Gut Health, Stool Analysis, and Elimination Diets

I know you'll like this question someone said given on a day-to-day basis their diet dietary intake may change they've eaten different things every day how do they know like sorry given on a day-to-day base their dietary intake may change their poop basically every day because they're doing different things how do they know whether they've managed to kind of maintain optimal gut health if they're really trying to kind of keep their gut nice and healthy what markers are they looking for if that kind of poop is changing day to day i mean yeah if your poop is changing day to day the best thing to do is keep a food log and just kind of saying okay if i wake up and and i'm basically spackling my toilet with diarrhea what did i eat the day before because that's probably what's going to be the the issue and you know gut health can get pretty pretty deep and intense and it's another one of those things we We know a little bit about a very complex system in the body. So what I'll typically tell people to do is if you want to eliminate all doubt, go do a stool analysis test, do a CDSA and see what's going on with your gut, right? Because you could have some type of imbalance that when you eat certain things, certain bacteria will react in a certain manner. So like I was actually, I normally don't run tests for people. I normally try to fix things before I order an expensive test, right? Because a lot of cases, a lot of the gut stuff, the same treatments help pretty much everything. But I would rather spend money on better lifestyle stuff and maybe some certain specific supplementation protocols. See if that alleviates a lot of it. If it doesn't, then we're on a stool analysis. But one of my clients here in Australia, he's a pharmacist. So he has access to all these tests. and he was doing fantastically well he went to croatia um did like a boats and hoes type thing that they do out there i don't know went partying and all that and went to amsterdam came home and then all of a sudden like he was having all these massive issues with a bloat and gas and like he's got a six-pack but his guts are blown out diarrhea all this we can't figure out what it is i'm like all right just run a cdsa and his his he has massive fungal overgrowth there's a bunch bacteria that's really off like opportunistic bacteria that's really off and so in a situation where it's extreme like that

then the best case thing to do is find somebody that can order you the right tests and then run a protocol that's going to be very direct. Like for him, because he's the pharmacist, very easy for us to pick a good pharmaceutical antifungal, a good pharmaceutical antibacterial, and then also layer on top of that a lot of holistic type natural things for maintenance. But if you don't have a good doctor that understands this type of stuff, then your best case scenario is keep a very diligent food log and then see how you react to different foods and see if eliminating those foods helps with the issue. And then taking those metrics, take your stress metrics. Are you sleeping well? Do you feel well rested? Do you have bags under your eyes? Do you have darkening under your eyes? Those are all symptoms. Do you have any type of fungal issues anywhere else? Athlete's foot, vaginal thrush, oral thrush, itchy bum hole, fingernail fungus. Like these are all symptoms that you might have an issue where your gut bacteria has gotten a little bit out of balance. So yeah, so like you say, in the absence of the kind of expensive tests, an elimination diet with a good kind of tracking protocol in terms of physical and or your subjective experiences and how you're appearing and then starting to reintroduce things would be a great way of kind of zeroing in on potential issues yeah for me that's kind of the first line therapy right let's see let's see if it if it's the food or if it's the environment so if i say So like the easiest thing to do is just take a piece of paper out and draw a line down the middle of it, put a yes on one side and a no on the other. Now, on the no side, you write down all the common things that you eat every week. You're not going to eat those for like three or four weeks. Okay, so let's say like most people, eggs, chicken, beef. That'll be like their top three proteins that they eat. Then for a lot of people, it might be green beans or, you know, you write down peas or you write down all the stuff you normally eat. we're not going to eat that stuff for like a month, maybe a month and a half, and let's try something different. Like instead of chicken, let's have turkey. Instead of beef, let's have bison. Let's eat some more, maybe some more fish and seafood, things like that, and see if that resolves the problem. If that resolves the problem, then we know it was the food creating the problem, and an elimination diet is probably going to be good to do for a good two months and then reintroduce foods one at a time. If they do an elimination diet and it doesn't get significantly better, then there's probably some type of pathology in their gut and possibly an issue between their gut and their brain. At that point, they need to be referred out to speak to somebody who can actually do the right testing to see what's going on in the gut. Do I need an antifungal? Do I need an antibacterial? Do I need both? Which is usually the case. If you've got a fungal issue, you'll usually almost always have a bacterial issue as well. And I think one of the reasons that is, is because if you have long-term chronic stress, that's going to cause an over-activation of your immune system. Cortisol goes up to bring the immune system back down and kind of put it back under control. And once it does that, it tends to suppress your immune system, which then allows your gut to get dysbiotic. But, you know, as far as what you can do for yourself, the elimination diet, maybe looking at, if you wanted to play around with some antimicrobials like black walnut, berberine. If you wanted to look at something like olive oregano, if you want to look at like rosemary oil, like look at some volatile oils, then look at some antimicrobials. That stuff can go, you can try that for a few weeks to also see if that helps. If it doesn't, or you feel worse, then it's definitely time to get referred out and go see a doctor. Poop in a little bucket, they go and they analyze it, and then they'll tell you exactly what's in there and then you'd be a very