How to Clean Your Gut Naturally

Author's Bio: Marcie Vaske, MS, LN, CNS

Hi, and welcome back to our channel.

Today we're going to be talking all about gentle and natural ways to cleanse your gut. So if you've been feeling a little bit bloated or sluggish or just a little bit off, I'm going to give you some tips on ways that you can naturally cleanse your gut without using anything harsh or doing a cleanse in general.

But before we begin, my name is Marcie Vaske and I'm a functional medicine nutritionist with Oswald Digestive Clinic. At Oswald Digestive Clinic, we see many people who struggle with gut health. So I'm going to link our website here where you can easily make an initial appointment. I'm also going to link our free guide, which is Five Ways to Improve Your Gut Health.

So let's dig back into our topic today of how to clean your gut naturally.

[Video Transcript Below Video - it is the same information]

How to Clean Your Gut Naturally

Now, of course, our gut actually isn't dirty, but it may be overloaded, it may feel more inflamed, or just have inflammation going on, or just basically out of balance. And so you might be experiencing different symptoms like being bloated or having more constipation or even diarrhea or lots of gas that you can't explain. And so today as I walk through some tips on ways to clean your gut naturally, listen in and think about, well, maybe that would work best for me, depending on perhaps your symptoms.

Get Enough Fiber

So at the top of the list is going to be getting enough fiber. Now fiber is acts basically like a brush within your intestinal tract and just kind of sweeps it all up and brushes it all out. So we're cleaning all the crevices and getting all the toxins or stool that need to be eliminated. And within fiber itself, we have two main categories, soluble fiber and insoluble fiber.

Soluble fiber will actually help to feed your good bacteria, whereas insoluble fiber acts more as like that broom that I talked about, or a brush kind of sweeping its way through and making your stool more bulky and then eat more easily to pass. Now the rule of thumb for fiber grams per day is between 25 and 35 grams. But one tip would be that if you haven't been eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, or maybe you're not having extra flax seed or chia seeds, you want to begin slowly with these things, or you will end up with more gas and possibly more bloating or diarrhea or constipation, however it works out for you specifically. So just kind of improve your fiber intake. Just be more aware and you can increase that incrementally over a period of a couple weeks, and you should feel like your digestive system is working a lot more efficiently.

Stay Hydrated

Now, the next big topic on ways to keep your gut clean is to hydrate. And I know I talk about hydrating drinking water in almost every video I do here on the channel, and ideally is that you want to be drinking half your body weight and ounces per day. But if that seems just totally out of the spectrum of what you're willing to do, at least getting that 64 ounces in, and these are all averages, but most people are not drinking enough water. Oftentimes, we're not taking into account perhaps any caffeine that you drank that day or maybe you had a workout and all the sweating that you did.

We know during the summer you're going to need to drink more water just because we're hot and we're oftentimes losing more water through our body. So staying hydrated helps to kind of work with all the fibers that I talked about in terms of keeping things moving in the intestinal tract. So as I said, keeping your hydration up, and that will help to flush out toxins from the body. It helps keep our bowels more consistent, and obviously then we have a more healthy gut.

Eat Fermented Foods

Now, another way to keep your gut healthy is, or to clean it naturally would be to eat fermented vegetables or foods perhaps. So fermented foods are sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yogurts, fer. These are packed full of probiotics and they will help to balance out your microbiome. And so if you're having a little bit of gut issue that you've noticed or maybe you've had more symptoms, they just kind of starting to increase, just slowly adding in some more fermented foods can really give you a big bang for your buck in terms of getting good flora and helping the diversity of your microbiome grow.

Now, the first few things I talked about were just implementing different items like fiber, drinking enough water, getting fermented foods,

But what about the things you should take out to keep your gut healthy and clean?

Eliminate Harmful Foods

And one of many of 'em, but a big topic here is going to be refined sugars, alcohol and ultra process foods. And don't forget artificial sweeteners. All of these will contain more toxins, creating more inflammation in our gut, and therefore more of an imbalance in our microbiome. So by eliminating these foods, we're going to set the stage for just a better functioning gut overall, giving a chance for your good flora, your good bacteria and microbes within the microbiome to really flourish and help give you the best non symptoms possible. So making your gut reduce gas, reduce in bloating, reducing constipation, and even diarrhea.

Try Herbal Support

Now, another way to really help clean your gut naturally is to consider doing some herbal support. There are specific herbs that can really help to calm the intestinal tract or even help indigestion. So the first one would be drinking a ginger tea. Ginger actually helps to reduce nausea, it helps to reduce inflammation. It helps to inspire our hydrochloric acid in our stomach, so you begin digesting better. There's also peppermint, peppermint tea, which can help to reduce cramping or even bloating and even support gas. A lot of times in peppermint tea you may even find fennel, which is amazing for reducing gas. Another one here is going to be slippery elm or marshmallow root. Those kind of teas help support the mucosal lining, so it helps to repair that gut integrity. So not that you have to go take a whole bunch of supplements to help clean your gut naturally, but sometimes these teas, just drinking a cup of tea a day can really help support what you're trying to accomplish.

Prioritize Sleep

Now, a couple more that I want to touch on here will be to, number one, prioritize sleep. And again, sleep is another one that I talk about nearly every video that I do. And sleep is so important, and it's something we often overlook because we feel like we can kind of skimp on it because the rest of our day is chaos and we have all these things we have to do. But really, if you're trying to reach a better health balance, and even just health in general and wellbeing, prioritizing your sleep is going to be so important, you know, should be getting around that seven to nine hour mark of sleep per night. And what is so important here with the gut is that the gut actually helps to repair itself while you're sleeping. So if you are struggling with gut issues, sleep needs to be a priority.

Manage Stress

In addition to that, they're kind of related here is going to be stress. Reducing the amount of stress you have in your life is also going to help. The gut repair is going to bring down inflammation. It will keep our microbiome in better balance. And so reducing external stresses from our life as much as possible is going to be really helpful. And the way that sleep and stress can help is that if you're getting enough sleep, your body has a better way of handling stress. So keeping those things very top of mind when you're thinking about healing in general.

Move Your Body

And then lastly, it would be movement. Movement in any way, right? So whether you're doing a very structured workout every day, that's great, but you can also just walk for 10 minutes three times a day or four times a day, or however it works out in your day. If you can't just prioritize one piece of your day to moving. But walking a biking, you could do swimming, which is always great. Anything that gets you moving and gets your blood flowing, doing something on a daily basis is going to help our gut move better. I can't tell you how many times I have had clients say to me when they haven't really been moving and then they start kind of walking, just walking. They notice that they have a reduction in gut symptoms.

So I hope that this video helped kind of line up some ideas and tips to help you keep your gut clean and do it naturally. We don't need to be throwing in all sorts of supplements to help cleanse our gut. Sometimes they can be pretty harsh and abrasive. Now there may be occasions where those things are necessary, but if you're really following just the simple guidelines that I put in place here, you should notice a difference in your gut health and be feeling a lot better. And if you aren't, make an appointment with us. I've linked our website down below where you can easily make that initial appointment. And don't forget, if you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comment section. We love to get them and answer them for you.

So thanks for watching today, and I'll see you next time.

If you'd like to explore any of this information further or obtain an individualized nutrition plan, you can schedule an initial appointment at our clinic.  We also take insurance and some of our clients get full coverage, which is great.

Or you can just start by downloading our FREE GUIDE: 5 WAYS TO IMPROVE GUT HEALTH