Gut Health and Movement

Whenever anyone considers loosing weight, doing exercise is one of the first things that comes to their mind. But what is exercise? Is it the same as movement? Why is it important and how can we achieve it in a healthy way to promote gut health?

When we talk about movement I like to divide it into physical activity and exercise. Physical activity is a movement that is done by your skeletal muscles and requires energy. This could be cooking, vacuuming, getting the mail, gardening, or most day to day activities. Whereas, exercise is a planned, structured, and intentional movement that is used to improve or maintain physical fitness. Such as walking on a daily basis for a set time, using resistance bands, planking, squatting, running, Zumba classes, etc. All physical activity nurtures a healthier well-being but exercise will in addition improve your cardiorespiratory function, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, and your body composition(ie: body fat percentages, visceral fat, muscle: body fat percentages).

Being both physically active during your day as well as having an exercise routine in place are important because those movements will directly impact the composition of your gut biome. Research studies, indicated that physically active mice contained more lactobacillus bacteria which, in conjunction with Bifidobacterium, have been known to enhance nutrient absorption, lower cholesterol levels, prevent heart disease, and exert an anti-inflammatory response and while we might not understand how and why this happens the evidence of it happening as clear and overwhelming. Exercise also helps with stress and when we control stress we aid and cortisol control that reduces our risk of waking, diabetes and heart disease among other chronic diseases.

How much exercise each person needs will depend on their fitness level. In general you want to execute 30 minutes of daily exercise. But the best part of this is that it has been determined that you do not have to do those 30 minutes consecutively. In fact many times I encourage breaking these up, especially when you’re starting to introduce movement into your life/routine. It is important to schedule your exercise. We have phones, use them to your advantage! Schedule alarms to go off and remind you to complete this exercise. You can also use the buddy system to keep you on track. Always consider that the opposite of no exercise-too much exercise has been shown to have a negative effect on the gut biome. Presumably too much exercise will increase the stress response and increase your cortisol levels which in turn increase inflammation and promote fat storage instead of fat usage.

If you struggle with finding time and what the right thing to do is; give yourself the gift of working with a health coach, like myself.