Ep. 110: Why It Feels Like Food Sits In Your Stomach Like A Brick

That heavy, pressured, food-isn't-going-anywhere feeling after meals is one of the most exhausting GI symptoms to live with and one of the most misunderstood. In this episode, Dr. Heather breaks down why food can feel like it just sits in your stomach for hours, what's actually driving that slowdown, and why standard testing often misses it entirely. Digestion that is underpowered, depleted, or stuck in survival mode has a real path forward and this episode walks you through exactly what's going on.

In This Episode

• Why the "brick in your stomach" feeling is a digestion slowdown, not a broken body
• What good digestion actually feels like and why low stomach acid is so often missed
• Why "healthy foods" can sometimes make symptoms worse
• The vagus nerve, nervous system, and why you can't fully digest in fight-or-flight
• A real client case study and why sequencing matters as much as the protocol

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Transcript

Dr. Heather Finley 0:03

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.

0:55

So here is my question for you. Do you ever eat a meal and feel like it just sits there? Like the food is not going in there? It feels like a brick is in your stomach. You feel like you swallowed a bowling ball. Some people finish a meal and they feel energized. They move on with their day, they're productive. And then there's you maybe undoing your jeans, wondering if you can justify an app on your office floor. If that resonates, you are in the right place today. I wanna talk about this because it's something that I hear about constantly, and I think honestly it gets brushed off way too easily. So if this resonates. You're gonna love today's episode because here's what I want you to understand before we even get into the science. This symptom is one of the most exhausting symptoms to live with, and I think it's exhausting partially because of what it starts to do with your relationship with food. You start fearing meals, you start avoiding social situations. You know, can, can we not go to that restaurant? I just, I don't know how I'll feel. Maybe you start eating less and less because eating less means fewer symptoms. Right? Except it usually makes things worse. And then there's just this quiet fear underneath it all of like, what if this is just how my body works? What if something is wrong with me? I wanna address that today because this is usually a sign that your body is, is not broken. It's just a sign that digestion is slowing down, and that is a very different problem than broken. The analogy that I want you to hold onto for this whole episode is your stomach is supposed to function like a blender. A washing machine, a conveyor belt all at once. It breaks down food, so it, it blender arises it, it turns it sterilize. It moves it through. That's a lot of jobs. But for a lot of individuals that we work with, their digestive system feels more like a storage closet. Food piles up. The pressure builds fermentation starts and symptoms ripple downstream in ways that might seem totally unrelated until you start to understand how they are connected. So that is what I wanna talk about today, what's actually going on. I wanna talk about first, what normal digestion should actually feel like. And I wanna start here because I genuinely think most people have forgotten what good digestion even feels like, or at least those of you that listen to this podcast. And I'm not saying that to be harsh. I'm saying that because when you've had symptoms for years, you adapt, you stop comparing yourself to a baseline that feels good because that baseline was. So long ago. So just as a reminder, after a meal, you should genuinely feel satisfied. You should feel calm, you should feel full. You should not feel tired. You shouldn't feel nauseous. You shouldn't be bloated for the next six hours, and you should be able to eat again at a reasonable time three to four hours later, not waiting from breakfast until dinner because you're still full. That is the goal. That is the general trajectory that we're looking at is every couple hours you are hungry, and obviously there's other components to this, like blood sugar and stress hormones and all the things that's not necessarily what we're focusing on today. But this here is what your stomach is actually doing. When it's working well, it's breaking down food like that blender. It's churning, it's contracting, it's sterilizing, incoming food with stomach acid. It's. Signaling the pancreas and the gallbladder to re release enzymes and bile. And then it's releasing that food into the small intestine at the right pace through a valve called the pyloric sphincter. So if any single step in that process slows down or breaks down, food can literally just sit there longer than it should, and that's. When you get that heavy brick and stomach full, pressured, nauseous feeling, that just won't go away. So let's start at the top with the first domino, and I have a couple recent episodes on this, so I'm not gonna go too