Imagine this-you are super excited about eating your favorite food from your favorite restaurant and when the food finally arrives, you gobble it up all with much glee and satisfaction. You are thinking to yourself “Oh wow! What a great day today has been” because well, for most of us good food=happiness. But just when you were drowning in that thought of feeling so fulfilled, your stomach starts to make some odd noises and before you know it, you are all bloated and super uncomfortable. Most of us have experienced this at least once. This has particularly been more frequent in recent times, considering the initial excitement of lockdown’s #quarantinecooking where we were so excited to try out all those new dishes that we saw on Instagram every day and went on feeding ourselves since we had nothing else to do. That excitement slowly faded and then we were so sick of cooking that we remembered our old friends-the food delivery apps! And in all of this, our poor stomach kept crying for help because we had clearly overburdened it.
Over the years, we wear out our digestive systems via modern lifestyle: stress, emotions, sugars, poor eating, overeating, undereating, alcohol, staying up late, etc. and once your system is worn out, the most common symptom is then, bloating!
Most of us tend to ignore the bloating knowing that it will pass (quite literally, in one way or the other!) or simply take a relatively harmless medication to put us at ease. However, bloating is not something that should be looked at as a passing symptom. It is in fact indicative of our overall health because bloating suggests that something is wrong with our digestion, and our digestion and gut health actually influence almost all other body functions.
There are a number of precautions you can take to reduce bloating – you’ve got to remember that your body doesn’t just decide to blow out for no reason – there is always a cause. If you can find the cause of the bloating, then you can take this away and avoid the pain. To narrow down the cause, you can maintain a diary where you note down when you experienced bloating and what foods you consumed that day. Over a period of time, you will likely identify your triggers and then you can consciously avoid them/eat them in less quantity.
The next step after you’ve found the cause is taking steps to restore and strengthen your digestive system so your body can become less sensitive to these issues. This can be done by doing a periodic detox, using certain spices as well as including more fiber and good fats in the diet i.e. more fruits, vegetables and nuts. Along with including the right foods, it is also important to prepare them in the right way and eat your meals in alignment with the natural body clock or what we call the circadian rhythm.
Exercise, adequate water consumption and stress management are also equally important. Exercise and water influence the movement of food through the digestive tract and stress if not managed well, can cause an inflammation in the lining of the digestive tract.
Thus, we can see that managing bloating is largely in our own hands and can be easily kept at bay if we adopt a healthy lifestyle.
