Hannah Aylward (00:00.108)

repairing your gut, it doesn’t come down to one supplement. It never was one thing for me. It was repairing function and addressing my gut environment and everything that impacted that, whether that was my nervous system or environmental toxin exposure or the food that I was eating or my microbial composition as well. And you can think of these six steps that I outlined for you today as different gears in the machine that are kind of keeping everything running.

If one gear stops working or stops turning, then the rest of the things are going to be impacted by that too, right?

Hannah Aylward (00:35.704)

Welcome to the Nutrient Dense Podcast. I’m your host, Hannah Aylward, holistic health coach, functional gut health practitioner, and the founder of Han. So many people are continuously failed by conventional and alternative health care. We are here to do it differently. Alongside my team of functional registered dietitians, I’ve helped hundreds of women around the world overcome their chronic digestive issues when nothing else worked.

I’ve learned a thing or two about what it really takes to transform your health from the inside out, and I’m here to share it all with you. Please keep in mind that this podcast is for educational purposes only and should never be used as medical advice. Now, let’s dive in. Your transformation is waiting. Hello, hello. So today we’re going to be diving into a little training that I have for you guys. And we’ll be discussing my story and how I actually

Reversed my IBS, bloating, and food sensitivities, and kind of taking you through the six key steps that I followed, the key the six kind of key steps that you really need to know if you are also interested in ditching your chronic GI and digestive issues. We’ll kick things off with a little bit of my story just to give you kind of a little bit of context. For those of you that are new here and you’re not super familiar with me, I’m Hannah Ilward. I’m the CEO and founder of Han.

And at hand we really help women overcome their chronic gut and digestive issues by addressing by taking a root cause approach to addressing and repairing the gut, the gut microbiome, the gut function, the gut barrier, all of that good stuff. And we specialize in chronic GI issues. And I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now, which is totally crazy to think about. We’ve learned a lot over the years, we’ve grown, we’ve adjusted, and and we’re always learning. We’re always in new trainings to learn to continue to be able to support our clients. So

It’s really good work. I really got into this work because I needed it myself. Surprise, surprise, right? So it was a a really, really long time of struggle for me. So I struggled with chronic gut and digestive issues for about seven years. And when I say when I say chronic, it was like every day impacted everything that I did throughout my day, everything that I ate, the list goes on and on. So I really feel for you if you are, if that’s you right now, I’ve been through it and I know.

Hannah Aylward (02:54.69)

just how wearable it can be and how much it will impact your quality of life. I was really the girl that ate healthier than all of her friends, right? I remember meeting meeting friends and they would be like, I have never met anyone that has eaten as healthy as you do, Hannah. And I was cooking my meals at home. I was like buying veggies. I was buying organic, I was using non-toxic products like skincare products and makeup and all of that. And I was really mindful of everything that I put into my body and on my body for a for a long time.

a really long time. And still, you know, even though I brought my own snacks everywhere, I didn’t eat gluten, I didn’t eat dairy, I didn’t eat any processed sugar. I would have like one glass of organic red wine every other week, maybe, with my girls. So I was conscious, right? I was exercising multiple times a week and I was doing I was doing all the things. All the things that they tell you to do, I was doing them. All of the things that you that you learn about when it comes to like bettering your health and eating healthier and all of that. I was doing all of those things. I was not

I was not buying anything with a long list of ingredients. I was shopping the perimeter of the store. Like the list goes on and on. I had already taken out a bunch of foods that weren’t supportive for my overall health. And I was still struggling nonstop with chronic digestive issues. So as you can imagine, incredibly, incredibly frustrating. Right. It was like I feel like I’m putting in so much effort and I’m not really getting any results that my my results aren’t matching my my effort. Right. So I struggled with chronic bloating.

Basically after every single thing that I ate. So it didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter if I ate a piece of bread, which I really didn’t because I wasn’t eating gluten for I kid you not, I didn’t eat it for ten years. And I didn’t eat dairy for ten years. I was really like I followed an elimination diet at at its core, like a strict elimination diet, for a huge portion of my life, thinking that that was gonna fix my issues. And it just it just never did, right? Or else I wouldn’t have been on it for that long.

So was like I was I was taking out these foods, I was eating as healthy as possible, but I was still dealing with chronic nonstop digestive issues. So constant bloating didn’t really matter what I ate. I could have eaten an apple, I could have eaten a sweet potato, I could have eaten a salad, I could have eaten a carrot, I could have eaten French fries. I mean, it didn’t it didn’t matter. Anything everything that I ate upset my stomach and it would leave me kind of like gassy, bloated, distended, having to unbutton my pants, and also just wanting to kind of stay at home. You know, you don’t really feel good in your body when things like that are happening. So I would just started

Hannah Aylward (05:12.162)

I just started avoiding social interactions and hiding at home a little bit because no one really understood what I was going through. And I was almost like a little embarrassed about a bit, which you definitely don’t need to be. But that’s how I felt, right? So it was starting to impact all these different areas of my life, including my relationships too. It was it was impacting my relationships, how I could show up for my friends, my family, any partners. I mean, dating with chronic digestive issues is not not easy. It sucks. So it was it was starting to kind of go into all of these different areas of my life and my health.

So for me specifically, we see clients with all kinds of different digestive issues and skin issues and low energy and things like that. For me, it was really mostly constant bloating, no matter what I ate, cleanest food, healthiest food, organic, not organic, didn’t matter, right? Then it was like a lot of IBS stuff. If you Googled IBS, I had I I hit the mark, right? So it was everything that kind of came along with IBS, like the hypersensitivity, the irregular bowel movements, the chronic bloating, all of that kind of stuff.

Lots of different food sensitivities. So I was reacting to most of the things that I ate. I was feeling like my list of food sensitivities was growing longer. So the list of things that I couldn’t eat was growing longer, and the list of things that I could eat was shrinking. And I was still restricting, right? Eating like not eating gluten, not eating dairy, not eating this, not eating that. And it wasn’t actually helping. My list of foods that I could tolerate was just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. to the point where I was like, none of this makes sense. I mean, there’s gotta be something super, super wrong wrong with me, right?

This is not working. I also had all of this kind of created huge food anxiety. If you know, you know. So it was like, I’m terrified to eat out. I’m terrified if I go outside of my routine that things will flare a lot. They were already flaring. I couldn’t afford bigger flares. so I kind of just started skipping meals because it was like the only thing that that took down the bloating a little bit. Would not recommend because that will cause more issues down the line. But my whole life was impacted by all of this, right? Constipation. I dealt with constipation too. So I would travel.

