BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

You’ve probably spent more time than you’d like to admit wondering if something is off with your gut. Not dramatically wrong, just persistently uncomfortable. Bloated after meals for no clear reason. Sluggish in the morning. The kind of thing you chalk up to stress, or age, or just how you are.

Trisha Pasricha, MD, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel in Boston and author of You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong, sees this pattern all the time. And her first move isn’t to order tests.

She gives patients a 30-day reset instead: five small daily changes, nothing drastic, held consistently for a month. For some people, that’s all it takes. Symptoms begin to ease and habits stick. For others, the reset clarifies what’s going on and makes any follow-up testing more useful. Either way, you leave with more information than you started with.

Here’s what the reset involves.

Fix your bathroom posture first

This one doesn’t take 30 days. It takes about 30 seconds.

Modern toilets are designed so you sit with your knees at hip level, same as a regular chair. That position puts a slight kink in your colon. There’s a muscle near the end of the intestinal tract that tightens when your knees are level. Raise your knees above your waist and it lets go, the colon straightens out, and things get considerably easier.

Researchers tested this in healthy people who thought they had no issues, and found a real difference. Pasricha says the reaction from patients is almost universal: they had no idea how much better it could feel. It also reduces the straining that contributes to hemorrhoids over time.

You don’t need anything fancy. A stool, a trash can, whatever gets your feet off the floor. The Squatty Potty was designed for exactly this if you want something purpose-built.

Eat more fiber, and eat it earlier

Pasricha is more focused on fiber than most gastroenterologists, and she has good reason to be. It’s her top recommendation for healthy digestion, and most people aren’t eating nearly enough.

Her advice: don’t save it all for dinner. A high-fiber, high-protein breakfast sets your digestion up for the whole day. Build from there with snacks like raw vegetables, lentils, or a handful of almonds, rather than trying to catch up at night.

On days she doesn’t hit her fiber goals through food alone, she uses psyllium husk, a well-studied soluble fiber. It shifts gut bacteria toward the kind that produce short-chain fatty acids. That’s useful for more than just regularity.

When you start eating more fiber, your stools will likely get softer and more frequent. Patients come back worried. Pasricha says it’s not diarrhea. It’s what healthy digestion looks like. A lot of people genuinely don’t realize they’ve been constipated for years until they’re no longer in that cycle.

Cut the three main gut disruptors

For 30 days, Pasricha asks patients to cut back on ultra-processed foods, alcohol, and NSAIDs.

Ultra-processed foods are linked to gut lining damage and polyp development, with emerging research connecting early-life exposure to rising rates of early-onset colorectal cancer. Alcohol irritates the gut and disrupts the microbiome. NSAIDs, including ibuprofen, naproxen, and Excedrin, damage the lining with regular use. “Any gastroenterologist has seen too many people come in with ulcers from NSAIDs,” Pasricha said. If a doctor has prescribed them for a specific condition, keep taking them. But reaching for ibuprofen daily for general aches is worth reconsidering.

Most people find these cuts easier than expected, and a good number keep going well past the 30 days.

Move every day, especially in the morning

Exercise stimulates contractions throughout the digestive tract, which is why doctors ask post-surgery patients to get up and walk as soon as possible. Movement is one of the fastest ways to get things going again.

You don’t need a long routine. A daily walk, particularly in the morning when your colon is naturally more active, is enough to make a real difference over a month. Regular moderate exercise also reduces colorectal cancer risk long-term. One thing worth knowing: extreme endurance training can backfire on gut health, so more isn’t always better.

Take stress seriously as a gut issue

The gut-brain connection is well established. Stress disrupts gut bacteria and affects motility in ways that are easy to attribute to something else, which is why most people never connect a rough stretch emotionally to what starts happening in their digestion. Pasricha includes it as one of her five pillars for exactly that reason.

What stress reduction looks like is personal. Sleep tends to be the highest-return thing you can protect. A morning walk covers both the movement and some of the stress reduction at the same time. The reset doesn’t prescribe a method, but it does ask you to treat stress as a real digestive factor rather than background noise you’ve learned to live with.

What to expect after 30 days

This reset isn’t a cleanse or a perfection project. It’s a calibration. Some changes will feel good enough to keep. Others will surface what needs more attention. Thirty days of small, consistent shifts give you a much clearer read on your gut than you had before.

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