Living with an Autoimmune Disease
Most of us have a leaky gut. It’s just a matter of where on the spectrum you land and how your body deals with it. For some, it could feel like bloating, gas, and fatigue, while for others it can be much more serious and cause chronic inflammation which may manifest into an autoimmune disease. The gut houses about 80% of our immune system, so when our gut is inflamed, a leaky gut will ensue and may cause autoimmune disease. An autoimmune disease means that the body begins to attack its healthy tissue and the result becomes an unhealthy, damaged body. There are about 100 known autoimmune diseases and approximately 23.5 million people suffer from them. Some of them are common and not life-threatening, such as psoriasis, while other autoimmune diseases are rare and debilitating, such as multiple sclerosis. While Western medicine may be needed, lifestyle changes, such as nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress management are your first lines of defense to prevent autoimmune diseases.
What is Leaky Gut?
When we eat, our food needs to be digested and broken down into molecules that can be properly absorbed. Amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose are examples. The digestion process starts as soon as food enters your mouth, where amylase, an enzyme secreted in both the mouth (saliva) and the pancreas, begins breaking down carbohydrates into simple sugars. When food enters the stomach, HCL (hydrochloric acid), pepsin, and protease (an enzyme that breaks down proteins in the stomach, pancreas, and small intestine) start doing their magic to break down the food even further into smaller molecules. If your gut is already inflamed, this process will be weakened or broken. The molecules then start to make their way to the intestines, starting with the small intestine. Here, more enzymes, such as lipase (an enzyme made in the pancreas and activated in the small intestine) help to break down fats into fatty acids and glycerol.
When your digestive system is weakened, or broken, leaky gut syndrome starts to rear its evil head. Due to poor nutrition, chronic stress, lack of exercise, poor sleep, antibiotics, medications, toxins, yeast overgrowth, or bacterial infections in your stomach, small gaps are created in the walls of the intestines, and particles of food that were not broken down properly escape into the bloodstream. It’s at this juncture that inflammation is born. Some people have a genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases, triggered by inflammation, and some are born out of epigenetics (when our genes can turn on and off depending on environmental and lifestyle factors). In both scenarios, medication may be needed but changing one’s lifestyle is essential.
Managing Autoimmune Diseases
There are multiple lifestyle changes you can make to manage your autoimmune disease. Let’s take a look:
Eat a healthy diet: Eating a healthy diet, free of inflammatory foods, is a great start to healing your gut. Avoiding processed foods, gluten, dairy, sugar, beans, legumes, and grains is best. Stick with whole foods rich in nutrients, such as organic fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, grass-fed beef, bison and lamb, wild-caught seafood and shellfish, pasture-raised eggs (some may need to remove eggs for a bit), poultry and pork. Consuming healthy fats is essential for gut healing as well. Olives, avocados, healthy oils such as unrefined coconut oil, MCT oil, clean animal lards, and grass-fed ghee are all healthy fats that will help heal your gut. Eating these foods will deliver higher amounts of omega-3 fatty acids versus omega-6 fatty acids, which when consumed at higher than normal levels, become inflammatory in our body. Healthy fats support good gut health by promoting the growth of more good bugs in your microbiome. We do need some omega-6 fats, but not the amount most folks are consuming daily from eating processed foods that contain rancid seed oils.
Reduce your toxic load: Life is full of toxins. We breathe polluted air. We eat foods grown with genetically modified organisms. We put toxic oils, serums, creams, make-up, shampoo, and soaps on our skin. We clean our homes, offices, schools, and gyms with toxic cleaning supplies. We drink contaminated water stored in plastic. Taking steps to reduce incoming toxins, when we can control them, is one way to help mitigate autoimmune diseases and symptoms. Eating organically grown foods, grass-fed and pasture-raised animal proteins, filtering your air and water in your home and office, drinking from glass bottles, and buying non-toxic skincare and cleaning products is the place to start. Supporting your liver function to optimize your body’s detoxification process is essential as well. Taking supplements, if needed, to make sure you are getting enough vitamins and minerals, staying hydrated with water and electrolytes, and exercising to sweat and saunas are all important to flush out even more toxins.
Manage your stress: Chronic stress plays a huge role in our gut health and immune system. Stress both fires up your immune system to produce inflammation and suppresses your immune system because it knows that keeping you in a state of inflammation is dangerous. This rollercoaster ride of revving up and shutting down the immune system is exhausting on the body and can make autoimmune diseases worse, or even begin. Where’s your sweet spot for reducing your stress? Is it meditating, walking in the fresh air, taking a bath, cooking, dancing, creating art and music, or yoga? There are so many different ways to manage your stress and everyone’s equation is different. Find yours.
Now that you know what a leaky gut is and how to heal our gut, where do you start? Most folks walk out of their doctor’s office learning that they have an autoimmune disease and feel both relieved and overwhelmed. Relieved that there’s a name to their health issue and overwhelmed because they have no idea where to start healing and supporting their body. How do they change lifestyle habits to support their new path?
3 Steps to Take to Support Your Autoimmune Disease
Clean out your kitchen pantry and fridge.
Get your hands dirty and dispose of all processed foods, grains, seed oils, conventionally raised animal proteins, sugars, and dairy.Exercise daily.
Exercise boosts the production of the good bugs in our gut so find two or three options that you enjoy and rotate them during your week.Build your healthcare team.
Whether it’s a health coach, a nutritionist, a registered dietician, or a naturopath, build your team to support you on your new journey. Health Coaches are trained to use science-backed strategies to help support their clients in making positive and sustainable behavior changes. Learn more about how a health coach fits into your health journey here.
Managing your autoimmune disease is a delicate task. Taking mindful actions to clean up your lifestyle will place you in the most optimal space for living a healthy life.
This blog is not to be used as medical advice or for making any lifestyle changes to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having.