And I would, I mean, I remember one time I didn’t have bowel movement for like 10 days after traveling. That’s ever happened to you. You know, it’s like one of the most uncomfortable things ever. And it leads to a lot of tears, leads to a lot of like menti bees and tears. So I’ve been been there as well. and even though I was doing everything right, like all of these things were still happening to me, looking very descended and bloated and like four to six months pregnant after eating anything. And like I said, I lived on these elimination diets. I spent

Hannah Aylward (07:35.874)

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on different gut repairing supplements. And this was, you know, when I was really struggling, this was, this was a couple of years ago at this point. Many, many years ago at this point. So it was like there were a couple functional medicine doctors talking about gut health and digestive health. And they were selling kits and probiotics and enzymes and L-glutamine and all of that. So I was just buying it all up. I was like, okay, this has got to be the answer. This has got to be the answer. I’ll just get an elimination diet and I’ll take these supplements and then hopefully that will fix something.

And it never really did, right? So I was taking a glutamine, I was taking enzymes, I was doing a lot of this, and I was putting in so much effort to feel better and to heal my gut, not fully understanding what that meant, but was reading about it, right? And I thought I was doing what I needed to do to heal my gut. And it just wasn’t really working. My my results weren’t really matching my effort. And looking back on all of this, I wish I knew now what I knew then. And I wish that I I’d

I understood that I just needed a better strategy versus like I was inherently broken. So a lot of my strategy was remove, remove, remove and optimize, optimize, optimize. And instead of going, okay, I need to remove these foods because I can’t tolerate them. I wish I knew then that the lots of the food reactions and the bloating and the constipation and the sensitivities were actually a result of what was going on in my gut environment.

But I didn’t really know that, right? Because I was like new to the game. This was before I got into this field and now do it as a career. And this is why I do all this. This is why I have the lives, the podcasts, why we help hundreds of clients a year. It’s because I’ve been through it and I’ve got and I got through my own issues and I like helping other women overcome their own issues. So just a little bit of context. If any of that resonates with you, you’re in the right place. You’re not broken. There is so much that we can do to get you feeling better. And now I want to walk you through.

Kind of the six steps that I walked myself through in order to overcome a lot of these digestive issues that I was experiencing. And most gut, you know, there’s so much noise right now in the in the space. There’s so much noise. We have like noise from influencers, we have noise from practitioners, we have noise from people with very strong opinions about carnivore or plant-based or fiber or no fiber or this or parasites or, you know, whatever it is. And it’s exhausting and it’s super overwhelming, especially if you don’t know how to like sort through the noise.

Hannah Aylward (09:52.76)

Which, how could you? How could you know how to sort through the noise? Unless you’ve done a bunch of training in this, you know? And everyone’s a little, a little different. But a lot of the advice out there just doesn’t work. People are taught to look at their symptoms and chase those symptoms. So it’s like, okay, I have bloating. How do I get rid of the bloating? I have constipation. I have histamine issues. Okay, I need anti-histamines. I need low histamine diet, or I have bloating. So let me remove the high FODMAP foods when there’s just so much more to it. So we need to.

Instead of listening to the advice that’s like remove gluten, remove dairy, cut out sugar, cut out cut out FODMAPs, take probiotics, enzymes, all of that kind of stuff, these things, some of them can help temporarily, absolutely, right? Some of them have a time and place those interventions, but it’s rarely actually fixing the deeper why. The why as to what what led to the gut becoming dysfunctional in the first place and what imbalances are we experiencing in the gut that is causing, that are causing.

These reactions to the food that we are eating. So what I wish I knew sooner, because it would have made my life, I would have been a lot nicer to myself and it would have been a lot easier on myself because I was just like berating myself. Like, you gotta eat better, you gotta do this, you can’t eat this, you can’t eat this. And it just never got me anywhere. What I wish I knew then was that chronic digestive issues are less of a food problem and they’re more of a gut environment problem. And I’m gonna kind of walk you through what that means because it’s okay if you don’t know what that means.

The your gut environment is really like what happens to the food after you eat it? Can you break it down efficiently? Where is it going? How’s it entering your gut microbiome? How’s your gut motility? Like after you swallow the food that you are eating, what’s happening next? When we get breakdowns in this environment, we start to react to a lot of foods and experience many different digestive issues. So chronic GI issues are very rarely a food problem. Of course, in the case of like celiac disease, gluten’s off the table, right? But for most of the people that we see,

They’re just reacting to like everything that they eat. They can eat one they can eat the same food on one day and feel fine and they’ll eat that exact same meal the next day and they’ll be bloated. They’ll be gassy. They’ll be constipated. They’ll be burping. They’ll have reflux. This is not the food’s fault. We’re eating the exact same food, right? This is a result of dysfunction in the gut environment. So that that concept I want you to really take with you after this training, because I think it’ll be very helpful to understand what could be going on in your body and how to actually fix it and just avoid you from going on that like.

Hannah Aylward (12:14.07)

Restrictive diet rabbit down the restrictive diet rabbit hole that kind of leads you nowhere except for into deeper food fear and possible restriction and doesn’t actually repair anything deeper at that root cause level. So let’s walk through the six steps that I followed personally to reverse my IBS, the chronic bloating that I was experiencing, food sensitivities, constipation, and what this could could look like for you too. So step number one for me was nutrition. And I talk a lot about food.

Right. And it’s not these food sensitivities and responses are not at the root of chronic digestive issues. But there’s no doubt that the food that you eat impacts your health. Right. I think we all, I think we all kind of know that by now. So I won’t I won’t do too much educating or convincing here. But the food that you eat directly impacts your gut microbiome. And your diet is one of the strongest and most modifiable factors influencing the gut microbes. Which gut microbes thrive in your gut microbiome, which decline and don’t over and don’t grow.

And what metabolic byproducts that they actually produce. Because your gut bacteria eat up certain foods and then they produce these byproducts that we would call something like postbiotics. So every meal that you’re eating is either feeding your good gut bacteria, or it’s feeding these more opportunistic microbes, or it’s and starving parts of your gut microbiome that we want to feed efficiently. So your diet doesn’t just nourish you, it’s it nourishes the trillions of different microorganisms.

That are housed in your gut microbiome. And when we’re talking about your gut microbiome, we’re usually talking about this that ecosystem of trillions of different microorganisms in small and large intestine. We also have some in the stomach, kind of higher up the chain, but most of that is kind of like your small and large intestine, with the majority, those like the much higher levels of microorganisms existing in the large intestine or the colon. So kind of down the chain, right? Which is also why I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but which is also why.

When we’re looking to repair gut health and gut function, we never start with something like probiotics. That’s like last on the chain. Probiotics, when you take them, you’re hoping that they make their way into your large intestine. Hopefully, most of them don’t, but you want them to make it all the way down there. But we have to ask, like, what’s happening farther up the chain that could be influencing that microbiome piece in the large intestine anyway? So we would we rarely start with something like that because we have to look at everything else that’s impacting.

