This month at Kula we excited to be offering a unique workshop exploring the power combination of food, Ayurvedic principles and yoga to detoxify your body, improve your digestion and eliminate bloating.
Kula teacher Steph Northeast, also known as Steph Lowe, is a Sports Nutritionist, yogi and founder of The Natural Nutritionist, a hub for celebrating the importance of real food, and author of Low Carb Healthy Fat Nutrition.
With a passion for spreading a positive message about real food and the incredible affect it has on performance, Steph launched The Natural Nutritionist in 2011 and is on a mission to inspire others to make health a priority in their lives.
Along with running The Natural Nutritionist, Steph hosts the podcast, The Real Food Reel, is the resident Nutritionist for Melrose Health and has an online 12-week online program, LCHF Endurance.
Steph shares her…
Top Tips to Eliminate Bloating & Improve Your Digestion
Bloating is a common problem that can often be quite easily addressed by changing how often you eat and your existing food behaviours. Here at my top three tips:
Decrease your meal frequency:
- Aim for four to five hours of satiety between meals, for both digestive ease, and a fat-burning opportunity meal-to-meal. If your meals don’t provide four or more hours of satiety, try adding more protein and quality fats such as avocado, chia seed, or extra virgin olive oil. Protein and fats are incredible satiety macronutrients.
- Your meal frequency is relative to your eating window i.e. mid-week you may consume three meals and one snack but on weekends/when breakfast is later, three meals may be sufficient. You may have been told to graze often, but digestion is a costly process and eating less often provides the perfect opportunity to rest your gut.
- Example meal times could include: 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 8pm (on a night when you have to eat later) or 9am, 2pm and 7pm.
Shorten your eating window:
- The gap between your last meal and breakfast the next day is your fasting window, to continue to provide digestive ease. To extend your fasting window, and therefore shorten your eating window, aim for a later breakfast, an earlier dinner or a combination of the two.
- Ask yourself, am I hungry? Rather than eating automatically when you wake. Often our meal times are habits from childhood that we can easily adjust with practice.
- Once you have established blood sugar control, experiment with a 16:8 fast two (2) days/week e.g. a 16 hour fast with an 8 hour eating window, such as fasting from 6.30pm to 10.30am (coffee prior is approved) and finishing your last meal by 6.30pm that day.
Develop healthy food behaviours
- Please avoid drinking large volumes of water with a meal, focusing rather on small sips during meal times. This optimizes your bile and digestive enzyme production to allow you to break down and absorb your food well.
- Take three to five diaphragmatic breaths prior to each meal to promote the parasympathetic or “rest and digest” state.
- Aim to chew each mouthful a minimum of 20 times. A huge component of digestion occurs in the mouth.
- Where possible, ensure you eat mindfully with minimum distractions such as social media or your inbox. This again promotes the parasympathetic state and prevents bloating which often occurs when we eat when our sympathetic nervous system is dominant.
Want to learn more? Join Steph for ‘Detox & Digest’ Nutrition & Yoga Workshop at Hampton on Saturday February 15 at the Hampton Studio.
More about Steph
Steph has been a student for close to two decades now, and yoga has always been her one constant. She partied hard in my 20’s, then raced a number of half Ironmans, but never felt her authentic self. Always moving from extremes, never balanced, rarely grounded. Then, in 2014 Steph experienced a debilitating back injury and was forced away from triathlon, which she can now see was creating space for a deeper dive into yoga, to rehabilitate not only her body, but her mind. While Steph has always known the power of yoga, it has exponentially changed her life in the last five years. It has been the catalyst for her strength, resilience and calmness of mind. Steph is her truest self on the mat – strong, balanced and truly connected.
Through yoga she has experienced such a powerful transformation and wants nothing more than for you to have the same. While she’s been lucky enough to have already found her life purpose as both a nutritionist and life-long student, she now sees that her deeper role is to help you to find yours. And it’s through yoga that you truly can.
Welcome Northeast Yoga. North for the mind, East for the heart. Yoga to connect the two.
To book a consultation with Steph or to find out more about The Natural Nutritionist, visit: www.thenaturalnutritionist.com.au.
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Strengthen, energise, release & thrive with Hot Yoga, Vinyasa Flow, Slow Flow and Yin Yoga classes at our beautiful studios in Hawthorn & Hampton, in Boroondara and Bayside Melbourne.
Our studios also host regular yoga workshops, Victorian weekend yoga retreats, and overseas retreats to exotic places like Bali, Thailand & India. We also offer as a mobile yoga programs for community, school and corporate groups.
Our Hawthorn studio caters to the surrounding suburbs of Camberwell, Kew, Canterbury, Glen Iris, Richmond, Balwyn & Surrey Hills.
Our Hampton studio covers the Bayside communities of Brighton, Sandringham, Black Rock, Beaumaris, Highett, Moorabbin & Bentleigh.
Enjoy our Intro Offer ~ 6 Classes for $50 ~ for newcomers to the studio, valid for 3 weeks from first use.
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