Alternative Medicine
![Dr. Will Cole - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07D56ZG15.jpg)
Gut Feelings: Healing the Shame-Fueled Relationship Between What You Eat and How You Feel (Goop Press)
"Working with Will Cole has changed my health and my life. Gut Feelings offers a highly effective, intuitive, and softer way to reset and reconnect your body and emotions."-GWYNETH PALTROW
The definitive guide to understanding the connection between what you eat and how you feel, offering a 21-day plan to reset your relationship with your body and heal the gut inflammation caused by stress, shame, and trauma-from the New York Times bestselling author of Intuitive Fasting and Ketotarian.
It's easy to suffer from frustration and confusion when it comes to nutrition and health. With so much focus on what, when, and how to eat, the emotional component of eating tends to get left behind. Dr. Will Cole sheds light on the relationship between your physical and emotional health, providing a framework for you to better understand the gut-brain connection and influence that connection for the better. He illustrates how stress and shame can cause gut inflammation and sabotage your health in a process called Shameflammation. On the other end, problems with the gut can often present themselves in the form of mood swings, anxiety, and food cravings. True health isn't just about what you eat, but how you feel.
Shameflammation can be the reason for chronic health conditions such as autoimmune disorders, leaky gut, IBS, and other GI disorders. Thankfully, it's possible to heal the connection between the physical and mental with good food and somatic practices that support a healthy gut and brain. Dr. Cole offers holistic tools to help you reevaluate your relationship with food and your body, getting you back in touch with your gut feelings. His 21-Day Gut Feeling plan helps you bridge the gap between your emotions and your health, including:
• More than fifty healing recipes, such as Breakfast Fried Rice, Scallop Noodle Bowls, and Honey Grapefruit Sorbet
• Dietary prescriptions founded upon flexibility and awareness
• Mindfulness techniques to strengthen your intuition and discover your priorities
Gut Feelings approaches nutrition and wellness from a place of self-love and will help you eliminate stubborn health conditions, on your own terms.
The definitive guide to understanding the connection between what you eat and how you feel, offering a 21-day plan to reset your relationship with your body and heal the gut inflammation caused by stress, shame, and trauma-from the New York Times bestselling author of Intuitive Fasting and Ketotarian.
It's easy to suffer from frustration and confusion when it comes to nutrition and health. With so much focus on what, when, and how to eat, the emotional component of eating tends to get left behind. Dr. Will Cole sheds light on the relationship between your physical and emotional health, providing a framework for you to better understand the gut-brain connection and influence that connection for the better. He illustrates how stress and shame can cause gut inflammation and sabotage your health in a process called Shameflammation. On the other end, problems with the gut can often present themselves in the form of mood swings, anxiety, and food cravings. True health isn't just about what you eat, but how you feel.
Shameflammation can be the reason for chronic health conditions such as autoimmune disorders, leaky gut, IBS, and other GI disorders. Thankfully, it's possible to heal the connection between the physical and mental with good food and somatic practices that support a healthy gut and brain. Dr. Cole offers holistic tools to help you reevaluate your relationship with food and your body, getting you back in touch with your gut feelings. His 21-Day Gut Feeling plan helps you bridge the gap between your emotions and your health, including:
• More than fifty healing recipes, such as Breakfast Fried Rice, Scallop Noodle Bowls, and Honey Grapefruit Sorbet
• Dietary prescriptions founded upon flexibility and awareness
• Mindfulness techniques to strengthen your intuition and discover your priorities
Gut Feelings approaches nutrition and wellness from a place of self-love and will help you eliminate stubborn health conditions, on your own terms.
