Today, I want to share a little more in depth about the single most important tool you can use on your digestive health journey.
You’ve maybe already tried a lot of tools to help you on your digestive or allergy journey.
You might think I’m going to tell you that supplements are the go-to tool. Or lab tests. Or elimination diets.
But the single most valuable tool to help you get a handle on your symptoms—and to help you understand what is going on in your body—is a Food-Symptom Diary.
A Food-Symptom Diary is the single most important tool on your gut-healing journey.
It’s not sexy. It’s not snazzy. Especially because when you use it, I ask you to take a look at your poop!
But truly, if you can learn how to properly use a food diary, you’ll find some answers. It helps you learn:
what foods your body is reacting to.
where seemingly disconnected symptoms are actually coming from.
what you can do in your daily life to reduce symptoms and feel better.
I use a food diary with every single client that walks through my door.
OK, but how do you use it?
I made a video for you this week, explaining what to do with it. You really don’t want to miss it.
If you’ve been frustrated with trying to figure out how food is triggering your symptoms and you’re looking for some help, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. In this focused session, we’ll discuss where you’re at, and what I think would be your next best steps. If I can’t help you, I’ll be sure to give you a referral to someone who can.
Colon hydrotherapy can be an essential tool to help you overcome your digestive health troubles.
To help you understand this, here something a little personal: I never realized quite how important regular, daily detox was until I started struggling with constipation…
If you have the same, you understand that bloated, foggy, crabby feeling that I get when I haven’t had my daily poop.
Until I studied functional nutrition, I didn’t understand how essential this process is. The primary ways that toxins move out of your body include pooping, along with hydration to promote urination and kidney-excretion, and exercise to promote breathing and sweating.
And regular release of toxins is essential for good health.
However, those of us with chronic health challenges often have impaired detox function and need some additional support.
This week, I’m sharing an interview with Arcata, CA colon hydrotherapist Ashton Wiesner, who owns the Vital Flow Cleansing Center, about colon hydrotherapy, and how it can support your detox process.
You might think that colon hydrotherapy isn’t for you, or you may feel a little squeamish about it…I hope that our interview helps clear away some of your worries about it, satisfies your curiosity about what it’s like to get a session, and helps you understand how it can help you with your healing process.
Can I help you? If you are struggling with digestive or food sensitivity issues and you’re confused and aren’t sure how to move forward, I invite you to schedule a free, 30-minute assessment session with me. I’ll help you clarify your next steps, and let you know if I think I can help you. You can schedule that here.
Have you ever felt bad about your digestion problem progress after reading heroic stories of health recovery on your Facebook feed? Or felt like there’s something wrong with you because you aren’t better yet?
I most certainly have faced this, and it feels double-strong for me, because I’m a coach who is supposed to have figured this all out.
But the truth is this: I still have digestive problems, and I still need digestion remedies!
The other truth: for some of you, there is no complete “cure”.
But this doesn’t mean that you are S.O.L. (that’s “sh*t out of luck”!)
Au contraire.
The solution instead is learning how to take care of yourself in a way that fits in your life.
If you’re like most of my clients, you’ve already been on this journey to restore your health for quite some time. But where I see a lot of people getting stuck is in the try-everything-and-see-what-sticks phase.
You deserve a more strategic approach that helps you build an arsenal of tools that you know work specifically with your unique physiology AND works with your life.
There’s a bit of a myth in the wellness space that says that you have to do a lot of complicated dietary and lifestyle gymnastics to see real results. And while some people are able to do this, others really struggle with it. Sometimes, life is just too full for a complete overhaul.
So I think you might find my video this week refreshing…in it, I share my current digestion remedies, which I continue to use daily. Hint: It’s not hugely complicated. Give it a watch, and let me know if you learning anything surprising.
Note: This article contains affiliate links, which give me a small commission on items you purchase by clicking these links, with no additional cost to you.
At the beginning of my healing journey, instead of doing a basic elimination diet to go gluten and diary free, I chose to use the keto diet as my template. During my keto time, I relied heavily on dairy products to provide my needed fats. I didn’t know that this was going to be recipe for disaster…
Many of my hormonal and endometriosis symptoms flared over the first 9 months, and got drastically worse. And I didn’t notice right away that my fat digestion wasn’t up to snuff when it came to dairy (I wish I had already studied nutrition before I committed this act of unintentional self-harm!)
