Learn The 5 Rs of Gut Healing to Start Feeling Like You Again

Have you ever done an elimination diet, but then when you reintroduce the food, it still seems to hurt you? As we head into the new year, you’re probably focused on resolutions to start healing certain areas of your life, and you might be tempted to do a diet where you just cut everything out. We can remove and reintroduce foods all day, but if we aren’t healing our gut, this cycle of pain and unhealth is just going to continue (not to mention the damage this does for our relationship with food, but that’s for another time). So, let’s talk about the 5 “R”s of gut healing.

First, let’s list them out: 

• Remove

• Repair

• Replace

• Reinoculate

• Reintroduce

Most of the time, elimination diets focus on the first and the last: remove and reintroduce. But that’s just going back and forth from pain to relief- that’s not healing. Let’s take a deep dive into each step:

• Remove: Take out the things that are causing issues. Think of it like scraping your knee. The first step really is to pull away from whatever you’re scraping your knee on, right? We remove foods so that we can remove the stressors on our gut. 

• Repair: your gut lining is one cell thick (just to put it in perspective, the skin under your eyes is about 30 cells thick. So one cell thick? That’s pretty easy to damage.) This means we need to give your gut a “band-aid” to allow for space to heal. This means we need to increase the mucosal barrier in your gut lining so you have that space for your gut lining to heal.

• Replace: When people are dealing with gut issues, a lot of the time that comes from having an imbalance in their digestive enzymes. This is where working with a professional is really important, because they can help walk you through what enzymes are not present in your gut so you can start replacing them. (if  you want to work with one of our coaches, book a consultation here!)

• Reinoculate: Most of the time, gut dysfunction comes from an imbalance of your gut bacteria (too much bad, not enough good, etc.) So this is where we would start building that good bacteria back up so your gut is back to thriving instead of surviving.

• Reintroduce:This is where we start introducing foods back into our diet. For the most part, people are able to eat foods that used to really bother them because they are actually healed instead of just taking a break and then hurting themselves again.

It’s important to do ALL of these things to truly heal your gut. If you just go back and forth from the first and last steps, it’s just going to be the see saw of pain and not pain. Want to know if you need to heal your gut? Take our wellness assessment here, and we will send you a targeted guide to get started on healing.

Stay nourished!