Editorial Reviews
"Working with Will Cole has changed my health and my life. He is a thorough and cutting-edge practitioner, an unparalleled source of wisdom, and the most compassionate of souls. Gut Feelings offers a highly effective, intuitive, and softer way to reset and reconnect your body and emotions. Like everything Will does, it's informative and healing."-Gwyneth Paltrow, founder and CEO of goop
"The book we have all been waiting for . . . Dr. Cole lets the scientific research lead in his explanations, detailing how shame, trauma, and stress can be stored in the body and hurt our physical health . . . reclaim whole-body wellness and harness long-term, sustainable health with his practical, easy-to-understand tips."-Uma Naidoo, MD, Harvard-trained nutritional psychiatrist and bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Food
"Dr. Will Cole has the rare ability to research complex areas of health and wellness and deliver them to people in ways that feel complete, accessible, and practical. In Gut Feelings, he does this while focusing on the vital and intertwining fields of mental and digestive health, at a time when we really need it."-Will Siu, MD, Harvard Medical School–trained psychiatrist, speaker, and writer
"A paradigm-shifting way to truly understand the inherent and foundational connection between our body and mind . . . It will shift how you think, how you eat, and, ultimately, how you exist in the world. The 21-Day Gut-Feeling Plan will show you just how much the food you eat daily truly does impact your mood and health . . . it's a road map to changing who you are at your core."-Dr. Nicole LePera, the Holistic Psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work
"Dr. Will Cole has done it again! Gut Feelings is the next frontier of mental health treatment . . . It will help you ditch toxic diet tribalism so you can find food peace, emotional resilience, and overall well-being."-Ellen Vora, MD, Columbia University–trained holistic psychiatrist and bestselling author of The Anatomy of Anxiety
"The book we have all been waiting for . . . Dr. Cole lets the scientific research lead in his explanations, detailing how shame, trauma, and stress can be stored in the body and hurt our physical health . . . reclaim whole-body wellness and harness long-term, sustainable health with his practical, easy-to-understand tips."-Uma Naidoo, MD, Harvard-trained nutritional psychiatrist and bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Food
"Dr. Will Cole has the rare ability to research complex areas of health and wellness and deliver them to people in ways that feel complete, accessible, and practical. In Gut Feelings, he does this while focusing on the vital and intertwining fields of mental and digestive health, at a time when we really need it."-Will Siu, MD, Harvard Medical School–trained psychiatrist, speaker, and writer
"A paradigm-shifting way to truly understand the inherent and foundational connection between our body and mind . . . It will shift how you think, how you eat, and, ultimately, how you exist in the world. The 21-Day Gut-Feeling Plan will show you just how much the food you eat daily truly does impact your mood and health . . . it's a road map to changing who you are at your core."-Dr. Nicole LePera, the Holistic Psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of How to Do the Work
"Dr. Will Cole has done it again! Gut Feelings is the next frontier of mental health treatment . . . It will help you ditch toxic diet tribalism so you can find food peace, emotional resilience, and overall well-being."-Ellen Vora, MD, Columbia University–trained holistic psychiatrist and bestselling author of The Anatomy of Anxiety
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
As Above, So Below
The Bidirectional Relationship Between Your Physical and Emotional World
If you raised an eyebrow (or two) when you read the introduction to this book, I'm not surprised. You might even doubt that there is an emotional side to health. To that I would say: One, keep reading, and two, keep an open mind. After years of working with people all around the world in my functional medicine telehealth clinic, I've seen the emotional side of health affect so many people. As a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to look at the person as a whole instead of seeing the body as separate unrelated parts like in the conventional medicine world. I often collaborate with conventional physicians, therapists, and holistic practitioners to organize the best protocols healthcare has to offer for my patients (there's a reason why functional medicine is also known as integrative medicine), serving as a proverbial "wellness quarterback" for my patients. A person's mental, emotional, and spiritual world is not just part of that overall holistic picture, it's the critical piece.
Later on, we'll dive into the nitty-gritty, granular reasons why our physical and emotional lives are intertwined. For example, we'll talk about how gut bacteria can influence our mood and how stress can cause physiological changes that sabotage our health. But we're not there just yet! Right now, I want to zoom out and talk about the practical everyday ways this gut-feeling connection reveals itself in our lives.
How the Physical Impacts the Emotional
From years of clinical experience in nutrition and lifestyle medicine, I know that physical health factors are more than capable of impacting your emotional world. You might be shaking your head, thinking, Well, of course, Dr. Cole-nobody likes to be sick, in pain, or have a disease! While it's true that having a chronic health condition or being sick can be a difficult emotional experience, I'm not necessarily talking about the emotional hardship of a diagnosed disease or the trauma of an acute illness, even though this certainly adds to the cycle of stress and health problems. Instead, I'm talking about the less obvious physical health imbalances-like chronic inflammation or gut-health microbiome imbalances-that can more subtly sabotage our emotional health day after day, year after year. This physical-emotional connection is insidious because it's often ignored by the conventional healthcare world, which treats mental health and emotional health as if the brain exists completely unconnected to the rest of the body. And yet it seems like every single day, mental health issues like anxiety, depression, or PTSD are connected to physical health factors, like diet, inflammation levels, or the status of the gut microbiome, further proving that the physical and emotional world has always been and always will be intertwined.
Just to give you a few examples:
◆ More and more studies are asserting that depression may be caused by chronic systemic inflammation in the body and showing that anti-inflammatory foods reduce symptoms of depression.