It’s easy to eat dairy many times a day. We might have milk or half-and-half in our coffee, milk in our cereal or pancakes for breakfast, cheese for a snack or with our lunch sandwich, and cheese as a topping on our dinner. Salads often are topped with cheese garnish or creamy dressings. And desserts and treats are another common source of dairy products.
Though dairy foods can be important and nutritious parts of a whole foods diet, the constant flow of dairy products can mask their true effects: many of us are sensitive to dairy and need to go dairy free.
In fact, dairy products are one of the top three food intolerances, and for this reason, I usually recommend that my clients do a trial period without dairy products when we begin working together. Once we complete this elimination, we can test the various forms of dairy to see which ones you react to.
It’s important to understand how and why dairy can be inflammatory, and to figure out if YOU are dairy-sensitive if you are working on improving your digestive or other health challenges. Many of you may need to go dairy free to get a handle on your health.
Let’s explore why you might try going dairy free.
What is Dairy and Dairy Free?
Dairy refers to products that come from or are made from animal milk. This includes:
Butter and ghee
Milk and milk powder
Cheese
Yogurt
Kefir
Cream and Half and Half
Ice Cream
Sour Cream
Dairy can also include ingredients that are sourced from milk, such as whey protein powder, casein, lactose, hydrolyzed casein, calcium caseinate, caseinate, iron caseinate, lactalbumin, lactoglobulin, lactulose, magnesium caseinate, potassium caseinate, rennet casein, sodium caseinate, whey protein hydrolysate, and zinc caseinate.
Dairy free refers to eating a diet without any dairy or dairy-derived products.
Why Go Dairy Free? Effects of Dairy on Your Body
There are several types of sensitivities to dairy. Your strategy for moving forward will depend on which type of intolerance you have.
Dairy Allergy
A dairy allergy would be characterized by a severe allergic reaction to dairy consumption, including swelling of the mouth, tongue, and throat, difficulty breathing, unconsciousness, and dilated pupils. This type of reaction, sometimes called anaphylaxis, is caused by a sudden and acute response of IgE antibodies and the release of histamine on a massive scale to an allergen.
If you are sensitive to dairy in this way, you likely already know it and avoid it. This is actually a pretty rare type of dairy reaction, though it does happen.
Lactose Intolerance
Lactose intolerance is a dairy sensitivity where the body does not have the enzyme lactase to adequately break down lactose, or milk sugar. Lactose intolerance can be quite uncomfortable, causing:
Intestinal cramping
Diarrhea, bloating
Gas and flatulence
Gurgling sounds in the belly
Vomiting
Most of you who suffer from lactose intolerance likely also know this about yourselves, as the symptoms are usually quite uncomfortable. It’s estimated that approximately 30-50 million Americans are lactose intolerant.
Casein Sensitivity
Casein is the protein in milk. Some people are sensitive to this protein, either because their leaky gut has allowed casein to be tagged by the immune system for destruction, or because of an innate sensitivity. Possible symptoms are:
Bloating and gas
Swelling and pain in joints or muscles
Nausea or vomiting
Diarrhea
Constipation
Skin itching or inflammation, such as eczema
Fatigue
Sinus and breathing issues, such as asthma, wheezing, coughing
Headaches
These latter two sensitivities can cause inflammation in the digestive tract, which can contribute to wide-ranging symptoms throughout the body. Inflammation from dairy in the large intestine can impede the absorption of minerals.
Many people who are gluten sensitive, especially those who have celiac disease, are “cross-reactive” to casein, the milk protein, because the casein protein is chemically similar to gluten.
A1 vs A2 Casein Sensitivity
Milk protein from northern European cow breeds, including Holstein, Friesian, Ayrshire, and British Shorthorn cows, contains mostly A1 casein, while milk proteins from the southern European breeds including the Guernsey, Jersey, Charolais, and Limousin cows mostly contains the A2-type.
Because milk is blended from many dairies and breeds, most regular milk contains both types of casein, but A2 milk, available in some stores, only contains the A2 casein (milk protein.) Some people are sensitive to one but not the other, and find they can tolerate the A2 milk just fine. This is also the reason why some people tolerate goat milk but not cow milk. Goat milk never has A1 casein.
So if you find that you react to milk but not other dairy products, it might be worth a trying an A2-type milk to see if you fare any better.
