Fiber is at the heart of the way I eat. It does so many amazing things and so many people are so deficient in it.
What does fiber do?
- It maintains the mobility of the GI tract. I don’t understand how people can walk around living their lives if they are constipated. I was constipated once for 12 hours and thought I was going to die.
- Feeds your microbiome. Your microbiome may just be the key to everything.
- Helps control blood sugar levels. Insoluble fiber isn’t absorbed so you eat, get full, and don’t take in a lot of calories and sugar.
- Aids in achieving healthy weight. Fiber can actually grab onto food and let it pass through your GI tract and not be absorbed.
- It keeps you full. You won’t be hungry on a fiber-filled diet.
If you want to know all about fiber and especially its effects on the microbiome, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is your guy. His book, Fiber Fueled, is amazing. He’s also all over YouTube if you’d rather watch. He has two long interviews with Rich Roll that are fascinating.
When I talk about eating fiber I’m not talking about taking supplements. Dr. Bulsiewicz recommends eating a variety of plants each week to get the best fiber and microbiome boost. Specifically he recommends eating 30 different plants each week.
That sounds really hard when you first hear it but I haven’t found it challenging in practice. I’m not going out of my way to get 30 different plants but when I look back on what I’ve eaten over the past week I far surpass that.
If you want to lose weight while eating all you want, fiber is your friend.
I’ll have to try eating 30 different plants in a week… I usually stick to my ten favourites 🙂
Ronel visiting for F:
My Languishing TBR: F
Fiery Farralis
I heard about the 30 plants thing for the first time about a month ago. We tend to get kind of lazy and focused on what works for us, so we were only eating about half of that number. But it was an easy fix. I figured out a way to get in some fruit at breakfast. I bought more varieties of veggies for my salads. We brought back an old dish that had fallen out of our repertoire — a greens stir fry. That got me to 30 plants a week. More really, because now that I decided that this is important to me, I’m still finding new plants to try.