Hannah Aylward (14:35.874)

That gut microbiome aspect. And we’ll be talking about that today. So back to the nutrition side of things, right? If you’re currently feeling very reactive to many foods, it’s not really a food problem overall. We have that deeper breakdown in the gut environment. And when you repair the gut environment, you’ll be able to tolerate more and more foods. And this is something that we’ve seen time and time and time again. I am a walking example of this, but it’s not just me. This is not, this is not just the end of one. We’ve helped hundreds of clients.

be able to tolerate foods again that they once could not. And yes, things like dairy, things like eggs, things like ice cream, going up for ice cream with their mom, things like fermented foods, right? So we’ve really seen it all tomatoes, even though they used to cause reflux for people, onions, garlic, we have, after we’ve worked with clients to repair their gut environment, they’ve been able to tolerate these foods again. So I’ve seen it work over and over and over and over again. And everyone’s process is a little different for sure, because everyone’s unique and everyone’s kind of

Breakdowns in the chain are a little bit different. But overall, when we repair function and rebalance the gut microbiome, we’ll see tolerance go up. This is coming from someone that didn’t eat gluten or dairy or processed sugar for 10 years. And I don’t recommend anyone eats a lot processed sugar. It’s not doing us any good, right? But I wouldn’t touch anything for I kid you not, close to 10 years. Strict elimination diet. And it got me kind of nowhere. And after doing the seaper re gut repairing work and walking through these steps that I’m walking you guys through.

Now I can tolerate these things. I can eat cheese. I eat cheese every day. I can eat Greek yogurt. I can travel. I can have a little bread, whatever. And it’s okay. And I don’t pay for it for the next three days or a week because my body can handle it. My gut is operating better. And there’s a there’s a lot that goes into that. So that’s kind of what’s available on the other side, right? Of course, I would never promise that like the same process is gonna get everyone there and that we can just, you know, overcome everything and like allergies and all of that. That’s not what I’m saying.

But I’m saying to the person that’s listening to this, that’s like, I feel like I’m just bloated after everything that I eat. It’s just a breakdown in function. It’s not the food itself. So we don’t need to live a life where we’re just removing those foods forever, right? But going back to this, nutrition at its core impacts the gut microbiome directly. So it’s impacting your gut bacteria, it’s obviously impacting your nutrient status, and it’s impacting your thyroid hormone conversion, it’s impacting estrogen clearance. Like the nutrition and the food that you eat impacts everything. So so much of

Hannah Aylward (17:02.114)

The health advice that we are told or that we see or that we scroll or that we listen to is all about kind of what to exclude from your diet. But there’s so much more that goes into this. And your body needs adequate nutrients to actually thrive. So living on these restrictive diets can actually worsen food sensitivities overall and worsen your gut health and your gut function. So instead of focusing on restriction, what we really want to do is focus more on nourishment. And this is something I talk to my clients about all the time.

I I want you to focus more on getting in enough of the good stuff than just eliminating a bunch of stuff that you’ve been told to eliminate. Cause your body needs the right raw materials to like do its job. So different things like liver detoxification and gut barrier repair and your gut microbiome, like these things require different nutrients. Your thyroid, your thyroid requires a bunch of nutrients to to work efficiently and convert thyroid hormone optimally so you can use it. So you have energy and and good metabolic function and all of that.

So we have to be careful with the restriction and we want to actually focus on getting in enough of the good stuff. So what I did on my journey was the first thing was that I learned how to balance my my blood sugar. And that really comes down to eating adequate protein, fiber, and fat at each meal. So that’s kind of the simplest way that I can put it. So I really focused on eating between 20 to 30 grams of protein at each and every meal, and then also adding in good quality fiber and good quality fats to each and every meal.

But big emphasis on protein here. And that made a huge difference for me pretty quickly, not so much in my like bloating, but more so in my energy and my sleep, because my blood sugar was more balanced when I did something like that. We also want to increase fiber diversity. We want to increase polyphenol rich foods. Polyphenols, your gut bacteria really eat up these polyphenols, and then they use them to produce these metabolites.

Like short chain fatty acids that actually help to support a strong gut barrier and decrease something like leaky gut, which you may have heard of. So once again, we want to eat enough of these good gut healthy foods to support our gut function overall, to support detoxification from the liver, to support the excretion of excess hormones, to support thyroid hormone conversion. All of this comes into play when we’re talking about nourishment and getting in enough of these good foods, right? So first and foremost, balance your blood sugar. That’s number one. If you have any questions about that.

Hannah Aylward (19:17.556)

Let me know. I also have a whole podcast episode on this where it’s I break down my five top tips to balance your blood sugar. I think it’s like 45 minutes and it walks you through the biggest things. And I can promise you if you implement those five things consistently, you will you will feel a difference. Go listen. It’s free. Come back to me in like two to four weeks and let me know how you’re feeling. I can almost almost guarantee you’ll feel better. So balancing blood sugar is really number one. That was a big thing that I focused on. And then I also focus on getting in more plant diversity and more.

Fiber diversity in my diet to support the growth of my good gut bacteria. The other thing that I focused on a lot was meal timing. So spacing my meals out three to four hours from each other. So my migrating motor complex could kick on and do its job. And your migrating motor complex kind of acts like this broom that helps to sweep debris through the small intestine and into the large intestine, and it prevents food particles from sitting, fermenting, and giving off gas and then overgrowing, contributing to an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine.

That will cause a lot of bloating. So the constant snacking and the constant intake can only will only exacerbate things like bloating and GI issues. Now, in order to space your meals out three to four hours in between, you have to be eating enough at each meal. So a bar is not gonna cut it, you know, a slice of turkey is not gonna cut it. We have to get you eating 30 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber, some good healthy fat at each and every meal. So then your blood sugar is more balanced and you can just kind of flow into your next meal.

without feeling starving or like you need a snack an hour later. So those are some key things. Like step number one is going to be to optimize nutrition. There’s a lot more that kind of goes into this and and nuance when it comes to this. and if you feel like you’re someone that reacts to a lot of the foods that you’re eating right now, j don’t worry. We still want to optimize nutrition here with these foundational elements. And then we also have to do the rest of what we’re going to talk about here next. So that was step number one optimizing nutrition, balancing blood sugar, fiber diversity, increasing polyphenol rich foods.

Good healthy fats, all of the and meal spacing, all of these things are going to support you on your gut repairing journey. They’re the foundation. Everything kind of comes from there. Step number two that I followed was functional testing. And this changed everything for me, which is why we run it and why we’ve run, my gosh, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these panels, if not, I mean well over a thousand at this point, to get data on what’s going on in the gut microbiome with the women that we work with. So

Hannah Aylward (21:42.988)

This was one of my personal like biggest turning points because I was doing the nutrition stuff and I was doing the random supplements, right? Like I was taking the magnesium and L-glutamine and everything, and I was following a fiber-rich, like healthy whole foods diet. And I wasn’t eating these inflammatory foods, but I still wasn’t really getting anywhere. And once I started utilizing functional testing, I started to get answers and things became a lot more clear because instead of just purchasing supplements and kind of throwing it, throwing them at into my body and seeing what helped and what didn’t.

