Ep 73: eating tips to avoid and reduce bloating

Ep 73 of The Hormone Helper Podcast: Eating tips to avoid & reduce bloating

In this podcast episode, Andrew Costa discusses the topic of bloating and how to eat to avoid it. He shares his personal experience with stomach bloating and explains the different types of bloating: hormonal bloating and digestive bloating. Andrew emphasizes the importance of understanding the causes of bloating and provides tips on changing eating habits and cooking methods to make food more digestible. He also announces a masterclass on better digestion and reducing bloating. The episode concludes with a reminder to simplify food and focus on maximizing digestion for a bloating-free experience.

Resources Mentioned in this episode:
Be free of bloat seminar coming up on feb 28th, click here to join:
https://fit4allfitness.com/bloatfree
Takeaways
Bloating can be caused by hormonal imbalances and poor digestion.
Understanding the different types of bloating can help in finding effective solutions.
Changing eating habits, such as taking time to eat and focusing on digestible foods, can minimize bloating.
Cooking methods can also impact digestibility, with steaming and fully cooking foods being recommended for those with digestion issues.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction: Bloating and its Impact
03:24 Hormonal Bloating
06:18 Digestive Bloating
13:47 Changing Eating Habits and Cooking Methods
21:17 Announcement: Be Free of Bloat Masterclass
22:39 Optimizing Digestion and Avoiding Bloating
27:32 Conclusion

Transcript

0:39

Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast and today's podcast episode will be us spending some time talking about bloating and how you can eat to avoid it. I feel like now that the weather is starting to get better and you're most likely going to be invited to more opportunities to eat at restaurants and go out, with that's going to come the inevitable bloat that people experience when they eat. As a hormone coach, I spend about two to three hours daily talking about clients with things that they can do. to avoid bloat and really about showing them what they can do so they can eliminate bloating even from meals in the future. Now I will say this, while sometimes even a good healthy gut will bloat, it is important to know like what bloating actually is, what it's triggered by, as well as how we can eat differently than we did before to minimize whatever bloating we experience. Bloating for me, It's kind of a personal thing for me because stomach bloating was something that I experienced for about two and a half years of my life when my hormones were super out of rack. And it's crazy because I still have pictures that I took to show my doctor at that time, uh, as to what would happen to the way that I looked at the end of the day when I was super bloated. So even as a guy, cause bloating is not just a female thing, even as a guy, it pushed out my whole gut and. you would swear, you would literally swear that I looked pregnant. Now, while I wasn't the type of person to really care, like how I looked at the time, and it didn't really matter even when I was passing gas and stuff, I did care about how I felt, which was freaking terrible. Like one of the things that I experienced through bloating is it was really difficult for me to pass gas. Sometimes it could be very painful, like sharp shooting pain in my gut. And I always felt like the next meal would be the thing that would just make my stomach burst. And that never felt good because one of the things that it affected for me was I didn't want to eat in front of anybody or with anybody because I didn't want to have to explain the gas. I didn't want to have to explain why, you know, I would, even my voice would get tight because I would hold in my stomach. It just made me really, really self-conscious. Now, the way that my bloating happened through the day is like it happened gradually over the span of the day. And that's typically what happens with most people with bloating. So bloating builds up regardless of like what we eat. And it would do the same thing, like regardless of what went in my gut. So like if it was a glass of water, I'd start to bloat. If it was broccoli and chicken bloat or even something like an apple, it would bloat. It was only as I started to kind of study nutrition and how food breaks down, as well as the hormones that I understood really two important things about bloating. One, There's different types of bloating, which I never knew this until I started doing the nutrition stuff. So like you actually have to know which one you have in order for you to be able to deal with it. And number two, that you can actually change the way that you eat, as well as the way that you cook to make your food more digestible. So you can actually avoid bloating. So to start bloating happens for a few reasons. And the first is being hormonal bloat. The second being physical bloating or what I like to call digestive bloating. So I, and many of the clients that I work with, struggled with hormonal bloating. And this comes from really two hormones that are pretty nasty for the gut if left unchecked. So those hormones are estrogen. So estrogen is responsible for storing fat and fat usage. Typically it hangs around ovaries, it hangs around testicles, it's kind of like the low end hormone, but it's also responsible for how much energy you use. And then your hormone cortisol, which is your stress