Two probiotic foods and three prebiotic foods a day. That's the whole baseline — everything else is refinement.
Eat them in the same meal. Prebiotic plus probiotic is a synbiotic, and it absorbs better than either alone.
If you're bloated: cooked vegetables over raw, chew slowly, walk after eating. Bloating is a message, not fat.
Most people arrive at gut health through a symptom somewhere else — skin that won't settle, a mood that swings on nothing, bloating that shows up at six in the evening. None of those feel like digestion, which is exactly why the gut gets treated last. But it sits upstream of all of them.
A supplement, and nothing to feed it
Taking a probiotic capsule on a low-fibre diet. The bacteria arrive and there's nothing for them. Fix the food first; the capsule is optional.
Raw vegetables when you're already bloated
Salads feel virtuous and cost you more digestive effort. Cook them for a week and reassess.
Reading bloating as fat gain
One is a temporary message, the other is storage. The panic response usually makes the bloating worse.
Treating it as a three-day cleanse
Your microbiome responds over weeks. Two probiotic and three prebiotic foods most days beats any protocol done perfectly for four.