Other Sensitivity Issues with Dairy
Besides these sensitivities, dairy can also impact your hormones. This is because milk, no matter the quality or source, comes from either lactating and/or pregnant animals, and therefore contains estrogens and other hormones. These hormones can disrupt the balance of hormones in our own bodies, and contribute to menstrual changes, acne, PMS, infertility, mood swings, pain, inflammation, and more.
Non-organic milk may also contain additional growth hormones, or lactation-stimulating hormones, as well as antibiotics, and residues of glyphosate and other chemicals in the feed the cows ate. Because toxins bio-accumulate in fat, milk is a reservoir for such chemicals. This chemical intake can damage our sensitive digestive tracts, just like glyphosate and gluten.
Dairy can also in some people be responsible for creating mucous in the digestive tract, if it’s not digested well, which can negatively affect your digestion and create irritation in the wall of your gut.
Should I Go Dairy Free?
The best way to evaluate whether or not dairy is contributing to your symptoms is to try eliminating it for several weeks, and then to carefully reintroduce it to see if you notice any symptoms.
I generally recommend eliminating gluten, dairy, and sugar (including alcohol) for 30 days as a basic elimination diet, as these are the top three inflammatory foods that may be contributing to your symptoms.
After you’ve eliminated these foods for 30 days, you can begin testing each one in turn, and using a Food-Symptom Diary (you can grab mine here) to track your body’s response. The key thing here is to only test ONE food at a time, and to wait 4 days until trying something new.
When reintroducing dairy products, it’s helpful to test each one that you regularly eat one at a time. So in other words, you might test butter first, but then wait four days, then test yogurt, and wait a few more days, and then test cheese. Each dairy product is unique, and you may find that you tolerate some better than others.
If your body shows symptoms within 3-4 days of eating the item, it’s probably best to continue to leave it out while you work on understanding what else is happening to create that sensitivity.
OK, so you can’t have dairy, and you’re panicking a little about what you’ll do without cheese? Let’s talk about some ways to crowd out dairy products, so you don’t feel deprived.
Milks There are many milk substitutes out there on the market. Try almond, hemp, rice, macadamia, or cashew. I don’t recommend soymilk, because most soy is GMO and likely contaminated with glyphosate, and is often also a reactive food for many people. It can also have some undesirable effects on hormones. Homemade is better than store bought, if you can find the time to make it.
Healthy Fats Try coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, and avocado oil instead of butter. Coconut oil with a little salt is delicious on toast. If you choose a non-dairy butter substitute, make sure it is free of hydrogenated oils.
Creamy foods Satisfy your craving for creamy foods with spreads such as guacamole, tahini sauce, nut butters (almond, peanut, sunflower, cashew), coconut cream, coconut milk, coconut or cashew yogurt. And don’t forget about mayonnaise/veganaise, or hummus.
High Calcium Foods Many people are concerned about the lack of calcium when giving up dairy. There are many foods that can provide adequate calcium such as sardines with bones, sunflower and sesame seeds, almonds, broccoli, collard greens, bok choi, oranges, white beans, black-eyed peas, and kelp.
What to Expect When You Go Dairy Free
As with any elimination diet, expect some cleansing reactions, and possibly uncomfortable symptoms while your body clears a backlog of inflammation and your gut flora readjusts to life without dairy.
Fatigue
Bowel Changes Many of the symptoms of dairy sensitivity are related to the digestive system. You may become less constipated, or your bowels may clean out as they are able to deal with the backlog of inflammation. Stay well-hydrated and trust the process. This should clear within a few days.
Cravings As with gluten, dairy contains caso-morphins, morphine-like compounds that mimic the effect of morphine in the brain. You can be quite addicted to our dairy products, and can experience a withdrawal when you stop eating them. Observe what this tells you about your relationship with dairy, and consider how you would like it to change. Be ready to crowd out your craving with healthy substitutes. You can also try using the amino acids L-glutamine or DPA (d-phenylalanine) with a glass of water on the tongue when the cravings are active. (For more on this subject, check out Trudy Scott’s blog about how to use individual amino acids for craving relief.)
Mood swings Related to the cravings and withdrawal symptoms, you may find you feel a little emotionally tender. Remember to warn your loved ones and coworkers that you may be a little off during the first week you go dairy free. Know that the mood effects will pass, and you will likely feel more balanced and in control than you have in a long time.
Flu-like Symptoms, like aches, chills, sweats, and nausea.