response and your energy usage hormone. So these are the two main ones that really tend to migrate into the gut sometimes. So let's start with estrogen. Estrogen does not normally live in the gut or in your digestive system, but Having an estrogen imbalance means that most of the hormone spaces allocated for it would be already full. So if you're thinking about how much space we have in terms of estrogen in our bloodstream, think of it like a parking lot. So every day your body has certain amount of spaces allocated for just this hormone. So it says, hey, estrogen in this parking lot, you've got 20 spaces. If we fill those spaces, it then has to go to another place to stay because most hormones don't free float, especially something like estrogen, which is typically attached to a fat cell and typically uses fat as a way to function. So the next closest place naturally where estrogen hormones can park is gonna be inside your stomach. And that's because the bacteria that live there and the things that we eat tend to be estrogenic in nature. So naturally, why not stay with a place that seems a little bit estrogenic? That just makes sense. So the same thing can actually be said for your stress hormone cortisol. So like if we have really high levels of stress, it actually takes up the spaces of our digesting hormones and it starts to exceed that parking lot and then make its way into our gut. So that makes it hard for us to actually process food in a consistent way. So when estrogen comes in and when cortisol comes in, it starts becoming very difficult for the body to be able to digest that food. Now, the reason why this happens is because a lot of the bacteria that are floating around, they only see food as something that can pull nutrients from. So when hormones get mixed in the gut and it starts to add things like edema, which is water swelling, or cortisol starts to bind to different types of food, what happens is the food stops looking like food to the bacteria. So if the bacteria is like, well, this isn't food, so I can't eat it, naturally what it says is, well, if I can't eat it, I gotta get rid of it, and then I gotta fight it. The fight is what brings on the bloat, because your body starts to swell, swell with water, swell with gas, in order to be able to combat that. Now with hormonal bloating, this fill up of hormones in your gut can seem almost random, because it's based off of, how much estrogen you have in the moment or how much stress you have in the moment. So if we are experiencing a very, very high peak period of stress, maybe through the workday, your bloating might be higher than going home and you're resting on the couch and there's not really a problem. The same thing with estrogen. Estrogen can shift wildly for women depending on their cycle, which is why sometimes they tend to get bloated closer to when their period is happening. But even for just regular people as well, if they have estrogenic food or if they're using chemicals or even deodorants and stuff that are increasing estrogen, it can start to build up over the day as well. So this randomness, this randomness looks like different times of the day, along with eating wildly different foods, your guts just gonna balloon up. So what does this look like? I was talking to O 'Kline about this and she shared it like this. Basically, she felt like she was waking up not feeling bloated, because that's when your hormones are at your most stable. So she felt not bloated when she woke up. She ate breakfast, started to feel a little bit of bloating right there. Then she had a glass of water, still bloated because she was stressed in the moment. And then she starts to swell up more. She feels over full, so she misses lunch in an attempt to kind of bring the bloating down. Doesn't matter because now hormonally, she's starting to stress about the bloating. She's starting to worry about other things in her day. So gets to dinner and then she's like, I feel like I just had to force a small meal, just using the healthiest foods possible, just to kind of keep something down. But regardless of what foods she chose, she swelled up to the point of not wanting to put her pants on again. So the hormonal bloating aspect doesn't really care about how much food you have eaten in the moment. because what actually happens is the stomach starts to attack the food instead of trying to break the food down. Now this is completely different, this randomness is completely different than looking at the other type of bloating, which is basically digestive bloating. So the issue for digestive bloating is mainly food digestibility. So our ability to break down food before it starts to ferment in our gut. So the way that our stomach works is that it's got millions of little gut bacteria that trade eating our food for giving us the energy and nutrients to it. This is the kind of symbiotic relationship that lives inside our gut. Because our stomachs can only absorb so much food in a single meal, as well as absorb so many nutrients in a single day. So like what makes food digestible in your body is a combination of how much good bacteria you have inside your gut. So how many workers you have to break down that food and the way that you eat your food, which is crazy. So from a bacteria perspective, if someone has a poor gut bacteria or a poor microbiome and their bacteria is dying off all the time, we'll talk about die off in a second. It's gonna be really hard for you to digest even just basic