Tummy Love: Top 10 Ways to Show Your Microbiome Some Love this Valentine’s Day
Can you believe Valentine’s Day is already here? It feels like the new year has just begun and we are already in mid-February! If you made a New Year’s resolution for better health, the microbiome is the best way to support your goal. 
Since it’s Valentine’s Day, we have passed National Quitter’s Day (January 14th) the day that most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions. So if you’ve slipped up, that’s okay! Valentine’s Day is a great day to show yourself some love, grace, and patience. It’s also a good time to take care of yourself and start up those healthy habits once again.
So to get back on track for a healthier year, let’s show your tummy some love!
Quick Notes About the Gut Microbiome
Before we get started, here are some good things to know about the gut microbiome to help you understand how it works.
- The gut microbiome consists of trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that reside in your large intestine.
- The microorganisms in your gut microbiome help to digest food and extract more nutrients from what you eat by fermenting it.
- The fermentation process causes a release of byproducts like short-chain fatty acids, vitamins, and other molecules — they can help or harm your body based on if it was healthy or unhealthy foods eaten.
- Your lifestyle choices affect the types of microbes in your gut and the balance of good and pathogenic microorganisms.
- If there are more problematic species, then the balance is out of whack and this is referred to as dysbiosis.
- Unhealthy microbiomes can lead to systemic inflammation, brain fog, inability to concentrate, abnormal bowel habits, bloating, indigestion, and even disease progression.
- Making healthy lifestyle choices helps your microbiome to stay healthy and promotes good overall health.
So now that you have the basics of gut health understood, let’s jump into the top ways you can show your tummy some love!
1. Eat Healthfully
This is one of the most obvious ways to support your microbiome. The foods we eat are what feed the microorganisms living in our tummies. If we feed them good things, they give us good things back.
Do you remember the food pyramid from grade school? This is a great way to start ensuring you’re feeding your body nutritious foods that will support your health. Check in every day with what you’ve eaten, see if you’ve gotten every portion checked off and you’ll be on a great path to a happy tummy.
Some of the best foods for your microbiome are foods that contain high nutritional content, prebiotics, and polyphenols:
- Fruits and vegetables
- Whole grains
- Healthy fats
- Healthy proteins
- Naturally occurring probiotics
- Water
To learn more about healthy nutrition, check out this article for a more in-depth overview of eating healthy.
2. Take Atrantil
Another obvious way to show your tummy some love is by using Atrantil. It has polyphenols, prebiotics, and postbiotics that your tummy absolutely loves.
Atrantil feeds your good bacteria while soothing any irritation you might be experiencing from dysbiosis. Inflammation, leaky gut, bloating, and gas are all soothed by Atrantil letting your stomach rest and your body reap the benefits.
3. Spend Time with People You Love
This is actually a two-way street which is pretty cool. Studies show that the more social you are, the more microbes you are exposed to. This bolsters the number of microbes you host in your microbiome giving you a higher microdiversity (which is a good thing).
In addition, the microbes in your gut can affect your desire to be social. So if you want to make better connections with people you care about, start taking care of what you eat and how you influence your gut microbiome. It can have drastic effects on how social you are and the more social you become the more good bacteria you get. Spending time with people you love also releases happy neurochemicals which also have a positive influence on your gut health.
4. Make Healthy Lifestyle Choices
You’ve heard it time and time again. Smoking, drinking, and being sedentary aren’t good for your health. All of these things are also bad for your gut. So kick the bad habits to the curb, and your gut (and other organs) will thank you!
5. Move Your Body
Make this one fun. If you hate going to the gym, stop trying to force the gym on yourself. Moving your body doesn’t have to be any strict process. Just get out there, move your body, get your heart pumping, and enjoy the benefits of a healthy gut!
Exercise is a huge factor in a healthy gut. People who exercise regularly have distinct microbes in their guts that help them have healthier immune systems, blast fat cells, and extract nutrients more effectively from their food. Who doesn’t want those benefits?
So whether it’s walking, yoga, dancing, weight lifting, or hiking, get out there and move to show your tummy and muscles that you love them.
6. Laugh Often
Now, we know that when you’re laughing you’re happy. Your body gets that dopamine kick to tell your brain, “hey we are having a great time.” So then your body gets those benefits of improved immunity and happiness. Which is great!
But there is actually a thing called laughter yoga and it’s been proven to be more effective at treating IBS than anti-anxiety medications. So if you wanna boost your tummy love go and have yourself a good laugh.
7. Be Gentle With Yourself
If you fell off the wagon trying to be healthier, you might be beating yourself up for it. Truly you don’t need that added stress and negativity. Allow yourself a little room for grace and patience.
Be grateful for the time you were successful.
Think about how you can improve your process to help yourself stick to it the next time.
And start over.
This goes for anything going on in your life. Our world today is full of stressors, and you don’t need to be adding more to yourself. So whether you like to journal, meditate, or just take some deep breaths, do what works for you. Center yourself and get back at it.
Time was created by people and doesn’t really exist. So when you feel stressed over time, remind yourself it’s fake and you can start over at any time. Not just at a new year, new month, or new week. Today.
8. Do Things that Make You Happy
Doing things that make you happy help to reduce your stress levels. Stress is a large influence on your gut health. The more you stress, the more dysbiotic your microbiome becomes. So to combat that, schedule some time to do things that make you happy. Listen to music, write, watch movies or dance. Whatever it is, do it without worry and do it, especially when you feel like you don’t have time for it. Because remember, time doesn’t exist.
9. Rest Well
Sleep is a time for our bodies to reset themselves. There are a lot of important things happening while we rest. A major one is the resetting of your digestive system. This time to let your microbes and digestive organs finish what they started and then rest is essential to good health. This is why some people fast regularly to really let their tummies rest and reset.
10. Enjoy Relaxing
Now that might sound silly, but it was worded that way on purpose. Have you ever started doing something that’s supposed to be relaxing but then ended up doing stressful things instead or during the supposed relaxation time? Yeah, that’s exactly why we worded it ENJOY relaxing. Actually, let yourself relax. You can get a massage, take a guided meditation, or sit down with a book you’ve been wanting to read. But do things that let your mind and body actually relax. This lets your worries and stress drift away and allows your gut the break it needs.
If you haven’t noticed, the best ways to love your tummy are to take care of yourself. Our world isn’t set up to promote this kind of living. And that’s exactly why our health is declining even when we have all of this new technology and medical help. To have a healthy, happy life, take care of yourself, and fortunately, those things benefit your tummy health too.
Enjoy this article? Give it a share on your favorite social platform (no this doesn’t count as being social — but it does show us some love!) to give the people you love some ideas on loving themselves this Valentine’s Day!
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- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6895849/