◆ Problems with the gut, such as yeast or bacterial overgrowth, often present themselves in the form of mood swings, anxiety, and persistent food cravings. When a patient comes in with any of these brain issues, the gut is the first thing I look at.
◆ Studies have suggested that inadequate immune system control and inflammation may raise the risk of developing PTSD after a trauma.
◆ Studies show that even mild dehydration can be linked to anxiety, tension, and mood disturbance, demonstrating that something as simple as drinking more water could improve mental health.
◆ Here's one you probably already know: A more sedentary lifestyle has been linked to an increased risk of anxiety and depression. But did you also know that exercise has been shown to be as effective if not more effective at reducing depression than prescription antidepressants? It's true.
If you've ever been told that mental health issues have nothing to do with your physical health, you're not alone. But I'm here to tell you that the connection between the two is all too real and couldn't be more relevant to your health and healing.
How the Emotional Influences the Physical
Now that we've established how physical health influences emotional health, let me ask you a question: Have you ever eaten a perfectly "healthy" meal and ended up bloated and with stomach pains? Often that's because you sat down stres...
As Above, So Below
The Bidirectional Relationship Between Your Physical and Emotional World
If you raised an eyebrow (or two) when you read the introduction to this book, I'm not surprised. You might even doubt that there is an emotional side to health. To that I would say: One, keep reading, and two, keep an open mind. After years of working with people all around the world in my functional medicine telehealth clinic, I've seen the emotional side of health affect so many people. As a functional medicine doctor, I'm trained to look at the person as a whole instead of seeing the body as separate unrelated parts like in the conventional medicine world. I often collaborate with conventional physicians, therapists, and holistic practitioners to organize the best protocols healthcare has to offer for my patients (there's a reason why functional medicine is also known as integrative medicine), serving as a proverbial "wellness quarterback" for my patients. A person's mental, emotional, and spiritual world is not just part of that overall holistic picture, it's the critical piece.
Later on, we'll dive into the nitty-gritty, granular reasons why our physical and emotional lives are intertwined. For example, we'll talk about how gut bacteria can influence our mood and how stress can cause physiological changes that sabotage our health. But we're not there just yet! Right now, I want to zoom out and talk about the practical everyday ways this gut-feeling connection reveals itself in our lives.
How the Physical Impacts the Emotional
From years of clinical experience in nutrition and lifestyle medicine, I know that physical health factors are more than capable of impacting your emotional world. You might be shaking your head, thinking, Well, of course, Dr. Cole-nobody likes to be sick, in pain, or have a disease! While it's true that having a chronic health condition or being sick can be a difficult emotional experience, I'm not necessarily talking about the emotional hardship of a diagnosed disease or the trauma of an acute illness, even though this certainly adds to the cycle of stress and health problems. Instead, I'm talking about the less obvious physical health imbalances-like chronic inflammation or gut-health microbiome imbalances-that can more subtly sabotage our emotional health day after day, year after year. This physical-emotional connection is insidious because it's often ignored by the conventional healthcare world, which treats mental health and emotional health as if the brain exists completely unconnected to the rest of the body. And yet it seems like every single day, mental health issues like anxiety, depression, or PTSD are connected to physical health factors, like diet, inflammation levels, or the status of the gut microbiome, further proving that the physical and emotional world has always been and always will be intertwined.
Just to give you a few examples:
◆ More and more studies are asserting that depression may be caused by chronic systemic inflammation in the body and showing that anti-inflammatory foods reduce symptoms of depression.
◆ Problems with the gut, such as yeast or bacterial overgrowth, often present themselves in the form of mood swings, anxiety, and persistent food cravings. When a patient comes in with any of these brain issues, the gut is the first thing I look at.
◆ Studies have suggested that inadequate immune system control and inflammation may raise the risk of developing PTSD after a trauma.
◆ Studies show that even mild dehydration can be linked to anxiety, tension, and mood disturbance, demonstrating that something as simple as drinking more water could improve mental health.
◆ Here's one you probably already know: A more sedentary lifestyle has been linked to an increased risk of anxiety and depression. But did you also know that exercise has been shown to be as effective if not more effective at reducing depression than prescription antidepressants? It's true.
If you've ever been told that mental health issues have nothing to do with your physical health, you're not alone. But I'm here to tell you that the connection between the two is all too real and couldn't be more relevant to your health and healing.
How the Emotional Influences the Physical
Now that we've established how physical health influences emotional health, let me ask you a question: Have you ever eaten a perfectly "healthy" meal and ended up bloated and with stomach pains? Often that's because you sat down stres...
