Getting clear on what is causing your bloating and addressing these factors is exactly how I help my clients relieve their gut symptoms and reclaim confidence in their digestion while allowing more presence in their lives.

If you’ve been on a journey to try and figure out how to stop bloating, odds are, you’ve come across a bunch of elimination diets (like Low FODMAP or food sensitivity) but where we often go wrong is that it’s not meant to be a new, permanent way of life.

I always like to say “Sometimes food is not the problem or the answer.” While cutting out potentially irritating foods might temporarily bring you some relief and be one tool in your toolbox for your gut healing picture, it ultimately is not a holistic solution, a sustainable long-term fix, nor does it really get to the root of the problem.

For example, eliminating foods that contain gluten, dairy and high FODMAP carbohydrates permanently from our diet will not fully address bacterial overgrowth, low levels of good microbes, circulation toxins, or heal a dysregulated nervous system – all of which impact your gut. An elimination diet might temporarily allow you to stop adding fuel to the fire, but you’re not actually putting the fire out.

If we want to find true healing, then we need to shift our focus to understand the whole picture and true root drivers or your GI symptoms instead of narrowing our diet to a few ‘safe’ foods.

Before we really dig in, let’s break down what elimination diets are and why they’re often recommended as a first line of defense.

Let’s define a few of the most common elimination diets and a few of my thoughts.

The problem with all of these protocols is that they don’t address WHY you have sensitivities or symptoms in the first place. You might very well be sensitive to certain foods, and they could be exacerbating your issues, but oftentimes the food itself is not the problem. So when we eliminate these foods in search of some relief, we not only don’t fix the problem, but we might create other issues on top of the original root. For example, cutting out fiber-rich carbohydrates from our diet means we are reducing the availability of key vitamins and minerals. Less fiber in our diet might make our digestive health even worse and put us at higher risk of abnormal bowel movements and slowed motility. We’re also actively depriving our gut microbiota of the fuel that they need in order to do their job to produce short-chain fatty acids, which actively maintain our gut lining and reduce inflammation. Not to mention, these elimination diets put us at a high risk of getting stuck in a diet cycle that leaves us feeling stressed and anxious around food.

Another common strategy for dealing with digestive issues are food sensitivity tests. In general, a lot of us like clear-cut, black and white answers, so when we’re having digestive issues, it’s tempting to immediately turn to tools like food sensitivity tests to try and identify a culprit. It might feel like a sigh of relief to be able to point to a specific food or food group as the trigger of our problems so that we know all we have to do to fix the issue is avoid the trigger. But more often than not, food sensitivities are a symptom of a bigger issue, not the issue itself.

Our body produces what we call IgE, IgG, IgA, and IgM antibodies for all of the proteins found in our foods. When the gut is inflamed or imbalanced, your gut is going to be more sensitive immunologically and we see a ramping up in the production of specifically IgG (the most common) antibodies.  This isn’t always going to be the best reflection of how sensitive your bod really is to the food, often we are going to see responses to bigger proteins like eggs, nuts, seeds, chicken – and foods you eat frequently! Common food sensitivity tests detect IgG antibody levels for various foods, and will report on the list of foods that may be triggering you based on which IgG antibodies were found in your blood test. But the IgG antibodies the test identified may be coming up simply because you eat these foods regularly with an imbalance, inflamed, or irritated gut and NOT because you’re actually intolerant  or truly sensitive to them. This is describing a confused immune system – not highlighting with clarity “problem” foods. So if you’ve done one of these tests before and your heart sank when all your favorite foods came back, you can take a sigh of relief knowing that you don’t need to eliminate these foods from your diet and ultimately there are other pathways for support.

Instead of worrying so much about the foods that may or may not be causing our problems, let’s shift our focus to promoting a healthy gut environment that is capable of optimal digestion. We want our gut to be able to respond to a variety of foods that we introduce it to, so restricting our diet is not the long-term solution.

When the fire is truly raging, and certain foods are fanning the flames, then there can absolutely be a time and a place for an elimination diet. These therapeutic short-term elimination diets are what I describe as a “healing window”. The goal should be to give our gut some breathing room to calm down, so that we can slowly embark on an individualized approach to actually tackling the root of the issue.

So how do we do this? Here’s what to do instead of an elimination diet: