Why is my stomach bloated after eating?
Digestion is key
Do you feel bloated after eating? We asked our natural living and food expert Janella Purcell to share her advice on beating the post-meal bloats.
Digestion begins in the mouth, so the first thing to do to ensure proper digestion is to chew, a lot. Practise mindful eating. This means do nothing else whilst eating apart from eat. No reading, emailing, talking on the phone, driving, walking or housework. Once you become present to what you’re actually doing, you’ll most likely be shocked at just how often you’re not chewing.
If food reaches our stomachs without being properly chewed, it has a really hard time assimilating and absorbing. It ends up as chunks of undigested food trying to move through our digestive organs. If this happens, once it gets down to the lower gut, we can experience all sorts of symptoms like pain, gas, stabbing and, yes, bloating.
Stress, by the way, constricts our guts, so avoid eating when you’re feeling this way; or if the stress is prolonged, eat easier-to-digest foods like broths, pureed soups, smoothies, miso soup and vegie juices.
You can also try taking a good probiotic to increase the population of good bacteria in your gut. Or perhaps try taking a digestive enzyme before you eat, as the problem may be that you’re not excreting enough of these needed for proper digestion. Look for a vegan one. Try to be aware not to overeat or eat too late at night, as these bad habits will slowly but surely weaken your spleen and all other organs of digestion.
Finally, and if all else fails, remove any hard-to-digest and/or processed foods for a week and see how you feel. It may be that you’re eating too much of one thing. The usual suspects are grains, animal products, legumes and sugar, of course."
NEXT: Food swaps to combat bloating or check out our health section.