and fundamental things. And so you're gonna experience bloat after your window of eating is over. But the same thing happens if we do things like overeat. So like if we overeat or do things to make our food harder to digest, like eat on the fly or not chew our food, some people just inhale stuff, we actually start to experience digestion overload where... the bacteria inside of us actually can't keep up with how much food is coming in. So not only do you have to have enough good gut bacteria in order for you to get proper digestion, you also have to be eating in a way that your body can keep up. Otherwise the bacteria, the little workers in your stomach will get overworked and they will start to die off. So what this type of bloating looks like for people is normally it shows up in the buildup of gas. So they start the day not feeling bloated, not at all, but then over the span of the day and with multiple meals, they become bloated where at the end of the day, they can no longer eat. So the gas buildup starts to build over time and their bloating gets progressively worse, but it gets steady. Now with digestive bloating, the issue is gas. So they're experiencing sharp gas pains, stomach tightness, and the need to pass gas all the time. So what happens in this case is people who experience this type of bloating don't fully digest the food. So if we have a 30 to 50 minute window and we'll go into kind of ways that you can optimize how you eat your food in a second. But if you've got a 30 to 50 minute window and we're well beyond the 50 minutes, but our food still is existing in our gut, the leftovers are actually gonna ferment. and they build gases as they liquefy instead of being digested. So similar to like the way that they make wine, which is kind of the easiest way to explain it. You leave all the peel, the juices, all the fiber, all of that stuff, you leave everything in the wine. And it starts to break down and it starts to liquefy. Instead of being absorbed, it actually ferments and then creates gas. and you have to bleed the gas out of the tank. I don't know if anyone's ever made wine here, but you have to bleed that gas out of the tank. Otherwise the pressure will be too much. And then, you know, you're going to start to get back gases build up and it changes the way that's, that's in the wine. Right? So when gases start to build up in your stomach, those gases are no longer digestible because we've been basically liquefying the food instead of absorbing it. So at this point, our gut says, look, we got to push them out. And there's only two ways of pushing out gas. Either you burp, most people don't burp. Typically people who burp have acid reflux and their flap has issues. And that's another, another podcast episode probably. But, um, second thing is passing gas. So passing flatulence because what happens is, is the body goes with stool, I'm going to have pockets of gas that comes in because I have to get this to leave because this gas can't sit here. So if you've got pockets of gas combined with a stool that's frequently leaving, then you're gonna have gas throughout the entire day. So these two, these are the two types of bloating, and this is how they affect the body. So now that we know what they are, it's time for me to talk about this number two piece, which is what the whole purpose of this podcast episode is. It's changing the way that you eat, as well as the way that you cook. to make your food more digestible, that way you can actually absorb bloating. Not absorb it, avoid it, okay? So when it comes to digestion, we have to remember that bloating is just one symptom, an indicator that your stomach is having a hard time. And I wanna showcase this, because many people don't recognize the other ones, because it doesn't hurt, or it's not as uncomfortable as bloating is. So bloating often comes with water retention, which is swelling of the body because if we can't process it and leave the hydration, most water retention leaves with stool and inflammation. So water retention is a big one. Bad gas with the feeling of fullness that doesn't make you want to eat anymore. That's a big thing. If you've got all of these, even if you don't have bloating, you're still having digestive issues. So these indicators are there to tell you that your digestion is running poorly. So if you don't address it, That's what can lead to the slowdown of your metabolism. Because our metabolism can only run at the speed that we process nutrients. So if we're eating, eating, eating, eating, but we're not digesting any of our meals, our body will throttle our metabolism to slow down our ability to digest. That way we can spend more time digesting food. Second thing is chronic IBS. IBS is this huge label that I can't stand from doctors. which basically means your bowels are irritable. It's called irritable bowel syndrome. And we don't know why. Chronic IBS is a diagnosed condition that basically your doctor goes, there's no clear cut condition because everything visually looks good. Your stomach looks good. Your intestines look good. You don't have some time of a twist. You don't have any polyps. We do an endoscopy and that looks fine. So they're like, well, if you're still having digestive issues, you have IBS. Basically what this means is your gut is so poor, it's being triggered by everything, and there's no way that they can tell what the trigger is, okay? So metabolism going down, chronic IBS, and weight gain around your stomach is