Weight Loss Often, dairy sensitivities can lead to bloating and water retention. When the dairy disappears, the body can release that water, and begin to heal the intestines. Weight loss can be a side effect. Make sure to weigh yourself at the beginning of your elimination diet so you can celebrate your wins at the end.
Improved Skin As with weight, skin issues are common symptoms with dairy sensitivities. Observe your skin during the month as your body adapts to life without dairy.
Improved Digestion Many of the common symptoms related to dairy sensitivity are digestive. Keep a close eye on your digestion, and note any positive changes, such as less bloating, less constipation or diarrhea, and less gas
Caveats with Going Dairy Free
Pre-Made Nutmilks: Many pre-made nutmilks in the store have added sugars, and other ingredients that don’t have a place in a whole foods diet. Read your labels carefully. If you can’t find one with the right ingredients, buy a nutmilk bag (this one is 100% organic cotton) and try the Nut Milk Recipe (at the end of this article).
Avoid Soy-Based and Processed Dairy Substitutes: There are many dairy-free mock cheeses and other dairy products out there, but many of them are full of processed ingredients. Many are based on soy. As I mentioned earlier, it’s best to avoid soy-based products, due to the likely GMO content, as well as non-real-food ingredients. Stick to healthy, real-food substitutes instead.
If you find that you don’t react negatively to dairy, there’s nothing wrong with including dairy products in your diet. The main thing to focus on is to buy grass-fed, organic dairy products to minimize your exposure to the toxic chemicals and hormones present in conventional milk and milk products.
Dairy Free Wrap Up
It’s really quite common for dairy products to cause or contribute to inflammation and symptoms, and for this reason I recommend to all of my clients to at least go dairy free for a short while to see if it is causing problems.
Of course, going dairy free is one small piece of a larger puzzle of discovering your unique food-symptom triggers, and investigating any other underlying causes of your symptoms.
If you’ve been struggling with how to make sense of all the special diets and recommended supplements you’ve read about, I’m here to help. As an expert in helping people understand their unique food triggers, I invite you to download your free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery, which will help you see your big picture road to feeling better.
When you’re ready for some one-on-one help, schedule a free 30-minute assessment session with me. I’ll help you start walking that road to gut recovery. Together, we can get you feeling well again.
Here’s that Homemade Nutmilk Recipe I promised:
HOMEMADE NUT MILK Makes approximately 4 cups
2 cups raw almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, or similar
½ cup dates
½ tsp. sea salt
4 cups water
Place nuts in a bowl and soak overnight. Pour nuts into a colander and rinse. Place the soaked nuts into your blender or food processor. Add the remaining ingredients and blend well. Be careful not to over blend. You don’t want to completely pulverize the nuts.
Pour this blended mixture into a nut milk bag (here’s the one I use), or sieve, set over a bowl. Squeeze the liquid through the nut milk bag, or press with hands or a tool in the sieve. Store in a glass jar in the refrigerator. Nut milk will keep for a few days.
It seems like everyone today is aware of food intolerances. It’s likely that you have tried at least one elimination diet in an attempt to improve your digestive or other symptoms. And with good reason: our daily food intake has a lot of effect on how we feel. Food is the main foundation of our health and how we feel—along with our habits around self-care, exercise, stress reduction, and sleep.
But along with the widespread use of special diets and restrictions I see being used by those with food intolerances, I also see a lot of very confused people. The Facebook Groups I frequent, related to autoimmune disease, digestive disorders like SIBO or IBS, and chronic fatigue, are full of people asking questions like:
“I have been eating a Paleo diet for a while, but I recently read about the low histamine diet, and I think histamine might be part of my problem. But half of what I eat on the paleo diet is high histamine, I’m so confused. What should I do?”
“I have been told to go AIP, Keto, low histamine, no dairy, no Eggs by my Functional Medicine Practitioner following the results of my elimination diet. I know I can do it, but I’m getting cold feet. Any tips and tricks to make this a little easier?”
“I’ve read about several diets that are “good” for SIBO—low FODMAP, SCD, GAPS, Cedars Sinai diet. But there are foods that some diets restrict that other diets say you can eat. Does anyone have an explanation for these discrepancies?
Or: “Diet. Do I need a dietician? I’ll stick to one diet, then hear of another and veer that way. Then I find myself cheating, feeling guilty, and picking another diet. My Naturopathic Doctor just said to do the SIBO-specific [diet] 80% of the time. It’s hard when you are surrounded by family who can eat whatever, whenever.”
