In this life, you’re either the girl who’s always dealing with back pain, headaches, or stomach (gut) aches. Whatever you do, make sure you’re not a stomach ache, girlie, because I am, and it’s no joke.
In secondary school, during visiting days, my friends and I would gather the food and snacks our parents brought, share them equally, and consume them at the same time. Yet I was the only one who would deal with explosive diarrhoea and smelly burps the next day. I noticed this pattern, yet I had no explanation for why my stomach was ‘weak’.
From then on, I became very observant of what my stomach accepted, and what it was going to punish me for. It hated when I ate anything (no matter how small) after 6 pm. I would wake up in the night from awful abdominal cramps and a non-stop visit to the bathroom. I also noticed that my tummy was particularly sensitive to vegetables with high fibre—imagine trying to be healthy by eating a salad but all you end up with is a stomach full of gas that will only go down by passing it out through smelly farts and burps.
I was fed up.
I enjoy eating—the flavours, the smell, the texture of food, I love it all. For a long time, as much as I associated eating with enjoyment and nourishment, I also associated it with bloating, indigestion, abdominal cramps, waking up at 1 am to throw up, stooling until you can feel your energy drain, etc. At one point, I preferred drinking my calories rather than eating them. Things felt more confusing because no one around me could relate to what I was going through.
What was really going on inside my stomach?
Years later, I received my PCOS diagnosis. One day, I googled “PCOS and Stomach Problems” and found out that the condition was linked to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) as well as stomach inflammation. This discovery validated all that I was experiencing. Apparently, excess levels of Luteinizing Hormone (LH) and Follicle Stimulating Hormones (FSH) that cause PCOS, also triggers Irritable Bowel Syndrome as well as Stomach Inflammation, and although I cannot claim any of those stomach conditions since I have no medical diagnosis for it, learning that excess LH and FSH can delay movement of food in the digestive tract, resulting in constipation, gave me a lot of direction on what may be fucking up my stomach. This is how I consciously began my journey to understanding and healing my stomach.
Earlier this year, I was mindlessly scrolling, looking for an interesting show to watch on Netflix, when I spotted Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut and the title alone piqued my interest. Did you know that in Science, the gut is popularly referred to as “the second brain”?
It’s a short and riveting documentary that digs into the science of gut health. Through cute and colourful animations as well as real-life case scenarios, I learned how the gut influences so much of our overall health—how we feel, if we are overweight or not, the kind of diseases we get, and how our immune system is trained.
I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary, way more than I thought I would. Here are a few things that stayed with me:
- 70% of the immune system resides in the gut.
- Gut bacteria help train the immune system during our early years to tolerate certain things and fight off others. It also produces several substances that we need to stay healthy, and which we can’t produce on our own.
- Having a greater diversity of bacteria in the gut generally correlates with better health.
- Gut dysbiosis (too much or too little of certain species) can be linked to many ailments, from irritable bowel syndrome to diabetes, to Parkinson’s Disease.
- Listen to your body cues. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re satisfied.
- Typically unprocessed, whole, plant-based foods travel through the gut more slowly and feed a wider variety of bacteria. Therefore, incorporating diverse foods, particularly fruits and vegetables, into our daily intake nourishes the microbial community within our gut, thereby enhancing overall well-being.
- For food sensitivities, micro-dose new foods that you feel you react to, as long as it’s not a true food allergy. (If it’s a true food allergy, that’s a different ball game!) But if it’s something that you feel causes symptoms like heartburn or bloat, then maybe start with one bite, see how you do, and gradually increase it from there. The reason is: that you don’t have the organisms in your gut that can help break some of those fibers and foods down, so you react to them. By micro-dosing the trigger foods, you can slowly rebuild your microbiome over time.
Hack your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut taught me so many things about maintaining balanced gut health, but what I am most grateful for is how this documentary strengthened my resolve to take care of my stomach because my stomach works overtime to take care of me in numerous amazing ways.
These are the Top 3 Things I Do to Heal My Stomach
1. Drinking a Lot of Water
Water is that girl. Want fresh skin? Drink some water. Thirsty? Drink some water. Want to mind your business? Drink water. Want to reduce bloating and lessen constipation? DRINK WATER!
I started drinking at least one litre of water every day and let me tell you something, it made me feel ten times better. I found that sometimes drinking water was a bit boring so I decided to spice things up. Currently, my favourite water recipes are cold water + lime + cucumbers and warm water + moringa tea. I drink this basically throughout the day and it greatly helps with bloating—if you stay consistent, you may even start to attract Ozempic allegations.
Meanwhile, carbonated drinks are a huge trigger for my stomach upset, so I am on a journey to eradicate them from my diet—the thing is, there are good days, and then there are days you just need to sit down and drink a bottle of chilled Coke.
2. Exercising
I hate to be the one to tell you this but, working out is one of the best things you can do for yourself (and your gut health). I started going to the gym about three years ago and it’s been a game-changer. Whenever I am consistent, I feel stronger, I look better naked, my energy levels are up, my mental health is good and my skin glows. So, I wasn’t surprised to notice that my periods become consistent at times when I consciously engage in physical activity (that’s a good sign), and as an icing on the cake, working out changed my bowel movement for the better.
On days when I cannot go to the gym, I skip and lift some weights at home, I go hiking or I go swimming. Find what exercises work for you and get your heart racing.
3. Adopting a Healthy and Diverse Diet
Hack your health: secrets to gut health taught me that our stomach needs a healthy microbiome (a community of bacteria) to effectively carry out digestive functions. We can make the microbiome in our stomach healthy by not only eating nutrient-dense foods like fruits and vegetables but also ensuring we are eating a variety of them. Basically, eating one type of fruit isn’t enough, you need to eat different types so that your gut is introduced to different types of bacteria. The documentary recommended trying to eat 20-30 different types of plant fibres per week. But if you rarely eat fruits and vegetables, start with 10-15 servings a week with a gradual increase over time.
Learning that things like packet chips, chocolates, sweets, and flour-based products do very little to introduce and diversify the microbiome in my body, has drastically reduced my urge to eat them. I now favour healthier meal and snack options, plus I try to make sure that even though I am eating healthy, I am not eating the same things.
In addition, I have adopted healthy eating habits like not eating after a certain time, portion control and not eating in a rush.
Healing my stomach is a journey that comes with its ups and downs. Sometimes, eating healthy can take a toll on one’s finances. Sometimes having to work out and adopting good eating practices requires a lot of discipline. But so far, it has all been worth it for me.
Over time I have learnt what keeps my stomach happy and what upsets it. For instance, my stomach actually appreciates salads but only with/after certain foods, at certain times, and in certain portions. I recommend everyone, regardless of whether you’re a stomach ache girlie or not, to watch the documentary to enable them to not only restore their relationship with food but to also focus on lifestyle changes rather than diet fads that are often restrictive.
