Your Diet:
Feeding Your Inner Garden

Simple, practical strategies for nourishing your microbiome — from a practitioner who's helped thousands of people rebuild their digestion.

By Brehan Crawford, MAcOM, LAc

Your gut is an ecosystem, not a machine

Welcome to Part 1 of the Gut Health Basics series. Over the next four posts, I'm going to walk you through the foundational practices I teach every patient who comes to me with chronic digestive issues — the same practices that form the backbone of everything we do at Gut Brain Synchrony.

We start with diet because it's the single most powerful lever you have for shaping the microbial community that lives in your gut. You have more microbes in your intestines and on your skin than you have human cells. That community — your microbiome — influences your digestion, your immunity, your mood, and more. What you eat is the primary way you feed that community, for better or worse.

But before we talk about what to eat, I want to be clear about something: we abhor diet fads and quick fixes. While eliminating specific foods for medical reasons is sometimes necessary, our goal is always to get you back to being able to eat and enjoy a wide variety of foods with a happy tummy. Not a smaller and smaller list of "safe" foods. Not another elimination protocol that leaves you anxious at restaurants.

The foundations of a gut-friendly diet

A wide variety of cooked plant fibers. Vegetables, legumes, and whole grains — cooked rather than raw, because cooked foods are significantly easier for your digestive system to break down. You can have raw foods in moderation, but if you're dealing with digestive issues, warm cooked plant fibers are your foundation. Think soups, stews, roasted vegetables, congee, steamed greens. This is one of the areas where Traditional Chinese Medicine and modern microbiome science completely agree — warm, cooked plant-based foods nourish both the terrain and the microbial community.

Plenty of lean protein. Protein needs vary by body size, but most people should aim for about 1 gram per pound of body weight, spread out equally throughout the day. This supports muscle maintenance, immune function, and provides the amino acids your gut lining needs to repair itself.

Healthy fats in moderation. Olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, and fatty cold-water fish like sardines or sockeye salmon are excellent sources of omega-3s (EPA and DHA), which are important for reducing inflammation. But here's what I see constantly in practice: many of my patients with chronic illness are eating too much rich, fatty food overall. We recommend steaming, lightly sautéing, or roasting with minimal added fat. Soup is almost always a good choice.

Minimize refined sugars, alcohol, and deep-fried food. Dessert on special occasions is encouraged — life is for living. But not every night. Fresh fruit or a square of dark chocolate makes a much better daily treat than processed sweets.

How you eat matters as much as what you eat

Make breakfast or lunch your largest meal — and dinner your smallest. Try to eat dinner early enough that you have about 3 hours without food before bedtime. This alone can dramatically improve sleep quality, which we'll cover in detail in Part 2 of this series.

Eat at a slow, leisurely pace and finish each meal while still just a little bit hungry. This gives your digestive system time to signal fullness and prevents the bloating and heaviness that comes from overeating.

Practice abdominal self-massage after every meal. Just a few minutes of gentle circular massage over your belly. If you do this until you pass a little gas, you'll know it's helping your digestive juices break down your food. This is one of the simplest and most underrated digestive practices I teach.

Hydrate with warm liquids. Warm water, ginger tea, peppermint tea, fennel tea, or masala chai are all good choices. Warm liquids help improve digestion, while ice-cold drinks can make it harder for your stomach to break down food and absorb nutrients. This is one of the oldest principles in Chinese medicine — and modern physiology agrees.

How to know your digestion is on track

If you're not hitting most of these markers, that's valuable information — not a reason to panic. It tells us your digestive terrain needs support, and the strategies in this series are designed to help you get there. For personalized guidance and a community of people working on the same foundations, join us inside the Gut Brain Synchrony community.

Part 2: Your Sleep

Poor sleep can unravel everything you've built with diet. Next, we'll cover the gut-sleep connection and the practical strategies that make the biggest difference.

1. Wicaksono WA, Cernava T, Wassermann B, et al. (2023). The edible plant microbiome: evidence for the occurrence of fruit and vegetable bacteria in the human gut. Gut Microbes, 15(2), 2258565. doi:10.1080/19490976.2023.2258565
2. Makki K, Deehan EC, Walter J, Bäckhed F. (2018). The impact of dietary fiber on gut microbiota in host health and disease. Cell Host & Microbe, 23(6), 705–715. doi:10.1016/j.chom.2018.05.012
3. Gérard P, Li CG, Bhuyan DJ. (2024). Editorial: Fruits, vegetables, and biotics for a healthy gut microbiome. Frontiers in Nutrition, 11, 1468453. doi:10.3389/fnut.2024.1468453