Sound familiar?
As a bonafide do-it-yourself-er, if I want to do something like a specialized diet, I spend time online, or buy a book or two about it, and dive in. But even with a very detailed book as a guide, many of our health situations are very nuanced and complex, and need a more nuanced approach.
Though a handout or a book is a great starting place, successfully applying a specialized, therapeutic diet requires a methodical approach. To use this approach makes sure that you are appropriately using the diet as a tool to learn more about your unique body, so you can continue to make better and better choices.
The alternative is blindly grabbing for the next right thing, anxiety about whether you’re doing it right, and hopping from one diet to the next , without really understanding what you’re seeing and what’s best. For example, how do you know if the diet is really working for you? Should you be concerned about deficiencies? How restrictive is too much?
So I’m going to spell out the method and approach I use to help my clients with digestive symptoms and food intolerances adapt the principles of using therapeutic diets so they can be successful with their food-as-medicine approach. You can use these tips to improve your success, too.
Food Intolerances Key #1: A Basic Elimination Diet, to Remove the Most Common Inflammatory Foods, Should Be Completed First.
The thing most therapeutic diets have in common is that they typically eliminate the top 3 most common inflammatory foods and focus on whole, real food. In my practice, I consider this to be gluten, dairy, sugar, and alcohol at a basic level, followed by the next top three, corn, soy, and eggs. A significant number of symptoms improve with this approach alone.
So, if you haven’t already gone down the elimination-diet rabbit hole, I recommend starting with a basic elimination diet that removes these top 3‑6 foods, and focuses on removing anything processed and eating nothing but real food for 30 days.
Many people find that this basic level of clean up provides a lot of relief from food-sensitivity symptoms. Most of us can benefit from this template at least once or twice a year.
A friend and colleague of mine, who doesn’t have any significant health issues, has recently decided to do this cleanse, using the Whole 30 template, twice a year for a month at a time, and always notices that his sleep and stress management improves, digestion improves, and he generally feels great.
When my clients use this approach, they usually find they sleep better, have less digestive upset, better skin, more balanced mood, and they often lose unwanted weight as a side benefit.
A significant number of problems clear up when you eliminate gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, and focus on eating whole, unprocessed food. This is the food our bodies were designed to eat, and is a valuable investment in our health, no matter your health issues.
Food Intolerances Key #2: Choose the Right Template and Customize
OK, so you did the 30-day elimination diet, but you are still seeing food intolerances and symptoms, and are confused about what foods are contributing to the problem. Now what?
The next step is to choose another elimination-diet template to work with, to see if you can isolate the food-related causes of your symptoms.
Diet templates like the Autoimmune Paleo, Keto-Adapted diet, or Low FODMAP diet are examples of templates that might help you figure out what is causing trouble. They are important and essential tools, and should absolutely be used. But as tools, they are really just the place for you to start.
The most important step here is to choose the right template for your situation. Imagine that your best, personalized diet is a small apartment in the middle of a huge city—you want to begin your search by looking in the right neighborhood to start.
So for example, if you have been diagnosed with IBS, or have symptoms that suggest IBS, you probably shouldn’t give the keto-adapted diet a try. (See my video Is Keto Good or Bad? Keto for IBS). It’s generally acknowledged that the Low FODMAP or Specific Carbohydrate Diet is a useful place to start thinking about which foods might be triggering your IBS symptoms.
In contrast, if you are have Type II Diabetes and Metabolic syndrome, the Low FODMAP diet probably isn’t a useful template, whereas the Keto diet might be right for you. For more about how to choose the right diet template, check out my earlier blog post Choose the Right Elimination Diet for your Persistent Symptoms.
Next, to get the best mileage out of diet template, you must take it and make it truly your own. The way to do this is to:
Work with the suggested elimination lists to choose small groups of foods to eliminate for a few weeks. The most likely culprits are the ones you eat frequently, especially daily.
After your elimination period, test them one at a time to see if they really do cause symptoms. You can use a Food-Symptom Diary (like this one) to track your results.
Remove the foods that truly cause a change in your symptoms or mental state while you work on healing the underlying causes of food intolerances (usually things like gut dysbiosis or leaky gut).
Food Intolerances Key #3: Only Test Specialty Elimination Diets for a Set Amount of Time, and Customize, Customize, Customize:
Specialty elimination diets, like Autoimmune Paleo, Low FODMAP, low histamine, low oxalate, low salicylate diets, should be a) trialed for about a month, and re-evaluated at the end of the period; and b) should be customized.
