National Nutrition Month, Week 4: Gut Health Matters
March 30, 2022 | Words by Gabe Yanez
Welcome to the fourth and final week of National Nutrition Month.
For the entire month of March, we brought you valuable and actionable nutrition information that, when combined with the workouts on the new NCFIT App, is guaranteed to help you make progress towards your fitness goals.
In case you’ve missed any of the previous write-ups, you can catch up with the links below:
We’ll provide the nutrition guidance and the NCFIT App will provide the workouts. All you have to do is put in the EFFORT. LET'S GO!
You Can't Ignore Your Gut
When it comes to nutrition-specific goals, most people fall into one of the following three buckets: they either want to lose some excess body fat, gain some lean muscle, or improve their athletic performance.
In this series of posts for National Nutrition Month, we already covered all three of those. But there’s one more key aspect to nutrition that’s often overlooked.
If your body composition and athletic performance improve, but you still feel bloated, have digestion issues, feel gassy, or just feel generally uncomfortable, there might still be plenty of room for improvement when it comes to your nutrition.
This is where focusing on gut health can be incredibly beneficial.
Gut health directly impacts digestion, making it the foundation of any nutrition goals you may be trying to achieve.
A healthy gut can lead to less inflammation and chronic stress, which will make it easier to lose excess fat. A healthy gut will also more efficiently break down protein and other nutrients to help you build lean muscle mass and improve athletic performance.
Optimize your gut health and see how it facilitates reaching the goals most people usually fixate on.
Unfortunately, our current standard diet and lifestyle aren’t doing our gut health any favors. Chronic stress and highly processed foods are two of the biggest culprits when it comes to poor gut health, and those are two things many people struggle with.
This makes it even more important for anyone looking to optimize their nutrition to audit their digestion and prioritize the necessary changes to help heal their gut before placing exclusive emphasis on other goals like fat loss or muscle gain.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Optimizing gut health can be a complicated subject. There are probiotic supplements, fermented foods, and all sorts of diets and fasting protocols that claim to have immense benefits for gut health.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that there are very simple things you can do to improve your gut health that don’t require any changes to your diet.
This week, challenge yourself to sit down for every meal and extensively chew your food. Rushed meals in a sympathetic (stressed) state are very detrimental to your gut.
Also, try to minimize or completely cut out snacking. Instead, aim for 3-4 bigger balanced meals throughout the day, but avoid grazing to give your digestion a break between meals.
You’d be surprised how powerful both these habits can be at improving your gut health and, as a result, facilitate a lot of your other nutrition goals.
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