Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura, and I'm so glad that you are here with me again for another episode.

Today is a solo show, and I’m going to recap an experience that I had recently of doing a gut reset.

Now, I talk about health a lot on this show. It's one of the pillar pieces of things that I talked about. And over the past few months, I’ve been noticing the subtle and not-so-subtle signs that my gut could really use some repair and support.

So, when a friend of mine mentioned that she was thinking of doing a 7-day gut reset program, I was like, “I’m in! I’ll do it with you”. It was something that I knew that I needed to do for my own health and well-being.

I’d shared my experience as I went through the program on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions about it. I thought about writing a blog post on it, but you guys know me. It’s so challenging to, “Put pen to paper.” It's much easier for me to just speak to all of you, so I thought you know what, I'm just going to do an episode on it, because I really think it's something that many of you might be interested in. I think it's also a program that can be helpful to you as well.

So, first of all, what is the Gut Reset program? Well, it's a 7-day self-guided program. It was created by Mary Shenouda, who is the founder and creator of Phat Fudge. She’s a professional chef, and you can find her on her website and on social media at @paleochef. I’ll link to her places on the internet on the show notes for this episode.

This is a program that you purchase. In the PDF, she walks you through exactly how and why to do the program step-by-step.

There’s a shopping list for the groceries that you'll need and the recipes you’ll make.

And if you're wondering why gut health in particular is so important, it really is the foundation for your wellness. If you have a healthy gut and a healthy digestive system, and your digestion is functioning properly in your body, then the rest of your bodily functions will likely also be working. When you have poor digestion, poor health, your gut needs a little bit more support. That impacts the other systems in your body, and that's when you start to see really uncomfortable, unpleasant symptoms come up that can result into illnesses if not addressed.

Gut health is one of the pillar topics of this show. I've done so many episodes on it, going way back to Episode 025, 028 -29, 033, and so on, I have a whole category on gut health, which I will link to in the show notes so, you can go back and listen to some of these past episodes. You can always find show notes for my episodes at my website at www.livefablife.com/ whatever the episode number is, for this episode, it'll www.livefablife.com/162.

So, I decided to try this program because I had a number of things going on, in my body that I knew were signs that my gut health could use some repair and support.

To be specific, for a long time in 2020, I was having pain in my teeth.

And because we're in a pandemic, and we have this highly contagious virus that is transmitted through saliva, I was really hesitant to go to the dentist.

But it really impacted my ability to chew my food. And you will know by listening to past episodes, if we've worked together, or you've taken any of my programs that chewing is one of the really critical components of having a healthy digestion.

And for a long time wasn’t able to properly chew my food. When that happens, I was digesting food that wasn’t fully chewed and that just takes more energy and effort on my body to have to digest that, to have to break that down and get it to where it needs to go in the body.

I could tell after months and months of doing that, that it was really impacting my body. Some of the symptoms I was having was, you know, my poop was abnormal. If you aren't familiar, poop is a huge, important and free diagnostic tool that will tell you what's going on internally, what's going on in your body. If you want context of what is healthy poop, and what is not, google, the Bristol stool chart, or better yet, I'll link to it in the show notes as well. And you can take a look at that. That's something that I use to gauge, how I’m doing. If I have unhealthy poop too frequently and too often, then I know that something's not right here. It’s a red flag for me and that's what was going on.

In addition to poop, I was having frequent indigestion, which again, is something that is not normal for me. During my weekly acupuncture sessions, my acupuncturist would always comment on how she was really focusing on using points that support digestion because I was having the skin around my cuticles were peeling, which is a sign of having weak Qi, my tongue for showing signs for some of that weakness too, and that I could use some digestive support. So that was another indicator for me that it's time to start paying attention to this because we all have these symptoms from time-to-time.

Normally, I really don't pay too much attention to it, but when it happens more frequently, and then it starts to happen more than once, that's an indicator to me that, “Okay, it might be time to do something about this.” I also was having body odor when I wasn't working out or sweating, you know, it wasn't hot outside, it wasn’t even humid. I'd wake up in the morning, cold under my blankets, but had body odor, and like these are all symptoms to me that something's not right.

I also had a pretty bad back injury, which is very unusual for me. I wasn't doing anything strenuous. I didn't lift anything, it just kind of happened and it really lingered.

So, I was like, you know, there's some inflammation going on here. I was having disrupted sleep, which is not unusual for me, but it's something that I knew that if I did this program, it could potentially help with that.

I was also experiencing a lot of anger and sadness. And these are things that while expected, especially after the traumatic year that we all had, living through a pandemic, for me, the ways in which I was experiencing, it was not typical for me. And I know I've talked about this before, I don't remember exactly what episodes, but there is a strong connection between the gut and the brain and with that, our emotions.

