NFTW Day 33: I Just Pooped

It’s Day 33 y’all and I just pooped. If anyone can explain that to me feel free to give a shout out in the comments!  😉  😉

It’s in my nature to automatically tie physical experiences to emotional ones—this is how I make sense of the world. For weeks now I’ve been purging frustration, stagnation, and limiting beliefs right there alongside the rotting, fetid food waste. So what does this bowel-movement-after-33-days-without-food suggest about the sheer volume of crap we can harbor deep inside our systems? What does that mean for our internal emotional landscapes?

Remember those internal mantras I talked about earlier? They’re not just guided by our hearts and our brains. Gut health plays just as much a part in our overall emotional well being. In other words, an unhealthy gut can absolutely affect our moods and our belief systems about what we can handle and what we truly can accomplish in our lifetime.

The gut-brain connection is well established in medical and scientific communities. Johns Hopkins explains it this way:

If you’ve ever “gone with your gut” to make a decision or felt “butterflies in your stomach” when nervous, you’re likely getting signals from an unexpected source: your second brain. Hidden in the walls of the digestive system, this “brain in your gut” is revolutionizing medicine’s understanding of the links between digestion, mood, health and even the way you think.

Scientists call this little brain the enteric nervous system (ENS). And it’s not so little. The ENS is two thin layers of more than 100 million nerve cells lining your gastrointestinal tract from esophagus to rectum.

And Harvard adds:

The gut-brain connection is no joke; it can link anxiety to stomach problems and vice versa. Have you ever had a “gut-wrenching” experience? Do certain situations make you “feel nauseous”? Have you ever felt “butterflies” in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.

For such functional GI disorders, it is difficult to try to heal a distressed gut without considering the role of stress and emotion.

I encourage you to read both articles HERE and HERE.

From a strictly Going-Without-Eating perspective, these past few days have gotten increasingly difficult for me. The end is in sight and that makes it harder to concentrate on the present moment instead of what the first food I’m going to eat will be (definitely a baked potato with butter, BTW). But when I have bizarre experiences that lead me to scientific discoveries that fall completely in line with what I’ve been experiencing for going on five years now—it’s much easier to focus up and recommit to seeing this through!

These topics never get old to me because I’m blessed to see and experience them in real time. So here’s to one more week and whatever these next few days will bring—huzzah!