How to restore gut health and lose sugar cravings in 21 days - forever.

My twelve year old daughter is two weeks into a 21 day programme to restore her gut microbiome (the health of her gut). To do this she has avoid all sugar, gluten, refined carbohydrates, red meat and dairy.

For the past few years she has struggled with the symptoms of an imbalance of Candida.

Candida feeds off sugar, so subsequently my daughter craves all sugary foods - which of course merely exacerbates her struggle. She has tried avoiding sugar before, for a few weeks, but found that as soon as she ate something sugary her cravings returned and all the good work would quickly unravel. Back came the tummy pain, the bloating, the fatigue, and rough, angry skin rashes. It was a disheartening experience.

So what made her want to start this 21-day programme?

Her light-bulb moment was the understanding that this was permanent.

It was this understanding that, crucially, created her will to change - which is just as well considering the number of favourite foods that would now be off limits.

This is tough for an adult, but it's supremely challenging for a child who is surrounded by her peers eating daily amounts of sugary and fatty foods.

But once the brain is connected with a goal, will power can kick in and reign supreme.

These past fourteen days, my daughter’s diet has been full of fruit and vegetables that are rich in vitamins, minerals and plant-based nutrients such as polyphenols, increasing the spectrum of both fibre and plant-based foods - to feed her gut bugs.

She has been ‘eating the rainbow’, eating lots of different colour foods every day, to increase her microbial diversity. Our ‘good’ bugs thrive on a colourful, varied diet.

This is the aim of balancing the gut microbiome: to regain the balance of the eighty-five percent of the ‘good’ bugs, and the fifteen per cent of the ‘bad’ bugs. (Most of us are completely the other way around).

We’ve always known that gut health is important, but over recent years the microbiome (the trillions of bacteria, viruses, yeast, parasites and fungi that live on and in us - primarily in our digestive system) has been linked to many diseases and health conditions, from diabetes and obesity to anxiety and depression. Our microbiome dramatically affects our food metabolism and weight, our immunity, our brain and nerves, our organs and our hormones.

It’s our ecosystem akin to a garden. Our gardens host a diversity of plant and animal life that is in a constant state of flux. And just like our gardens, our gut hosts bacteria and other organisms. Some of these organisms stay all the time, and some come and go, fluctuating depending on the amount of stress we’re under, and the food choices we make. The food choices we make can have a dramatic impact on our gut microbiome. A healthy gut is a healthy microbiome.

My daughter, like so many of us, was not making the best food choices. But I didn't blame her: her sugar cravings tended to sabotage any good intent she may have had. And these poor food choices were creating havoc for both her body and brain.

When gut health is imbalanced the microbiome cannot produce the right types and amounts of biochemicals that her brain needed in order to make good decisions.

However, it was essential that this 21-day programme was her own choice.

How many of us make changes only at the moment when carrying on in the same way becomes untenable? I believe that is where she was standing at the start of this programme.

And what's happened in the past 14 days?

In the process of making better food choices my daughter has discovered a whole new world - a world in which she is not driven by cravings for sugary foods. She is no longer over-eating, or constantly ‘hungry’ (I call it a ‘false hunger’ as the hunger was generated purely by craving sugar).

Not only that, it took less than forty-eight hours for her tummy cramps to disappear; her bowel movements are now regular, she’s not grumpy (in fact she has a veritable skip in her step); she needs to sleep less and gets up each morning without me needing a fork-lift truck to get her out of bed; her skin has regained its baby softness, her skin rashes and angry candida pimples have almost gone; her bloated candida belly has changed shape and is diminishing in size on a daily basis.

It’s almost as though someone has taken a pin and pricked the bloated suit that she was unhappily wearing, liberating her true self from within.

She was always a very happy child, but this experience has awakened her vitality, her connection to herself and the world around her. Her whole being is being suffused with enthusiasm and health.

This is true healing.

And, most importantly, she feels good.

All of this began to happen by Day 4 of the programme. Not after a week or two weeks. Day 4.

In previous posts I’ve written about the fact that we don’t have any sugar at home, and that the problem lies firmly at the door of our wider culture, and also, most problematically, at her school where they have the lurking presence of the equivalent to a tuck shop and an ice-cream van parked right outside. Even the most abstemious of children would buckle in the face of that daily temptation.

The joy of this 21-day programme is that in the process of restoring her gut health it is creating new neural pathways to her brain. So by correcting the microbiome, the correct information is sent to the brain.

Within 21days I am witnessing her relationship to food rapidly changing, as well as her taste buds. She has embraced the diet, to the point where she is now more open to trying new flavours. I no longer have to police her nutrition - a relief for us both.

It is truly transformative.

She understands that once her gut health is restored she should be able to live life with roughly an 80/20 compliance: 80 per cent of the time eating a good diet, and 20 per cent of the time eating sugary or fatty foods — with no ‘pay back’.

This I believe was the nugget of gold: she could see a way out of the unhappy yo-yo of craving, abstinence, craving, followed by more miserable abstinence. She understands that once her gut microbiome is restored, she can eat sugary foods and it won't have the same effect on her as before. This moment of understanding gave her the necessary will to change.

This is without doubt the greatest education she is receiving: she is learning valuable life skills, how best to protect her health now and in the future.

Even if she ‘goes off the rails’ at some point and binges on sugar, the seed has already been sown, the knowledge is already there, the new neural pathways have already been formed.

We know that learning works best when it is experiential, when you feel it. And she is feeling every day for the past two weeks how flipping fantastic it feels when you take inflammatory foods out of the body.

Yesterday I asked her if she thought this regime has helped to improve her mood. She answered yes, and I asked in what way and she replied: "I feel happy."