huge. Because if we're not processing the food, then it's being automatically kicked into fat storage, and then our weight's gonna start to go up. So not many people realize this. but our food habits and our routine and how we're bringing food into our bodies, it's changed significantly over the past 20 years. And I've seen tons of clients who do things like eat the right foods and they're having tons of healthy options and tons of micronutrients. And I'm like, man, your food's great. But they have a lot of work to do when it comes to how they eat. Because we've become a society. who tends to eat while driving, while working. We try to inhale the sandwich as quickly as possible so we can kind of use the rest of the lunch to react. Our digestion was not made for this. It was actually not made to multitask. And what I always share with my clients is this, the majority of digestion struggles come from the way that you eat, not actually what you are eating. If you get to this point, where you're eating healthy food and it's triggering you, or one day gluten triggers you, but the next day it doesn't. One day dairy triggers you, but the next day it doesn't. One day you get, you know, you eat half an apple, you bloat, but then you eat a full meal and you don't bloat. This is an indicator that you are struggling with your digestion and you have to start looking at the way that you're eating as well as being able to improve your gut microbiome. So, How do we improve this number two aspect? This involves looking at these things. So number one is how long we are taking to eat. Too short, you don't leave enough time to fully digest. Too long, and your gut's gonna start to attack the food that's left. So in this case right here, a typical digestion takes about 30 to 50 minutes. So if we are eating food, After the 15 minute or if we're digesting food after the 15 minute 50, five zero minute window, our body's gonna start to attack what's left. Cause it says I've worked too hard. The bacteria are exhausted. They've been fully fed. At this point, we need to push whatever's out left. So then that way we can make room for the new meal and allow these, these bacteria to kind of rest up. Okay. So how long you're taking to eat, that's a big one. Okay. Now, Second thing you gotta look at is what you're doing while eating. Because our body cannot process signals of hunger and fullness if we're trying to process signals like work or rest. Because the majority of us are very guilty of multitasking while we are working. So I'm trying to work, I'm trying to eat. I'm trying to rest, I'm trying to eat. I'm trying to eat on the fly. And the body goes, well, are you hungry? Am I full? Do I have enough nutrients? It becomes almost impossible for the stomach to tell where along the digestive tract it's working. And then another thing too, is like the signal of stress. When we experience a signal of stress, our body actually shuts down digestion so we can deal with stress in the moment. So looking at what you're doing while eating is very, very important. Next thing that I'd say is looking at which food you're eating on your plate first. Because things like animal protein, Liquifying two to three minutes in your gut while things like dairy can take upwards of 30 minutes to break down It's because of the way that the chain of molecules is created a protein is very very simple very easy to break down or something like dairy has so many molecules your gut has to do more work and has to use more bacteria in order to break that down, so If you're, for example, putting all the dairy stuff first, your body's struggling to process that, and then you're throwing meat on top of it, well, you might get well past your window before you're actually starting to break down that meat, and you might end up attacking it instead. The final thing that I'd say is look at how you're cooking your food. Because if you have food, for example, that has too much fiber, it's gonna take longer for the stomach bacteria to break down and to get nutrients and energy. from the food, as opposed to something that doesn't have fiber, and that's just, for example, protein, just straight up digestion, liquefies very quickly. So here's what I recommend. Actually, before I go into what I recommend, because I wanted to kind of showcase this earlier and I forgot, okay, before I go into what I recommend for this, okay, I want to let you guys know, and gals, know that I'm planning a masterclass to go through more of these principles on better digestion to reduce bloating. because I feel like bloating is a big thing that I'm getting questions fired at me like every single day. So I want to do it later on this month. I'm planning probably February 28th. Let me see my calendar here. Yeah. So February 28th at 7 PM. That's when I'm going to be doing it. 7 PM EST. It is called the Be Free of Bloat Masterclass. If you want to register for it, you can click the link in the show notes to register or go to the website, the www .fitforallfitness .com slash bloat free. That's it. All one word, B -L -O -A -T -F -R -E -E. So fitforallfitness .com, bloat free. And there's info on the masterclass on that link with the registry button. I wanna do this as a masterclass because I know how frustrating it can be. to feel like you can't eat certain foods you love and be worried that every single thing that you put into your mouth is going to leave you feeling gassy. It's going to leave you feeling anxious and self -conscious