6 Lifestyle Tools for Better Digestion
It’s no secret that our lifestyle plays a major major role in how well our digestive system functions.
Beyond the food we eat, factors such as how active we are, what our sleep looks like, how stressed we feel, etc., all impact our digestion and gut health.
The great news is that there are many simple, attainable tools that you can explore for yourself, and implement into your life as you wish, to support better digestion. Enjoy these simple tips for better digestion, directly from a gut health nutritionist.
In this article, we’re going to be covering 6 lifestyle practices and tools you can incorporate into your day to day, for better gut health.
Let’s dig into it ⤵️
Elevate your Knees for Better Poops (using a stool or Squatty Potty)
No joke, this is a great way to help your body in having a better (much more satisfying, you know the type 😅) bowel movement.
The way our toilets are designed in North America don’t accommodate our physiology very well. The way we sit on a toilet, where our knees are generally lower than our hips, actually ‘kinks’ our colon (thanks to our puborectalis muscle), which can impact our ability to have a well-evacuated poop.
Squatting, or making sure that our knees are above our hips, relaxes the puborectalis muscle, meaning we don’t get the kinking in the colon, allowing stool to flow more effortlessly!
The “squatty potty” is a stool designed to aid in this, but you can use whatever you’ve got (you can pick up a conventional stool from anywhere, use a box, a stack of books, whatever you’d like), so long as you’re able to rest your feet on it in front of you to elevate your knees as you have a bowel movement, it’s all good.
Having a tough time picturing what I mean? You can check out Squatty Potty’s (not an affiliate or anything!), website here to get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Incorporate Movement Everyday
Movement is a hugely underrated lifestyle practice for good gut health.
One way that movement can support our digestion is through motility. When we move our bodies, be it through walking, hiking, and structured exercise class, we’re promoting motility.
Specific movements can be particularly helpful in motility, aiding both in promoting bowel movements, as well as expelling gas, which can help with reducing bloating, distention, and abdominal pain. Yoga-based movements like twists, cat-cow, and child’s pose can help with this.
Likewise, movements that help to strengthen our abdominal area can help tone muscles that play a role in our motility, promoting better bowel movements and digestive function.
Exercise is also great for our microbiome. There are studies that suggest that exercise could actually improve the diversity of the beneficial flora in the microbiome, and increase the abundance of these good bugs (which is really great for us!).
Abdominal Massage
This tool is especially helpful if you need a little support in having a bowel movement, or are struggling with bloating and distention due to gas buildup. You can lean on this tool when you acutely need some help to get things moving along.
You can decide whether you’d like to use a little bit of oil or not, but a great abdominal massage involves making gentle circles, clockwise. This movement and direction follows your colon, encouraging gas and other contents to move along.
You can start in the lower right quadrant, between your belly button and your right hip bone (this is where your cecum and ileocecal valve are, which connects the small intestine to the first part of your colon, the cecum). Then slowly move up to just under your right rib, and continue the circle around and down the left side. Keep up this circular motion for a few minutes, or as needed.
For a visual on how to do an abdominal massage, check out this video.
Deep Belly Breathing
This is a practice I talk about often: with my clients, with my community, with anyone who will listen, really. It’s profound in its ability to help us digest better.
Deep belly breathing shifts the body into the “rest-and-digest” state, which is where our body digests best; it’s where our body can focus its efforts on our digestive processes. Spending most of our time in this state can help with motility, promote better digestion, and keep our microbiome healthy and resilient.
I love this practice because it’s so easy to integrate into your life, and can take as little as 20-30 seconds to feel its effects.
To practice this, breathe through your nose, deep into your belly. Your tummy should protrude out as it fills up with air — we aren’t breathing into the chest here. It might take some practice to get used to this feeling if you’re used to breathing higher up. If you hold a hand over your heart, and one over your belly, you should feel the hand on your belly rise and fall as you breathe into your diaphragm.
Breathing this way allows the diaphragm to activate the vagus nerve, which is the nerve that connects our enteric nervous system in the gut, to our brain (you might’ve heard of the gut-brain axis before). It’s this that transitions us into the rest and digest state, where our digestive system can run nice and smoothly.
Eat Mindfully
Eating mindfully is one practice that can really help with our digestive function, and improve specific digestive issues like bloating, distention and indigestion.
Our teeth are the only mechanical component of our digestive tract — we have them for a reason!
Every other aspect of our digestive process is chemical. It's really important to make sure that we're chewing our food thoroughly, giving our digestive system as much support as possible, so that it's not working that much harder to digest our food, as it passes beyond our mouths.
Ideally, we want to be chewing our food until it's almost a baby-food-like consistency. Chew more than you probably think you need to 😅 This helps break down the food we're eating into smaller particles, making it easier for the rest of our system to digest and process. This also allows enzymes in our saliva to start their work on breaking down nutrients like carbohydrates.
If we aren't chewing enough, and we aren't properly breaking down our food in our stomach and early parts of the small intestine (perhaps due to low stomach acid, compromised digestive function, etc.), this could lead to extra fermentation of the food particles by bacteria in the intestinal tract, which can then lead to bloating, motility issues, gas buildup, distension, pain, and more.
Likewise, trying to stay as present during meals, as possible, is a great way to support better digestion.
If we're eating while watching TV, responding to emails, scrolling through insta, it can take our focus off of chewing (which we just covered the importance of), and may actually keep us in a stressed, "fight-or-flight" state, which is not ideal for digestion.
Tongue Scraping
Our oral health actually has a huge say in our gut health (and overall health). We actually have an oral microbiome (did you know that? 👀), and it plays a role in what our intestinal microbiome looks like further down the tract.
Bacteria in our mouth can actually make their way (translocate) through our digestive system (especially if there isn’t enough stomach acid to neutralize them), and influence the populations in our gut microbiome. This can potentially contribute to imbalances or “dysbiosis” in the gut microbiome. There is newer science actually investigating the connection between the oral microbiome, and dysbiosis like SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth).
The tongue is actually one spot in our mouth that has greater populations of bacteria (you might have noticed this for yourself, as a white-ish or yellow-ish film on your tongue). Tongue scraping is a great way to get rid of this plaque-like build-up on the tongue, so we aren’t swallowing it back!
I recommend scraping your tongue after you brush your teeth in the morning, and before bed. I also recommend brushing and tongue scraping before having your glass of water in the morning!
Alright!
We just covered 6 ways that you can support better digestion through lifestyle:
elevate your knees for better poops
incorporate movement every day
abdominal massage
deep belly breathing
eat mindfully
tongue scraping
Whether you might be experiencing constipation, diarrhea, bloating and distention, acid reflux, or gas, these lifestyle tools and practices will help support better digestive function, and a healthy microbiome.
If you are currently struggling with your gut health, have implemented these lifestyle practices, and find that you’re still struggling — it may warrant some further investigation to see if there may be an underlying imbalance in your gut!
If looking for support from a practitioner seems like the best next step for you — then I'd love to invite you to check out my program, The Gut Restore Method, to see if it might be a good fit.
The Gut Restore Method is a comprehensive 1:1 program, where I help folks restore their gut, recharge their energy, and nourish their nervous system via a root-cause, functional approach ✨
You can learn more about it here.
