3 Underrated Tips To Banish Bloat, From A Functional Medicine Doc 

To be clear, everyday gas and bloating are completely normal—but the latter often leads to discomfort, which can be pretty frustrating. 

And you'll know if you experience more than the occasional bloat. Allow Mary Pardee, N.D., to paint the picture: "After breakfast, your stomach feels a bit distended, you feel gassy, you feel bloated, and it doesn't go anywhere," the functional medicine doctor (who specializes in integrative treatments for gastrointestinal conditions) says on today's episode of the mindbodygreen podcast.

"Then you eat lunch, and it gets worse, and now you actually have some pain and discomfort, maybe some cramping," she continues. "People will tell me, 'Before I go to bed at night, I feel nine months' pregnant. I don't even have an appetite because I feel so full.' That's what we call bloating." 

"Consider eating more discrete meals versus grazing all day long," Pardee says. This can be difficult, especially if you have a smaller appetite (due to bloating), but she suggests having sit-down meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with perhaps a snack in between—to give your digestion a break. 

"If you're grazing all day long, you're not allowing for as many repetitions of the migrating motor complex1, or the MMC," she explains. "In your small intestines, you have this mechanism of housekeeping; when you're fasted for about 90 minutes, it triggers that MMC to come in and sweep the contents of the small intestines through so that you eventually clear it, have a bowel movement, and can eat." 

But when you snack throughout the day, you keep that MMC from getting triggered. "You have to be fasted for about 90 minutes for that to be initiated," Pardee explains, and it takes around 1.5 hours to complete2. Of course, you should always listen to your body and eat when you're hungry, but consider having separate meals that you can space out regularly. 

"When it comes to bloating, another thing to consider is carbonation," Pardee shares. Nothing against sparkling water—we love it, and so does Pardee! However, if you do struggle with bloat, you might not want to make seltzer your drink of choice. 

Even if you opt for standard H₂O, you might not want to gulp it down during meals. "If you're dealing with bloating after a meal, and you're drinking a liter of water with those meals, consider taking that out and drinking it between your meals instead," says Pardee. 

Adequate hydration is crucial for gut (and overall) health, so please make sure you reach your daily water quota. However, Pardee notes that consuming fluids while you eat will increase the volume of contents in your stomach during digestion. "Consider taking your fluids between meals versus with meals, just to reduce the pressure that's in the stomach at the time of digestion," she explains.