M1 : Lesson 7.6: Digestive Issues & Food Sensitivities
Transcript
Another area of limbic system cross wiring is how our brain responds to the food we It’s true that we can develop digestive issues as a result of infection or toxic exposure, yet ongoing gut issues are often the result of assessive stress based can chemistry in the bloodstream triggering dysfunctional digestive responses. Our vagus nerve is directly innervated with our digestive organs and poor vagal tone, which you’ll learn about in the next module or actually in module 3, can drastically affect our digestion and our gut motility as a result. Over time, stress hormones and poor gut motility result in something known as loosening of the tight junctions in our gut lining. Making our gut permeable or leaky to foods and toxins or anything that wants to pass through. This leaky gut barrier allows food particles to travel into the bloodstream, where the immune system has a response and it sees it as a foreign pathogen that shouldn’t be in the body.
Rather than just undigested protein. And the result is food sensitivity or even an allergy reaction. Over time, the gut can become so leaky due to chronic stress and inflammation that we have adverse reactions to many foods. And our immune system and brain create a memory to respond to these foods as if they’re harmful every time we eat them later. And that causes more inflammation and sometimes a downward spiral to other foods.
This inflammation and body reaction to eating foods can further result in food anxiety. We start to scan foods as threats because of our reaction in the past, and the messages get that gets sent to the Olympic system are that foods are dangerous. This loop can get really sticky for people. And the trick is to untangle the fear response from the food reaction so that we don’t have a huge limbic system body response to food. And secondly, to decrease our overall stress response in our body so that our tight junctions in our gut can repair and heal and stop having foods leak into the bloodstream.
So the vicious cycle of digestive issues often looks like this. First, there’s an initial stressor or infection that causes changes in the microbiome of the gut, and the gut lining can become damaged. The stress continues, and the gut lining continues to become more permeable and foods start to pass through the gut lining into the bloodstream. The immune system responds and food sensitivities begin. The body response to eating the food is uncomfortable.
And causes more stress and more limbic system activation of food hurts me. This increased stress chemistry and vigilance, and the gut permeability can worsen over time. We learn about all of our sensitivities on a blood test or so something else, and then it reinforces our new beliefs that food is harmful to us. This can cause our brain to react even more to the point where we only have to hold the food or look at the food before we have a reaction. Clearly, it’s not a reaction in the gut anymore, but also the brain.
Unraveling the food fear reaction cycle. We need to 1st retrain the brain from overreacting to the foods. We need to reduce our stress levels overall so that our gut lining can repair. We need to learn to incrementally introduce foods over time to teach our body that these foods are not a threat. We improve our absorption and our healing mode as we stay out of threat mode while eating to keep our selves in an elevated emotional state as much as we can.
We may need to address other issues in the body while on this journey to decrease the overall inflammation and stress chemistry in the body. This might include supplementation, healthy diet plans, and other protocols to port the healing process. I recommend this is done with a sense of optimism about bringing back nourishing foods into your life rather than living a lifestyle of restriction and avoidance. Food intolerance and digestive issues are one of the most common issues we work with using brain retraining and nervous system regulation, and it’s very successful in reversing these conditions. I personally worked with several people who literally could only eat 3 or 4 foods.
4:49They were severely underweight and were able to get back to eating everything they wanted. Our digestive system and nervous system are so interwoven that it simply makes sense to regulate your nervous system as a direct treatment of chronic digestive issues. I recommend using the brain retraining module in module 4 to create new positive associations to food so that you will learn how to retrain your brain’s triggers to those foods. And also, please utilize the forum to ask others how they rewired their associations with food to be creatively resourced and ideas for your process.