I was using data to inform what supplements I needed based on what was actually going on in my unique gut microbiome and in my with my digestive function, which will be different from someone else’s. So when we work with clients, we always run functional labs, non-negotiable, because that’s what gives us the data to help them get better. We can tell a lot by patterns. I can tell a lot of what could be going on with your digestive function based on what you share with me. You’re like, I react to fiber or

I react to avocados and bone broth, or I react to foods rich in fats. That gives me some data to work with because I can go, yeah, that’s a breakdown in fat digestion. That’s a histamine issue, right? There are patterns that can help us. However, working with the data, we need to understand what’s going on in your gut in order to inform best next steps for you. And testing is really, really helpful here. So I ran functional soul testing on myself, and that’s when I discovered.

my gosh, I have a bunch of gut dysbiosis. I’m dealing with low stomach acid patterns. My liver actually needs some support. My bile needs some support here. I had really, really, really low secretory IgA, which is my gut immune function, which was showing me, A, that I was burnt out, B, that I needed to eat more. And C that my gut didn’t have the raw material the the like energy to actually maintain a healthy ecosystem within my gut microbiome. So it gave me a lot of data to work with, which was also why.

These other things that I was using, like digestive enzymes, weren’t working. My lab showed no need for digestive enzymes. I didn’t need them. I was pr my body was producing enough digestive enzymes on its own. My pancreas was doing a good job there. So I was just totally wasting money on enzyme support because it wasn’t, it wasn’t really getting me anywhere. It’s not what my body needed. What I needed was to support my low gut immune function, to optimize stomach acid production and to clean up my dysbiosis.

Hannah Aylward (24:03.574)

And also support my nervous system and blood sugar and all of that. And that’s what really helped me get over the hump. And I had tried it all. I mean, I had tried oregano oil, I had tried berberine, I was taking the the other supplements, the L-glutamine and all of that, but I didn’t really know what I was looking at. And that’s why I’m such a proponent for testing. And full transparency, no test is perfect. You’ve got to work with someone that understands these tests like in and out and can read between the lines because they’re not super.

black and white and like clear cut. So work with someone that’s well versed in this. But this is why we run it, because we can tell by patterns that our clients are showing up with what could be going on. But we always want to validate with testing to see what is present in their gut microbiome. sometimes blood work can be really helpful here too. So testing other things like your iron recycling system and your fan and including your ferritin and vitamin D, right? And liver markers, all of this can be a really useful part of the puzzle.

For me personally, this functional stool testing changed everything for me because instead of once again just restricting more and more foods and throwing more supplements at my digestive issues, testing allowed me to personalize interventions based on what my body needed. And I cannot tell you how many people we have supported that have come to us from working with on dozens of supplements, right? All kinds of supplements, magnesium, B12, vitamin D. It’s all fine. There’s no issue with any of those.

But when we dug a bit deeper, it’s like there’s so much more. They’re still dealing with chronic digestive issues. So most of the women that we work with are they put in so much work. They’ve done so much education. They’ve read the blog posts and they’ve read the books and they’ve listened to the podcast and they’re still stuck. And you just need a better strategy and some more focused support here, right? So it’s not that these supplements are inherently bad. Could they be supportive? Totally. But unless we know that that’s what your body needs right now, it could, it could likely just be a waste. So

There’s a more targeted approach that we can take take here to get you feeling a lot better, which is exactly what happened to me, which is why I’m such a proponent of this process, because it changed everything for me as the girl that was like doing it all right and wasn’t really feeling like anything was working. So we’ll also see a bunch of people come to us from like functional medicine doctors and naturopaths and all of that. They have them on a bunch of supplements. And then I’m like, cool, what did they test? What did why do they have you on these supplements? Like what is

Hannah Aylward (26:25.898)

What’s the reasoning for all of this? And they weren’t actually feeling any any better on this stuff, which is why they’re talking to me in the first place, right? So they’re not the supplements aren’t actually addressing the deeper roots of the of the dysfunction in their gut health, in their digestive system. and after the right testing and interventions, we were able to help them massively turn a corner when it comes to their gut and digestive issues. So functional testing changed.

everything for me, which is why we use it. I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t think it was valuable and if it didn’t make a huge difference in my life. And I just see it I see it make a huge difference in, you know, so many women that we help. And I’d say on average we help between 150 to 200 people a year in more intensive programs, building out multiple protocols. So we’re seeing a lot of what works and a lot of what doesn’t work. And I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. So

We we’re constantly tweaking and and making things better to get our clients better results. And this is something that has stayed because of its value here. But the test itself is not going to reveal any everything, right? So you wanna work with someone that knows how to read in between the lines and knows the ins and outs of these of these labs and what labs your body needs right now, because that can vary too. So we really like to work with functional stool testing, but sometimes we like to add on an HTMA. Sometimes we wanna add on a mycotoxin panel to check for mold.

Sometimes we want to add on a ther a full thyroid panel to see to check in on your thyroid function, because that could be impacting your gut health and your digestion and your bloating and constipation. Sometimes we’ll add on a SIBO breath test because that could be helpful. So there’s a lot of need for guidance here and specificity when it comes to your unique case, but the testing to me is a non-negotiable. Okay. The next thing, step three that I really took to overcome my own chronic digestive issues.

was working on supporting my detox pathways and and opening up my drainage pathways. So you can think of this as your body’s ability to actually like take out the trash. There is a process of detoxification. Our liver is always working to detoxify for us. It it goes through phases one, phase two of detoxification, phase three of detox really occurs through the gut, because you’re gonna essentially just excrete these toxins out of the body via your stool, which is why constipation is

Hannah Aylward (28:37.824)

Such a huge issue because we’re not actually able to remove these toxins that are in the body that our liver has worked so hard to package up for us for removal. We have to make sure that we can actually get them out of the body. And this is where drainage really comes into place. And this is extra, extra, extra important if you are someone that feels hypersensitive, can’t tolerate a lot of alcohol, can’t tolerate a lot of caffeine, are sensitive to smells, can’t tolerate supplements very well.

This is really, really key here. We have to work on opening up your drainage pathways. you can just think of it as like you’re it think of your home and you’re like, okay, I’m putting the trash in the trash can, but the trash is still in your home. You have to like take the bag out and go put it in the trash bin at the curb, right? This is that’s like the drainage. That’s how you can think of drainage. So we excrete these toxins after the body gets ready to package them up through.

Our stool through our sweat, right? Our lymphatic system helps us here as as well. Our kidneys. This is how we’re removing these toxins. So we have to work to optimize these things. And poor drainage can look like bloating, fatigue, like I mentioned, that hypersensitivity. So you’re like, I’m chemically sensitive. I’m I’m sensitive to smells. I’m sensitive to fragrances. I’m sensitive to supplements. I’m sensitive. You’re just kind of hypersensitive. That’s a big sign for me.