So, when I start to feel anger and sadness, anxiety and depression in the way that I had been feeling, that’s a huge red flag for me and there's something to be concerned about here.

I was also having some breakouts, which, also isn’t usual for me at this point in my life. And you know, I have a history of having poor gut health. I have a history of having severe IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome. I've had SIBO, three times (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth), and I've been dealing with the fatty liver for a couple of years. So, these are things that I'm prone to and when these symptoms start to happen frequently and all at once, that's an indicator for me that it's time to do something about it.

So, I decided to do this program with a friend of mine and having done many of these types of programs before I’ll tell you, I think it's an advanced program. I think if you've never done anything like this before, it will be very challenging for you. It was challenging for me, and I'm experienced doing these things. I've experienced coaching people through programs like this. And I'm really grateful that I had a friend to do with it, because I think it made all the difference. So, I prepared for it by….

Well first, before I share with you how you're prepared for it, I have a little interesting story to share with you.

Part of my training for being a Functional Nutrition Health Coach I studied with a functional nutrition Alliance for 4 years from 2016-2020. As you near the end of that program, there’s a special, I guess, “offer” for those of us who have gone through the program because I would say the majority of us get into this type of work because we've had our own challenges in our health.

They have a program called “Heal the Healer.” Being the experts here, the long, seasoned, tenured professionals take a look at our cases and give us a plan that might help us in our own health conditions. I had my session back in January of 2018, so three years ago. Since then, I've had my treatment plan of action posted to my refrigerator and I happened to look at it the week before I did this gut reset.

In the action section they recommended was to really focus on having foods that will support the liver. And the foods recommended to me were black seed oil, vitamin E, turmeric, sweet potatoes, raw vegetables, cilantro and parsley, ginger root, liver, dandelion leaves, and lemon water, which is basically what we eat on this gut reset.

What's funny is that, again, I've had this on my fridge for three years, and I actually never did anything about it.

You know, of course, I did things here and there. I ate sweet potatoes, drank lemon water, ate dandelion greens, but I've never eaten these things all together in a program.

And I definitely have never had black seed oil and liver is not part of my regular diet.

So, when I realized this, I kinda just smiled to myself, because I thought, “Well, here we are, three years later, this is the first time I'm actually taking the recommended protocol and putting it all together and actually doing it in a program.

Because I didn’t create a program for myself with the specific recommended ingredients, but yet here it is. This program that came to me with the things that were recommended three years ago.

So that was one thing that really kept me going when the program got challenging - that this was recommended to me three years ago, and here I am finally doing something about it.

I prepared for it by taking the full week before I started to ease into it. I looked at what the program was and knew it was going to be challenging. I knew that I couldn’t just start Day One cold turkey.

So, I took a week to ease into the program to start doing some of the daily practices and to start eating some of the foods. But I didn't go all the way into it that first week. Like I said, I just took my time, went through the shopping list, did a whole kitchen audit to figure out what I needed and what I had, went grocery shopping, and then come that Monday because for me, my week starts on Mondays, started Day One on a Monday.

The first three days of the program essentially is a bone broth fast, where the only food or drink you’re consuming is bone broth. It's enhanced with other ingredients, which makes it really tasty.

Actually, it's surprisingly, really filling, there's a lot of satiety there. But again, the whole part of only eating and drinking for three days is really hard. So those first three days was challenging.

Then from Days 4-7 is where you start to eat some of the other foods that are recommended and prescribed on the program.

Other than the liver, they were foods that I like and normally eat.

Not that I don't like liver, I think we all know how we feel about liver. I actually couldn’t bring myself to prepare it on my own. So, my friend was so nice and prepared mine for me.

But I had told her that my mother, when we're really young used to cook chicken liver all the time. And I remember eating it and really liking it. And then, you know, of course you grow up and then you realize what it is and then you hear everyone else's opinion of it and then you start to form these opinions, and you adopt these opinions as your own, and well, I really had this mental block against liver. I've had it before - I usually have it about once a year, it's just not something that I can bring myself to prepare and eat entirely by itself. I usually mix it in with some ground beef in a meatloaf.

So that was Days 4-7.

Day one, as you can imagine, especially in the morning, was the hardest. That's when you're going through your withdrawal of thinking about all you aren’t going to eat or drink for the next three days.

So, I’ll admit, I had some almonds, which aren’t prescribed in the program.

I thought to myself, you know what, having these like five almonds is not going to make or break my program. And if it's going to give me the wherewithal to be able to continue on instead of just quitting altogether, why not?

If it's going to relieve some stress and anxiety for me, why not give myself that grace. And most of all, I just wanted it because I really enjoy crunchy things.

