What if I told you your bloating and gas, tummy aches, cramps, rumbles, odd noises, or irregular eliminations were at the very heart of your skin concerns? Would you believe me? When a dull complexion, dry eczema-like, itchy patches, breakouts, or even dark under-eye circles don't improve with consistent care, it could be a sign you need to address your beauty within.
Hey friend! Last week, we introduced our new series called the Skin Diet Connection, where I'm excited to be putting on my health coaching hat for you all to talk about what a healthy diet for glowing skin looks like.
After almost ten years of helping women with their most troubling skin concerns, I had a gut feeling (wink, wink) that topical products like those I make here at Cosmic were only half the story. So I then decided to follow another big ole dream of mine and study nutrition through the Institute of Integrated Nutrition and get my certification as a Health Coach to understand better how we could find a solution.
I've always loved health and wellness studies and thought I had a pretty good foundation. But what I learned studying nutrition over those next 18 months totally blew my mind! It opened doors to healing possibilities that I didn't even know contributed to how we look and feel.
This week I wanted to lay the foundation for the next few weeks and talk about digestion. Gut health has been a buzzword over the past few years, and rightfully so. If you've been glazing over gut health thinking it's just another fad, lean in here because this is important. All this talk about gut health, our microbiome, and probiotics are more like the beginning of understanding our body in a whole new way. It's a new, emerging field of study and the connections our gut has to our overall health are out of this world exciting.
It's essential to start here. I think no matter what you choose to eat, whether it be indulgent or the healthiest choice available, if our digestion is not healthy, our body can't make the most of what we're providing it with.
Healthy digestion is responsible for the breakdown, assimilation, and elimination of the foods we eat. It begins even before we put the first piece of food or drink in our mouth. Our senses send messages to the brain that cue the body that it might just be time to eat. While we prepare food for our next meal, what we see, smell, and touch is sending subtle messages to our brain, and digestion begins by our mouth ramping up saliva production as our stomach acids prepare to break down our foods.
Our body is one great, complex community of systems that, when healthy, communicates effortlessly to get the essential work done. But when our health gets off balance, it becomes a roadblock in getting beauty nutrients to make it to our skin, hair, nails, brain, well you get what I mean.
Although getting facials and buying skincare is fun! A holistic approach to beauty means we want the body's systems to work in harmony, giving us the best opportunity to glow and look and feel our best.
So what do you need to know about gut health? I'm gonna break down the essentials for ya here:
You have trillions of bacteria, both good and bad, living inside your digestive system. What you eat will determine the bacteria in your digestive tract. Eat healthful foods, and the good bacteria will multiply and flourish. Eat more indulgent foods, and that type of bacteria will dominate. So ask yourself, do you want smoothie bowl-eating bacteria or Taco Bell eating bacteria? If you want both, try to stick with the 80/20 rule and limit foods with little or no nutritious value to only 20% of your daily diet.
The medical community now believes up to 70% of our immune system is housed in our gut. What's that mean? It means that a digestive system with healthy bacteria can actually keep you from getting sick or, in the case of skincare, is a holistic way to fight acne, especially chronic ance from the inside out.
Some medical experts call our gut our second brain. This is because many of our feel-good brain chemicals are actually produced in the gut! In addition, experts have found that having healthy gut flora is essential in balancing mood, a holistic approach to mental health. This is super important because we all know that how we feel directly affects how we perform, especially in breaking patterns and making healthy changes. Patterns or habits are easy, comfortable, well-worn grooves, and we need our minds in tip-top condition if we want to find the motivation to start cleaning up our diet and eating for healthy beauty.
So what can you do right now to help your digestion? Access whether you might have a digestive issue that needs to be addressed. Decide, is major or minor, and seek the help of a healthcare professional or even a health coach if you're unsure. Adopt the 80/20 rule! Eat for optimal nutrition 80% of the time and indulge in treats like sugar, alcohol and refined carbs, and saturated fats 20% of the time or less. Keeping in mind your not just feeding yourself - you're feeding an army of gut bacteria that can help protect you again illness and disease in the future. Eat fermented foods to recolonize your gut with the best live probiotics. Adding foods like yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, pickles, miso, tempeh, kimchi, sourdough bread, and some cheeses to your diet will begin to set you on your path.
If you have specific questions, please don't hesitate to reach out - I've seen a clean diet and healthy digestion work wonders on the skin. If you need help, we can step up a consult and assess your current gut health situation.
xo, Michelle