Of either mast cells are overactivating or we have this issue with detoxification and drainage that needs to be addressed first and foremost. This is also why you can, if you have ever worked with someone to do a gut protocol and you couldn’t tolerate anything. So they’re recommending supplements for you and you’re like, I can’t take these, I’m feeling horrible. There’s a that’s a sign that something else is going on. You shouldn’t feel that horrible. We need to work on opening up your drainage pathways.

So simple things that you can do there, optimizing hydration, right? Because you literally pee toxins out in your urine. Your kidneys are filtering, right? So you need to make sure that you’re staying extra hydrated. Things like electrolytes and minerals can be really helpful here. Moving your body on a daily basis is very helpful here. These are some simple things, right? We can also, of course, bring in higher level interventions to support liver detoxification, to support lymphatic drainage, to support regulating bowel movements as well.

Hannah Aylward (30:54.53)

But we have to make sure that your body can actually excrete these toxins, or else they’re your b your liver’s basically packaging them up and then it they’re just being put back into circulation. So your body’s like doing all of this hard work for you and then you can’t actually move them out. So we have to make sure that we’re opening up these drainage pathways. Other things that can be helpful are lymphatic, like stimulating your lymphatic system. So something like rebounding, dry brushing, even just bouncing up and down. You don’t need a rebounder. You can literally just like do some heel drops.

Walking, you know, massages, deep breathing, all of these things can be really helpful for supporting that lymphatic drainage. And you want to do these on a daily basis. This is not like a one and done. This is a doing this consistently. So it becomes a part of your life. So you’re supporting your body’s ability to naturally detoxify on a regular basis. And then of course, like I said, we can add in and basically always do with our clients more high-level supplement interventions and things like that to support this process too, because the women that we work with,

Have been struggling with chronic digestive issues for a long time, so you know it’s likely that we’ll need some higher level interventions there.

Hannah Aylward (32:01.4)

We are big fans of eating enough protein over here on Team Han. Protein is essential for muscle repair, a strong gut lining, balanced blood sugar levels, and so much more. For most of our clients, we like recommending around 100 grams of protein per day to start, and adding in a good quality protein powder can be super helpful for hitting those numbers. It’s an easy add-in, you can throw it into a smoothie or even add it to oatmeal. Choosing the right protein powder can feel so overwhelming.

Half of them are full of fillers and crap ingredients, and the other half honestly just taste bad. Equip protein is one of my go-to recommendations for our clients and one of my personal favorites. We love it because it only has a small handful of ingredients. It’s 100% carefully sourced, real foods, no additives, allergens, chemicals, fillers, or other junk. It’s gluten-free and it contains 21 grams of protein per serving. Equip’s Prime Protein also offers

a complete amino acid profile. It’s also independently tested to make sure that the protein powder is free of harmful amounts of heavy metals and toxins like glyphosate, which is honestly super hard to find. Equip prime protein is a grass-fed beef protein. So it is animal based, but it’s dairy free, unlike whey or casein protein powders. Grass-fed beef protein is packed with collagen, gelatin, and micronutrients that your body needs.

We also see that it’s typically much better tolerated in our clients with chronic gut and digestive issues over something like a plant-based protein powder. In addition, some of their flavors do contain natural flavors, but they’re distilled vapors from natural and organic compounds or fruits like vanilla, coconut, and strawberry, and are processed without any chemicals, fillers, binders, or artificial ingredients, which once again is incredibly hard to find. Personally, I buy both the chocolate and the vanilla.

Flavors of the Equip Prime Protein, but honestly, they have like so many other incredible flavors out now. If you’re interested in trying out Equip Prime Protein, you can use the code HANNAHAYLWARDHHC at checkout for 15% off. And we’ll pop that code in the show notes of this episode for you as well. So once again, you can go to equipfoods.com, choose the flavor of protein powder that you want, and then use code HANNAHAYLWARDHHC for 15% off.

Hannah Aylward (34:17.932)

Okay, step number four here. This is a really, really important, really, really, really important piece of the puzzle. And this is the concept of digestion. Like everyone talks about gut health and everyone talks about the gut microbiome and everyone talks about probiotics. But before your gut microbiome exists, we have to ask: are you actually digesting your food efficiently? And this is something that in the many years that I’ve been doing this, I think it’s like so, so, so overlooked. And I overlooked it too, because

When I was first in my journey, it was like I’m really, really, really focused on diet. And then I was focused on probiotics and herbals. So it was like berberine and oregno oil and all of that. But we have to ask ourselves, are we actually able to optimally digest our food? Because that is taking place before the food even makes its way into the microbiome piece. So if we’re just throwing herbals and probiotics, it’s like think of it as a chain, right? This is kind of down, this is like steps down the chain.

Digestion is a north to south process and it actually starts in the brain. You’re it’s nervous system regulated, and then we have like salivary enzymes, mastication, and then we swallow it down. And then we’re hoping that our digestive juices are strong enough to help us break down this food efficiently. And if they’re not, we’re gonna run into big issues. So most people focus on what they’re eating: probiotics, herbals, or even something like L-glutamine for the gut barrier.

restricting more foods, thinking that that’s going to really fix the problem. But before any of that comes into play, you have to actually be able to break down and digest your food, the digest the food that you are eating. And if you can’t, bloating and gas and constipation or diarrhea, these things are gonna be inevitable. So once again, digestion is a north to south process. And and something like probiotics is like last on the train. So for example, we break down our food using stomach acid, pancreatic enzymes, salibary enzymes, so many different enzymes, right?

And then also bile. If these aren’t working optimally, you’re gonna feel heavy, you’re gonna feel bloated, and you’re gonna feel gassy. And what will also happen is if we have low stomach acid kind of at the top of the funnel, you could say, that’s going to then lead to poor enzyme output and also contribute to poor bile flow. And then we’re going to basically like you’re eating this food, you’re not efficiently breaking it down and it’s sitting in your GI tract longer than we want it to. So you’re having this like incomplete digestion take place.

Hannah Aylward (36:40.386)

That will then lead to fermentation of these foods. That will then lead to gas and bloating and then food reactions. And it will also contribute to this overgrowth of bacteria and microorganisms in the gut. So in the the small and large intestine. So it’s like before we even talk about bacteria and we before we talk about things like probiotics, we have to make sure, am I breaking down the food that I’m eating efficiently or am I dealing with maldigestion? So it doesn’t matter.

What I eat, I could be eating the healthiest food in the world. If I can’t break it down efficiently, and if I can’t absorb the nutrients from the food that I’m eating well, I’m going to run into issues. So this is what I have seen just be very overlooked in this space with many different practitioners for a really, really long time. It’s not just about like killing off bacteria. It’s not just about probiotics, probiotics. It’s not just about restricting foods. It’s like,

Do we have optimal function all around? And this is why people can get really stuck. Because it’s also possible you can add in things like herbals, herbal antimicrobials, or whatever, or maybe even antibiotics, and you can feel a little better and then it will kind of come come right back. It’s because we have an optimized function north to south. So this is a really, really big piece of the puzzle. And this is something that I had to work on personally as well. And things that you can do here to really support optimizing your digestive function today, chewing your food, chewing your food to applesauce, consistency.