So that was Days 1-2.

Day 3, and the rest of the week went progressively faster, in fact, or easier, I should say.

On Day 4, when we actually had solid foods that we could chew, it was so filling, I felt so full. It was still considerably less food than what I would typically eat. I thought that was really interesting - how quickly my body was able to adjust.

In addition to the food part of the program, there's also daily rituals that are recommended to start your day and then to end your day with.

I’ll admit, I didn’t follow those to the letter. Some of the things I did, I was already doing pre-program and some of the things I just didn't do. I didn’t wait an hour after waking up to pick up my phone. I didn't even attempt to that.

I did do things like opening my window and letting fresh air in, journaling which is part of the process. Granted, when you get the PDF, there are spaces in it to journal. So those things I did, but I didn't finish or follow it to the letter of the law. Still good experience, though. One thing I did do was to start a practice of yoga and meditation, primarily because, again, I was injured. I hurt my back, which was one of the reasons I was did the program.

I'm finding that yoga really helped with that and so that became a daily practice of the program, and it continues afterwards. I think it really helped me to stay in tune with my body, to keep myself motivated to continue when it did feel challenging.

So, to recap, Day 1 was the toughest, and it slowly got easier as the days progressed.

I've been asked this question a lot - Did you miss food? Yeah, of course! The whole time I was thinking about all the foods that I wanted to eat, that weren't in the program, even foods that I don't normally eat.

I was like, “Oh, I really want a pizza”, and like, I never eat pizza.

It's really funny because the whole time I'm going through this, I'm trying to observe my thoughts and my experiences, because that's my thing, right? To really observe myself most of all, in addition to other people. As I was going through this observing, “Why am I thinking this way? Why am I thinking about this? Why am I feeling this way?” I'm thinking, “Gosh, the power of our mind, right? It testified to me how our mind is so much more powerful than our bodies in certain situations. So that was a really good, I guess, reminder for me of that.

Another question I got, because I opened it up for questions on my Instagram stories was, “Was it hard?”

Yes, of course, it was hard. I laughed, because you know, I'm a coach for the 2-Day Sugar Detox program and this program is really challenging for a lot of people.

And while it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I really think it makes a 21DSD quite child’s play.

But having done the sugar detox before, having done a Whole 30 years ago, having had to follow the Low FPDMAP diet for my health reasons, having done elimination diets to figure out food sensitivities and food intolerances, having done seasonal detoxes and cleanses, I’ not new to doing a nutritional therapy program like this. So, I knew that if I just stuck with this program, it would get easier as time passed.

I will say that if this is your first time doing a program like this, it’s going to be hard for you. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, but it is doable. I think if you're doing it for the right reasons, and if you keep in mind, why you're doing it and what you hope to get out of it, if you do it with someone, it's definitely doable. It's not easy, but it is doable.

I made it through the whole week with the exception of the final meal. So technically, if I did all 7 days, my last meal on the program would have been Sunday evening. But I went ahead and just had a normal meal on that final Sunday, because I had some Dungeness crab in my freezer. I’d been thinking about it the whole week. It's my most favorite food. And I was like, “You know what? I had a good week, I stuck with the program. I feel great. We're just going to end it one meal early.”

And I had Dungeness crab that Sunday night and it was fantastic. I was joking, “I should really get an award because I did the whole program with having a chocolate pudding pie in my fridge.”

In that week preparing, I was like, “I gotta have this chocolate pudding pie as like my last hurrah before I start the 7 days, especially going into this 3-day broth process.” And so, I had a few pieces of pie, and I was like, “I'm not gonna eat the whole thing.” So it was my fridge the whole week, and every time I opened the fridge, it was staring at me, but it didn't have any of the chocolate pudding pie! I was like, “I really deserve an award for this.” Anyways, that was more than you needed to know about that.

The program ended, I felt great, my digestion got back on track, meaning my poop got back on track to normal, healthy poop. I didn't really have indigestion anymore, and the back pain that I was having was significantly reduced. I mean, even by Day 2, I could tell a difference where I could move more freely.

I still felt some stiffness, especially in the mornings, but if I did the yoga practice, it went away. I could really move a lot more freely, especially in those first moments of getting out of bed, and then even easier after doing yoga.

So, it was a really successful program for me. I felt really good coming out of it.

Coming out of the program, I didn't want to just dive immediately back into how I was eating before I really wanted to take things slowly and let my body adjust. So, when I started eating foods on Day 4, it felt like so much food for me and I felt full. That really continue through the end of the program.

I guess on Day 8, the first day after the program when I could eat whatever I wanted, I actually had no desire, no appetite to eat what I used to eat pre-program, which was really interesting to me.

