3 Mindset Shifts that Heal Your Gut (Do this if you already avoid trigger foods)
Have you ever been told that your results are determined by your mindset — and your first reaction was, what does that even mean? Is it a bunch of affirmations I tell myself? Is it just thinking something until I believe it? What is mindset, even?
Mindset is one of the most underrated pieces of a positive health outcome — especially if you're a woman who has done everything by the book to heal from IBS, gastritis, or to get an autoimmune issue into remission, and you still haven't gotten the results you want.
This is something I work on with my one-on-one nutritional therapy clients all the time, because so much of what's keeping them stuck lives in their mindset. And I want to be precise about what I mean, because it's easy to misread: I'm not saying you have gut issues because your mindset is wrong. I'm saying your mindset may be the reason you can't see the solution that's already in front of you — sometimes literally in your pantry or your medicine cabinet. Think of having a headache and completely forgetting you have Advil in the house. The fix is right there. You just can't see it.
Mindset can keep you from believing you're able to heal. And when you believe you can't, you stay exactly where you are.
What mindset actually means
It's about reframing your current situation so you can move forward.
Sit with the word reframe for a second. If you have a picture, the frame changes how you see it. A big frame makes the picture look smaller. A small frame makes it look bigger. The picture itself never changes — what changes is how you look at it.
Three mindset shifts/Reframes I work on with clients in chronic gut pain
1. Your problem is your solution. Same as the steering wheel. A gut-specific version of this is redefining what inflammation actually is. Inflammation isn't the enemy — it's your body's way of protecting you. When you change your relationship to something like inflammation, you open the door to outcomes you couldn't see before, because you start thinking outside the box.
2. Play with the idea that you chose this. I know this one is hard. But when you entertain the notion that you chose the gastritis, the stomach pain, the in-and-out of doctors' offices, you get to ask what you might be getting out of the situation. It moves you out of victim mentality and into awareness and action.
3. Ask what this is teaching you. This is the simplest one: what is this bloating, this IBS, currently teaching me? This is not the same as "everything happens for a reason." It's about who you become as you move through a health challenge — stronger, more resilient, more empathetic — because of what you went through, not in spite of it.
The "nothing is going to help me" feeling
So when you've gone through gastritis and you can't eat. When bloating makes you lose your confidence. When you have mystery symptoms no one can resolve, even though your diet is impeccable, your lifestyle is dialed in, and you know your way around supplements — and you still have that "nothing is going to help me" feeling?
That's exactly where mindset can unlock the healing.
That's the beautiful thing about nutritional therapy and the work we do with clients struggling with gut issues. Once you get into the mindset that the bloating isn't the problem — it's the solution — and that your inflamed colon isn't the problem because inflammation is your body trying to protect you, your whole relationship to your symptoms changes. And that's how you start healing.
I hope this gets you thinking differently about your symptoms. Right now my books are open for free discovery sessions with me personally, where we can talk about how nutritional therapy heals your bloat — so you can feel confident in and out of your clothes, eat pizza and ice cream again without symptoms, and get your life back.