much into it because you can go and listen to this more in depth. But I wanna talk about stomach. So when most people hear stomach acid, they immediately go to reflux. They think I have too much stomach acid. That's why I have heartburn. And this is honestly one of the most widespread misunderstandings in GI Health because for many people, and I would argue most of the people that we see clinically, the problem. Is either the opposite or it's more of what I talked about last week of like sphincter and kind of mechanical issues. So low stomach acid is one of the most common and missed drivers of that food just sitting there feeling. So how I like to explain it is trying to digest a meal without enough stomach acid is like trying to cook a roast in an oven that never fully heats up. Gross, right? The food never fully breaks down. That texture stays intact. When you cook a roast, you want it to like break apart with a fork, right? That's the most delicious kind of food. That protein doesn't cleave properly, and instead of this like properly broken down, processed meal moving through your GI tract, you get a partially broken down, slow moving mass that creates pressure and gas and fermentation. And so these symptoms of low stomach acid are honestly identical to what people usually assume is too much acid, that heaviness, bloating, burping, reflux, constipation, undigested food in your stool. And if you've been on a proton pump inhibitor, any kind of ant acid medication, Pepcid, omeprazole, et cetera, for a long period of time, and you're still symptomatic, this is worth paying attention to. So why does stomach acid get low in the first place? A few big ones. Chronic stress, this is a huge one. Rushing your meals, eating on the go undereating. Long periods of chronic dieting, uh, especially like long term restriction. This doesn't even mean an eating disorder, although we do see a lot of people post eating disorder recovery, but just long periods of chronically undereating because of GI issues. It can be a chicken or egg scenario. Postpartum depletion, low minerals, especially sodium and zinc, potassium chloride, h pylori, infections, and then long-term and acid use. So I wanna make a really important connection here that I see play out constantly in our gut together. Clients, a lot of people come to me trying to eat. Healthier, quote unquote. They started eating more salads, more raw vegetables, more high fiber foods, more dense proteins, and they feel worse. They're convinced that those foods are somehow bad for them or that they just have all these food sensitivities or that their body can't handle healthy food. But what's happening is that in many of those cases, these quote unquote healthy foods require robust digestive capacity, so salads, raw vegetables, dense proteins, higher fiber, they are harder to break down for a variety of reasons. And when digestion is underpowered, these foods create more symptom burden, not less, not because the foods are the problem, but because digestion needs to be supported first. Now let's talk about the next thing, which is poor stomach emptying. When food just sits in the stomach, because I think this is a mechanism that most directly explains that brick in your stomach sensation after your stomach does its initial work, the food that's now partially digested and mixed with stomach acid into what's called chime. Is supposed to gradually empty into the small intestine where nutrient absorption happens. So there's a whole regulatory process around that timing and how fast food empties, depending on the composition of the meal, how much fat, protein, all these signals coming from the small intestine. So when that emptying slows down, foods stays in the stomach longer than it should, and those symptoms of sluggish. Stomach emptying are very specific. That fullness that lasts for hours, that nausea, upper gi bloating, reflux, burping, poor appetite, pressure after meals that downstream constipation. I wanna give you an important distinction here. This is not the same thing as gastroparesis, which is a more severe condition where stomach emptying is significantly impaired. This is often connected more to like diabetes, nerve damage, other underlying conditions. If you're having severe symptoms like vomiting frequently. Losing significant weight, please get evaluated. I'll talk more about red flags towards the end of the episode, but many people have sluggish stomach emptying patterns that don't show up on standard testing. They haven't clinically been diagnosed with gastroparesis, although we have seen many clients with gastroparesis and they've been diagnosed with it and it can completely resolve. So it's more of just this functional slowdown than a structural problem. So this is like the oven is working. It's just working at like 60%, not a hundred percent. So the analogy that I keep coming back to is imagine a highway exit that's partially blocked. People are still getting through. There's literally nothing more frustrating, right? Like you're so close to your destination, but then there's a backup and it just. It