Foundations of Health

Written by Emma M Stevens (intern) of Viterbo University and Orli Rabin of ThrivingBiome

February 1st, 2025

If you’re navigating an autoimmune condition or gut health issue, the flood of advice, tips, and tricks from endless sources can feel overwhelming, and it’s tempting to dive straight into complex approaches like restrictive elimination diets, specialized supplements, and lifestyle overhauls hoping for the fastest path to relief. However, the truth is that skipping over foundational elements of health can leave your body unbalanced and unprepared, making these advanced treatment approaches less effective. 

We believe that the foundations of health are rooted in five pillars––nourishing eating habits, movement, minimizing toxins, restorative sleep, and stress reduction. These pillars form the foundation for a healthy gut, balanced hormones, immune health, and reduced inflammation. You can think of them as the soil in which you hope to plant a lush garden. Without a stable, nutrient-rich base, even the hardiest plants (or the best treatments) can struggle. Balancing and nurturing these intertwined foundational elements creates the thriving, fertile environment for targeted interventions to take root and flourish.

Autoimmune conditions and gut health challenges are anything but simple because they typically involve multiple body systems working (or not working) together. These concerns often stem from a combination of causes, such as eating patterns, lifestyle habits like sleep and stress, and outside factors like environmental exposures which can throw off your body’s delicate internal balance, or homeostasis. An imbalance in one pillar can disrupt others as the body strives to restore stability. Understanding how these five pillars influence health and what you can do to nurture them can help build a strong foundation of balance within your body.

Here are what we refer to as the 5 pillars of health:

Nutrition

What you eat, how much you eat, and how you eat it plays a huge role in how you feel and function. If you ever notice that your energy seems nonexistent, your cravings are out of control, or your mood feels unpredictable, these may be signs that your diet is falling short of your body’s needs. When you don’t eat enough, your body sees it as a biological threat and responds by activating the stress response, slowing metabolism, and prioritizing protection over basic functions like digestion and immune health. This can be especially concerning for those managing autoimmune and digestive conditions, where restrictive elimination diets and food sensitivities can make undereating more common.

Nourishing your body properly allows it to feel secure, heal, and thrive. While there is no “magic bullet” food or diet that will fix every issue, and everyone’s nutrient needs are unique, getting back to the nutrition basics can help most people feel their best. Start with three essentials: eat enough, eat real meals, and eat balanced meals. So, what does this look like?

• Eat Enough: Eat every 3-4 hours to fuel all of your body’s essential functions, from breathing and digesting food to thinking and moving.
• Eat Real Meals: Opt for solid foods over liquids like protein shakes or light meals.  Hearty, solid meals digest more slowly, keeping you full and satisfied longer while also encouraging mindful eating and healthy digestion.
• Eat Balanced Meals: Including carbohydrates, proteins, and fats at each meal stabilizes blood sugar and energy levels, promotes satiation, and keeps cravings at bay. 

Adding in anti-inflammatory foods like omega-3 rich fish, olive oil, berries, and leafy greens further supports your body’s overall well-being and helps lower inflammation. Remember to stay hydrated, eat mindfully, and listen to your hunger cues. Honoring your body’s needs and taking small steps like these can have a huge impact on how you feel. Check out the graphic below for an in-depth look at building a nourishing plate.

Excercise

‍Moving your body daily provides incredible benefits for both your physical and mental well-being. It improves circulation, lowers blood pressure, boosts energy levels, and supports the body’s natural detoxification pathways, among others. However, the pressure to push yourself to the limit during exercise, combined with the demands of fast-paced modern life, can over stress the body and make it feel unsafe. This triggers the “fight or flight” response and sends cortisol (aka, the stress hormone) levels soaring, in an effort to protect the body. Over time, this heightened state can increase inflammation, disrupt digestion, and worsen existing imbalances. Constant physical demands can also deplete essential nutrients needed for repair, recovery, and overall health, leaving you feeling drained.

So, how can you honor your body through movement and make it feel safe? Calming the chaos with low-impact exercises like walking, yoga, swimming, and pilates provides the benefits of movement without overloading your system. This gentle movement activates the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the “rest and digest” response, which helps lower stress, restore healthy digestion, and foster safety and recovery. Nourishing your body with balanced, wholesome nutrition, incorporating rest days and restorative stretching, and tuning into your body’s needs, creates a strong foundation for healthy and well-fueled movement.

*Deep Dive: Once you have mastered the art of gentle movement in your daily routine, you can enhance your exercise routine by exploring the concept of cycle-synced exercise. Fluctuating hormone levels throughout the menstrual cycle affect your energy levels and recovery. Letting your body’s natural rhythm guide the types and intensity of movement, helps optimize your fitness journey. Learn more about cycle-synced exercise here (link to freebie content?).

Lowering Toxic Load

‍You have probably heard about toxins before, but have you ever wondered what they really are, or how they could affect your health? From the air you breathe to the food packaging you use, and the lotion or shampoo you applied this morning, your body encounters potential toxins constantly. Think of your body as a bucket filling with water–each small exposure adds a drop. When this metaphorical bucket overflows, it manifests in your body as inflammation, digestive upset, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, and more. While your body is equipped with safeguards like your liver, kidneys, digestive tract, and skin to detoxify your system, excessive toxic load can overwhelm these pathways, causing the bucket to overflow. High stress levels, poor sleep, and a less than optimal diet further deplete your body’s resources to manage and eliminate toxins.