Chewing it to usually like 30, 30 chews per bite of food. And you’re gonna realize if you take this two cents with you, you never do that. You’re chewing your food like three times and then you’re swallowing it down. That can, you know, after we swallow our food, we don’t have teeth anywhere else in our GI tract. We are relying on our digestive juices to do the rest of the work. For many of us, we’re struggling in that department if we have chronic GI issues and chronic digestive issues like gas and bloating. So you have to chew your food well. This is like,

one of the first phases of digestion that that occurs at the top and then affects everything downstream. So chewing your food to applesauce consistency, chewing it really well about 30 times per bite, eating in a more relaxed state is going to be helpful as well because the body will be set up for optimal digestion. Eating and when you do eat, feeling being present with your food, smelling your food, like and and interacting with your food, cooking your own food, all of these things help too.

Hannah Aylward (39:04.928)

initiate the cephalic phase of digestion, which takes place before we even take a bite of food. Before you even take a bite of food, your body is like priming to digest that food, or it’s totally unaware that food is even coming. And you can think of it. I always use the example of when you walk into like an Italian re food restaurant and you can smell the garlic and you can smell the tomato sauce and all of that. And then you walk in and you’re like, ooh, I’m I’m hungry. Like my body’s getting hungry. I’m ready to eat.

You’re giving you’re taking in those aromas. You’re you’re entering that environment and your brain is going, Ooh, food is coming. I can smell it. And that’s literally helping to turn on the digestive process, specifically the cephalic phase of digestion. So we have to be present with our food. We have to chew really well. And we want to like put our phones down, put the computer down, turn things off, and and actually be present and grateful for the food that we are able to eat. So you can be eating the healthiest foods in the world, but if you can’t actually break them down.

Digestive issues, nutrient deficiencies, gut barrier issues, gas bloating, quote unquote IBS, like all of that stuff is is coming because you’re you’re we’re aren’t able to actually break it down very well. Of course, when we work with clients, we’ll use higher level interventions for this, right? So depending on what they need, we may support enzyme production, we may support bile flow, we may support stomach acid production, but it’s not a one size fits all for everyone. And there’s customization really needed here.

But if you want to dig into these topics more, I have podcast episodes on all of them. I have a podcast episode on Bioflow, I have a podcast episode on low stomach acid. Go listen, go binge the podcast and listen to these episodes. They’re super helpful. And it’s just the nutrient dense podcast, and it’s all right there for you. I have like 84 episodes, which is crazy. I don’t know, I don’t know how I’ve made 84 episodes. But this is this is key, right? So this is key before a lot of the other stuff. And this is influencing your bloating and gas. And this is part of the reason why.

You feel like you’re eating a super healthy, clean diet and you’re still looking six months pregnant with bloating. A big barrier there and kind of bottleneck will be the inability to optionally break down your food and digest your food. So this is like a key, key, key step in this whole process of repairing your gut. Step number five that I worked on was I had to rebalance my gut microbiome. So I was working on the nutrition, I was working on opening up my drainage pathways, I was, I was balancing my blood sugar, I was doing all of that. I ran the right testing.

Hannah Aylward (41:23.852)

And then I could see, I need help with stomach acid. And I could also see I have a bunch of gut dysbiosis. I had a bunch of overgrown gut bacteria that were causing me to react to the foods that I was eating. And which is also why it never made sense to me. Cause I was like, I’m eating this one day and I’m fine. And then I’m eating this exact meal the next day and I’m not fine. And it’s the same food. I’m eating the same food and I’m responding to it differently. That is a big sign that there’s a breakdown in that gut environment, right? So

After running the correct labs, I realized I had gut dysbiosis. I was also dealing with mold exposure. So I had really high levels of mycotoxins after testing that was totally wrecking my gut health, influencing my bile, causing intestinal permeability. And it was also leading to microbial dysbiosis in my gut. And no one was catching that. I saw doctors, I saw people, and no one even knew what was going on. They were like, I was even told at one point, they like, just lose weight. You should just like lose a couple pounds. And I was like,

Thank you so much for that advice. That was so helpful. I’m so glad I made the time to come here. This got me nowhere. So I had to really rebalance my gut microbiome. So I realized I had high levels of mycotoxins after testing. I had gut dysbiosis. I was dealing with patterns of low stomach acid, and I had bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine. So I was just like, I had bacterial overgrowth across the board, which was why I felt like I was banging my head into a wall because I was eating.

salads and carrots and veggies and pro lean proteins and no gluten and no dairy and all of these things. And I was just like bloated and gassy regardless. And then I started to get even more sensitive to things where I would like, I couldn’t tolerate any alcohol and I couldn’t tolerate so many different things. And then I literally just looked inflamed. If you look at pictures of me then versus now, I look just, I’m just puffier, right? So my whole body was struggling. And fortunately it hadn’t gotten to the point where like,

I had Hashimoto’s or hypothyroidism or anything like that yet. And I’m glad I caught it, because all of these breakdowns in gut health can contribute to things like that. So I had to go in and rebalance my gut microbiome in order to tolerate more foods and in order to decrease things like gas and bloating and support, also support a healthy gut barrier. Cause you’ve probably heard of something like leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability. And we always, in any case of increased intestinal permeability, we have to ask.

Hannah Aylward (43:41.772)

What is leading to the breakdown in the gut barrier in the first place? And anytime we have big overgrowths in the gut of unsupportive gut bacteria, more dysbiotic, opportunistic gut bacteria, that will impact our gut barrier and it will cause inflammation and irritation of that gut lining, leading to that more quote unquote leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability picture here. So I had to do a lot of rebalancing when it came to my gut microbiome after.

