How To Get Rid Of Bloating

As with any problem, there is a cause or a reason for that problem being there in the first place. This seems very obvious but many people do not often make this connection. When discussing how to get rid of bloating it is vital to determine the cause first, and then find a solution. Are you bloated because of a known or unknown medical condition? Do you have food allergies you are not aware of? How is your intestinal health these days? One "cure" does not fit all because bloating is a symptom of many different health and food related problems. While taking an alka-selzer may provide you with temporary bloating relief, it is really just masking the underlying problem.

Imaging having a car with a warning light flashing. It beeps, it flashes, and it's frankly really annoying! What would be the best way to stop this? If you treat it like most people treat their health, they will simply take out the light bulb of the warning light! Problem solved. This is ridiculous, obviously, but it is often how we solve issues like how to get rid of bloating. Remove the annoyance instead of the cause of the annoyance. Wrong!

So what actually causes bloating? Well, literally it is caused by gas trapped in the stomach or intestines. No kidding you say? Yes, it's true, but how does that gas get there? Let's point our first finger at a very obvious cause of simply swallowing the air. If you are a chronic gum-chewer or mint-sucker, removing these habits might be how to get rid of bloating. Also people who use straws a lot with their drinks end up swallowing a lot of air, and if that drink is carbonated that just compounds the air and gas that is entering your stomach. If you are a very fast eater your are swallowing a lot more air than you need to. So before we even get into medical conditions or other underlying factors, look at the most obvious and simplest reason for your bloating problems.

Certain foods cause people to bloat right? But not all people get bloated by them so I will just pause here and warn against blaming certain foods as the main problem. It is certainly important to know which foods trigger your bloating but I believe that this is just another version of that flashing warning light I mentioned earlier. Some foods just naturally produce gas. Beans, milk, cabbage, and sprouts are common culprits in gas production but they also happen to be very healthy(with the exception of milk, which will be left for another post to deal with). So something seems wrong about removing these very nutritious foods permanently from your diet to solve how to get rid of bloating. We have to dig a little deeper to find out the "why's" and the "how's".

Another finger can be pointed to poorly or completely undigested foods. These foods will ferment in your colon and create gas and other unpleasant and even harmful substances that will definitely lead to poor health over time. Think about how beer is made, or even bread. The fermentation creates alcohol and carbonation in beer, and makes your bread rise. This is not what you want going on in your colon. Constipation can really compound this problem as it gives more time for fermentation to occur. It is answering the question of why this is happening when we truly start to get to the real problem.

Although we have not answered the question of how to get rid of bloating, I hope you can appreciate that it is not something to throw a quick bloating remedy at and call it fixed. Remedies are totally fine for quick and easy relief and we will be covering some different bloating remedies in later posts, but discovering the reasons for bloating should always be the main goal. Don't remove that warning light, it's there for a reason!