you're listening to an archived cabal concept podcast after listening to the show check out the most upto-date podcasts available at Steven cab.com slmp podcasts or search directly on iTunes and now welcome to the cabol concept where board certified naturopath and Integrative Health practitioner Dr Steven cabal shares how he was diagnosed at the age of 17 with a life-altering illness and given no hope for Recovery it was only after studying and traveling all over the world did he discover how to combine ancient ayurvedic healing practices with state-of-the-art naturopathic and functional medicine to fully rebalance the body and re-energize it with life it's time to discover how to get well lose weight and finally feel alive again and now here's your host Dr Steven cabal and today on our weight loss Wednesday show we're going to go through how constipation can actually cause weight gain or at least limit your ability to lose weight weight so let's go into all the different reasons how that can actually occur and then what you can do about it all right so let's get right into it so one thing that happens is or so essentially you have 20 plus feet of intestine now that intestine is attached to the stomach and what's supposed to happen is when you put food in your stomach you're supposed to have good hydrochloric acid enzymes start the digestion but then after that hydrochloric acid is going to help finish it up with pepsin and then that creates a lot of acidity a very low PH then that moves through the stomach right in the first part of intestines which is called the dadum now that first part of the small intestine in that part you're getting enzymes and you're also getting bile being dropped in now bile is a very high pH so it's about 8.8 or so when that meets the acidity of the stomach content coming in it creates this kind of eruption or emulsification of fats and other food particles that then really tear up the food that's a good thing so that less digestion less stress has to be done by the rest of the digestive system meaning the intestines so that's a really important thing to get right now a lot of people they have weakened digestion because there's lower stomach acid they're doing improper food combining there's fermentation going on in the stomach so what happens is by the time all that food substance starts coming into the intestines you are then creating an environment for yeast and bacteria and other things like that to ferment that food and it stays in there for far too long when it stays in there for too long yes this can cause constipation but it can also cause inflammation and that inflammation can then lead to water weight and bloating and a lot of the symptoms that you may be having right now but what's really important is that hormones can also get caught up especially estrogen if you're not having one to two ball movements per day you are most likely allowing estrogen metabolites and other food toxins to be reabsorbed back in the bloodstream and when this happens you can actually get yes increased water weight gain of course from the extra ex ra estrogen but you can also get a lot of the PMS based symptoms that would happen typically let's say 3 to 5 days before a female cycle but men can have the same type of premenstrual syndrome symptoms that anyone does and so what I would say is this you have to make sure that you're at least having one to two bowel movements per day and we're going to get into how to do that in just a moment but also when you look at stress and how stress can affect the body and again a lot of us are stressed from you know maybe it's our work our life our relationships our family whatever it might be but a lot of people also stressed internally and they're stressed internally because again they have gas they have bloating they have cramping they have other wellness-based issues that are affecting their stress levels too well what happens with this higher level of stress is that it actually constricts the intestines it constricts the bowels and when that happens this peristaltic wave that's supposed to happen in the intestines this inter secession that moves the food along the 20 plus feet of intestine it's slow or it is basically stopped and when that happens you're not going to be able to move that food along as well that waste product and it's not going to be able to be removed from your body as quickly all of these things are issues because they create then a greater fire oflight response in the body a greater level of inflammation and of course you have a higher immune response when all these things happen your body's metabolic rate begins to slow you begin to hold water all the things that you don't want when you're trying to lose weight so this is just a very super important topic to talk about so now let's get into it so how do we fix this well fixing it one last thing is that one of the reason people are constipated is because they're simply dehydrated so if they're dehydrated they're not drinking enough water during the day or they're drinking too much caffeinated products or different things that would have to consume more water meaning meaning maybe you're eating a lot of meat in your diet and if you're eating a lot of meat in your diet your body needs more water to process that as well so what I would say is this make sure that your hydration level are quite high so that means if you weigh 160 lbs or so you want to drink about 80 o of water per day that's about 10 glasses of water per day now the go same goes for any weight so approximately what you want to do is you want to take half your body weight and drink that in ounces of water per day so if you weigh 200 lb you'll drink 100 ounces of water per day and that's going to be what about 12 glasses of water so this goes for everyone that's your starting point now remember there are always contr indications for this meaning if you have low blood pressure then you may not want to drink that much water because it's going to flush a lot of those minerals out of your body you want to get more fluids then from your smoothies and different things like that that already have all those minerals but you still need the water you just might want to get it more from the fruit variety or at least squeezing some lemon and a little bit of sea salt uh into that water too okay so that's the hydration