One thing I’ve found personally, with my food intolerances, and more widely with clients is that they are rarely sensitive to everything on that list. Our bodies are complex systems, with many overlapping influences, and our food tolerances are as unique as our fingerprints.
The key here is that the template tells you where to look. You have to look at that list and identify the likely culprits, but the wider goal that we shouldn’t lose sight of is that we want to have the widest-variety diet we can have.
We don’t want to eliminate foods that are actually working for us, and we don’t want to inadvertently create nutrient deficiencies by quitting foods that are actually OK for us. Eliminating foods that we DO tolerate for long enough can lead to reduced oral tolerance and actually increase food intolerances!
Specialty eliminations, with lengthy lists of things to exclude, should be taken on for a trial period, about a month, and then evaluated.
If you haven’t seen any improvement in that time, then that diet is likely not the right template for you, or there are bigger issues that need addressing. A supportive diet is always an important piece of the healing puzzle, but it sometimes isn’t enough.
Food Intolerances Key #4: If Symptoms Persist Beyond an Elimination Diet, You Need to Start Thinking About WHY Those Symptoms are Persisting.
The problem is likely bigger than just food. And regardless, I always want you to be thinking about why the sensitivities are there in the first place.
Some top possibilities include:
Gut dysbiosis or SIBO
Leaky gut
Adrenal or thyroid problems
Gut adhesions/scars
Environmental illness from mold, pollen, dust, household toxins, workplace toxins, etc.
At this stage in your game, it’s important to find a qualified Functional Medicine or Functional Nutrition Practitioner, or Naturopathic Doctor, or similar holistic health care provider to help you investigate your root causes.
Each of these providers has a methodical way of figuring out where to support your body in your quest to regain function and quality of life.
Food Intolerances Key #5: It’s Vitally Important to Work Methodically.
It’s easy to skip around, get confused, and just get no clarity while diet hopping. But the true value of the elimination diet work is to test a series of theories about what is causing your problem, and to slowly cross off the ones that have nothing to do it.
In this way, you build on your experience and create a highly personalized diet template. And not only this, but this work empowers YOU to intimately understand what your body is doing why.
If we return to a question from the top of this article, I can now answer it:
“I’ve read about several diets that are “good” for SIBO—low FODMAP, SCD, GAPS, Cedars Sinai diet. But there are foods that some diets restrict that other diets say you can eat. Does anyone have an explanation for these discrepancies?”
The reason for these discrepancies is because there is no one, right diet for everyone. Food intolerances are caused by many different possible causes, and without doing some methodical investigation, it will be difficult to tell why this template helps and this other one hurts.
There is a right template to begin with, and this will depend on the specific symptoms or problems you are trying to address. Once you’ve chosen that diet template, it must be customized specifically for YOU! You may not need to remove everything or even a lot of the foods on the list.
This person asked specifically about SIBO, and why all these diets are supposed to work for SIBO. The answer is because each person’s SIBO is unique, and has unique causes. For many SIBO patients, the low FODMAP diet is very helpful. But “FODMAPs” are five different types of fermentable starches. The particular bacteria causing your SIBO bloating, diarrhea, or constipation may only be interested in one or two of them. But to figure this out, you must do the methodical work of getting clear about which specific foods are triggering your symptoms.
Doing this work is definitely a little bit time consuming, compared to popping a pill, or using a “stock” diet template, but it provides drastically better results in the end.
Conclusion:
Cutting through the confusion of which diet to eat for your health can be easy: simply choose the right place to start, and do your homework about which foods are specifically a problem for you. Working through this method will provide you with the most useful food information you could imagine: a perfect, tailor-made diet, uniquely suited to your personality and circumstances.
If after reading through all this, you’re still confused, or not sure how to move your situation forward, please reach out to me to get some support. This is the exact method I use to help my clients, who struggle with everything from anxiety to SIBO, figure out what to eat to thrive, while minimizing symptoms.
Bloating is one of the most common symptoms of IBS and SIBO, and one of the most uncomfortable. Along with frequent diarrhea or constipation, bloating is probably the symptom that drives most clients to seek help.
Luckily, with some concerted effort, bloating is one of the symptoms that responds well to dietary and lifestyle habit interventions. In today’s post, I’m going to share my top 6 tips for natural bloating relief to reduce bloating due to IBS or SIBO.
