Are you feeling bloated and gassy after meals? It’s a horrible and uncomfortable way to feel. And to be honest with you, I sometimes feel like that after eating certain foods. In the past, before I really got on top of a personalised diet that works for me, I used to suffer from that quite a lot.
There’s a couple of things that you can look at. One is what type of foods you’re intolerant to or sensitive to according to your DNA. But the other, and probably the strong area of interest, is what’s going on in real time in your gut.
We know that bacteria contributes to bloating and gas, and in order to have a healthy gut, we need to have a good variation of bacteria – not too many good bacteria and not too many bad. It’s okay to have a few bad bacteria, but you want to have a nice variation. Very often people have got that dysbiosis in their guts, where they haven’t got that variation, and that can cause bloating and gas amongst other things. It’s typically what we’re eating, how it’s reacting with the bacteria in our gut, that can then lead to bloating and gas.
There is a product you can look at, which is a gut intelligence test from Viome – it’s a simple stool test. And once you’ve returned that, about four weeks later you get the results on this beautifully presented app. And this app will tell you four simple things, as well as the results of the bacteria in your gut, (though that part might not make much sense to you – things like lactobacillus, and Bacteroidetes).
The four columns that it gives you in the app are:
- What are your super foods
- The foods you should eat all the time
- What are the foods that you can enjoy, but not every day
- The foods that you should have really sparingly, they are not great for you
And then your Kryptonite foods, the foods you should absolutely avoid. And this is real time data. It’s what’s going on right now in your gut that is probably causing that bloating and that gas. I’ve done this, my colleagues have done this, loads and loads of clients have done this test. It’s a brilliant, brilliant kit.
If you don’t want to put any investment in anything else, the simple thing to do is eliminate foods from your diet. So cut out a food, see if it reduces your bloating and your gas. It’s simply a question of eliminating everything one by one. Obviously, if you eliminate several things, you won’t know which one it is when the symptoms disappear.
My advice would be to do some testing using the Viome kit. Alternatively, an elimination test, and get to the bottom of what you’re eating and what’s not getting on with your bacteria. It’s really all about the small stuff, the little bacteria.
If you take care of them, they’ll take care of you!
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Leanne Spencer is an entrepreneur, coach, TEDx Speaker, author of Remove the Guesswork, and founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. Bodyshot is a health and fitness consultancy that helps busy professionals get more energy by removing the guesswork around their health, fitness and nutrition. Visit www.bodyshotperformance.com or email [email protected] to register your interest in our services and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.