How to Overcome Skin Problems, Depression, and Low Energy

One of the most powerful lessons I ever learned as an engineer was that everything is a system.

We called it “Systems Thinking.”

It’s the idea that everything in a system is connected and every system has inputs and outputs.

Let’s take our bodies; there are many inputs… things like food, environmental toxins, water, stress, supplements, joy, happiness, love, etc.

There are even outputs, like how we feel, our poop, our skin, etc.

At a high level, our body is a very complex system. And like any system, we can change the inputs to get a desired change in the outputs.

What blew me away years ago was this: changing the inputs that influence the gut (things like food, stress, supplements, etc.) creates the most powerful change in the outputs (how we feel, symptoms, poop, etc.).

Changing the Inputs That Affect Your Gut Can Completely Rebuild Your Body

Nothing proved this to me more than when I changed my diet and the years of diarrhea stopped in just 7 days. 7 days after I changed my inputs, the outputs dramatically changed. Pretty amazing little system our body is, isn’t it?

So… with Leaky Gut Awareness Week heading towards a close, it’s time we started talking about how many critical parts of your body the gut is connected to.

Today’s clips are all about the gut-skin connection, the gut-hormone connection, and the gut-fertility connection and what we can do to change the symptoms that are driving us crazy.

Lesson 10: How Gut Inflammation Triggers Depression

What if inflammation in your gut could actually travel to your brain and cause depression? If you’ve struggled with depression and anxiety you’re going to want to join me for this interview with Dr. Emily Deans, where we go deep into the Inflammatory Cytokine model of depression and why a fire in your gut triggers a fire in your brain.

Get the rest of the interview with Dr. Emily Deans here.

Lesson 11: Why Leaky Gut Is Probably Causing All Your Skin Problems

What if your skin problems were actually a HUGE RED FLAG from your body that something was terribly wrong in your gut? What if it’s actually like your body screaming at you to help your gut. If you’re anything like I was and struggle with skin problems like acne and rosacea, you won’t want to miss this clip from an interview with one of our friends and mentors, Chris Kresser, L.Ac.

Chris goes into the specifics about the gut-skin connection and how leaky gut can actually make your skin break out with acne and other chronic skin conditions… let’s listen in.

Find out more about the gut-skin connection in the full interview with Chris here.

Lesson 12: The Gut-Hormone Connection Stealing Your Energy

Did you know there’s a direct correlation between how burned out your adrenals are and how damaged your gut lining is? This clip is from a recent interview I did with one of my mentors, Dr. Dan Kalish, one of the world’s best Functional Medicine Practitioners, where he shares the direct relationship between our gut and our hormones. If you’ve ever struggled with low energy, chronic fatigue, and hormone problems like PMS or low testosterone, you won’t want to miss this. Let’s listen in.

Get the rest of this powerful interview with Dr. Kalish here.

Today’s Action Step

Sometimes the most powerful way to keep moving forward is to look back and remember how far we’ve come. I had to do that just about every day during my healing journey.

There were so many times I wanted to give up or quit because I didn’t think I could make it anymore… but then I would remember how far I had come and that would be enough to get through another day.

Today’s exercise is all about how far you’ve come.

Think about one input you changed that completely improved your outputs (symptoms). This could be your diet or a supplement you took… or an infection you killed.

Then, leave a comment below and share that input with this community. It might just be the one input someone else needs to read today in order to get to the next level of health.

I’ll see you in the comments.

-Jordan