What Are the Primary Causes of Bloating?
There are really just a few primary causes of bloating. A huge one is bacterial overgrowth in the intestines. Bacteria eat and excrete, just like we do. Their excretion is gas.
Some bacterial gases that can cause bloating include methane, hydrogen, and hydrogen sulfide. This last one can cause rotten egg farts, and bad breath.
Bacteria generally like to feed on sugars or starches, and this is why a diet like the Low FODMAP diet, that reduces the amount of certain fermentable starches, often helps you feel better if you suffer from bloating. Another microbiome culprit of bloating is yeasts, like candida.
The other main cause of bloating is constipation or slow gut motility. When your gut slows down, this can make it more likely for gases to build up before they are released, and this can make you feel super uncomfortable!
Some people have bloating so severe that they look pregnant by the end of the day.
Therefore my natural bloating relief tips are going to address these root causes.
Natural Bloating Relief Tips
Natural Bloating Relief Tip # 1: Stress
The first thing I want to talk about is stress. You might roll your eyes at me, but stress is a huge trigger for digestive symptoms of any kind. Stress puts your body into fight or flight mode. When this happens, your digestion slows or stops. To keep your digestion moving well, you want to be in the “rest and digest” state. To tame stress, identify your triggers, address the things you can, and create a plan to manage the stress from things you can’t control. Managing this type of stress includes meditation or mindfulness practices, physical activity, laughing regularly, therapy, and doing things you love. You owe it to yourself to handle this first.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #2: Identify Your Food Triggers
You can make a lot of forward progress with bloating by investing time to identify your food triggers. This helps you get your symptoms under control relatively quickly. One of the easiest ways to figure out your food triggers is to work closely with a Food-Symptom Diary. (If you don’t already have mine, you can grab your free copy here and get right to work.)
Once you are feeling a little better, you can turn your attention to healing deeper layers of gut dysfunction, and hopefully expand your food choices again to a more normal template. Here are some food types that may be contributing to your symptoms to consider:
FODMAPs: FODMAPs are types of carbohydrates that feed bacteria, and may lead to a symptom flare. The goal is not to avoid ALL high FODMAP foods, but to identify the particular ones that flare your symptoms. Check out my video Low FODMAP Diet for IBS and the blog Your IBS Diet Plan in Context for instructions on how to do this.
High Carb Diet: Too much carbohydrate, sugar, and starch may be your issue. Most of this may be covered by considering FODMAP foods, but in some cases, it may be more broad than that. See if reducing your carbs while increasing your proteins and fats helps.
Too Much Fiber:Too much fiber, especially too much too fast can lead to bloating. You can reduce your intake of fiber (or prebiotics), or back off entirely until you work through other root causes.
Too Much Fat: Some people experience bloating if they eat too much fat. Some are sensitive to animal protein, while others are sensitive to industrial seed oils like canola, soy, and cottonseeed, which can easily become rancid. And for some of you, no matter what the fat is, your gall bladder is struggling to produce enough bile to help break down your fats. Figuring out which situation applies to you can help you make the right choices.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #3: Support Basic Digestive Function
No matter your digestive troubles, you should always be supporting your basic digestive function. For a more in depth discussion of how to do this, check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO. But here are the top three to get you started:
Stomach Acid: Stomach acid greatly helps your digestive tract keep moving, and so helps with bloating. You can support stomach acid by using a little apple cider vinegar or lemon juice in water before meals, or by using betaine hydrochloric acid (HCL) capsules.
Enzymes: Enzymes help your food break all the way down, which may reduce the symptoms of bloating. If carbs are a problem, look for enzymes with amylase. If fats are a problem, make sure you are getting lipase or ox bile. And if proteins aggravate your bloating, make sure there is some protease in there (and you did follow the previous step of stomach acid, too, right? This helps protein break down fully.)
The RIGHT Probiotics (usually no histamine producers): Probiotics are important for good digestive and immune function, but the wrong kinds can aggravate bloating. This is especially true if you are struggling with methane-dominant SIBO or histamine intolerance. Make sure to choose probiotics that don’t have histamine producing strains. Check out my video Probiotics Guide for IBS and SIBO for more information.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #4: Get Your Gut Moving
Oftentimes bloating is closely related to how quickly your food is moving through your intestines. The more slowly it is moving through, the more bloating you are likely to have. Check out these tips for helping your digestion move along at a normal pace.