for the rest of the day. Anybody, everyone deserves to be blow free so that way they can focus on living your damn life free of food restriction and not be paranoid of whatever you're putting in your mouth. So I recommend whether it's you or a partner or a friend, anyone is able to join this masterclass. If you are struggling with bloating, I recommend that you attend, it's free. Okay? So I'll be showing you how to stop bloating for good. I'll, along with teaching you what you can do to improve your digestion so you can reduce IBS issues and speed up your metabolism. Okay? So that's going to be February 28th, 7 PM EST. That's a big one. Okay. So check, take a look at the show notes. All right, now let's get back into what you can start with in terms of being able to remove the bloating. Okay. So let's go into kind of when eating food first. Okay. When eating your food, a typical meal is going to take about 30 to 50 minutes max to digest. And anything after a 15 minute timeframe, we talked about getting attacked because the stomach has reached the limit of food breakdown. So here's what I recommend for clients. Always set a 30 to 40 minute break to eat any full meal. Okay. It's important that you sit down, you be conscious and present. So your body can really tell when it's starting to get full. No phones. just be there to eat. Don't multitask, don't look at your email, don't work, don't have conversations. Eat and be intentional with when you eat. Because in that moment, your body can fully recognize all of the food that's being processed, and we can make sure that we're maximizing our digestion window, and we're not confusing our hunger and fullness signal. That's important, okay? So the next thing is when eating, you wanna focus on foods, that digest quickly, so like protein. That way the body can spend the majority of the time digesting things like carbs, gluten, dairy, and fiber, which are the toughest things to break down. So big thing with this is like always start with your protein. If you're having a full thing where you've got protein, you've got carbs, you've got fats, you've got vegetables, okay? I would say do your proteins first, easy peasy. Eat your vegetables, perfect. and then carbs, and then it would be carbs and fat or carbs, gluten, dairy in that order. By doing that, you're leaving the hardest thing or the toughest thing to digest last. And because everything else will liquefy and be relatively simple to go in, it means that your digestion can solely focus on breaking down the tougher stuff, which means that you have a higher chance of not attacking the stuff. Okay. Now at that point, we talked about taking the time to separate signals. So you know what your hunger and fullness cues are, right? Final thing's gonna be from a cooking perspective. So from a cooking perspective, I recommend only cooking food until you have the digestibility you need. So here's what I mean by that. There's a couple different ways we can cook food. There's raw, there's steamed, there's cooked, and then there's broiled. With raw, you have the highest amount of nutrients, but you also have the highest amount, of cellular fiber that is there. So with higher levels of fiber, your body and your gut has to do way more work to break down than something that is broiled, that is falling apart and has no fiber, something that's been cooked for a really long time. So you wanna keep as much nutrients in the food as possible. That being said, if your gut is already having a hard time, even if you're sacrificing a little bit of nutrients in the cooking process, The next step would be steamed. Steaming it loosens up the fiber, but still gives you access to the nutrients. If steam still has a hard time, gives you a hard time digesting food, then I recommend fully cooking it because cooking it gets rid of about 60 % of the fiber and you're only losing about 10 to 20 % of the nutrients. The last thing would be broiled. Broiled is the stuff that like you can get meat to fall off the bone. You can get the fiber to be very, very little, but... In doing so, you're losing more nutrients. So any type of food that's giving you a hard time, look to see whether or not you can cook it more to be able to soften it up, to make it easier to digest. By following these suggestions, okay, looking at all the suggestions above, making sure that we're taking the time to separate the hunger signals, focusing on digesting the protein first, then veggies, then carbs, then gluten, then dairy. That's a big thing, okay? Being conscious of setting the time. So setting that 30 to 40 minutes and just being solely focused on eating. By doing that, you can maximize how quickly your stomach can digest food so you can go ahead and move on with your day. This is also gonna help you get the most amount of nutrients with your food, as well as help your body limit the amount of gas that is made from food that you can't be digested within the stomach's time limit. It seems super simple, but truthfully, I believe that we've been complicating food for a while now. So bringing things back to simplicity is always beneficial, at least in my opinion. That's what I wanted to share with you guys for this episode. So that's all for this episode, ladies and gents. I hope to see you on the next podcast. And hopefully we can see you on the Be Free of Bloak Masterclass as well too. And that'll be February 28th. 7 p .m. EST look forward to the next episode and we'll catch you guys later. Bye