is taking forever to get there. So traffic isn't fully flowing at full capacity. You can like see where you need to go, but there's one lane and you can't get there. That is what sluggish stomach emptying looks and feels like. And here's what makes this so important to understand. The digestive tract is a one continuous. Muscular tube. So if movement is slow at the top, it usually is slow downstream as well. And this is why so many people who complain about constipation or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or chronic lower GI symptoms also have upper stomach heaviness or upper GI issues. It's not a coincidence. It's because the same system is expressing this whole slowdown. The next thing that I wanna spend a few minutes talking about is that digestion is energy expensive. And this is an interesting concept. I think this reframe is genuinely surprising to most people, and it changes how you understand why this is happening. A lot of people assume that digestion is automatic, like breathing, your body just does it, but digestion is actually one of the most. Energetically expensive processes that your body does. Think about all the things that it requires, producing stomach acid, producing enzymes, contracting muscles throughout the GI tract, moving food, absorbing nutrients across the intestinal wall, regulating blood flow to the gut. I could go on. But you get the point. Your body treats digestion like a luxury budget item, and when the body is running on empty, when your internal energy bank account is depleted, it starts cutting expenses and digestion is one of those first places that it gets cut. So this is exactly why symptoms show up so consistently in specific populations, burn out women, postpartum moms, women with low ferritin, people under chronic stress, people who are undereating, even healthy undereating, like they're eating healthy foods. Just not enough over exercisers. People running on caffeine in a few hours of sleep. Here's the thing that you can remember. A lot of people are trying to force food into a digestive system that's functioning like it's on low battery. The food comes in, but the system doesn't have the resources to process it. You, your, the phone never fully charged, if you wanna think about it that way. So when we see this pattern clinically, one of the first things that I'm gonna think about is. Where is this person's energy actually going? Because if everything is going towards survival, towards stress responses, towards propping up a depleted system, the digestive system will get the leftovers. So this brings me to what I think is one of the most important sections of this episode, and I wanna be really clear about something before I start. This is not me just saying that your symptoms are anxiety because they're not. This is just physiology. You cannot be in a full flight or fight and fully digest food at the same time. There's just no way around it. These two things are incompatible. So when your brain perceives a stressor, and I wanna emphasize that stressor does not mean a tiger is chasing you. It just means traffic. A stressful meeting, a difficult conversation to-do list that never ends. The body is going to redirect resources towards survival, so that means less stomach acid, slower emptying, reduced enzyme output. You get the point, reduced blood flow to the gut, slower motility. So stress changes are physiology. Your symptoms are a physiological response. Not just a character flaw. They're not a character flaw at all. So let me explain the vagus nerve because it is one of the most underappreciated structures in GI health. The vagus nerve is essentially the communication highway between your brain and your gut. It runs from your brainstem down through your throat, your heart, your lungs, your stomach, your intestines, and it's a two-way road. So information goes both ways. Your, your gut is actually providing even more information to your brain than your brain, to your gut, which is wild. So the vagus nerve helps to regulate stomach acid production, contractions, motility, bowel movements, digestive signaling. So when that vagal tone is poor and when that communication is disrupted or suppressed, you'll see more bloating, constipation, nausea, reflux, food, sitting that tight throat, chest sensation that a lot of people will describe. So the part that I want you to think about that's really important here is that modern life is almost perfectly designed to tank our vagal tone, which is why we have to overemphasize this with our clients. Eating while scrolling through your phone, eating in a car between meetings, working through lunch, rushing every meal, chronic stress. Doesn't have a clear off switch. Overscheduling sleep deprivation. A lot of people I see aren't just dealing with a gut problem. They're dealing with a nervous system that has been in chronic survival mode for so long that it doesn't know how to downshift anymore. And until that piece is addressed, the digestive system can't fully. Come back online. And what I also want you to hear from this is that doesn't mean that it's, if you have a busy life, it's impossible to heal. Take it from me. I'm a mom of three. I'm an entrepreneur. I have a very busy life, a very full life. And yet. I have found by specific tools and specific supports, ways to support my nervous system so that I'm not living in a chronically fight or flight state. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm perfect at this all the time because nobody is. But nervous system regulation does not have to be complicated. And a lot of people will use the excuse of like, well, how nice for you? I'm too busy for that. If you find yourself saying that the, the harsh reality here is that you need it more than anybody else. And I used to have that mindset too, of like, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or, yeah, must be nice. Or I don't have time for that. You, you have to make time for that. Otherwise your body will get you to the point where it forces you to make time for that. So I just wanna pause here and say something that I think you need to hear. If you have gone to doctors, you've had endoscopies, you've had standard blood work run, and you've been told that everything looks normal, I believe you, that something still feels wrong because standard GI workups are designed to rule out disease. They're designed to rule out tumors, ulcers, severe inflammation, structural abnormalities. These are important and they should absolutely be done when symptoms warrant them, but they're not going to assess your microbiome health, your digestive capacity, your stomach hazard levels, your motility patterns, mineral status, nervous system regulation, bacterial overgrowth, h Pylori, et cetera. So normal labs don't mean optimal function. They mean that the markers tested are within standard reference ranges. That's a completely different thing. So this is why functional testing can change the picture. So often for people who've been told that there's nothing wrong, not because they're conventional doctors miss something obvious they didn't, but because the questions that we're asking are just different. So you can very much have underlying issues, even if your tests have been normal. So let me just share a little story, a client story that I think just pulls all of this together. We had a client who got to the point that she was scared to eat. Every meal felt heavy. She looked pregnant by dinner. She had that upper stomach pressure, bloating that wouldn't quit. Rosacea, reflux. She had endoscopies, she'd done GI workups, everything was normal. Her doctor was a little bit stumped and she started to wonder like, well, maybe this is just how I am. So after about 18 months of going in circles, trying different medications, trying all these things, she started working with our team when we ran a GI map. Which is a functional stool test that looks at what's actually living in the gut and how well digestion is functioning. Here is what we found. She had h pylori, which is a bacteria that lives in the stomach lining. And the thing about h pylori is one of the ways it survives is by suppressing stomach acid because stomach acid is actually. What would kill it? So the bacteria essentially turns down the acid to protect itself, which meant her stomach was already starting with a compromised ignition switch before even food arrived. She also had low levels of good bacteria that are supposed to be there, plus some opportunistic or unwanted bacteria that we're filling in those parking spaces. If you've heard me talk about the gut before, you know, I often compare it to a parking lot. We want good bacteria parked in our parking lot. So the bacteria in her gut were the kind that ferment and produce gas and create that pressure and bloating. Her digestive enzyme output was low, meaning that food wasn't breaking down properly. Even once it left the stomach, her immune system was elevated and reactive, and that makes sense when the gut lining is under chronic stress. So if you put all that together and every single symptom she had it. Really did make sense. That heaviness, that pressure, the reflux, the bloating, none of it was random. It was all connected. Her body was doing exactly what a body does when digestion is compromised at multiple levels at once. So here's where I wanna be honest with you. The answer was not just, oh, we'll take these supplements for h pylori and move on. I see that approach a lot and people often come to me frustrated because they treated an infection and they still felt terrible or it came back. That's because that infection was one piece of a bigger picture. We had to rebuild that whole environment, support motility, work on the nervous system, help her body to feel safe, to digest and heal. And then restore the microbiome in the right order. So the sequence matters a lot more than most people realize. You can do all the right things and still not get results if you're doing them in the wrong order or if you're skipping those foundational pieces. So by the time, by the end of her time and gut together, she wasn't just eating without fear, she was eating things she hadn't