The Gut Connection

The health of the digestive tract is seriously underrated.

Maybe you’ve been dealing with symptoms of an irritable bowel for years and you’re keenly aware that your digestion is connected to how healthy you feel, not just physically, but emotionally too.

Not only does constipation make you feel bloated, gassy, and full (in the worst kind of way), but it also can make you feel irritable and cranky.

On the other hand, chronic diarrhea doesn’t only mean you’re unable to absorb your nutrients, but it can also make you feel quite vulnerable and even anxious.

If you have gut problems (anywhere on the spectrum), you probably understand the gut-body connection better already.

But what if you don’t?

What if you’ve never experienced gut-related symptoms? Why should you care about the health of your digestion if you want to heal from symptoms x, y, or z?

All disease begins in the gut

Your body has been intelligently designed to take in, sort, and either utilize or excrete all sorts of inputs from the external environment– things that we ingest (foods and beverages), inhale (air quality, fragrance, and cleaning products), inject, and absorb (personal care products, EMF frequencies, etc.).

It does this largely in part by the design of the gastrointestinal tract, which includes liver as the major detoxifying organ. This guy gets the MVP award for working round the clock (literally) to help your body process and get rid of any junk that does not belong. 

When you’ve got gut problems, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ve got liver detoxification problems upstream.

Now, although I could spend entire post talking about all that the wellness-promoting effects of properly absorbed nutrients from a healthy digestive system, I’m focusing today on what the body struggles to eliminate and how that is an equally important (and often neglected) part of the wellness equation.

Why have we neglected the liver?

I can’t really answer that question except to speculate that the symptoms that we commonly experience aren’t traditionally attributed to liver function.

We sort of take for granted that it’s working (you know, those people who say “you don’t need to detox, that’s what you have a liver for…”), and don’t really pay much attention to it until lab markers indicate it’s dysfunction.

By the time you see elevated liver function tests (think AST, ALT, Alk phos, bilirubin, etc.) your liver has been struggling and sludgy for a while.

Most people have no clue there’s an issue until things have really progressed and their detoxification capacity is severely compromised.

What happens when the liver can’t detox?

I’m so glad you asked.

A stagnant liver is a clogged filter. Toxins in the liver go through 3 phases: phases 1 & 2 are complex detoxification, but phase 3 is all about drainage because the liver has to do something with these toxic byproducts. 

When the filter (liver) gets clogged, detoxification efforts are compromised while toxins are stored. Under normal circumstances, these toxic byproducts are dumped through the gallbladder into the bile for excretion through the colon. 

If the bile ducts are blocked for any reason, an emergency hatch opens and instead of the toxins draining into the bile in the gallbladder, they go into the bloodstream where they are spread systemically throughout the body.

This is where we see skin issues, rashes, acne, eczema–we also can see respiratory and kidney related issues as well, because these toxins that should have been eliminated from the body are instead being deposited into other organs and tissues and are trying to find other ways to get out.

Remember our body has 3 main ways of eliminating toxic waste, and if the primary route through the bowels is compromised, they’ll try to exit through the urine or the skin (or even through respiration, considered a secondary detox pathway).

Most people wouldn’t notice their skin eruptions and think, oh, my liver must be stagnant.

Most people wouldn’t know a symptom of liver dysfunction if you pegged them on it.

Jaundice? Yeah, you’re in serious trouble when it gets to that point. 

The body tries to give you whispers and clues before it ever starts screaming at you. We just have to learn to slow down enough to notice and learn how to interpret its messages.

The gut connection

Am I really saying that every single disease always begins in the gut? Of course not. 

But what I think Hippocrates meant by this saying is that if the digestive process–which is by design supposed to utilize the things that are helpful to the body and eliminate the things that aren’t, mainly by the wisdom of the liver–if that highly complex filtration system is compromised, that is where disease begins.

That is why I called my program The Gut Connection Blueprint, in an effort to shed a light on these crucial systems and to connect the dots between their functions and your overall health and wellbeing.

If you don’t heal your gut first, you cannot ultimately fix a toxic terrain. 

Toxins are ubiquitous in a modern society. We cannot completely escape them. Of course we need to be mindful of our exposures, but this just means that the lifestyle we live must be regularly promoting drainage and detoxification to support the health of our digestive system. Every single day.

If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry, I’ve got you! I created this FREE Detox Essentials Guide to get you started with all the basics of my 5 favorite detox strategies.

Go check it out and start giving your liver some love today!