Most mornings I swim at Terrigal Beach before the car parks fill up. I keep a scrappy journal, and somewhere in last winter’s pages I wrote: felt flat all week, not sleeping well, gut off. I’d been eating on the run, grabbing easy things, and I’d quietly dropped most of the plants from my meals. It took me a little while to connect those dots. Fibre was the thread I kept pulling on.
What fibre actually is — beyond the cereal-box version
Ask most people and they’ll say fibre is the stuff in bran that keeps you regular. Fair enough. But that’s a pretty narrow read of something far more interesting. Dietary fibre is the collective name for the indigestible carbohydrate structures found in plant foods: fruits, vegetables, legumes, wholegrains, nuts and seeds. Your body can’t break most of it down the way it breaks down protein or fat — and that’s exactly the point.
Nutrition Australia distinguishes between two broad types: soluble fibre, which dissolves in water and forms a gel-like consistency in the gut (think oats, lentils, apple), and insoluble fibre, which adds bulk and helps move things through. Most whole plant foods contain both. The two work together rather than in isolation, which is one reason food sources tend to serve us better than isolated supplements. Nutrition Australia’s fibre fact sheet is a good plain-language overview if you want the full picture.
The gut connection — and why I keep coming back to it
The thing I keep coming back to is the relationship between fibre and the microbiome. The trillions of microorganisms living in the large intestine ferment soluble fibre and produce short-chain fatty acids as a by-product. Those fatty acids feed the cells lining the gut wall and seem to play a role in how settled the whole digestive system feels.
I’ve noticed — and dietitians often point this out too — that people who consistently eat a wide range of plant foods tend to report feeling more comfortable after meals, less bloated in that low-grade constant way, and more energetic through the afternoon. That’s not a cure for anything. It’s just a pattern worth paying attention to.
Our Gut Health Challenge goes deeper into this if you want a structured place to start.
Fibre and energy — the slow-burn argument
Fibre slows the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream after a meal. Slower digestion, steadier release. What that tends to feel like in practice is a longer stretch of sustained energy rather than a quick spike and then that familiar mid-afternoon slump where the to-do list starts to blur.
I’ll admit I got this wrong for years. I thought energy was mostly about caffeine timing. But I’ve noticed that on mornings after a genuinely fibre-rich dinner — a big bowl of brown rice and roasted vegetables, or something like this Feta, Sweet Potato and Eggplant Frittata — I feel more even-keeled by 3pm than I do after a lighter, low-plant meal.
Wholegrains, legumes, and root vegetables sit at the core of this. The Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend adults aim for 25–38g of dietary fibre daily depending on age and sex. Most of us are sitting well short of that. Eat for Health’s guidance on fibre intake has the specifics broken down by life stage.
Sleep, stress and the gut-brain link
This is where it gets genuinely interesting, and also where I’d urge some caution about overreaching claims. The gut and the brain communicate constantly via the vagus nerve and through various signalling compounds. Gut-health researchers are still mapping a lot of this, so I’ll keep it to what feels observable rather than definitive.
What I’ve written in my journal more than once is that my sleep is lighter and more fragmented in weeks where I eat poorly. Dietitians often suggest that a well-fed gut microbiome produces precursors to serotonin and other compounds involved in mood and sleep regulation. Whether that’s the direct mechanism or whether it’s just that eating well reduces background physical discomfort, I genuinely don’t know. Either way, the correlation in my own experience is hard to ignore.
If you’re curious about the food-stress-sleep triangle more broadly, our piece on Calming Foods is worth a read alongside this.
Practical ways to eat more fibre without overthinking it
Here’s what actually helps, in my experience. Not a strict programme, just small consistent additions.
Start with breakfast. A smoothie bowl built on rolled oats, seeds and fruit gets you a meaningful amount of fibre before 9am. Our Green Smoothie Bowl is a solid starting point. If you’d rather something savoury, our Gluten-Free Granola works well with Greek yoghurt and sliced fruit.
Add legumes somewhere in the day. Lentils in a soup, chickpeas in a salad, white beans stirred through a braise. They don’t need to be the hero of the meal, just present. A recipe like our Chicken with Mushroom Quinoa layers in plant fibre without it feeling like a conscious health project.
Eat the skin. On apples, potatoes, zucchini. A lot of the fibre in vegetables and fruit sits just beneath or in the skin, and we’ve got a habit of peeling it away.
Vary the plants. This is the one I think gets underweighted. It’s not enough to eat the same two or three vegetables every day. Different plants feed different microbial communities, and variety seems to matter as much as volume. Aim for eight to ten different plant foods across a week as a rough guide, though honestly I’d say a dozen is even better if you can swing it.
A quiet note on going slowly
One thing worth flagging: if you’ve been eating a low-fibre diet and you add a lot of it in quickly, you’ll likely feel it. Bloating, gas, general digestive protest. The gut needs time to adjust. The practical advice most dietitians give is to increase gradually, drink plenty of water alongside it, and give your system a few weeks to settle into the change.
My honest opinion — and I’ll own this as an opinion — is that most wellness conversations about gut health get tangled up in expensive supplements and powders when the most effective thing is just eating more actual plants. Not always glamorous, not a quick fix, but it’s the thing I keep coming back to when I strip everything else away.
The Terrigal ocean is cold enough most mornings to clear my head pretty fast. But it’s what I eat the night before that seems to shape whether the swim feels like effort or ease. That’s a small observation from a scrappy journal entry, not a clinical finding. But it’s kept me paying attention.
— Tanya Pryce, Golden Door Living
