Healthy eating for weight loss has a primary target of eating healthy food, with a spin off of balancing your weight. Mostly this comes down to weight loss, as most people tend to be overweight rather than under weight. But it can significantly improve weight gain, too. The target is to obtain balance. And one of the ways to achieve this is to ensure your bowel flora is healthy.
The modern medical world has a war on bacteria and other pathogens, mistakenly targeting them as the creators of ill health. This is very far from the truth. Every body is teeming with bacteria. It is essential to life. Without bacteria, there would be no life.
The proliferation of bacteria during an infection are only opportunistic scavengers, clearing up a mess created by your lack of a healthy immune response. The bacteria are, in effect, the messengers. And they are being shot. But they are not the cause of ill health.
The gut is teeming with bacteria. There are a variety of complex and diverse bacteria essential to effective digestion. Your mouth contains millions of bacteria. Your stomach and small intestines contain very little bacteria, comparatively, because of the high acid environment.
The lower intestines, also known as the large intestines or colon, contains over a trillion organisms per gram of faeces. Bacteria makes up about 60% of your stool.
There are a variety of ways of upsetting this delicate balance of essential bacteria. They include:
- eating the wrong foods
- the use of antibiotics and other medication
- which often goes hand in hand with ill health
- a strong and/or recurring unbalancing emotion such as fear or anger
It is essential to keep all the bacteria in your body in optimum working order, especially your gut flora. You will know if they are in balance because they ensure you:
- retain natural immunity to infections
- never suffer with diarrhoea or constipation
- limit gas production
- don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases such as arthritis
- don’t suffer with cancerous growths
The importance of having healthy gut flora cannot be over emphasised. But, judging by how common digestive problems are today, how much antibiotics are used and how cancer is exploding at an exponential rate, there are very few people who have this.
You can achieve this simply by making some drastic changes to your diet. Healthy eating for weight loss guides you through why some common foods are unhealthy and what you can replace them with.
Keep your gut flora healthy!
You can find out more about healthy eating here.
