Food isn’t the only medicine

I met someone recently and when I explained what I did and that I helped people heal their diseases and they smiled and said knowingly, “Let me guess, is it something to do with the microbiome?”.

It made me smile because I went down that rabbit hole for quite a few years. Yes, your gut has an impact on your health but that is very very very rarely the reason for your illness especially if its autoimmune. You just haven’t gone deep enough. You gut might be causing issues, affecting your thoughts, your mood, your hormones. But what is affecting your gut to be off in the first place?

I spent a long time ‘fixing my gut’  - I had analysis done of my innermost workings with a team in collaboration with Tim Spector, I pretty much did a nutrition degree in the years of research I did about food. Food is medicine but it isn’t everything and I certainly couldn’t eat my way back to health as much as I tried. And I really tried. I also tried all the fixes of balancing my gut microbiome as well. And that didn’t stick either.

Getting to the Whys was what fixed it, and those Whys weren’t in the food or my microbiome. They were in the stored emotions in my body that were causing such upset TO my digestive tract. You just have to go deeper and get to the root. It can seem illogical that the root of your digestive issues isn’t a compartmentalised imbalance - its so tidy to think that this one little microbial strain is the thing causing your upset. Would’t that make life easy? Just eliminate the bacteria, the candida strain, the X and all will be well?

Well life isn’t that simple. Neither are our emotional lives. They are big and complicated and messy and we bury those feelings and that messiness. It is that that we need to address to get to wellness the vast majority of the time.