Are you ready to get more “revealing?”
With summer right around the corner, you might be thinking about how you’ll feel wearing shorts, tank tops, and bathing suits. This year especially, after so much time spent stuck indoors and dealing with higher-than-normal stress levels, you may have experienced some unwelcome body changes.
We love you no matter your shape or size, and we understand that you want to present your best self – the you that you feel good about sharing with the world. Of course, revealing the best version of you is almost always tougher when there’s something working against you.
If weight in particular is an issue… and you’d love to shed some pounds… or stop craving sugary snack foods… it’s time to have a look at your gut bacteria. Because, weird as it sounds, your gut bacteria influences everything about your weight, from which foods you crave to when you get hungry to how your body uses/stores calories.
And good news – If you’re not happy with the messages you’re getting from your gut bacteria, you can change the conversation by understanding what it needs to thrive. Because your gut holds the key to healthy weight management – this summer and all year round.
Can Gut Bacteria “Mind Control” Your Eating Habits?
Your gut microbiome hosts trillions of bacteria. That includes beneficial probiotic bacteria that improve and support good health… and harmful pathogenic bacteria that try to undermine you at every turn.
A well-balanced gut microbiome contains a diverse population of probiotic bacteria that vastly outnumber pathogens. This healthy gut environment allows the probiotics to positively affect your health and wellness, including your body weight and shape.
Among other things, your gut bacteria dictate:
- How fast your body burns calories
- When you feel hungry or full
- Whether you have food cravings
- Which foods you gravitate toward when you’re hungry
- How easy it is for you to maintain your ideal weight
And all of the above can go off the rails if your gut microbiome is out of balance. When that happens, pathogenic bacteria outnumber probiotics – a condition called dysbiosis. That imbalance can spark tremendous changes in things like the way you eat and how your body stores fat. And those pathogenic bacteria can make you suddenly gain weight that’s very hard to get rid of.
3 Ways an Unbalanced Gut Causes Weight Gain
When your gut microbiome is in a state of dysbiosis, pathogenic bacteria can make you gain weight.
Even worse, those bacteria can make it feel impossible to lose weight, no matter how hard you try… and they do it in three distinct ways.
- Pathogens influence your food choices
Because their survival depends on you eating foods full of sugar and fat, pathogens pull out all the stops to get their preferred diet. To make sure that you eat what they want, pathogenic bacteria:
- Increase levels of ghrelin, the “hunger hormone,” so you feel hungry more often
- Signal your brain to crave sugary, fatty snack foods
- Drive your food choices by changing your taste buds to like the same foods they prefer
- Avoid the healthy fiber-rich foods that probiotic bacteria thrive on
- Pathogens shift your metabolism toward fat storage
Another way pathogens make it easy to pack on pounds – and super hard to take them off – is by changing your metabolism. This shift from fat burning toward fat storage changes the way your body processes calories, which can lead to noticeable weight gain. In fact, when scientists implanted the gut bacteria that cause obesity into mice with a normal/healthy body mass, those mice rapidly gained weight even though their diets didn’t change at all.
- Pathogens produce compounds that promote obesity
Pathogenic bacteria create inflammatory compounds that have been closely linked with obesity. Researchers have found that dysbiosis is common in overweight and obese people, and may even cause weight-related problems. If dysbiosis is standing in the way of your ideal body, all hope isn’t lost. In fact, there’s a very simple way to counteract weight issues caused by pathogenic bacteria.
Getting your gut microbiome into healthy balance with high-quality probiotics and prebiotics can quickly tip the scales in your favor.
A Healthy Gut Promotes Healthy Weight
Dysbiosis and pathogen overgrowth can cause all sorts of weight issues. But, the opposite is true too: A healthy gut microbiome promotes weight loss and ideal weight maintenance.
A big driver of a better body via probiotics has to do with special compounds – called short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) – that beneficial bacteria create. Unlike the damaging compounds produced by pathogens, SCFAs are deeply involved in keeping you healthy and happy – and that includes helping you get to and stay at a healthy weight.
Probiotic bacteria help you achieve your ideal weight by:
- Switching your metabolism to fat-burning mode
- Turning off fat storage genes
- Properly regulating ghrelin (the hunger hormone) levels to help curb appetite and cravings
- Driving the release of appetite-controlling hormones
- Encouraging you toward choosing nutrient-rich foods (yes, a gut with a healthy supply of probiotics actually helps you choose smarter food options)
With a healthy, balanced gut microbiome on your side, not only will you feel fantastic, you’ll find it much easier to reach and maintain your healthiest weight.
How to Rebalance Your Gut Microbiome
To get your gut microbiome in healthy balance, you need to take two very simple steps:
- Replenish beneficial bacteria with high quality spore probiotics
- Selectively nourish probiotic bacteria with targeted prebiotics
The synergy of both steps contribute to a well-balanced gut microbiome. Spore probiotics quickly wipe out pathogens to clear space for a diverse population of probiotic bacteria. Targeted prebiotics supply the nutritious fiber that probiotic bacteria consume so that they can produce healthy compounds like SCFAs.
When you supply your gut microbiome with spore probiotics and targeted prebiotics, you’re delivering exactly what your body needs to dodge unwanted pounds and enjoy a healthy you that you’ll feel proud to show off.
Maintain Your Healthy Weight with a Healthy Gut
Keeping your gut microbiome in healthy balance with Just Thrive can help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
Just Thrive Probiotic contains a clinically-studied blend of four proven spore probiotics.
Just Thrive Precision PREbiotic supports probiotic diversity and supplies the fiber necessary for the production of short chain fatty acids.
Keep your gut in summer shape with Just Thrive Probiotic and Precision PREbiotic and save up to 25% off.