Optimizing my digestive function after optimizing my nutrition and opening up my drainage pathways. So it looked like for me, cleaning up dysbiosis, I had to support the growth of my good, beneficial gut bacteria. I had to support the growth of short chain fatty acids as well that help to naturally seal up the gut barrier and reduce inflammation. A lot of that you can do with different food strategies. So really increasing your intake of prebiotics and fiber-rich foods and especially polyphenol-rich foods. And I had to really look at

In taking more prebiotics to support the growth of my good gut bacteria while also using interventions to take down the levels of my bad, unsupportive gut bacteria and contribute to kind of rebalancing that gut microbiome overall. And the key here is really to build gut resiliency. We want to restore balance in the gut microbiome and we want to build resiliency because a diverse and healthy gut microbiome helps to actually weed out these other things from taking over. So

When we have adequate levels of our good gut bacteria, it helps to keep other things like Candida, for example, out of the way. Like because they’re all existing in the gut environment, but there’s not going to be any room for something like Candida when we have a lot of our good gut microbes. And there’s not going to be any room, like our good gut bacteria help to support good gut immune function and kind of maintain that ecosystem, and vice versa. So we wanna rebuild a nice, healthy, diverse gut microbiome.

through food strategies and also taking down levels of unsupportive gut bacteria to kind of rebalance things. And then we’ll see that tolerance will go up and digestive issues will go down. And that is exactly what happened to me in my case. And then I could find myself traveling and not being constipated for 10 days after it took me pro personally probably my whole journey was a long time because I didn’t know what I was doing. So that’s why I help people today. It was years of struggle, years and years and years of struggle. But once I kind of had like a like a real plan

Hannah Aylward (46:01.376)

I would say three to four months in, I was like, my gosh, this is night and day difference. And I could travel and I could be out of my routine. And I was like, I’m going to the bathroom. I can eat food and not pay for it for, you know, a week after. And I’m experiencing way less digestive flare-ups because I was kind of restructuring and repairing that gut environment. So it’s pretty amazing what can happen. We’ll see. Quality of life just gets a lot better.

From personal experience, life is a lot easier on the other side of dealing with all of these chronic digestive issues, way more enjoyable enjoyable. So that was really step five. And then I want to make sure we get step six before we kind of round out and I can answer any questions that you guys have too. So step number six for me was really tending to my nervous system. And this is really important to discuss. And also, if you listen to my podcast or if you’ve been a client of ours, you know that I always say that stress.

Stress isn’t just stress. It doesn’t just stay stress, right? So we know that there is a huge gut-brain connection. Your gut impacts your brain, and your brain impacts your gut. It is, it is bi-directional. Your gut is influencing your brain massively, which is also why we’ll see people with chronic GI issues deal with like anxiety, depression, that kind of thing, brain fog for sure, especially as we have an increased inflammation from something like lipopolysaccharide producing gut bacteria. It can get kind of specific, but.

Gut issues can contribute to brain inflammation, right? Crossing the blood-brain barrier and and taking things off and leading to things like like brain fog and trouble remembering your thoughts and focusing and all of that kind of stuff. But your brain is also going to influence your digestive function. So personally, I had been in survival mode forever, for my whole life. My whole life I’ve I was in survival mode. I was always type A. So if you were to ask like my my dad, you know, it was like,

I am getting straight A’s. I’m graduating top of class. I graduated college early. I skipped a grade when I was younger. And I was like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I played sports. I practiced with two teams. I played for the school and I played for a travel team. And it was like I and I had a job. I mean, it was like nonstop and I I was wearing myself out. So I had always been type A and I also started restricting my diet at like age fourteen. So I started my first restrictive diet when I was very, very young.

Hannah Aylward (48:20.706)

Because I just wanted to control the size of my body. And that did a lot of damage. So I had years of under-eating, heavy restriction, and over-exercising because of the fact that I just never felt good enough. And I was always trying to be better and always trying to optimize and always go, go, go, feeling like I was never, never ever enough. And then when I was a child, my parents got divorced and it was really bad. And we like lost everything. And I was in and out of hotels, and it was really, really, really ugly.

So I adapted to this lack of safety by thinking I’m gonna control everything that I can control and I’m going to grasp onto what makes me feel safe because everything was very messy and unstable. So all my body knew was survival, not safety. I I didn’t even know what safety in my body felt like at this time because I had adapted. Cause the brain’s very smart and you’re very smart. Like your body’s very smart. So you’ll just adapt.

Things get really stressful, you adapt. Things get really dangerous, you try to adapt. And the brain is always gonna help to try to keep you feeling safe, even if it’s not supporting you. So my, my, my kind of what’s the word I’m looking for? Adapt adaptation, I guess for lack of better phrasing, was if I if I’m perfect and I do every single thing right, then I will be enough and I

Will then be able to relax and I’ll be I and then and then everything will be okay. Right. But you never get there. You never get there. You’re always just chasing that forever and ever and ever if you’re not careful. And I was just stuck in this stress loop because no one’s ever gonna tell you you’re enough. You have to be enough for yourself, right? No one else is ever gonna give that to you. But I didn’t know how to give it to myself. And I was shown that, you know, in order to kind of here’s my environment, my environment’s a mess, everything’s unstable.

How can I be my best and protect myself so I can just move forward? So it was like stuck in this stress loop, go, go, go, never stopping, always on edge, walking on eggshells my entire childhood, which led me to be totally in this chronic fight or flight state. And that fight or flight state is when the stress hormones are just being pumped out, right? And being in that stress loop, being in that chronic fight or flight state.

Hannah Aylward (50:34.658)

Your body cannot repair in this state. You’re always on edge and you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? Especially if you’ve endured things in your life that have like primed you that way. And I had, I had been through really hard stuff where I didn’t know what was gonna come at me next. So I just had to try to control everything that I could, you know. So I was always, always, always on edge. And fight or flight impacts your digestion, right? So when you enter into that sympathetic dominant state, stomach acid is directly affected by this, vagal tone is directly affected by this.

Digestive enzyme secretion, gut motility, blood flow to your digestive organs, intestinal permeability. I mean, the chronic fight or flight state, living in that chronically stressed-out state, impairs digestive function directly. This is not theory. We we see it, right? It is going to cause degradation of the gut barrier. It is going to lower stomach acid levels, which will then impact enzyme secretion and also bile flow, right?

It can also increase mast cell activation. So high cortisol levels can actually contribute to mast cell activation. It can contribute to the immune system always being on, cranking out those inflammatory cytokines as well, increasing levels of inflammation. And it will also impact your gut microbial composition. So the the goal in all of this is not just eliminating stress and being like, okay, cool, I’m just gonna like quit everything and I’m just gonna

you know, meditate for 10 hours a day, unless you can do that, that’s wonderful. I would say please go do that if you are able to. But most of us aren’t, right? We’re like managing families and jobs and finances and the world and all of this stuff. So most of us don’t really have that option. So it’s not about elec totally eliminating stress forever. It’s about becoming more resilient to it, supporting your own body’s physiology and having the tools that you can use to support yourself when things get stressful, because they will get stressful.

Because life’s life is like a little inherently stressful, right? We can also work on our perspective and our belief systems that impact our stress levels as well. But instead of just thinking about it as like taking out all stress, it’s like, how can we support the body in being more resilient to stressors? Because it’s very often that we will encounter those stressors. Like it will happen, right? So I was really forced to take a look at my own patterns and what was contributing to my own lack of safety, how I spoke to myself, how hard I was on myself.