specific on how to treat that okay that's good so another question I had was going back to kind of another question that got sent to me there's a couple of questions around that kind of someone who's flirting with type 2 diabetes so they've been having some high blood sugar readings and they were looking at ways of managing that so they were looking at potentially the best supplements or minerals or foods to help reduce or bring down blood sugars? Okay. All right. So let's start with food because everything should be food-based and supplement secondary. So we'll talk food and training. Number one, get your aerobic work in. I'm telling you, man, that's going to be the best thing. Number one is that. Number two is obviously resistance training. The majority of where you hold glycogen, the biggest depot is going to be in type 2X fibers. So you're going to want to lift with, you're not, you don't want to lift with heavy weights but you do want to lift technical failure Okay So lifting in like bodybuilder rep ranges so if we looking at like hypertrophy rep ranges strength endurance rep ranges and making sure that you take it down to where you getting it like one ugly rep and you done like the minute you get one ugly rep that's the end you've pretty much fatigued everything you need to if i can grow more type 2x fiber and type 2a fiber glycogen right so that that will be helpful. If I'm also doing some of the higher rep stuff, like the hypertrophy and the strength endurance stuff, and if I'm doing some aerobic training, then that's going to build more mitochondria that allows me to manage that flow of energy through the cell and through the mitochondria. So that's going to be helpful. The third thing is sleep. A lot of people that I see that are having issues, especially with metabolic syndrome, type two diabetes, they are not prioritizing sleep. If you don't sleep, your blood sugar rises, right? And then it makes you basically insulin resistant the rest of the day. Making sure you're doing simple lifestyle stuff, like walking more, like not worrying about hitting like 20,000 steps a day. But you know, if you're, if you're, if you're in London, and you're one tube station away, and it's a 15 minute walk to that tube station, get off early and walk the 15 minutes and just try to try to do simple stuff like that part further away from things that easy, easy stuff. And then looking at things like, you know if you're if you're sitting at home and you're not doing anything and you're watching you know netflix sit on the floor and do some nice light stretching just do some static stretching you know what what we really need to do more of to be able to get more glucose into the cell and get it out of the bloodstream is we need more muscular contraction okay so that doesn't necessarily mean lifting weights more all you need is to contract the muscle when you contract the muscle, you become glucose sensitive. And that's, that is different than insulin sensitive. So even if I'm, if I'm like, after we get off this, I'm going to go watch the new episodes of The Last Dance. And what I can do, I've been sitting at a desk all day working. So what I can do while I'm there is I can just flex muscles for 20 or 30 or 40 seconds. And that's enough contraction to make your body, your cells more glucose sensitive. That's really easy stuff people can do at a desk when they're at work and no one even knows you're doing it. Stretching is the same thing. If I go into a deep static stretch, the muscles are contracting to protect joints. Okay, if I can hold that, that makes me more glucose sensitive. So the more stuff I can do to become glucose sensitive and to burn through energy and to build more mitochondria, the easier it's going to be to regulate my blood sugar. So is that a good thing to do before eating, doing like a body scan of contract and relax or some stretching before a meal absolutely absolutely and that's that's also the case to to train multiple times a day and when i say multiple times a day i'm not meaning like going in and you know maybe working up to one rep max in the morning and then going back in the afternoon and doing functional life perch v and then coming back in the evening and doing like giant sets what i'm saying is like wake up when you wake up in the morning okay wake up have your cup of coffee, have a pee and a poo, and then do like 10 minutes of stretching or do 10 minutes of yoga, do 10 minutes of sun salutation, do 10 minutes of sprawls, just something to get the body moving. Okay, then at lunch, maybe you're contracting all your muscles, you go out for a quick 10, brisk 10 minute walk before you eat that type of thing. When then, you know, in the evening, you go and you hit your training, and then you make sure you, you know, get a good night's sleep. I mean, it's really the, it's the simple stuff that's screwing people up. It's, it's not the, it's not what they're doing dedicated in the gym. It's what they're not doing outside of the gym. And I had this, I had a long talk with, um, I've got like some herniated lumbar discs right now. And so the physiotherapist I see, he works on the nervous system. Then he works on the mechanical side. And so you're going to kind of see a theme going forward in all of the industries. We've got to work on the brain and the nervous system then we can work on the muscles the mechanics and so we had this uh a big talk about look you know we can fix you like i can fix you with programming he can fix you with the physio but if you go home and you sit at your desk the same way you've been that's going to negate all the all the hard work you've been doing so it's the little basic everyday things that screw a lot of people up but i think maybe having a little bit of knowledge some people would say so if we just say just go for a walk it's going to help your type you know borderline type two it's like well that's not going to help why is that going to help you know a little bit of knowledge around the kind of you know what's happening on a cellular level suddenly it's like oh okay i can see how that actually is going to help let's do that it's like we it's like we talked about earlier like sometimes you got to take a couple of steps back and sometimes you got to slow down before you go faster and so in order to get somebody to buy into that you have to explain you know what the benefit it all a sales process I need you to do this because it going to benefit you in a certain way Now,