So, how can you lighten your body’s toxic load? Start by reducing your exposures: 

• Choose organic foods to avoid pesticides and food additives 
• Avoid plastic food containers and packaging 
• Select natural, fragrance-free cleaning and personal care products
• Equip your home with air and water filtration systems 

*To help you get started, we curated a selection of natural and non-toxic products, available here.* Next, support your body’s natural detoxification pathways:

• Moving your body regularly promotes perspiration and toxin removal through your skin 
• Eating a balanced diet fuels your body’s natural defenses, and including plenty of fiber and probiotic-rich foods promotes bowel regularity and the clearance of toxins through the digestive tract 
• Staying well-hydrated also aids elimination through the digestive tract, and supports the kidneys in filtering and flushing out toxins through the urinary tract 

Most importantly, focus on progress over perfection. Small, intentional changes make a huge difference, providing your body with the support it needs to achieve natural balance, and prevent your bucket from overflowing. 

‍Setting Up Your Sleep Hygiene

‍Sleep is one of the most crucial pillars of health, yet it often gets overlooked or sacrificed as the hectic nature of life takes center stage. Prioritizing rest is important because quality sleep is essential for proper immune function, normal hormone balance and cycles, digestive function, and mental well-being. Inadequate or poor quality sleep lowers your body’s defenses, leaving it more vulnerable to imbalances, stress, and illness. Luckily, your body is incredibly intelligent and has a natural internal sleep-wake cycle, known as the circadian rhythm. Natural light and darkness cue the release of hormones like melatonin, which guide feelings of sleepiness or alertness. If able, aligning with this natural rhythm creates optimal conditions for restorative sleep. For most people, this means going to sleep around 10 pm and aiming for 7-8 hours of sleep in a quiet, cool, and dark room. You can honor this rhythm and promote restorative, healing rest by cultivating healthy sleep hygiene habits. 

• Start your day with 15-20 minutes of natural light exposure (even on cloudy days) to encourage wakefulness in the early hours. Eat breakfast outside, take a gentle walk in the morning sunlight, or try a guided morning meditation in nature.
• Avoid stimulants like caffeine after 12 pm as it can take up to 10 hours to leave your system. Keep in mind that caffeine is not just in coffee drinks, but can also be in teas and chocolate.
• Power down electronics at least one hour before bed. The harsh blue light emitted by screens can disrupt melatonin production and the natural sleep-wake cycle.
• Incorporate calming practices like meditation or gentle stretching in the evening to prepare your body for sleep.

*Deep dive: If you frequently wake up in the early morning hours with no explanation, this could be a sign that you are not eating enough during the day. Overnight, your body continues to use glucose (or blood sugar) for energy, when glucose stores dwindle, blood sugar can drop. To compensate, stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol can spike, disrupting your sleep and causing nighttime wakings. A bedtime snack containing complex carbohydrates and magnesium may help stabilize blood sugar levels and promote restful sleep. You could try snacking on an apple with natural almond butter, fresh berries and pumpkin seeds, or a small, comforting bowl of oatmeal.

‍Learning to Level Stress

‍We all experience stress. Acute stress can strike suddenly and without warning–like the frantic rush when you’re running late, the jolt of anxiety when you lose something important, or the scramble to meet an impending work deadline. Your body rushes to protect itself, triggering the “fight or flight response” of the sympathetic nervous system, causing a racing heart, sweaty palms, and an upset stomach. While stress is a natural part of life and these short-lived events are typically manageable, chronic stress is a different story. Prolonged stress keeps your body stuck in overdrive, flooding it with cortisol and adrenaline, often resulting in inflammation, digestive dysfunction, and hormonal imbalances, including insulin resistance. To protect itself, your body mobilizes all its resources and diverts them away from normal processes like digestion, healing, and repair. This long-term stress also contributes to anxiety, depression, and sleep disruptions, creating a vicious and damaging cycle.If stress is a natural part of life, what can you do about this? While you cannot fully rid yourself of every stressor in life, you can engage in practices that shift your body toward the restorative “rest and digest” response of the parasympathetic nervous system. Regular, gentle movement, practicing meditation, deep breathing, and spending time in natural light foster a sense of calm and help lower stress hormone levels. Prioritizing adequate, restful sleep and nourishing your body also contribute to your ability to cope with stress. Practicing healthy techniques to cope with and release stress helps both you and your body become more resilient, and refocus your body’s resources on healthy digestion, strong immune function, and efficient detoxification and drainage processes.

‍Final Thoughts/Next Steps

‍Your foundation of health starts with nurturing the five pillars–movement, stress management, nutrition, toxin reduction, and sleep. Small, intentional steps like incorporating a calming meditation into your day, nourishing your body with wholesome food, and focusing on restorative sleep practices can support your body’s natural balance, making it more resilient and better equipped to navigate complex health challenges and treatments. Your body is constantly communicating its needs; it can just take time to learn how to listen and respond with care.If you’re seeking more personalized support and guidance on your journey, or if you have questions, working with a Registered Dietitian could be a great option for you!

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