Hannah Aylward (52:52.0)

what I thought was normal when it came to stress levels, under eating for years, over-exercising for years, not prioritizing my own recovery when it came to workouts, when it came to sleep, when it came to like my workload, I just I just pushed, push, push, push, push, and eventually tipped myself over the edge where it was like, I can’t even digest anything that I eat anymore. Because stress does not say stress. It has physiological impacts on the body and directly impairs digestive function. So simple things that you can do today

You know, bringing in a a breath a morning breath work practice, putting your phone down, bricking your phone, putting it away so you’re not constantly taking in new information and you’re not constantly overstimulated. Prioritizing your sleep, going to bed earlier, making sure you’re getting a good eight hours, spending time in nature, eating enough food, balancing your blood sugar, dealing with gut microbial overgrowths and gut permeability issues and infections, because those are all stressors, right? Not eating enough or having a regular blood sugar levels, that’s a stressor, that’s a physical stressor.

Nutrient deficiencies are a physical stressor. Environmental toxin exposure, things like mold, that’s a stressor on the body. It it increases stress in the body. So how can we, instead of going, okay, I’m just never gonna have any stress at all, because once again, that’s kind of impossible, it’s like, where can we become more resilient and minimize the stress where we can take care of our bodies so we’re also more resilient to stress? So I had to really, really, really do some work here because I was stuck in this pattern of like, I’m ne I’m

No chill. Like a no chill. It was go, go, go, go, go, go, go, work, work, work, work, work, and never, ever, ever settle. I never took time off. And that was just kind of revving me up and contributing to more and more stress. It was like I was like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. It’s like supplements and healthy diet and all of these things. And then it’s like it’s just draining and draining and draining and draining. So we have to look at this nervous system component when it comes to repairing our gut health overall.

And then also just su supporting every every body system. Cause like your thyroid’s directly impacted by this, your gallbladder is directly directly impacted by this too. It’s it’s all connected. So we want to absolutely support the nervous system when it comes to really any type of healing or repairing or are optimizing health. So this is this is also really, really essential for getting better and staying better. So if you’ve done gut protocols, if you’ve taken antimicrobials, if you’ve

Hannah Aylward (55:13.528)

Take in the supplements, if you’ve taken enzymes, if you’ve taken HCL and you’ve done a lot of this stuff and you felt better and then things came back, we always want to look at why. Why did things come back? Did we have an environmental toxin exposure? Are we low in minerals that we need? And or did we just go back into these habits where we’re go, go, go, never stop, and our nervous system is completely dysregulated, setting the environment for these things to just kind of come right back. So regulating the nervous system and supporting yourself here is key to getting better and really staying better.

So I learned a lot along my journey, which is which is why I do the work that I do today, right? It completely changed my life for the better. And I’m not just saying that. Like that’s how I created all this. That’s why I ended up here. That’s why I do these trainings. Repairing my gut changed my entire it changed my entire life, which sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not. I mean, my life on the other side of all of this is drastically different. And that’s what I want for every everyone, because no one should be bogged down by their health issues and having them dictate their

Decisions and what they wear and where they can travel and all of that kind of stuff as much as we can, you know, as much certain times, yeah, there’s you know, we’re we’re born with things, whatever. But a lot of these chronic digestive issues, we can do so much to get you feeling better and and better the quality of your life. So healing for me, repairing for me, because the word healing, I’m like, we’re never healed. We’re always in process of of healing, right? Healing is is long term. It’s it’s it’s forever because life continues to happen. So I’m mindful of kind of using that word, but.

repairing your gut, it it doesn’t come down to like one supplement. It it never was one thing for me. It was repairing function and addressing my gut environment and everything that impacted that, whether that was my nervous system or environmental toxin exposure or the food that I was eating or my mo microbial composition as well. And you can think of these six steps that I outlined for you today as like different gears in the machine that are kind of keeping everything running. If one gear stops working or stops turning

Then the rest of the the things are going to be impacted by that too, right? So if our digestive output struggles, that’s gonna impact the microbiome. If the microbiome struggles, that’s gonna impact the gut barrier. If our nutrition struggles, that’s gonna impact our nutrients that we actually have available for our body to do what it needs to do to support our body’s just underlying baseline physiology. So all of these things work together, which is why you’ll never find it in like one diet or one supplement, because we have to repair this whole ecosystem.

Hannah Aylward (57:39.414)

Which can feel overwhelming if it’s new to you, but it’s not. You know, you just gotta work with someone that knows what they’re doing and can kind of help you throughout this process. And that’s why we’re here. So when we start to put all of these other pieces of the puzzle together, your gut can start to repair. And people often start by adding in supplements without any data or just taking out foods without any data or searching for like the one root cause. There’s never one, you guys. It’s always like a couple things because it’s all they all are connected. They all influence one another. So it’s never just low stomach acid.

It’s never just SIBO. It’s never just leaky gut. It’s never just mold, right? It’s like all of these things create imbalances in the rest of the system, which once again can feel over overwhelming, but doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be. The good news is that once we come in and we repair all of these different areas, you’re gonna feel so much better on the other side. So jumping into just one of these things is never really the the answer. We need a more comprehensive approach overall. So

If you have tried everything and you haven’t gotten results, it doesn’t mean that you’re broken. It just means that, you know, you need a better strategy. And I know it can once again feel overwhelming for some because there’s a lot of different pieces. But the good news is that you don’t have to really know and understand all of these pieces and tackle it on your own. And we’re here to help if if you want and if you’re interested. So if you’re really interested in supporting your body from the ground up and repairing your digestion as a whole, we’re gearing up to start the next round of my HDSB program.

We’re gonna kick it off in September. So it’s we start the second week of September. Inside of this program, we run functional testing, we build out customized protocols. We walk you through all of the steps that I outlined here. We’re gonna talk nutrition, we’re gonna talk blood sugar, we’re gonna we’re going to run testing, we’re going to build out protocols using supplementation, targeted nutrition, lifestyle stuff, nervous system support. And it also comes with a lot of coaching. And it’s not a generic protocol, right? It’s it’s customized interventions and coaching based on.

based on your needs. So if you are interested in in working with us in that capacity, you can just DM me the word wait list or or message me the word wait list, or you can comment, you can comment wait list and it’ll that it’ll be in the show notes below. You can look in the show notes below for the wait list link. And this is the final round of the program for the year. So we run, we open this program up two to three times a year. typically this is our last round for the year. So if you’re interested in getting these labs and walking through this process with us and getting some expert guidance.

Hannah Aylward (59:58.444)

And having all of the guestwork taken out of it. We’d love to help you. So just send me the word wait list and I’ll send you a link. You can sign up for the wait list and then you get first access to the program. We’ve already have people signing up, which is amazing. And we have not, we’re not even close to opening the doors. People are joining the wait list and signing up from there. And we do cap the program. So if you are interested, just don’t hesitate. Reach out, ask questions so we can make sure that we can get you a spot in there and support you inside of your gut repairing journey. So I hope this was super, super helpful for you today. Yeah. Amazing, you guys.

Big hugs to each and every one of you and reach out with any questions. And once again, just send me the word wait list if you want to hop on that. And we can support you. Bye everyone.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Nutrient Dense podcast. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and come back next week for a new episode. See you then.