Always bloated?
It’s the end of the workday, you’ve spent the whole afternoon uncomfortable since lunch, and you just can’t wait to get home and undo the pants that somehow became two sizes too small since you put them on this morning, only to find nothing will settle the bloat so you’ll have to just stick it out till the next morning… I know the feeling, all too well!
Excessive and constant bloating is one of the most common gut symptoms I see day in, day out in my clinic, often accompanied by being embarrassingly gassy, constipated one day, and diarrhea the next. Now let me be clear, bloating some of the time is normal. Our bodies change throughout the day, dependent on so many factors, such as how long ago we ate, how much we ate, the type of food, hydration (or dehydration) and when we last moved our bowels. What I’m referring to here is excessive, uncomfortable bloating, which happens frequently, you know, the type where you tell me you look ‘x’ months pregnant!
Speaking from my own experience, I know how frustrating it can be when you feel like you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work. Back in the days before I studied naturopathy, I tried every supplement, diet, cleanse, detox, you name it! Nothing helped. A lot of it made things worse. The problem with these is that they don’t work to find or treat the root cause. They’re band-aid approaches to your symptoms, and although they may provide short-term relief, they don’t address the problem, making it near impossible to find long-term relief.
If you take only one thing from reading this, let it be that there is always a root cause. How do we find out what it is? Read on!
SYMPTOMS & HOW TO FIND OUT YOUR ROOT CAUSE
As I mentioned, bloating is often accompanied by various other digestive symptoms, such as excessive (and smelly) gas, constipation and/or diarrhoea. So many of us these days feel we are intolerant to everything, making it difficult to go out and live life!
To get to the bottom of what’s going on for you, there are a few tell-tale signs I’m looking out for in consults, whilst we recount your story and build a timeline together, such as, “Ever since I went on that trip, I’ve never been the same since” .. or… “One day I can eat pasta and feel fine, a few days later I’ll have the same food and feel awful for days” .. or.. “I was diagnosed with IBS years ago and I’ve been doing low FODMAP ever since but I’m still bloated and uncomfortable almost every day”.
Often what these tell me, is that there may not be a true allergy or intolerance at play, but a root cause that can be investigated and most importantly, treated! The next step is my favourite, functional stool testing! This can be arranged and interpreted by a qualified functional medicine practitioner, such as a naturopath or nutritionist, and is very different to what you might have done in the past with your GP. The current available insights testing can provide is out-of-this-world good, and will quite honestly blow your mind.
Going through these results with my clients is one of the best parts of doing this work - the reason being, yes, it provides us with all the info we need so I can put together a tailored and effective treatment plan for you, but the part really takes the cake is the validation it gives to the client sitting in front of me. For someone who has spent years knowing their health isn’t quite right, but with no answers or a light at the end of the tunnel, to be able to physically see objective data highlighting their inflammation, leaky gut, low microbial diversity - whatever it is, all of a sudden the feeling is, “Oh wow, so this is why I’ve felt like crap all this time”. Especially for my female clients who have experienced medical gaslighting in the past, this is everything.
HOW TO TREAT IT AND GET RID OF THE BLOAT FOR GOOD
Once we finally have the answers, it’s time to get started on a tailored treatment plan and begin your journey to not only feeling better, but getting long-term results. Depending on your individual needs, your plan might include a combination of supplements, herbs, dietary and lifestyle advice to rectify what we found. For example, this might be to reduce inflammation, heal and strengthen the lining of your gut or repopulate your beneficial bacteria, generally broken down into phases, so you have a clear timeline of the process, including the one we all want to know - when you’re going to start feeling better!
As we move through your treatment plan, we work together to address any contributing factors, one of the most common areas impacting our symptoms is our nervous system and stress management, and funnily enough, this is often the one part we all overlook. When we’ve experienced high levels of stress for a long term, we can develop what’s called hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysfunction, essentially meaning the hormones involved with our stress response become out of whack, and we spend too much time living in fight-or-flight (sympathetic nervous system activation), and not enough time in rest-and-digest (parasympathetic nervous system activation).
The gut-brain axis has been incredibly well researched, and we know for sure that our thoughts impact our digestive function - if you’ve ever played sport and had diarrhea the morning of a big game, you know! Especially when we’ve experienced issues with our digestion in the past, it can take time for this messaging to recover - take a moment to visualise, that you’re heading out for dinner with thoughts of, “I don’t know if they’ll have what I need to eat here, I’ve been doing so well and now I have to go out and I just know I’m going to feel sick after, I hope I don’t need the toilet urgently, that would be so embarrassing”, in comparison to, “I know my body can digest this meal, I’m taking deep breaths and trusting my body, life is to be enjoyed and I know I can eat out with loved ones and be present” - feel the difference?
The point is, the belief that you can heal in any aspect of your health is paramount to healing. Read that again.
A FINAL WORD
Natural medicine is so effective in this space and it's one of my absolute favourite areas to work with. Supporting clients from struggling to travel and eat out without fear, to getting back to living their life to the fullest; there’s no work more rewarding than that.
Something that needs to be mentioned if you’re planning to try to resolve your symptoms on your own, be mindful of self-prescribing and using chemist or online purchased products. Working with a qualified naturopath or nutritionist gives you access to practitioner-only products which are regulated and tested for their quality, safety and efficacy. And yes, that online parasite cleanse with no testing or professional guidance is not the answer to your problems!
If you’ve been struggling with bloating and digestive symptoms for years and you’ve had enough, book a FREE 15-minute discovery call here and let’s chat about how this process could truly change your life.
In the meantime, grab yourself some comfy pants and just get dressed 🤎
