A Surprising Food That Helps With Weight Loss

Weight gain and obesity are common as a result of poor dietary choices. The Western diet of processed foods, sugary foods, and high-fat foods does not help the epidemic and excessive weight can cause serious health problems and diseases.

While dieting and exercise are common solutions for weight loss, you can get additional support in the weight loss challenge from probiotic supplements.

Your Diet and Your Bacteria

Probiotic foods, such as kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, and other fermented items, help maintain the right balance in your gut. In addition to these, probiotic supplements can help promote gut health too.

Surprise! It’s not just one food, but an entire group of probiotic-containing dishes that help with weight loss. Adding probiotics helps maintain beneficial levels, but in addition to this you need to ensure you supply your friendly microbes with the nutrition they crave.

A diet of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as fiber (a prebiotic substance, which helps feed gut bacteria) ensures that your probiotic community gets the nutrients it needs to thrive. This is especially important if you have recently takes a course of antibiotics, which will wipe out both good and bad bacteria, thereby reducing your helpful community.

When the active colonies in your gut are at full strength, your health is better, and weight gain can be prevented.

Just as there are foods you want to include to support your gut bacteria, there are foods to avoid. Processed and convenience foods, sugar-laden items, high-fat content, and artificial preservatives are all damaging to your friendly bacteria and allow harmful strains to thrive.

Without the beneficial strains to promote weight loss, the sugar and fat in your diet will quickly elevate your weight and lower your overall health.

Secret Gut Support

Trillions of bacteria live within your gut and even though this may sound disgusting, these microbes are actually beneficial to your health. While bacteria in general are associated with disease and illness, the ones in your gut promote healthy digestion and support your well-being.

Just as you require certain nutrients to thrive, so do your gut bacteria. When you eat unhealthy foods, these microbes are unable to perform their duties.

Your gut consists of harmful bacteria as well as beneficial ones. When the beneficial strains are cleared out by poor diet, the pathogenic ones can take over, which increases your risk for disease. In order to maintain a healthy balance in your gut, you need to incorporate probiotics in your diet. These can be obtained through certain foods or the best probiotic supplement.

Since gut bacteria help promote healthy digestion, they have an indirect link to controlling weight. Poor digestion means nutrients are not absorbed and also that fat is be improperly utilized and stored around your body.

Studies have indicated that obese individuals have a less diverse selection of gut bacteria as compared to those of a healthy weight.

The Bacteria-Weight Connection

The more diverse your gut bacteria community is, the healthier your digestion is and the more control you have over your weight. To confirm the connection, scientists took bacteria from obese mice and transferred it to regular mice, causing them to gain weight.

To avoid weight gain and obesity, probiotic support is required so your gut community can function at optimal levels.

There is a connection between fiber, your gut bacteria, and weight loss. Fiber is known to be essential to your diet, primarily because it promote healthy bowel movements. Your body is not able to digest all types of fiber, but your gut microbes can. Their digestion of fiber releases beneficial chemicals that promote weight loss, showing that probiotics are involved in the processes needed to keep you slim.

Weight can also be controlled by your gut bacteria as a result of their effect on oxidative damage. Unbalanced gut communities cause an increased presence of free radicals that cause oxidative damage. This contributes to weight gain but can be controlled with probiotics. Certain gut bacteria can digest antioxidants like flavonoids, which protect your body from oxidative damage and therefore, weight gain.

The Little Guys That Fill You Up

The digestion of fiber by your gut bacteria does more than promote smooth digestion. Certain bacterial strains that digest fiber also influence the actions of hormones, like leptin.

Leptin controls your appetite. Increasing probiotics in your diet increases the amount of leptin produced. More leptin means reduced appetite, which decreases your chances of gaining weight.

The gut-brain axis is a constant communication pathway between your gut and your brain. Not only are digestive issues associated with mental health, but the hormone controlling your hunger levels is activated in your brain.
When healthy bacteria thrive in your gut, the messages to your brain promote regulated eating. However, when processed foods allow bad bacteria to thrive, cravings for these and increased eating messages are delivered instead.

Inflammation Regulation

Unhealthy diets full of sugar, fats, and processed foods contribute to weight gain and promote an unhealthy gut. The unbalanced gut community triggers inflammation within the gut, which interferes with digestion, increases your risk of disease, and promotes weight gain.

Probiotic foods or a quality probiotic supplement can help keep you gut community balanced in favor of the beneficial strains, keeping inflammation and your weight down.

Harmful bacterial strains produce chemicals such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which triggers inflammation and weight gain. Overweight individuals have been found to have different bacterial colonies in their gut and increased numbers of inflammatory markers, showing that the harmful strains are in charge.

Just as there are bad bacteria strains that promote inflammation, there are beneficial ones that inhibit the actions of inflammatory chemicals and protect the lining of your gut. These friendly bacteria prevent inflammatory-related diseases, including leaky-gut syndrome, promote healthy digestion, and help you control your weight.

Weight control can be a challenge, but with the right support, you can gain the upper hand quite easily. Exercise and diet go a long way in promoting good health and keeping excess weight off.

But without the support gut bacteria, you will be facing an uphill battle. There is no need to sign up for a weight-loss support group, simply add probiotics to your life and start your own internal weight watchers.

This post was supported by 1md.org; images by  Alexander Mils and Jakub Kapusnak on Unsplash