Why you’re still bloated and what you can do about it.
I’ve been helping women with IBS and SIBO to break free of the bloating, gut ache and unpredictable bowels for many years in my naturopathic practice and in that time I’ve seen some amazing transformations.
Although every woman with chronic gut complaints and their specific health history is unique, I have noticed some common reasons many seem to struggle with ongoing bloating.
So I want to share these with you and also most importantly tell you what you can do instead, to finally feel good about their gut.
Treating the cause
When it comes to persistent and uncomfortable bloating, it’s really important that you address any underlying cause of the problem. Because this is different for everyone, and if you’re treating the wrong cause then you’re not going to fix the bloating.
With my clients, I like to do H Pylori testing, run a blood panel checking liver function and a gut Microbiome test to ensure that we are looking at every possible cause. My mantra when it comes to gut health is “test, don’t guess!”
I also make sure to cover the basics, such as removing common bloat causing foods like carbonated drinks, gluten, dairy, sugary foods and processed foods with certain additives. We make sure everything is covered.
What you can do to address the Confusion about Cause?
Start a symptom journal now that tracks the time and severity of your bloating so that you can start to see patterns. This is really helpful when you work with a naturopath like me because we can often tell what the underlying cause might be from this information. Also spend time thinking about when it started, what makes it worse (not just food, but lifestyle factors) and how soon after eating it happens. Immediately, after just a glass of water, or does it build up over the day.
It’s also helpful if you track your food too, as we can start to see patterns of whether certain foods are contributing to your bloating.
2. Thinking it’s all about WHAT we eat. Not HOW we eat
It’s easy to assume there’s something external to us that’s required, a medication, a supplement, a herb, a cleanse (heaven forbid). Or to focus on the foods that were last to enter the digestive system, since they seem to be the only thing that changes between waking with a flat stomach and feeling 6 months pregnant after lunch. But in reality, we have all the makings of great digestion inside us and limiting our diet to a few safe foods is restrictive, boring, and lonely. It’s also a risky game that leads to nutritional deficiencies for many. If we can fine-tune our digestive secretions: hydrochloric acid, pancreatic enzymes and bile we already have the capacity to regulate the growth of bacteria, wanted and unwanted in the digestive tract.
Understanding how these digestive secretions work is critical to success with SIBO, IBS, and most definitely persistent and uncomfortable bloating. One of the things I spend the most time on in practice is talking about not just what you eat, but how you eat.
So How I’m eating? I didn’t know I could get that bit wrong.
Grabbing food on the run and eating in a rush are about the worst things you can do for your bloating. How about snacking at the computer throughout the day? Or eating in the car on the way to get the kids.
Preparing your own food and being with your food before scoffing it allows for a stage of digestion that is greatly underrated. The Cephalic phase of digestion is when our sight, smell, and touch communicate to the brain that food is coming and we suddenly have a watery mouth in anticipation. This is a great sign your body is ready for the food that’s coming. It allows time for the amylase and salivary lipase to be ready for the food in the mouth, the Hydrochloric acid to be ready in the stomach and then enzymes and bile to act on the remaining food soup in the small intestine.
3. Thinking stress isn’t affecting their gut
I ask my clients about their stress in every consultation. What their load is like and whether they feel overloaded. It is very common to understate our personal stress, because we don;t see it as bad as someone in immediate trauma. Especially in women who have become accustomed to carrying multiple burdens and the expectations of women in our current society. And sometimes stress in women is easier identified as guilt. This quote from Debrah Francis-White rings true for many of my clients “Women are trained to feel guilty when their kids are in after school care while they’re working back to back nursing shifts - and guilty that they’ve dropped out of the half marathon they were running for their teentrepeneur charity because they’ve got severe period pain - and guilt for being late to their mother’s birthday dinner because they’ve been helping friend through a messy break up…” There’s so much juggling and running between roles, and expectations that stress has become implicit in our lives. But our bodies haven’t evolved to function well in sustained stress. When we are under stress, our body won;t produce the digestive secretions that are required to break down our food, and also keep bacteria entering the digestive tract in check.
What can we do about stress, I can’t just change society or not show up.
Eat in a relaxed state. In parasympathetic dominance (rest and digest): That means slow down. Sit down! Turn the TV off, put your phone down, take some deep breaths and always avoid eating on the run. If you can take the time to engage with your food while preparing it your brain sends messages to your digestive system about the acids and enzymes it’s about to need, before the food hits the digestive tract.
Chew thoroughly. Mechanical digestion reduces the pressure on the rest of the digestive juices to break down large particles in order to absorb those nutrients. Additionally while chewing our body creates more salvia which contains amylase, an enzyme to help digest carbohydrates.
Use bitter herbs and sour flavours in your meals to activate the rest and digest state, increase your digestive secretions and benefit your gut function. It’s very easy to predominantly reach for sweet and salty foods in our society, and yet by excluding the bitter and sour flavours we miss out on increasing the hydrochloric acid in our stomach, the pancreatic enzymes into our small intestine and likewise the bile from our gallbladder.
Need help? Have you had a Gutful of Gut Ache?
Hopefully, this blog post has helped you see why you might be struggling with persistent and uncomfortable bloating and also what you can try instead.
If you need expert help and advice then here are some ways I can provide that for you:
1. Book a free discovery call and we can talk about what might be holding you back from giving up the Gut Ache and whether you’re a candidate for my Misery Guts Anonymous program
2. Follow me on Instagram for regular thoughts on the topics that relate to women who’ve had a gutful of gut ache. @guthealthnaturopath
3. Read my blog post on stress and the gut here which will give you some more information for overriding the stress we touched on here.
