Gut health is everything. Especially for our hormones, preconception, pregnancy, and post-partum phases! Our gut is where we absorb all our vitamins and nutrients, excrete excess hormones is responsible for our mood. Our stress levels, sleeping patters, diet, and lifestyle choices all impact our gut health without us even knowing! Our gut is our second brain and can cause us to feel at our optimal best if our body isn’t absorbing essential vitamins and nutrients or breaking down food correctly.
Within our gut lives thousands of good bacteria and to help sustain a health gut flora and keep everything running smoothly! Our gut controls levels estrogen, serotonin, progesterone, and corticosterone. This means if we aren’t moving our bowels regularly, then we aren’t excreting excess hormones or producing our feel-good hormones which means our mood isn’t going to be the best either. We should be moving our bowels every day! Balancing hormones via our gut isn’t difficult, however, in the modern world, stress, the food choices available to us and high doses of sugar can interfere with our gut health and are driving factors with imbalanced hormones.
The good news is, every day we can optimise our gut health to support us as women in preconception, pregnancy, and post-partum phase. To do this our top tips are to:
- Incorporate a range of Low-GI foods, such as, brown bread, brown rice, legumes, and starchy vegetables
- Monitor our stress levels through meditation, mindfulness, yoga, low intensity workouts and spending time in nature
- Incorporate probiotic rich foods into our diet, such as, yogurts, fermented vegetables, cashew cheese and tempeh.
- Incorporating a wide range of foods rich in vitamins and minerals in your diet, change up your meals to maximise getting a wide range of vitamins and minerals.
- Eating breakfast every day! Breakfast is ALWAYS the most important meal of the day because this stimulates our digestion AND determines our energy levels for the day. And no coffee isn’t breakfast 😉
Gut health can be complex as everyone’s bodies are soo different! To maximise your gut health to balance your hormones, our experienced naturopaths are here to help you feel your optimal best this year!
