While bloating and the holidays seem to go hand-in-hand, you might experience bloating a lot more regularly than just around your turkey dinners. While it’s not normal, it can be quite common to experience bloating any time after you eat. Even when you try to “clean” up your diet and eat really healthy, you may still experience the post-meal bloat. I’ve been there too, I get how unpleasant it feels, and how frustrating it can be when you may not know what’s causing it. In my own personal experience, plus what I’ve seen with my clients, here are the top 3 reasons you may bloat after eating:

 

Eating too fast can lead you down a very slippery slope to eating too much. Maybe you come from a big family where if you didn’t eat fast you didn’t eat, or maybe you were an active kid that only had minutes between soccer and piano to get in a meal. Either way, if you tend to eat fast you are likely eating more than you should as it takes approximately 20 minutes for your brain to get the message that you are full.

Slow down and chew. It seems so incredibly basic, but digestion starts in the mouth. If you’re just biting and swallowing, you’re skipping an entire step of the digestion process, making it harder for your digestive organs to complete the process. This means that while these organs need to work harder, your food also sits longer in an acidic and damp environment, where it then starts to ferment and create gas, inevitably leading to bloating.

So after you take a bite, put your fork down, and chew your food. Not only will this help improve your digestion, but you’ll also get to taste and enjoy your food, and it will slow you down letting satiety kick in so you don’t overeat.

 

If you’re bloating after you eat, it’s probable that you have undiagnosed food intolerance. Bloating after a meal is one symptom (of many) of a food intolerance, or your body’s inability to fully digest that particular food. It’s this incomplete digestion of the food that leads to unexpected gases building up in the intestine, creating painful pressure, and making your belly distend.

While bloating may not be as severe or immediately dangerous as an anaphylactic reaction that is common in severe food allergies, undiagnosed or ignored food sensitivities and intolerances can lead to long term digestive distress, inflammation, and stress in the body overtime. As we learned in this post here, chronic, systemic stress in the body can cause other unwanted health problems to arise such as weight gain, autoimmune conditions and potential development of disease. So if you believe that a night of feeling bloated and gassy is worth diving into the cheese platter, it’s important to understand that there may be an underlying food intolerance present, which if left unaddressed could potentially lead to bigger problems down the road.

If you want to feel and look your best, I will always recommend removing all known food sensitivities from your diet. This is one of the fastest ways to give our digestive system and body a break, resolve inflammation, and even effortlessly shed pounds.

But at special times of the year, when some of your favourite foods come out, you may choose to indulge and “treat” yourself. If this is the case, you can help your body out by supplementing with a digestive enzyme about 10 minutes before you eat. The digestive enzyme will go to work in your body to complete digestion where your body may lack the enzymes to do the job itself. I recommend trying a plant-based digestive enzyme, as these often have a broad spectrum of action and will work in the acidic and alkaline stages of digestion.

 

Poor diet (or the Standard American Diet), and chronic stress are two huge contributing factors to a depletion in stomach acid, or hydrochloric acid (HCl) levels. So if you’re popping antacids to deal with heartburn, or find yourself belching the alphabet after a meal, or maybe your finger nails and hair are brittle and prone to breaking, it’s possible that you have an underactive stomach or low HCl levels. Adequate HCl levels in the stomach are critical for optimal digestion, and your digestion needs to be in tip top shape to combat the bloat.

My biggest recommendation is to get your stress under control. It’s really difficult for your body to effectively digest your food and prevent bloating, if you’re eating while stressed. When you’re stressed out, your body will actually shunt blood flow and energy away from your digestive system as a survival mechanism, essentially shutting down digestion. So making the time to eat in a calm environment, and focusing on chewing is going to do wonders for your digestion, and keeping the post-meal bloat at bay.

Another tactic you can try is taking a digestive bitters tincture prior to eating. The bitter action of the tincture can enhance digestive secretions in your stomach, liver, pancreas and small intestine to improve overall digestion function. I personally use and really like Canadian Bitters by St. Francis Herb Farm.

 

It’s important to keep in mind that there are a variety of other factors that can also cause bloating, such as low thyroid function, a bacteria imbalance in the gut, or consumption of specific bloat-inducing foods. However, the next time you unbuckle your pants at the dinner table and you curse down at your growing distended belly, I encourage you to think about the basics such as chewing really well, slowing down while you eat, reducing stress, and eliminating food sensitivities from your diet as the first steps to take to banish the post-meal bloat.