Do you ever have strong sugar cravings during the day, or when you start a diet to lose body fat?
Do you have a protruding stomach after you eat, or later in the day, that doesn’t make sense?
Do you get gassy or have bloating after eating certain foods?
Or do you ever feel like the food you ate in the morning is still floating in your stomach at dinner time, making you feel like you couldn’t eat more, but you’re still hungry?
These all come from a specific thing: harmful bacteria and fungi that have taken root in our digestive tract.
This is SIBO, Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth, which causes bloating in the lower abdomen.
It’s candida and c.diff, and even h. Pylori, where the bloating can occur higher up in our stomach, above our waste.
These cause intense sugar cravings, a protruding stomach, gassiness and bloating, and make us feel full or give us indigestion and heartburn.
They make sticking to a diet a nightmare, raise cortisol levels, make gaining muscle harder, and cause hormonal issues and energy crashes.
And they affect our mood and make it harder to get good, deep sleep.
So let's find what these things are and see what we can do to address them.
WHAT IS SIBO, SMALL INTESTINAL BACTERIAL OVERGROWTH?
While there are many bacteria to address, as well as candida, in this article we’ll cover SIBO as they each follow much of the same path.
SIBO is caused by bacteria that make their way into your small intestine and take root, causing all sorts of problems.
These bacteria create gas and bloating, raise cortisol levels, demand sugary foods to feed them, and make you feel pretty terrible if you don’t comply.
They also degrade your intestinal lining so it lets through these harmful bacteria, along with other toxins, into your bloodstream, and can lead to bacterial infections, toxicity, and inflammation throughout the body.
Not good.
As we know from the above article, if our levels of digestive acid are weak, then bacteria, parasites, and viruses can get through into the body.
While parasites will be the subject of another article, and your immune system, if healthy, should take care of viruses coming in, these bacteria are another story and they effect much more than most people think.
The stomach is supposed to be acidic, so it kills these bacteria before entering the small intestine.
But when it doesn’t they make it through to the small intestine where it’s very much not acidic. It’s dark, it’s warm, there’s lots of food coming in. It’s the perfect home for them.
Here they set up shop doing a number of things.
First, they eat your food. That’s right. If you’ve felt that you’re eating so much but your body just doesn’t seem to be getting the nutrients you’re giving it, this is most likely one of the causes: Someone else is eating your food.
This leaves you undernourished, with low energy, and feeling you need more food when really you don’t.
But when they eat it they also have a waste product they give off: Gas, which causes bloating, especially around the waist.
If you’ve ever seen someone do an effective bacterial cleanse, or a digestive cleanse that included anti-bacterials to kill SIBO, then you may have noticed that they sometimes lose inches around the waist.
This isn’t trapped food waste or body fat being gotten rid of, this is the bacteria that were creating a constant source of gas and bloating being gotten rid of, at which point the gas that is there makes its way out and no new gas replaces it = no more bloating.
(Note: This is not the same as a lack of Potassium which causes another kind of bloating — water retention — mainly around the feet and ankles, but also in the stomach.)
And yes, some people can lose many inches from around the waist when these bacteria are killed off.
SUGAR FEEDS SIBO, HARMFUL BACTERIA & YEASTS
Another point here is the type of food they like: sugary foods, grains, breads, processed sugars, starchy foods, you name it. They thrive on these things and you can even do a cleanse or take an anti-bacterial with little to no effect if you keep consuming these foods as, while you are killing them, you’re also still feeding them.
But not only do they thrive on sugary foods — they demand them.
You see, our cells can communicate their needs and problems, via our nervous system, to our brain.
But bacteria in our body, whether harmful SIBO, or helpful bacteria in our colon (your microbiome), can communicate with our brain via the same channels the cells use — as if they were actual cells in our body.
So if you haven’t had sugar in a while, they get hungry. And they’ll communicate that hunger, just as your cells will, giving you an exact craving for the type of food they like.
If you try to come off sugary foods, starving them, they’ll get back at you and make you feel their pain until you go buy that donut.
But that’s where those cravings are coming from.
That’s why when, say you don’t normally eat a lot of junk food but only some, but then decide to cut it all out fully, you’ll later that day get not only a large urge to eat that same junk food, but possibly something even more sugary or more junk food than normal, to make up for their “missed meals”.
This is one reason why, if you’re planning on coming off sugar for health or fat loss reasons, it’s smart to kill these bacteria first or as part of the diet, or they will almost surely make you break your diet.
This is one of the main causes behind almost all losses in trying to go onto a healthy diet or lose body fat. They’re the “I’m going to get fit” New Years Resolution killers.
Now, these harmful bacteria affect much more than just sugar cravings and bloating. They attack our intestinal lining, causing something called “Leaky Gut”, and that affects our overall health, hormones, energy levels, and much more in a number of different ways.
We’ll cover all of this in the Gut Health Series.
But one thing you can do right now is start taking digestive enzymes with any meal if you experience gas, bloating, GERD, or acid reflux, as these each indicate SIBO or other harmful bacteria or yeasts.
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