touched in years because her system was actually working. So you're probably thinking, what do I actually do about this? I wanna frame everything that follows around. One principle is that we have to support digestion from the top down. The impulse most people have is to treat the symptoms wherever they feel them, right? Bloating, address the bloating, constipation, address the constipation. But if the slowdown is starting at the stomach level, those downstream approaches are gonna keep producing these mediocre, piecemeal results that you don't want. So number one, start with meal hygiene. I know this sounds way too simple to matter, but I genuinely know and see that it makes a meaningful difference. So slow down before your meals. Take a few deep breaths, not just as a ritual, but as a way to. Signal to your nervous system that you're safe. It's time to digest. Chew your food more thoroughly than you think You need to sit while you eat, and when possible, don't eat while you're scrolling, working, driving. This is not gonna be a perfect thing all the time, but these things work because they actually activate your parasympathetic nervous system that rest and digest state you cannot fully digest in fight or flight. So even small changes to your meal environment can have a real effect on your digestive output. Number two is support the vagus nerve tone. So this sounds kind of esoteric, but it's very practical. Humming, singing, gargling with water, walking after meals, getting morning sunlight. These are all evidence-informed vagal nerve supports, and several of them are just enjoyable. Walking after a meal is something that I love and recommend across the board even five, 10 minutes. Supports motility and blood flow to digestion. Next up would be support stomach acid and digestive function. So adequate protein intake matters here. Minerals matter here, digestive bitters can be helpful. Digest the bitter foods can be helpful. Addressing chronic stress is not optional in this picture. And then treating any underlying infections like h pylori, next, support motility. So walking after meals. Yes, I'm mentioning that. Mentioning that again. Hydration, electrolytes. Minerals, regular meal timing. Your GI tract has a circadian rhythm and consistent meal. Timing helps adequate meal spacing, so not grazing all day long. Anything that supports regular bowel movements because upstreams, slowdowns and downstream slowdowns are usually connected. And then consider testing would be next if you've been dealing with this for a long time. Or strategies above aren't moving the needle. This might be a situation where functional testing genuinely changes the picture. A GI map can help identify h pylori, microbiome imbalances, digestive enzyme output, and then just look for any immune or inflammatory markers. HTMA can reveal the mineral components and thyroid patterns stress patterns, et cetera. So that's worth discussing as well. Before I wrap, I, I do think it's worth mentioning and I wanna be clear that there are symptoms that should be medically evaluated right away. If you are experiencing severe or frequent vomiting, rapid weight loss, difficulty swallowing, abdominal pain, you're vomiting blood, black tarry stool, please. Go see a GI doctor. Those symptoms go beyond what we're talking about today, and you need a proper workup. So let's just close it out. If you feel like food sits in your stomach after every meal like a brick, your body is not failing you. Your digestion is likely just underpowered. It's slowed down, it's stressed out, it's depleted. Or maybe you're stuck in a survival mode pattern and doesn't know how to exit. All of those things are very understandable and all of them have. Things that you can do to move forward. A lot of people will spend years trying to fix bloating at the bottom of digestion without realizing that it's starting at the very top. So that's the thing that I want you to walk away with today. If this episode was a light bulb moment and you wanna understand more about what is going on in your gut. You can head to the show notes. I've linked my gut health quiz. This can help give you a sense of where to start, what your symptoms might be pointing to, and then if you're ready to get one-on-one support, you can learn more about gut together there as well. As always, please share this episode with someone you think needs to hear it. If you're enjoying the podcast, a review means the world. It helps this show to find the right people who need it. And we also do a monthly giveaway. So when you submit, you review, you just. Email your review to Happy Gut at Dr. Heather Finley dot co. We pick a winner every month to win an HTMA test and consult. So definitely do that if you wanna test out some mineral testing and get some support there. But I'll see you next week. Your teaser is next episode. We're gonna talk about why healthy foods can sometimes make bloating even worse. Yes, it's really counterintuitive, but I think it's really important to talk about in this space. So see you next week on the next episode. Have a great rest of your day.