Exercise: The physical jostling of exercise helps move the bowels, and it also creates beneficial biochemical changes. At least a daily walk helps keep things moving.
Stretching and Yoga: My colleagues and friends, Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA shared this with me about yoga poses that are beneficial for bloating (You can read their whole post with photos of the poses over on their blog here):
“Simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating. By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention. There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating.
Simple inversions, such as headstand and handstand, calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting, like in Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist pose) stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation. Forward folds, such as uttanasana (standing forward fold), apasana (knees to chest pose), malasana (yogic squat), balasana (child’s pose) can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to help expel gas. More poses that can help include Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose) and Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose) can be helpful as well.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhale and dilation on the inhale will increase peristaltic motion. Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place. We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.”
Prokinetics (ginger, LDN): Certain herbal or pharma consumables help encourage intestinal motility. These include Ginger, and low-dose naltrexone (LDN). A few commercial products that help include MotilPro by Pure Encapsulations, and Iberogast by Iberogast, and Motility Activator by Integrative Therapeutics. (You can find these products in my online supplement dispensary at FullScript.)
Massage: Loving up your belly with a little massage oil every now and then can encourage your motility. And come on, this isn’t so hard! It feel’s nice! The main thing is to always work in a clockwise direction, because this is the direction of flow for your large intestine. Try small circles all around the perimeter of your belly.
Adhesions: If chronic constipation and slow motility are a huge contributor to your bloating, you may have abdominal adhesions or scar tissue physically pulling on your intestines and slowing their flow. The gold standard for this work is the Clear Passage Clinics. There are several around the country, and they have had amazing success treating abdominal adhesions in their patients. Or look for a massage therapist or physical therapist in your area who specializes in working with adhesions.
Enemas: Regular enemas can help keep things moving. This particular tip has been a HUGE help for me. If you make a mistake with a trigger food and you’re really uncomfortable, a simple water enema, or enema with some medicinal components can relieve the pressure and allow the gas to move out quickly.
Vagus Nerve Support: The vagus nerve is the super communication highway between your brain and your gut. It is a major contributor to gut motility, so encouraging vagus nerve function can keep your gut moving. Check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO for more information about how to stimulate the vagus nerve.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #5: Correctly Identify Infections and Treat, In the Right Order, for a Long Enough Time
Gut infections and dysbiosis can be a significant contributor to bloating. Parasites, bacteria, and yeasts can aggravate the lining of your gut, produce excess gas and toxins, and blow you up like a balloon, especially the bacterial infections. For more information on this topic, check out my video Gut Microbiome Testing for IBS and SIBO.
Parasites: Parasites, if present, must be addressed first. To skip over this step will usually render any other attempts to deal with bacterial or yeast infections ineffective. Parasites are also somewhat difficult to find with culturing or microscopy stool samples, DNA-PCR analysis can find parasites much more reliably.
SIBO: A very frequent underlying cause to ongoing bloating is SIBO, or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. Testing is relatively simple, and treatment includes many of the things I’ve discussed here. If you are having trouble locating a practitioner who offers SIBO testing, please schedule an assessment session with me to discuss.
Yeasts: Yeasts like Candida may be aggravating your bloating, but can only be addressed after any parasites or bacterial problems have been cleared up. Stool testing with a DNA-PCR analysis, like the GI-MAP really helps to identify the level of yeast, and is superior to stool testing that attempts to culture the microorganisms. Yeasts are very difficult to culture.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #6: Absorb Gases
One last possible way to help is to use binders or herbs that help to absorb the excess gasses that are causing pressure. You may not want to choose this route if you struggle with constipation, as binders may slow things down. Here are two options.
Atrantil: A product designed by a gastroenterologist, this three-herb formula can really help reduce bloating. (I don’t have any affiliation with Atrantil, I’ve just used it and found that it worked).
Binders like clay and activated charcoal: These can also be really valuable, but must be taken on an empty stomach and away from food. The one I use is called GI Detox, by Bio-Botanical Research (also no affiliation).
Conclusion
I hope that all these bloating tips can help you find some relief from your bloating, no matter the cause. Now that you know what to try, where will you focus your attention first? Leave me a comment or a question below.
If all this information feels overwhelming, know that you don’t need to stress about it. I’m here to help you! If you need some extra help sorting out how to make sense of this for your unique situation, I encourage you to do one of two things:
