Ep. 97: Why Eating Healthy Hasn't Fixed Your Bloating and Constipation

Let's be real: eating healthy was the answer, you’d already have relief from your bloating and constipaiton. 

Most of the women we work with are already doing the “right” things including: eating whole foods, avoiding junk, taking supplements, and yet, they are still dealing with bloating, constipation, and a gut that feels unpredictable.

In this episode, I break down why that happens and what’s actually missing.

You’ll learn why clean eating alone doesn't fix GI issues, how mineral depletion quietly impacts digestion and stress tolerance, why healthy foods can feel worse when digestion is weak, and how stress, gut bacteria, and infections can all interfere with your ability to absorb and tolerate food.

This episode is especially for you if:

• You feel worse eating “healthy” foods
• Your symptoms flare on busy or stressful days
• You’ve been told your labs are normal, but you don’t feel normal
• You’re tired of guessing and piecing things together

Connect + Next Steps

Curious what’s actually driving your symptoms?
Take the free 2-minute Gut Root Cause Quiz

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow along on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow along on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Exhausted, bloated and wondering why your ferritin won't budge, even while taking iron? Join me for a live training covering the exact reasons why you're stuck and how to improve your energy, hair loss, gut and ferritin.

Why Iron Isn’t Enough: The Truth About Low Ferritin

Sign up for the webinar here! (early bird pricing ends Feb 7th!)

Transcript

Dr. Heather Finley: 1:14

Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist. I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues. And now I'm here to guide you. On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort. So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back. So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief. You are in the right place. Welcome to the love your gut podcast.

2:06

If eating healthy, fixed bloating and constipation, my clients would be the least symptomatic people I know, but honestly, they're usually the healthiest eaters in the room and they still feel awful. So what if eating healthy isn't the reason that you don't feel better, but the reason that you feel worse? If you've ever thought I eat so well, why is my gut still a mess? Then this episode is gonna explain exactly why. And by the way, I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat healthy. So if you're starting the year thinking, I'm eating so healthy, why do I feel worse? I promise you are not alone. This is one of the most common things that we hear, especially at the beginning of the year when people have started new diets or new habits or whatever it might be. You're probably eating whole foods. You're cooking at home, you're choosing clean ingredients, you're avoiding junk food, you're taking all these supplements and on paper it looks like you're doing everything right and yet the bloating is still there. The constipation is still there. Your gut feels super unpredictable. These are the clients who tell me, I'm scared to eat out. My pants don't fit by 5:00 PM I feel like my gut controls my life and I've been there too. I understand how hard it is to feel like you're doing everything right and yet. Nothing is actually going right. So here's the part that I want you to hear very clearly. Most of our clients are the healthiest eaters who we work with, and they're also the most frustrated, not because they're doing something wrong, but because eating healthy alone isn't the same thing as having a body that can actually handle healthy food. There's this idea every January of new me, new year, new me. Eat cleaner, be more disciplined, try harder. And that mindset works when you're generally healthy, but it doesn't work when your gut is already struggling. If you're dealing with chronic bloating, constipation, food reactions, acid reflux, diarrhea, or just symptoms that keep coming back, trying to be more quote unquote perfect with food usually makes things worse because the issue is not your effort. I already know that you are a high achieving disciplined person. The issue is what I'm gonna talk about today, so let's dive in. The first place that we have to start is minerals. This is the piece that almost no one talks about, and it's why we often use this as a first step. There is a reason that we offer mineral testing as a standalone option and our practice and not many other things as a standalone option. Gut testing is incredibly helpful, don't get me wrong. But if there's one thing, the minimum thing that you can do for your health this year, it is test your minerals. This is the minimum foundation. Everything is built on minerals are not optional. They are the raw materials that your body uses to function. Your body needs minerals to make digestive enzymes and without them. You can eat the best food in the world and still not break it down properly. Minerals are required for muscle contraction, so if you're constipated, if things are moving too quickly, this includes the muscles that move food through your digestive tract. If. If those muscles can't contract, motility will slow down. Constipation and bloating will become almost inevitable. Minerals also help your body buffer stress, and they support how your nervous system responds to pressure, lack of sleep, emotional load, and busy schedules. They also help regulate nerve signaling so that your system can shift at a fight or flight and into digestion and repair. That's one thing that we hear from our clients a lot is, I'm snapping at my kids less. I'm not feeling as overwhelmed. Is that just a fluke or is that actually something? And it is something you need minerals like potassium. Magnesium, et cetera, to actually help shift your body from nervous system state to nervous system state. So here's the really simple version. No minerals means no enzymes. No minerals means slow gut motility, and no minerals means that stress feels louder in your gut and in your body. So if your mineral reserves are low or just out of balance, it's harder for your body to handle Stress and stress can show up for you possibly as gut symptoms that might look like more bloating on busy days or constipation when you're traveling or digestion Just. Totally falling apart if even a small part of your routine changes. This is why someone can be doing quote unquote everything, right? But. A bad night of sleep or a busy week or just life with kids totally throws off their digestion pretty much immediately. This is also especially relevant if you're a busy mom. We work with lots of busy moms. I just got off office hours with our clients and one of our clients was there. She's a very busy mom of three. She has twins, she's nursing, just lots of stress, sleep deprivation, and a lot of GI symptoms. And a big piece is that. We got her mineral test back. She's so depleted, so stress is gonna feel even worse when you're really depleted. It's harder to get more restful sleep. You feel wired and tired, and so all the years restricting food if that's been you or just cycling through gut protocols. That depletes minerals. And when minerals are low, the body loses its ability to adapt. At that point, know, amount of willpower or trying harder really makes a difference. Your system simply does not have the raw materials that it needs to function. So like I said, this is the minimum. Once mineral support is in place, the next place we can look is digestion, because the truth is that healthy food asks more of your digestive system, not less so fiber, protein, fat. They don't just magically turn into nutrients because they're good for you, right? We know that we should eat fiber. We know that we should eat protein. We know that we should eat fat, all the things, but they require being broken down. Stomach acid, digestive enzymes, bile coordination of muscles, and so everything has to fire at the right time in the right order. At the right strength. And when your digestion is working well, healthy food will feel really good, but when your digestion is weak, even the cleanest, most nutrient dense foods can make you feel worse. We actually had a client, I'll never forget this. She came to us and she's like, why do I feel better eating a cheeseburger and fries than salads and smoothies? Like I, I want to be able to enjoy a cheeseburger, but I also wanna be able to enjoy a salad. This was not because like her body just needed more cheeseburgers. It was because her digestive system was overwhelmed. It didn't have the tools it needed to break down a raw salad or really fibrous foods. Those salads and smoothies were high in fiber. They required more stomach acid, more enzymes, and more just. Overall digestive effort. The cheeseburger and fries were a little simpler. They had less fiber. They placed less demand on her already stressed digestive system. Yes, fat from a cheeseburger or fried foods does require bile and lipase and all the things, but that was not her issue for her. The meals moved through the stomach more efficiently instead of sitting there and fermenting and creating pressure and bloating. So she felt less uncomfortable, less distended, less reactive, even though the food looked quote unquote worse on paper, I. This is why, how food feels in your body will matter more than how healthy it looks online. Your digestion matters so much, and when digestion is weak, healthy food can feel like pouring gravel into your digestive tract. It's just not gonna move. It needs a shovel to help move it through your digestive tract. A helpful way that you can think about this is trying to drive. A pill in a car with a weak engine. The problem isn't getting there. It's how you're getting there. The engine just does not have the power yet, and if you keep loading more weight into that car, Allah, fiber and harder to break down foods without fixing the engine, everything is gonna slow down. So once you understand digestion. Stress starts to make a little bit more sense too. And once you actually fix digestion, then maybe you're even less stressed about your digestive system. Not in the just relaxed way that people are told, but minerals and digestion, proper digestion are key to a healthy stress response as well, because stress also. Is involved with both of those things. Stress physically turns digestion off. When your body is in a stress state, stomach acid will drop. Digestive secretions will slow. Motility will slow. Food will sit longer than it should. That creates more pressure. More fermentation, more bloating. Stress can also shift the balance of gut bacteria, which is so interesting. You can literally change the ratios of bacteria because of stress, which makes digestion feel even more unpredictable. And that is why you might be able to tolerate something on one day and have completely different reactions the next day. So I want you to ask yourself a few honest questions. Do you feel pressure to eat perfectly? Quote unquote? Do you get anxious about eating out or eating foods that you didn't prepare yourself for? Do your symptoms get worse on busy days, even when your food choices don't change If you're answering yes. To any of those questions, I think it's important to understand that sometimes it's not the food, it's the state that you're eating in. If you are rushing through meals, eating while stressed, feeling guilt or anxiety around food, or just constantly bracing yourself for symptoms, your nervous system will never. Fully shift into digestion, and when digestion is turned down, even safe foods can feel like a problem. This is why you can't just focus on what you eat to fix your digestive symptoms. It's just one small piece of the puzzle. Of course, food affects your digestion, but it's not the whole piece. You have to address minerals. You have to address digestion, stress, the, these are the things that really keep people stuck. Is just focusing on food. You have to focus on the capacity of the entire system. Once all of that is addressed, or once you've taken a look at all of those things, the next piece that often gets misunderstood is gut bacteria. I was on a podcast actually earlier today and she asked me, how has the. Conversation around gut health changed in the last even year, and I told her that I really think that finally we've shifted the conversation around gut health away from just probiotics and more into this more comprehensive approach of actually looking at the whole system prebiotics, fiber. Stress, minerals, all the things, which is really great because just taking probiotics is also not the way to fix your gut health. Although they can play a role, gut bacteria balance like a parking lot and your gut bacteria. You want to have lots of beneficial bacteria in this parking lot. You don't wanna have an empty parking lot. That means you're lacking bacteria. You wanna have good patrons in the parking lot of the store, right? You also don't wanna have an empty parking lot that allows for riffraff and parking lot parties to show up. Because what can happen is your gut bacteria do play a role in how food will feel in your body because your bacteria actually help you break down fiber, especially the types of fiber that your own enzymes can't fully digest. Your gut bacteria also help you produce beneficial compounds like short chain fatty acids. These help support inflammation, gut lining, health, immune function, help with brain health, et cetera. And so when these things are balanced or when your parking lot is full of good bacteria, they help reduce gas and bloating rather than create it. So when that balance is off, that experience totally changes. If your microbiome is imbalanced, the foods that are considered, quote unquote good for you or healthier for you, quote unquote, they may actually cause more symptoms like I was sharing at the beginning of this episode. Not because you shouldn't eat those foods, but because the system that's supposed to process them is not. Functioning optimally. So I wanna be very clear. This is not like don't eat vegetables, don't eat fiber. By now, you should know that vegetables are good for you. You should not avoid them forever just because they make your stomach hurt. The goal is never long-term avoidance. The goal is fixing the reason that they hurt in the first place. Some vegetables naturally will cause gas. That's completely normal. If you eat a whole plate of broccoli, I would expect that you might be a little gassy or Brussels sprouts a little gas after certain higher fiber. Foods is not a problem. The problem is when the gas is persistent and painful or accompanied by bloating, that will not go away. Pressure that will not go away. Changes in bowel movements that last for days, this is where timing and readiness really matter. I'm very pro fiber. This is something we really work on with our clients, but there is a definitely a time and a place for it. If you are in the early stages of your gut journey, adding fiber too quickly to a gut that isn't ready for it can feel like a lot and can make you go backwards, which is where the order matters. And the order in which I'm presenting this information on the podcast is generally the order that you would want to go. And everybody's gonna be a little bit different, but this is generally the order that you would follow. So we don't wanna add fiber too quickly, even if it's technically a quote unquote good food. We wanna support minerals, digestion, stress, see how the microbiome responds. It's also why adding fiber blindly or just aggressively can backfire. In our program. In the VIP option, we do regular food and symptom reviews. For this reason so that clients aren't guessing, we help them figure out when to add back fiber, when to back off the right kinds of fiber, because different types of fiber will do different things. For example, one of the fibers that we love to use is sono fiber, because there's research showing that it decreases methane producers or gas producers in the body. So knowing when would be the time to add something like that in how to increase it in a way that actually builds tolerance instead of triggering symptoms. And sometimes you might have a slight increase in symptoms. So knowing what would be expected and then what is actually too much. So the goal is to eat more variety. Build the capacity to tolerate more foods with the ultimate goal of 30 plants a week, which I have other episodes where I talk more about that, but fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, legumes, herbs, spices, all that fits into that bucket. 