How to improve your bloating problems
Whether your problem is related to what you eat, when you eat or how you plan your diet, following these tips should help provide you with some ways of beating your bloating problems.
All are easy to follow and involve very little effort. Why not give them a go!
- Drink at least 2 litres of still, plain water daily. Drink it throughout the day, but avoid drinking more than a very small amount 20 minutes before food and about an hour after food, as this will dilute your digestive enzymes and reduce the effectiveness of digestion.
- In the meantime, chew your food really well, at least 20 times per mouthful. This will feel very peculiar to start with but persist – it makes more difference than any amount of medicine could ever do.
- Make sure that you are relaxed when eating rather than eating on the run or typing with one hand whilst cramming in a sandwich with the other! If you are stressed whilst eating, the adrenalin you’re producing will switch off your digestive system.
- Sit up straight and put your shoulders back when you are eating, and for at least 10 minutes after finishing a meal. This gives your stomach (which is located under your ribcage) sufficient room to move its muscular walls to mix food up with digestive enzymes. It makes a huge (and completely free) difference to digestion.
- Keep coffee out of the diet completely, even decaf, and don’t have more than 2 cups of regular tea (decaf or otherwise) per day, as these are also bad for just about everything, including gut transit time.
- Once an hour, take a few moments out to do some deep breaths. You can find suggestions for simple breathing exercises online or from library books, or in a book like ‘Breath Better, Feel Better’, by Howard Kent. The point is that your body needs to be as free from adrenal surges as possible to facilitate good digestion, and oxygenating the tissues helps with this in a very straightforward manner.
- Limit wheat to one meal per day, if at all.
- Prioritise sleeping – be in bed by 10pm whenever possible, even if it means getting up earlier to get things done. Your digestion will thank you. If you can eat your evening meal before 6pm then this will work even better.
