I’m happy to announce the launch of my new Gut Heroes audio podcast!

I hope this offers a convenient way to listen, whether you’re commuting, doing yoga and balancing on your head or out on a walk.

You can access this podcast in all the usual channels (Spotify, Apple and most podcast apps for Android and iPhone). Just type in Gut Heroes and click ‘subscribe’ or ‘follow’ to stay up to date.

I also have a YouTube channel which you can see here. I will put most of the YouTube content up as audio, here on this podcast. There will also be plenty of audio-only content that you will only find on the podcast.

If you want to listen here on the website feel free to click the play button below. Enjoy!

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the first ever Gut Heroes audio podcast!

I just wanted to kick off this podcast with a little bit about what Gut Heroes is about, what to expect in this podcast, and really how I hope it could help you.

You might be aware I also have a YouTube channel, and you can find a link to that on my website, gutheroes.com.

One of the reasons I set up an audio podcast as well is, if I’m really honest, simply because it takes a huge amount of time to create videos, and I find it a bit awkward being in front of the camera.

I’ve just built up so much content that I want to share with you because I think it could help you, and I wanted a way of getting some of these ideas across, getting some of my research across, in a format that I can do a lot more quickly and that I can put online in the form of a podcast.

I also love podcasts. I listen to probably a couple of hours’ worth every single day. It’s something you can do while you’re commuting, while you’re walking. And I personally find it one of life’s great pleasures.

And I hope, if possible, I can share some stuff which you will find interesting. And it would be my absolute joy if you find some of it helps you, you know, relieve some pain or really just helps you thrive, makes you feel better than you currently do, or if you’re already feeling good, just gives you that extra boost.

So a bit about how I work within this…

I have an autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis. And that is a form of arthritis that affects the spine, a form of rheumatoid arthritis. I’ll do a separate post which goes into more detail about that.

But I just wanted to put across that initially, this project was just going to be about that. It was just going to be about sharing my experiences with the AS community. And that is absolutely something I’m going to do, and it’s one of my primary drivers. But I also realised as I went further down into this journey, that it’s about so much more than that.

There are so many things that are interlinked within gut health and the microbiome. And honestly, by making small changes to the way you see food and the way your body interacts with food and other things in your life as well, things like stress and even things like environment, you can make profound differences in your life. And again, I’ll talk about my story maybe in more detail on a different podcast, but I am currently completely medication-free for a condition which can just give you the most crippling pain.

I was in a really dark place with it just, you know, nearly three years ago, where I didn’t really see much of a future. I was in a place where I was in pain almost all of the time. I couldn’t do really basic things. The idea of even doing my shoelaces was an insurmountable task because I was in so much pain.

And it is insane how making the changes I’ve made by researching into gut health, by understanding that the food I put in my body can have a different impact on me than it can have on other people. And the realisation that this can be the same for other people with different conditions and different symptoms and different health problems.

There are some foods that will interact differently with the body. And a lot of this is down to the modern diet, which contains a lot of processed foods and a lot of synthetic ingredients and foods. And these, in my belief and according to a lot of the research, are having a devastating effect on our health.

So I’m really passionate about this, and the other thing I’m passionate about is making this information freely available. I’m really happy to do this in my spare time, and I’m currently self-funding this, and I’m very glad to do it because I don’t think this information should be behind some sort of gate. I totally support people who do charge for this, and that’s a wonderful way of making a living. But I also want anyone who is struggling with their health, who is struggling with an autoimmune disease, or who maybe is just struggling with their general wellbeing and finds this information helpful, to have access to anything that I have found helpful.

So I’m going to share everything I can. Where I can, I will try and give you scientific studies to back up some of the findings or theories that are being looked into currently that have promising results.

And I think one of the things that maybe will set this apart from some of the things you’ve come across elsewhere is that I rigorously test everything I do on myself.

So I go through a process which is really threefold. I will come across an idea of something that can help. So that might be reading the work of various research papers, scientists. I do a lot of reading books by microbiologists and other people in the field, and I read what they’re up to, the findings they have had, and then I dig into Google Scholar and I read the papers directly.

I also am part of some really wonderful social media groups, and I’ll put a link to the resources on the Gut Heroes website so that you can look at these and join these yourself. But I look at what people in those communities are saying, so going back to the example of my autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis. I’m in a great community there, which has thousands of people, and everyone is so generous with their personal experiences. So if I’m on there and there’s a hundred-odd people who are saying, “I tried this supplement and it really helped me,” or “this yoga exercise that really helped me,” then for me that’s really great anecdata, so sort of anecdotal data that’s really worth looking into.

This is the magic of the internet. It’s the hive mind, and I really just want to put that information out there, make it as accessible as possible. We don’t all have time to constantly be monitoring these groups or reading research papers or reading books about this kind of stuff. And the take I put on this is that where possible, I run what I call lab experiments on myself. I don’t actually go to a laboratory, but what I do is I have a really detailed spreadsheet, which I’ve been keeping now for coming close to three years.

It has an enormous number of data points on it. I have, at last count, it was over 90 individual metrics. And I track everything I do each day from the number of steps I’ve walked, my heart rate, which is sort of monitored by my watch, every type of ingredient of food I’ve had in my meals, everything I’ve had to drink, the weather that day. I’ll do a separate podcast on this if it’s helpful because I’m happy to share my spreadsheet and how I do it. But I put lots of metrics on there because I really want to be as thorough as possible in determining what works for me, but also what might work for you.

So I think by trying to cover as many bases as I can, I can weed out some anomalies. And it means when I run one of my discovery lab tests, I call them, I can say, “Right, I’m going to test doing sauna for this number of weeks.” I can do the test, and I won’t be testing anything else at the same time, and I can look at all the different metrics I have in my spreadsheet. I can see how my pain levels are changing, if they’re getting worse, if they’re getting better, is it affecting random things that you wouldn’t expect?

For example, are my sinuses better as a result? Has it improved my cough? Do I have an elevated mood? All of those different things, because I think often with science and discovery and personal experience, some of the most profound findings are the things you don’t expect. And by keeping a really rigorous record of this, I hope, and I really hope, some of this stuff will be useful for you.

Now, what works for me might not work for you. We’ve got different genes, we’ve got different biology, we are in a different environment, different stress levels, all of those things. But that’s fine. The main purpose of this is to show you some things you could try, things that might help. Things that, you know, there might be some things that help 90 out of 100 people. There might be other things that only help 10 out of 100 people, that’s fine.

One of my real big hopes with this resource, this podcast, is to help show you the methods I’ve found helpful for testing things safely on myself and how to record it so that you can really get to a place where you think, “Yes, this is a solid result,” or “No, this isn’t really helping.” And then, hopefully, over time, you get to a place where little by little, you’re seeing improvement over improvement until before you know it, six months down the line, or a year down the line, or two years down the line, you’ve gone from a place where you’re seeing dramatic changes to your life, a dramatic change, for example, to your energy levels or your mood or your pain levels.

This has been my experience. I really, really hope it is your experience too. And I hope that we can share information and that we can help each other.

I just want to finish up by saying, I’m thrilled to have you with me. Thank you for tuning in, thank you for listening. I’m always open to advice for topics I could cover or questions, any of those things. Hop over to the Gut Heroes website, click the contact button, and drop me a line. So once again, thank you for listening. I’m Tommy, and I will speak to you next time.