30 plants a week is really what we're going for. There's one more layer that I wanna talk about, and this is the piece that often explains why someone is doing everything right and not making progress. And that is infections, because infections in the gut can quietly block digestion. It's not always this dramatic thing. It's not always like constant pain or obvious. Sometimes it's just symptoms that never fully resolve, no matter how clean the diet is. For example, h pylori, this is the most common infection in the world. It's very a common bacterial infection. This lowers stomach acid and impacts mineral absorption, iron absorption. Someone could be eating plenty of foods or even taking iron supplements and still have low ferritin because absorption is compromised. Or they could be doing all the right things to improve their stomach acid, but if they have a persistent h pylori infection, then all of digestion is not working together and they're having symptoms with healthier foods that they need stomach acid to break down. Parasites are another example. Something like Giardia can damage the lining of the gut and actually can even create temporary or even longstanding lactose intolerance. Suddenly, maybe dairy feels like a problem, not because you're now dairy intolerant. It's because your digestion has been disrupted. Once you take care of the Giardia. Typically your ability to digest dairy or lactose resolves. There's other bacterial infections that can interfere with nutrient absorption and impact mineral depletion as well. So when minerals are already low, remember that was the first thing that we talked about. This creates a cycle. Suggestion will weaken stress tolerance drops and symptoms become harder to calm because it's just this vicious cycle. So. At a very basic level, any kind of infection in the gut, h pylori, bacteria, giardia, whatever, they interfere and compete with nutrient absorption and create inflammation. And when those things are present, digestion cannot function optimally. This is why you can eat perfectly and still struggle with something. That's actively interfering with your digestion and inter until that interference is identified and addressed, food changes alone are not going to create the relief that you're looking for. So I hope that this is helpful to think about why. Okay. There definitely could be some missing pieces here. I've tried all the things. I've tried, lo fodmap, I've tried Whole 30. I've tried this probiotic, I've tried that probiotic, but perhaps there's stuff going on under the surface that I actually need to address. So when you take a step back and look at all this together, it does start to make sense why so many people feel stuck. Because doing everything right doesn't automatically lead to feeling well. Clean eating or Whole Foods and supplements can not move the needle if the foundations aren't there. We don't want to guess or piece things together over time because that leads to burnout. And normal labs don't always reflect how your gut is actually functioning day to day either. This is why so many people, I believe, feel really frustrated and confused because they've put in effort, they've made changes, they've tried to be consistent, and they're wondering why they're not getting results. Not because they're not disciplined, because they're missing foundations. Like I've talked about today and missing the foundations in the right order. Addressing these things in the right order leads to digestion that works really well together, and a body that has the capacity to respond to the inputs. Once those foundations are in place, food no longer feels like the problem. Symptoms are more predictable. Progress finally starts to stick. And at this point. You don't need more discipline. You need a different strategy, right? So what actually moves the needle? It's not just throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's not adding another supplement. It's not eating even cleaner. Progress comes from supporting your body in the right order, and that means supporting digestion so that food can be broken down, restoring motility, so that things can move the way that they're supposed to. Rebuilding mineral reserves so the body has the materials. It needs to function. Regulating stress, so digestion can stay turned on, and then testing instead of guessing, so you're no longer throwing things at the wall and hoping that it sticks. So doing things in the right order, getting data, and that's when those pieces really fall into place. Food stops feeling scary, like the enemy symptoms are predictable, and it stops feeling like you're walking uphill both ways in the snow, if you've. Already tried eating healthy. This isn't about eating healthier. You need to understand why your body is struggling and how to actually support it. So if you feel like this episode is describing you, that is your sign to work with our team one-on-one. This is the same framework that we use with clients who have tried everything else in the Got Together program. We take this exact approach, we're gonna look at. All the pieces, your minerals, digestion, motility, stress, gut function, and guide you through the process step by step so you're not guessing or doing it alone. Most people that work with us didn't just wake up one day feeling confident about getting support. They were just tired of staying stuck and doing the same thing over and over again. And maybe that's you too, so you can apply to work with us. Through the link in the show notes, if you've been listening nodding thinking, this sounds like me, I would trust that instinct. Getting support is often the missing piece that allows everything in your digestion to start working. So let me know if you have questions. You're always welcome to reach out to me on my dms on Instagram, and I'll see you next week on the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast.