7 Signs Your Gut is Failing

Sometimes you can't tell that your digestion is having the start of a problem. I mean after all, being a little bit gassy after a meal doesn't really mean something serious, right? Now that's true, but what you may not know is that digestion tends to progress through seven stages. Now in this video we're going to break down what those seven stages are, east versus west, so you know exactly what to look out for in terms of digestive function. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, board licensed doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, and author of the health book Master the Day. Let's jump in. So for most of my 20s I was a patient of basically GI doctors, and through all these digestive problems, while I'm not going to rehash my whole story here in this video, one thing I didn't know that I later learned was that my gut was not just having these miscellaneous symptoms, the bloating, the constipation, the IBS-like episodes, but I didn't know that my gut was actually going through a progressive decline, meaning there was a step-by-step process that showed increasingly compromised gut function. And if I had known, if I was able to recognize where I was in this process, it would have been much easier to take care of it and actually fix my gut. So let's talk about those seven stages of digestive breakdown or decline. So stage number one, food isn't moving properly. So from my point of view, the first warning sign is actually one of the most common. You eat a meal and hours later you still feel like the food is just sitting there. You might feel unusually full, bloated or heavy. Maybe you're burping a lot after meals. Maybe you get pressure in the upper abdomen or you can only eat a small amount before feeling completely stuffed. Now in Chinese medicine this can be called food stagnation. So normally the stomach receives food, it begins breaking it down, and the stomach function has a downward moving function which moves the contents of your GI through the system. But when the movement becomes disrupted, food can essentially become stuck from a Chinese medicine point of view. Now it doesn't mean that everyone with these symptoms has delayed gastric emptying, but there are multiple reasons you can feel bloated and full. But here's what's really cool. Thousands of years before we could measure gastric contractions or emptying rates, Chinese medicine was already paying attention, very close attention, to a very similar functional question. Is food moving in the direction it's supposed to? Because digestion isn't just about what you eat. It's about what your body can actually do with what you eat. And this concept of like food stagnation is often just the beginning. Because if food repeatedly isn't being transformed and broken down, Chinese medicine says this can eventually start accumulating. And that is stage number two. Stage two is your digestive function becomes stagnant. What we call Qi stagnation. Stage two is when the problem isn't just food sitting there. The movement of your entire digestive system starts becoming disrupted. Maybe your stomach feels unusually tight or distended. You get trapped gas that seems to move around and one of the biggest clues is that your digestion seems to get noticeably worse on days where you're stressed, frustrated, overwhelmed, or anxious. Now in Chinese medicine this is where we start thinking about the idea of functional stagnation, what we call qi stagnation. When this function comes to digestion that movement has to be coordinated. So we say the stomach moves things downward. The spleen pancreas nourishes, transforms, and transports, think of like enzymes, and the liver helps maintain the smooth flow of function throughout the system, and those kinks can happen from stress. So that stress response we call liver Qi stagnation. Now your digestive system is one of the areas where you can feel that, and that's why someone can eat essentially the same meal on two different days and have completely different digestive reactions depending on their emotional state. So the modern science gives us another way to think about this. Your brain and digestive tract are constantly communicating through what we call the gut-brain axis, involving the autonomic nervous system, the enteric nervous system, hormones, immune signaling, and other pathways. And stress can change how the gastrointestinal tract moves. And in some people, the nervous system can become more sensitive to normal stretching and pressure, a phenomenon called visceral hypersensitivity. So sometimes a normal amount of gas or bloating may trigger something that feels very uncomfortable. Now this is where Chinese medicine adds an additional interesting layer, because it asks not only, what did you eat? It also asks, what state was your body in when you ate? Were you relaxed? Were you angry? Were you rushing? Were you answering emails between bites? Were you eating while your nervous system was under pressure? Because sometimes the problem isn't simply the food, it's the environment your body's trying to digest that food in. And if that disrupted movement continues long enough, Chinese medicine says the digestive system can become depleted. It stops being primarily a problem of things being stuck and becomes a problem of not having enough strength in your GI to properly transform that food. Now in stage three your digestive system becomes depleted and this is where things start to change. Because earlier the problem was mostly about movement, but now you start noticing something different. Eating may make you tired. You finish lunch and immediately you really just want to lie down, your stools are feeling loose or poorly formed, you might see undigested food, and your appetite might not be what it used to be. So food may come in, but your body isn't utilizing it as efficiently from a Chinese medicine point of view. Because now we're not only talking about digestion, we're also talking about nourishment of the whole body. But Chinese medicine did notice a pattern, because when digestive symptoms begin appearing alongside fatigue, weakness, Poor appetite. The problem may no longer look like stagnation. The system itself is depleted. And there's another clue that we look for at this stage, which is where moisture starts accumulating when it shouldn't. Now if you're recognizing yourself in these first few stages, this is exactly the kind of pattern I look for with my patients. If you want help figuring out what's actually driving your digestive systems and how we approach it using both Chinese medicine and modern functional medicine, DM me the word gut on Instagram and I'll send you a full video where I break down the process of fixing gut problems, food reactions, and bloating. And if you'd rather work through it yourself, I created a free gut root cause quiz below this video to help you identify what's actually driving your gut symptoms. So you can download it for free below the video or by Or by scanning this QR code on the screen. Now stage four, dampness begins to accumulate. This is where your digestion starts to feel heavy. You're not necessarily in severe pain, you just don't feel that good. You stay bloated, you feel sluggish, your stools are sticky or hard to clean, you wake up feeling heavy instead of feeling refreshed, your appetite may go down, and some people feel puffy or brain foggy, and in general in Chinese medicine there's a specific word for this pattern, dampness. And traditionally we even see clues on your tongue. The tongue can look swollen, sometimes with teeth marks or scalloping on the side depending on the pattern, and there can be a thicker white or greasy coat. And this is where Chinese medicine becomes even more specific, because dampness doesn't always stay dampness. Sometimes the heavy stagnant environment begins showing signs of heat, and other times the GI shows signs of cold. And those two people can have completely different symptoms, even though both started with the same digestive And that's stage five. Now, stage five, your gut becomes too hot or too cold. Stage five is where Chinese medicine starts asking a very different question. It's a very weird one, but it's your GI showing signs of heat or signs of cold. Because two people can have digestive problems that sound almost identical on the surface and require completely different approaches in Chinese medicine. So let's start with what heat really means. Maybe you experience burning in the upper GI, acid reflux, strong thirst, foul-smelling gas or stools or bad breath, loose stools that are urgent, and maybe your tongue looks a little bit redder with a thicker yellow or greasy coat. Now in Chinese medicine we say these are clues that heat or damp heat is affecting your system. Now let's compare it to another person. They also have digestive problems but instead of burning they overall feel cold. Their abdomen is better with a heating pad on it. They prefer warm food and drinks. They notice less uncomfortable sensation in the stomach and the stools may be watery or chronically loose. So Chinese medicine will look at that person very differently. The pattern may point towards cold, and if the pattern becomes more deficient and chronic, it's what we call spleen yang deficiency. So heat and cold are not like modern biomedical diagnoses. They're ways of conceptualizing what symptoms are happening in the body. Stage six is where the signs that start in your GI show up elsewhere in your body. So maybe the stools become increasingly dry and difficult to pass, but also your skin and mouth feel dry. You feel weak. Your energy doesn't recover the way it used to. And if the nourishment is deficient, someone's weak, tired, lightheaded, or traditionally anemic. So modern medicine has a bit of a parallel here, because eating enough calories doesn't necessarily guarantee you're getting or absorbing everything your body needs. The nutrients have to be broken down, absorbed through the intestines, transported, and made available for your tissues. So if someone has malabsorption, chronic diarrhea, a restricted diet, or GI problems, these nutritional deficiencies can develop. So by this stage, the story is no longer confined just to your digestion. It's not just bloating. The digestive system may be now affecting the whole person. And that brings us to the final stage. In stage seven, your gut problem becomes a deeper whole body problem. And this is the stage where people most often don't associate this with their gut. Because eventually, your symptoms may stop looking digestive at all. You walk into a room and you forget why you were there. You can't concentrate the way you used to. Your thinking is cloudy, you wake up tired even though you slept, and foods you tolerate you used to tolerate Maybe bother you now with itching, flushing, hives, congestion, headaches, or allergy-like symptoms. Now your gut isn't an isolated system. It's one of the largest interfaces between your internal environment and everything coming in from the outside world. Food, bacteria, microbial products, environmental toxins. And sitting right along that interface is an enormous amount of immune activity. One of the immune cells involved is the mast cell because You know, people think mast cells and they think allergies, and that's true. They're a major player. But mast cells in the gut interact with epithelial cells, nerves, blood vessels, other immune cells, so they participate in many other aspects of your body and your physiology. So with a mast cell problem, someone can experience cramping or diarrhea with flushing, itching, headaches, fatigue, nasal or respiratory symptoms, and sometimes cognitive symptoms. But Chinese medicine looked at this problem through a completely different lens. It recognized that thousands of years ago, when digestion becomes chronically dysfunctional, the pattern often doesn't stay confined to digestion. Take, for example, a patient of mine, Annie. Annie came to me and at one point was taking up to 70 supplements a day because of her constant bloating, food reactions, allergies. Anxiety and sleeping problems. The functional doctor she was seeing gave her 70 supplements a day. And when I saw her years later, she was still having the bloating. So it didn't fix the root cause of the problem. And treating her with Chinese medicine with formulas, we were focusing primarily on her gut and also on the anxiety. And with the gut and the anxiety, After treating her for the first time in years, despite all the money she spent, all the supplements, she was able to eat food without bloating 98% of the time. She was able to start sleeping through the night and her multi-hour elaborate ritual to regulate her nervous system, because otherwise she couldn't sleep. She was anxious. She had gut problems, was no longer needed as we fix the gut and the nervous system. So that was someone who was able to get really incredible results, despite having had 70 20 supplements per day that... Temporarily helped her a little bit but didn't fix the root cause. Now if you're listening to this and thinking, okay but what stage actually sounds like me and what do I do about it? I made something to help. If you just DM me the word gut on Instagram, I'll send you a full video where I break down the process step by step to figure out your bloating and food reactions. If you'd rather work through the quiz yourself, I created a free gut root cause quiz to help you start identifying what may actually be driving your digestive symptoms. You can download it for free right below this video. There's a link right below here. Now, if you recognized yourself in any of these seven stages, the next question is naturally, what's driving the pattern in your body? Because bloating, brain fog, and food sensitivities can look similar on the surface, but come from very different patterns underneath. I put together a deeper training, step-by-step, approaching how I find these root patterns, why some of these gut problems keep coming back. So you can click the link right over here to watch this video on my step-by-step process to fix bloating, constipation, and food reactions and allergies.