issue now we want to look at what happens when the Dig system just isn't working as well well one way to get it going is that you can use things things like celium husk fiber you can think use things like a good natural magnesium which would help with the stress and the fight ORF flight based response you can use a good probiotic to begin to balance the intestinal Flora we use a very special um intestinal Flora probiotic for this that contains sacris bardi which is a beneficial yeast that helps push out larger amounts of yeast as well so that's a great trifect of supplements right there remember no one supplement typically is the solution those three will help get things going as you're improving your f food as you're doing an Elimination Diet all of those things you can just go to Steven cal.com fortore you can see the constipation package that we offer you can also see the colon cleanse that we recommend now I'm not a big fan of laxatives the reason is that your body can actually become used to using laxatives and what happens is it relies on that and then its own B motility its own Movement of food through the intestines becomes weakened because it's reliant on those glaives however doing a colon cleanse one once or twice a year no problem at all and I think that's actually a very healthy thing for most people to use something like the activated charcoal the bentonite clay to pull all that stuff off the intestines it's a very very healthy thing um and people have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years so you can at least online see the products that I recommend the ones that I believe in the ones that I use in my practice and the ones that are third party tested so you know that they don't have any heavy metals or molds or things like that in them the other thing you want to look at is this if you really want to get to a deeper deeper level of why you may have constipation you might want to look into functional medicine testing to figure out is it stress or is it something that's going on inside of the actual intestines themselves meaning like if it's stressed you can do an adrenal hormone stress test and that will tell you if you have elevated levels of cortisol and if you have elevated levels of cortisol well that stress could be causing that constipation now also one thing to look at too is you could do a hair tissue mineral analysis to look for low magnesium other metabolites like that um any type of minerals and heavy metal Metals the third test that you could think about running is an organic acids test and the organic acids test is a urine base test and all you're doing is you're looking for actual high levels of fungus and yeast you're looking for cluster dvcl which is a bacteria that can live in that gut and so by looking at that by looking at different vitamin levels you'll be able to assess is there something wrong with the bacteria in your intestines that's causing some type of constipation as well so you could you can run all three tests of course but you can also just decide you know like let me just start with good nutrition let me start with some of these good nutritional products and then nutritional supplement products and then after that I could run the functional medicine test or you could say hey I want to get to the bottom of this right now I'm going to go with the test first I'm going to see what the test say and then I'll get my neutral supplements based on what the test say so you can really do it either way I just want to present you with information not inflammation of how you can actually get the results that you do want and exactly how I do it in my own practice and since we are very successful in our practice working with people I just want you to have that same exact success and so when we're looking at constipation yes we're talking about it absolutely can G help you or cause you to gain weight but also you know make it really difficult to lose weight because of all the water retention and bloating and and poor absorption of food in general so you're not absorbing as many nutrients as you should because you're not properly breaking down your food so that's a big thing but of course I always take it back to Wellness and if you're not losing weight and you're not if you're inflamed and there's bloating and there's gas there all these different types of things then you're most likely not that well either and this can lead to mood based dis orders it can lead to headaches it can lead to autoimmune based issues and I don't want you to end up there so what I want you to do is try to take care of this right now and what I'd say is start with that functional medicine test or just go right into those supplements um you can begin with a colon cleanse and then you could actually just move into those nutritional supplements as well so you do what's right for you please let me know if there's any follow-up questions to this topic and I'd be happy to answer those have a great day are you ready to heal yourself and then go on to heal others if so the Integrative Health practitioner Institute can help you discover proven functional medicine protocols that blend the best of seven different healing disciplines from around the world I personally share with you the exact handouts in protocols I use in my private practice that enable people to get well lose the weight and live longer stronger I want to pass this information on to the next generation of health coaches and that is exactly why I created ihp we are the future of the health coaching industry and the skills and knowledge you will learn will make you an in demand certified health coach anywhere in the world although we have many medical professionals taking the ihp certifications no experience is necessary and half our members have no previous Health certifications at the Integrative Health practitioner Institute our motto is a health coach in every home our goal is that you take this knowledge and then share it with family friends loved ones your community or in practice where you create a career you love and can be proud of the global ihp Community is filled with some of the most kind and caring people in the world and we can't wait to welcome you into our world soon for more information or to set up a discovery call with one of our ihp health coach graduates simply head over to integrative [Music]