How to beat the festive bloat

We’re all prone to a little indulgence at Christmas, but rich food and overeating can play havoc with your digestion, leaving you bloated and uncomfortable. It’s not surprising - we consume on average 6,000 calories on Christmas Day alone! That’s nearly three times the recommended daily intake for women!

There are a variety of reasons why the holidays create more tummy troubles than the rest of the year: 

• You often eat more than you usually would, putting pressure on the digestive system.
• You might be drinking a lot more when you eat – whether it’s prosecco at a party or red wine on Christmas Day – and this dilutes stomach acid, making it harder to digest your food properly. 
• More rich, creamy foods than you’re used to can trigger heartburn or reflux or else make IBS symptoms worse. 

USE YOUR SENSES

The first step in the digestive process is often overlooked, but it’s a critical one. Known as the cephalic phase, it’s triggered when you see or smell food. You are literally whetting your appetite. 

When you start thinking about the lovely meal you are going to prepare, you are getting your digestive juices flowing. The enzymes in your saliva help you break down your food more easily. So, when the time comes, your body is ready to start digesting food before you have even cut the first slice – never mind actually put anything in your mouth.

It may sound like an incredibly simple step – and it is – but these days we are often so busy that we don’t make the time to think about our food in this way. If you find you’re always eating on the go, throwing a sandwich down your neck at your desk or having a TV dinner, this is a vital step you are missing out on. One trick is to be mindful and try and spend a few minutes thinking about your tasty lunch before you eat it to get the digestive juices going.

CHEW YOUR FOOD

Remember what Mum used to say? Chewing your food (the second phase of digestion) is key when it comes to good gut health. With proper chewing, you are mechanically breaking down the food into smaller pieces so that there’s a greater surface area and the digestive enzymes can get to work more easily, doing their job.

If you’re not chewing properly, it’s highly likely that you’re not digesting your food very well. And that means you won’t be absorbing the vital nutrients either. Not chewing also means that the food you eat takes much longer to break down, and, as it hangs around in your digestive system, it can start to ferment, causing uncomfortable wind, gas and bloating. 

Don’t worry about chewing a certain number of times – that all depends on what you are eating and various other factors. 

Instead, try this test: chew your food enough so that if someone asked you to spit it out, they wouldn’t be able to identify what it was. Another sign you need to chew more is if you start to see undigested food in your stools.

BALANCE YOUR STOMACH ACID

Sales for heartburn tablets are skyrocketing, because so many people wrongly assume that their digestive troubles are due to too much stomach acid. What nutritionists like me find more frequently in clinic is the total opposite! Getting older, stress and some over-the-counter medications can make your stomach acid levels drop to the extent that you don’t produce enough to digest food sufficiently.

Why is this important? The stomach acid you produce not only kills any bacteria in the food you are eating, it also breaks down the protein in your meal. If you’re not fully digesting the protein element in food, it can start to putrefy, creating gases that force open the oesophageal sphincter muscle (a type of ring muscle) and what little stomach acid there is can escape. So, the burning feeling, especially if accompanied by smelly gas, can be a sign your digestion isn’t working as well as it should be.

One solution is to have a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar before each main meal. It’s important you choose apple cider vinegar with the ‘mother’, rather than one you can buy in the supermarket (that’s for your chips).

Some people genuinely produce too much stomach acid and, if you try the apple cider vinegar trick and it seems to make things worse, you can neutralise the acid by taking a little bicarbonate of soda, stirred into water.

PLAN WHEN YOU WON’T EAT

As well as WHAT to eat, one of the things I find myself talking a lot about in clinic is NOT eating. It’s never truer than at this time of year.

It’s important to space out your meals, so the digestive system actually gets a chance to rest. This might require some self-discipline if your house is routinely full of bowls of nuts or towers of chocolate boxes. 

Eating no more than every 4 hours is a good benchmark to aim for, and it gives the body enough time to completely digest the previous meal and have a break before you put it to work again. Of course, there will be days when your eating routine falls out of whack, but don’t beat yourself up. Just get back on track the following day.

And if any of your symptoms are really bugging you, or lasting longer than expected, why not get in touch?