powerless and triggered all day long, I see you.

One helpful way I’ve learned to frame this is the idea of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. As a quick explanation from a very non-expert, it’s the basic idea that when we experience a stressor our body’s autonomic nervous system can flip from a parasympathetic nervous system (or rest and digest) response to a sympathetic nervous system response, which has a cascade of effects such as producing adrenaline, slowing digestion, wound healing, etc. It’s because it’s meant to give us a quick way to channel all of our energy into keeping ourselves safe with responses such as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn when we are in danger. But it was never meant to be a state that we stayed in all day every day. Ideally, we are generally able to go through our days with our rest and digest response turned on, with periods only occasional periods of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn triggered and then downregulated once the danger is gone.

Mindfulness and self-awareness

One of the ways we can tell ourselves, our bodies and our brains that we are ok is by practicing mindfulness and self-awareness of what’s going on in our bodies and minds through the formal practice of meditation.

It’s where you tend to set aside time to basically do nothing, perhaps focusing on the breath, which can be a helpful anchor, or doing a body scan to connect with the body. Mindfulness practices like body scans or using something like the 54321 Method can be especially supportive if you tend to disassociate, which is common in people with high ACE (adverse childhood experiences) scores and past history of trauma.

One big reason mindfulness practices and meditation can be so helpful for people like me with gut problems is the gut-brain axis, which is the bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain. The gut makes and holds a ridiculous amount of serotonin (95%) and dopamine (50%), which are the body’s “feel good" neurotransmitters. So when we start to do things to support our consciousness and give us space to pause, rest, or breathe, despite the constant mind chatter or negative looping thoughts, the better off we are as a whole, not just for our mental health, but this is especially helpful for those of us with gut issues.

A truly enormous body of research supports the use of mindfulness meditation for psychological distress and emotional well-being as well as reduction in inflammation, etc. (Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt & Walach, 2004).

Even just spending a moment in the morning to give yourself space to breathe and set your intention for the day can be a great start. This has been foundational for my well-being.

Overcoming the negativity bias with positive psychology

Look I know when you’re sick, it sucks. And all you can think about is problem, fix, problem - what is the solution?! Our minds were meant to give greater weight to what’s wrong because that’s typically how we keep ourselves safe and focus on what’s wrong so we can fix it.

And when there isn’t an easy, clear answer or you’re still struggling to figure out what’s going on, perhaps while you’re working with doctors to figure that out, things aren’t always so black and white. When it’s complex and layered, like any healing journey usually is, it can be easy to get stuck in what’s wrong, especially when you’re stuck on the toilet in pain, for example. That’s your negativity bias for you, thanks brain.

So to counter this bias, we can consciously choose to focus on and give more weight to the good. Glimmers are the opposite of triggers and they’re moments you can look for that give a signal of safety to our bodies - the moment when you step outside to get in your car and you hear birds singing in the morning or the warmth of the sun on the skin of your arm. You may savor those and may even practice gratitude for them later. Glimmers, savoring, and gratitude are positive psychology tools worth exploring and that I come back to again and again because they actually help.

Nature’s pharmacy

Things I’ve used to minimize the amount of meds I’ve needed to be on over the years:

DiGize - an essential oil I really love to use - it absorbs through the skin when my tummy is wonky and needs a little extra support. Nature’s pharmacy has so many ways it can support us too!

Nux Vomica - a homeopathic remedy I have used on occasion that I learned about from one of my “healers” who suggested this when I’ve had different variations of gut problems from h. pylori and acid reflux to e.coli. Homeopathic remedies work on the idea of “like heals like” – it’s not an area I’m super familiar with, but I’ve definitely experienced the benefits before so might be a route that could be helpful for you too 😊

These are some of the ways I’ve worked through my gut issues. While this isn’t everything – I mean I’ve spent over a decade learning this stuff from personal experience and then through my health coaching studies and supporting others – but this is DEFINITELY a good start.

And what I like about this approach is it speaks to the whole person, it’s the part that’s often glossed over when you’re in the thick of it all, seeing doctors and practitioners and trying to figure it all out and just make it go away to get back to normal.

From diet to positive psychology to natural remedies, what are you taking away from what I shared today that piqued your interest?

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I'm Jayne Anne

As a board-certified health coach, I have 5 years of experience working with those who feel stuck to gain clarity and perspective when they can’t see the way forward. Borrowing tools from both ancient and modern practices such as mindfulness and self-compassion, I support the people I work with in creating the mindset shifts that lead to your ability to take aligned action again. I derive a lot of joy from supporting others in healing from the inside out through my coaching business, Health on Your Terms. I also value courage, kindness, charisma, and compassion. And I'm an empty nester, an INFJ, a long-time meditator, and lover of nature, poetry, and all things spiritual.

To learn more about my 1:1 support, click here.