Good Belly Yoga

If you want a plant to grow in your garden, it helps if you understand your plant’s nutritional needs so they can thrive and be healthy. Years of gardening has taught me that plants have specific needs and so do the bacteria in my gut. I want a healthy garden in my gut.

I have learned a lot from growing things in my garden, and the care I put into learning each plant’s best growth environment has also taught me that I have to take care of my insides like I take care of my garden.

I’ve been eating yogurt all my life because I wanted a good gut, but I didn’t stop there.

I kept studying and learning a lot about the process of digestion.

One of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read on the process of digestion is by Mary Roach, “Gulp: Travels Around the Gut.”

I have learned so much from paying attention to my little friends inside me. They don’t need just probiotics, they also need prebiotics.

You want your gut to be a friendly environment for your microbiome. Yogurt was a good start, but I learned there were so many more materials these friendly micro-organisms needed to build a healthy home for themselves inside my gut.

Now I eat a lot of vegetables and drink a lot of water to be healthy. And I take a lot of vitamins and supplements to support them. I drink herbal teas that are specific to my body and its needs.

I found out there were many different things I could do if my guts get upset. I have a menu of solutions to choose from. It took a long time to find the right combination, but I persisted and monitored my progress by being in touch with my body and how it reacted to different foods.

Sometimes I need to eat oranges, chocolate, and whole warm cooked grains, I love cheese but I avoid eating too much, so I can digest and take in the natural vitamins in my food that will support a healthy gut environment.

I used to be vegetarian (and I made a living for a while as a vegetarian cook for Wholly Foods when it was just a store in Berkeley CA.) Then I got sick, and found out I had pernicious anemia because I was low on B12 even though I took supplements and had a special yeast grown to give vegetarians B12. Now I eat small portions of organic meat with my whole grains and garden vegetables. My idea of desert is not sugar, only things that grow on trees, bushes, and in cranberry bogs.