Did Birth Control Destroy Your Gut?

What’s that? You went off birth control and now you are bloated, gassy, depressed, fatigued, having skin issues, severe PMS and gaining weight. Perhaps you’ve developed brain fog, histamine intolerance or food intolerances, IBS, estrogen dominance or maybe you haven’t seen your period in months?

How are all these symptoms related? Poor gut health. Yes, your acne, depression, eczema, brain fog are most likely related to your gut. There’s a common misconception that we need to be having digestive symptoms for our guts to be out of wack. This is not true. We also continuously blame things like acne, brain fog, and PMS on our hormones but what if I told you your gut may be to blame?

Hear me out. You find out you have a hormonal imbalance. You take some herbs and things to try and balance them out. Great, BUT what is the root cause of your hormonal imbalance? What caused your hormones to get out of wack in the first place? 9 times out of 10 it’s probably going to be your gut from said birth control or other factors.

This is why I always address digestion, mineral balance (i’l explain later), diet and gut health first and foremost before we start addressing the hormone imbalance.

Disclaimer. I am not here to bash birth control, hell, who knows where I would be today if I wasn’t on it for those 12 years! If you need to be on it, I get it! But I really wish someone, just one person, would have informed me and saved me from all the digestive distress, hormonal imbalances and post birth control symptoms I experienced and helped me support my body instead.

So how does birth control come into the picture?

One of the biggest offenders that alters our gut microbiome is medications, you got it, the birth control pill. Birth control directly disrupts our normal gut flora and makes us more susceptible to an overgrowth of bad bacteria and yeast. It also causes leaky gut or intestinal permeability, this is when our small intestine literally becomes “leaky” and allows unwanted undigested food, bacteria and toxins into our bloodstream. Sounds fun huh? It leads to full body inflammation and hormonal disruption. There are even studies that now link PCOS to an imbalanced gut flora and leaky gut.

If we have a comprised digestive system that means we are certainly not digesting and absorbing our food optimally leading to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, yup, we not only need to be addressing our gut health but also the vitamins and minerals lost. Up next: the vitamins and minerals depleted from birth control and what to do about it.