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Upside-Down Pilates

In this episode of Upside-Down Pilates I share with you the Reformer workout I am currently doing to build up my strength! In this episode, we will enjoy some quadruped arms, short box side-bends and side lying legs, lower body rotations side, and overhead press on the long box. Grab your Reformer and join me!

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Are you ready to be healthy and thrive? Would you love a personalized hand crafted program to go from sick and in pain to happy and free?

If you are interested in investing in yourself and joining me for Upside-Down Pilates or returning to Upside-Down Pilates personalized programs , please fill out this form to see if we might be a good fit to work together. Do not let distance stop you! I work with clients all over the world via Zoom! No equipment required!​

Upside-Down Nourishment

There's a version of eating well that's mostly about restriction: what to cut, what to avoid, what you're doing wrong. It's exhausting, and for most people it doesn't survive a difficult month.

Here's a different framing that holds up better, because it adds instead of subtracting.

The population you're feeding

A 2016 estimate put the number of bacteria in an average adult at around 38 trillion, most of them in the large intestine (Sender, Fuchs and Milo, 2016). Their composition responds quickly to what you eat: in one study, switching people to a very different diet changed their gut bacteria within days (David and colleagues, 2014). That speed is the useful part. Whatever you've been doing, the picture isn't fixed.

What that population does with what you send it is the part that matters. When gut bacteria ferment fiber, they produce short-chain fatty acids, compounds involved in the gut lining, in inflammation signaling and in appetite (Koh and colleagues, 2016).

What actually feeds it

Variety. In the American Gut Project, one of the largest citizen-science studies of the gut, people who ate more than 30 different plant types a week had more diverse gut bacteria than people who ate 10 or fewer (McDonald and colleagues, 2018). It's an observational finding, so it shows a link, not proof. But it's a useful target, and it sounds harder than it is: herbs count, spices count, nuts and seeds count, the mixed grains in bread count.

Fiber, which most of us are short of. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, more than 90 percent of women and 97 percent of men don't reach the recommended intake of fiber, mainly because most adults don't eat enough fruit, vegetables and whole grains (US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services, 2020). Fiber is what the bacteria ferment, so it's the raw material for everything above.

Fermented foods. Yogurt with live cultures, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso. In a ten-week trial with 36 healthy adults, the group that ate more fermented foods ended up with more diverse gut bacteria, and 19 inflammatory proteins in their blood went down. The group that ate more fiber instead didn't see those changes within the ten weeks, and the researchers found larger effects with larger servings of fermented food (Wastyk and colleagues, 2021). It was a small study, and fiber still matters for the reasons above. My read is that the two do different jobs, and fermented foods are a complement to plants, not a replacement.

The order of the meal. In a small study of people with type 2 diabetes, eating the vegetables and protein before the carbohydrate led to a lower rise in blood sugar after the meal than the same food eaten in the reverse order (Shukla and colleagues, 2015). The evidence comes mostly from people with diabetes, so for everyone else it's something to try and judge for yourself. It costs nothing.

What quietly works against it

Ultra-processed food isn't a moral category. But one line of thinking is that much of it is absorbed early in the digestive tract, leaving little for the bacteria further down; that is still a hypothesis, not a settled finding. Artificial sweeteners are worth knowing about too: in a 2022 trial, some of them changed people's gut bacteria and their blood sugar response, and the effect varied a lot from person to person (Suez and colleagues, 2022). None of this is catastrophic occasionally.

Counting to thirty

Thirty sounds like a number for people with a lot of time and a farmers' market nearby. In practice, most of it comes from small changes to things you already buy.

A bag of mixed nuts can be three or four types on its own. Swapping plain rice for a mix with lentils or barley adds two. Frozen vegetable mixes count each vegetable. A handful of herbs on a dinner you already make counts. So does the jar of seeds you sprinkle on yogurt, and the beans you add to a soup.

The point isn't to keep a tally forever. It's to notice, for one week, how narrow the usual shop has become, and to widen it a little. My view is that this works better than any list of foods to avoid, because it asks you to add something, and adding is easier to keep up in a hard month than cutting.

One thing to try this week

Add before you subtract. Pick three plants you don't normally eat and buy them this week. Try it for two weeks and see how you feel.

Sources

• Sender R, Fuchs S, Milo R. Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body. PLOS Biology, 2016.
• David LA and colleagues. Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome. Nature, 2014.
• Koh A, De Vadder F, Kovatcheva-Datchary P, Bäckhed F. From dietary fiber to host physiology: short-chain fatty acids as key bacterial metabolites. Cell, 2016.
• McDonald D and colleagues. American Gut: an open platform for citizen science microbiome research. mSystems, 2018.
• US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020 to 2025.
• Wastyk HC and colleagues. Gut-microbiota-targeted diets modulate human immune status. Cell, 2021.
• Shukla AP and colleagues. Food order has a significant impact on postprandial glucose and insulin levels. Diabetes Care, 2015.
• Suez J and colleagues. Personalized microbiome-driven effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on human glucose tolerance. Cell, 2022.

COMING SOON!

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If you are interested in building a diverse and resilient microbiome to eliminate your pain and creating a long and enjoyable life please consider investing in yourself and joining me for Upside-Down Nourishment or returning to Upside-Down Nourishment personalized programs, fill out this form to see if we might be a good fit to work together.​ Do not let distance stop you! I work with clients all over the world via Zoom!

REMEMBER, self care is health care! If you don't care for yourself you won't be able to care for anyone else.

Have a beautiful day!

Lisa