You probably wouldn’t know by looking at me that I struggled with my weight for a good part of my life. I was never severely overweight, but it always seemed like there were 5-10 pounds that would never go away. I tried ALL the diets, I’d lose some weight, but I would always end up gaining the weight back. I just figured my metabolism was “broken.” Can any of you identify?

In this latest video, “Gut health and Weight Loss”, I’m going to share the missing link to weight loss, which is rebalancing your gut health. That way you can boost your metabolism, shed the extra pounds, and in particular blast the belly fat away! Be sure to stick around to the very end – I’ll share details on how to download my “Gut IQ” quiz, so you can see if gut imbalances may be undermining your weight loss efforts.

If you saw my “Understanding Gut Health” video, then you’ll know that your gut is extremely metabolically active – meaning it’s a major player in producing energy for the rest of your body. So when the gut isn’t healthy, your whole body goes into an energy crisis, or “low power mode.” In low power mode, your body isn’t thinking about losing weight, it actually wants to accumulate more fat so it has more energy available.

And when the gut is imbalanced, it can also affect your hormones (estrogen, thyroid, insulin, etc) which also leads to more weight gain. Insulin in particular causes you to gain more belly fat! Above all else, it’s the inflammation created by gut imbalances that are the major problem. Inflammation or over-activation of your immune system exacerbates all the other problems I mentioned above. It’s the underlying cause of all diseases. And when it comes to belly fat or any kind of fat, there’s a vicious cycle going on. Your fat cells release chemicals that create inflammation, and that inflammation turns around and stimulates more fat growth.

So how do we reverse this gut-derived inflammation? In Functional Medicine, we use the 5 “R” approach:

• Remove
• Replace
• Reinoculate
• Repair
• Rebalance

For the sake of time, we’ll only cover “Remove” today. We want to remove stressors the gut: This includes various foods, food additives (like artificial colors and flavors, sweeteners, preservatives), infections, and toxins.

Millions of Americans have food sensitivities or intolerances to gluten, dairy, eggs, or other foods we don’t know about. This isn’t the same as an allergy, that’s much less common and can have a severe reaction. But do you ever have gas, bloating, belching, indigestion, headaches, nasal congestion or a runny nose after eating certain foods? I used to ALL THE TIME! My gut was under constant stress as I was eating lots of gluten, dairy, and eggs, which unfortunately it turns out I’m intolerant to. It was sad because I love those foods, but once I got them out of my diet, those stubborn 5 pounds melted away, without me having to do absurd diets or put insane hours in the gym. Now I just do insane hours in the gym because I like it!

Other gut stressors could be infections, like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, yeast, or parasites. And to diagnose those, you’ll need to get special lab testing done with a Functional Medicine physician like myself. Oftentimes this involves doing a stool test, and not all traditional doctors are equipped to do so.

There’s so much more to cover on this topic, but I’m going to wrap up here for now! If you have any questions at all, please comment below! I’d love ot help!