And so, for those first couple of days after the program, I continued to drink the broth in the morning for breakfast and have the beet salad. I stuck to only having one for meal per day because that was all that I needed. I didn't get hungry for anything beyond that. And as time went on, the farther I got from completing the program, my appetite slowly returned to what it was before. Now I'm back to eating three meals/day again, but it took almost a week to get there.

There were a lot of lessons learned. So obviously, I did the program because I was feeling like physically, my gut health could use some repairing some support. But there are some other things that came out of the program that weren't necessarily what I was looking for going into it.

One of the biggest things, and this always happens to me whenever I do a program like this, is that I really get clued into my emotional eating habits. I don't think of myself as an emotional eater, but we’re all emotional eaters, right? We eat when we're happy, we have family get-togethers, we eat when we're sad, right. It's just how we soothe ourselves - with food, at least some of us. I do.

So, it really clued me in to how I was eating according to my emotions. This might seem obvious, but I think, I really needed this time to get in touch with that again. In fact, when I work with a lot of my clients, my sugar detox clients and other health coaching clients, I don't consider myself a health coach for emotional or intuitive eating.

But it's always a byproduct of the experience and my work that we do together, that they come out of it, realizing that like, “Oh, actually, this has really helped me to get clued into how I emotionally eat, and now I can start to feel like I have the tools and the skills to be able to eat more intuitively.” This was my experience with this program.

So, it helped me tune into my emotions and recognize when I am eating out of emotions, as opposed to when I'm actually hungry, or when I'm eating out of habit, as opposed to when I'm actually hungry.

It helped me break out of eating ruts that I was stuck in. I know that if I eat too many grains, it's gonna upset and affect my digestion, and here I was eating granola all the time. Even though I wanted to start eating less of it, I couldn't make myself do it.

This program provided me with temporary boundaries, that then enabled me to start to listen to my body. And that helped me to recognize the clues of emotional eating and help me to stop eating the foods that I'd not necessarily wanted to stop eating, but maybe want to start eating less of.

And in that way, doing a program like this really helps me learn the skills to help me eat intuitively. I know intuitive eating is a big topic, and it's something that a lot of people practice a lot. I fully subscribe to that, and I fully believe in intuitive eating.

But I don't believe that many of us have the skills to know how to do that, have the skills to learn how to listen to our bodies. I intend to do another episode just on that topic alone.

I think that doing a program like this, whether it be this program or another type of eating program, I think it can really help you learn those skills or relearn them again. And that's exactly what this experience was, for me.

It really helped me break away from some of the habits some of the foods that I was addicted to, really helped me get tuned in again to foods that really do well for my body. I love to eat beets, but I don't really eat them a lot on my own just because they're kind of a pain to prepare. But, after spending a few days eating them, and then also learning about mixing different foods and flavors and textures, it really helped me get more creative about oh, you know, I can actually start to mix different things together, instead of just eating the same foods over and over again, which is also not good for your digestive health.

So, you know, it really helped me to reset my appetite and to realize that just eating these foods actually makes me really full. And it was exactly what it is it was - a great reset for me. I know a lot of people get triggered by the word “rese,t” get triggered by the word “detox,” by the word “cleanse.” For me, they're just words. And because I've gone through these experiences many times before and I know what to expect of myself. I know they're going to be challenging, but I also know the lessons learned - they're great for me to just reset myself.

I'm back to eating some of the foods that I ate before but like I said, I'm much more in tune to when to eat them, how much of it to eat, and eating less of the ones that I really wanted to eat to begin with, so that's my experience with this program.

I was asked if I would do it again and I absolutely would if I felt that my gut health could use some repair and some support. This is not a program that's meant for you to eat this way all the time. A lot of programs like these aren't. They're meant to be short term.

If you do them longer than is recommended, you actually can do more harm to your health. That’s what my experience was way back in the day when I did Low FODMAPS.

Because my IBS symptoms were so severe, many different practitioners, even my conventional doctors actually recommended Low FODMAPS for me, and I followed it.

It's really only intended to be followed for 1-2 weeks, but I was so afraid of reintroducing some of the foods that I ate before, because I knew how much they made my body suffer that I was afraid to. I spent the whole year on Low FODMAPS, and I really truly believe it actually did more harm than good.

So, I think if you go into this program with the right mindset of why you're wanting to do this, what you want to get out of it, but understand that these are only meant to be for a short amount of time, I think there's a lot of lessons you can learn, and a lot of healing you can do for yourself, both in body and spirit.

So that's it for this week. I’ll link to this program and all of the other things I mentioned in this episode in the show notes at www.livefablife.com/162.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to share more details about what you might be interested in about my experience in doing this. So, reach out to me either on the website show notes or on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi and I’ll see you right back here again next week.

Thanks for listening.