Bloating during the period, the FODMAP diet and deadlifting postpartum

This week I'm answering some great questions that I've had.

You might have heard me talk about bloating and the impact on diastasis recti before.
A great question this week was to do with bloating around your period and whether this also affects diastasis recti recovery.

Then I talk a bit about the FODMAP diet as a solution for people who have issues with IBS/bloating etc. I personally think there's a better solution for this group of people and that's journalling.

And, finally, I'm talking heavy lifting/deadlifts postpartum. Why when I say "You can do whatever you want" I actually mean it!

Just a  reminder that HPNB now only has 5 billing cycles!

So this means that you not only get 3 months FREE access, no obligation!

BUT, if you decide you want to do the rest of the program, after only 5 months of paying $10/£8 a month you now get FREE LIFE TIME ACCESS! That's $50 max spend, in case you were wondering.

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And, of course, you can always find us on our YouTube channel if you like your podcast in video form :)

Visit healthypostnatalbody.com and get 3 months completely FREE access. No sales, no commitment, no BS.

Email peter@healthypostnatalbody.com if you have any questions, comments or want to suggest a guest/topic

Playing us out this week "My Roots" by Cira Grandi

Transcript

Peter Lap: 0:00

Hey, welcome to the Healthy PostNatal Podcast , with your postnatal expert Peter Lap that, as always, would be me. On today's episode, I'm answering more of your questions. I'm talking about period bloating, the bloating that happens during your period and whether that interferes with your diastasis recti recovery, which is an excellent question that I had through Deadlifting postpartum, can you do deadlifts and can you do heavy deadlifts postpartum with diastasis recti? And finally, I am talking about the FODMAP diet and why, wh, it with a passion that is unrivaled, I think there's a much, much better way to find out if you're struggling with a particular ingredient or particular foodstuff, as they say Right. So, without further ado, here we go.

Peter Lap: 1:16

Hey, welcome to the Healthy Post Natal Body Podcast little little little Lytto Lopee. This is the podcast for the 3rd of December 2023. We're in December already. It's dark. I'm recording this on a Friday afternoon at approximately 20 past four, and it's pitch black outside. There is no light anywhere anymore, and this is the way of the world now. It's pitch black everywhere and cold. It is so cold. On the plus side, I'm here with Bob, b Kitty and Lola, but is sleeping in the other room. So all is well in our world. I hope you're well.

Peter Lap: 1:57

I am once again doing more listener emails because that's what I do when I don't have a guest on. I'm talking about the things that you asked about, peter, a c com y the way, if you have any questions, any comments, any, you know, if you want to give the podcast a little five-star review on Apple appreciated that that that be by the way, I keep forgetting to ask that stuff If you're one of the people listening and say, ah, I don't mind this guy too much, then by all means leave a little five-star review, maybe even a little review type of you. Yeah, well done, pete, sort of thing in there. Also, other people can find it easier and Apple keeps pushing and Spotify and all those platforms keep pushing the podcast.

Peter Lap: 2:41

Period bloating that's a nice segue. That's what I'm talking about. For the first part, I had a question from somebody that said Pete, you talk a lot about the paraphrasing here because I don't have the email anymore because I'm a jackass. That said, Pete, you talk a lot about bloating and I still have diastasis recti and you talk about how bloating interferes with that. What about period bloating? I have diastasis recti. My bloating is pretty bad during my period. Will that interfere with my diastasis recovery. That's an excellent question because I do tend to bang on a little bit about bloating and diet and all that sort of stuff.

Peter Lap: 3:28

Again, for most of you listening, you will have heard me say this before, but just in case you're new to the podcast, diastasis recti is essentially caused by internal pressure and bloating is an increase in internal pressure. My English isn't great today, by the way. I have no idea what's happening, but it took me literally eight or nine takes to do the intro and I'm not doing this again. We're just going to plow ahead. There will be no editing, we're just going to stick with it and the transcribing software and people will just have to struggle trying to figure out what I actually said. I hope you understand what I'm saying. So diastasis recti is caused by internal pressure, so not just necessarily being pregnant, but bloating and all that sort of stuff is part of that, as I always say. What I say is that if you are experiencing food type bloating whilst you have recti, in an ideal world you'll change your diet in such a way that you'll bloat less. Not possible for everybody, but wherever you can, you do that and it will help speak your dinosaurs recti recovery up and it's like a one-on-one makes-to type situation.

Peter Lap: 4:53

Of course, period bloating there's very little you can do about it. Now, if you always experience bloating during a period, then that is just what it is. Most people most women that I come across, of course, don't bloat for 30 days when it's period related, and this is kind of what the difference is between food bloating and period bloating. Period bloating is relatively temporary and that's three to four, maybe five days. As a push it can be a little bit longer.

Peter Lap: 5:26

But what I find with most food-related bloating that now people complain about is that it is much more frequent than almost every day, because the reaction to the everyday food stuffs that are causing the bloating is usually what the problem is, and quite often it's things like onions and all that sort of stuff that can cause it. I'm not saying that and again, this is specific to you. This is all. So onions don't cause bloating in everybody. I'm not saying telling people to stay away from onions. I'm just saying that if it's something like onions or garlic or apples that cause the bloating, or carbohydrates or fine sugars that cause bloating and you're used to having those things every single day, then you're basically bloating 30 days out of the month, whereas and that is obviously easily adjustable whereas period bloating is for a few days and then everything kind of goes back to normal a little bit. So don't worry too much about it. That is not enough to really push any diastasis recovery or interfere with any diastasis recti recovery.

Peter Lap: 6:39

And of course you can still do your exercises during when you b anyways right, you can still. There is no reason why you can't do unless you have crippling period pains. But there's no reason why you can't do those exercises. I always tell people who are on the HPMB program HPNB the healthy personator, postnatal bodycom program bodycom. com com. com that in an ideal world you would just do the home routine. If you don't have the energy to do the strength session that week of those few days, then you just do the home routine. It's like seven minutes, usually relatively gentle exercises, but that just keeps everything going and that makes a huge difference. So when you come out to the end of it, of your period, and the bloating is gone, you'll have still made some progress and that's a wonderful place to be at right. So that's the difference between food bloating and period bloating.

Peter Lap: 7:38

Food bloating is a much more permanent thing for most people. I think it's a permanent. It's a wrong word. It's a much more regular thing, for what happens more frequently? Right, regularly, I regularly get emails from people, from women, that say in the morning I wake up with a flat tummy and by the evening it's completely round and swollen and now look three, four, five, six months pregnant again. And yeah, that can happen, and if that's caused by foodstuffs, then it's trying to find out what causes. That is a very valuable thing to do, and actually I was going to talk about the FODMAP diet later on, but I think we'll do it now. You'll have come across the FODMAP diet A lot of people are talking about now.

Peter Lap: 8:28

Basically you cut out a whole bunch of foods that can cause bloating and IBS and all that sort of stuff and then slowly but surely, you reintroduce them again, one by one. I'm not a huge fan of that diet. I think it's it's it works for for medicine reasons, I for for medical reasons. I get it. If you have to do the diet for medical reasons, that's a different thing. If you're just trying to find out which item is causing you trouble, it's a terribly restrictive and stupid diet to go on, because you're basically cutting everything out and then you're slowly reintroducing things, bit by bit, whereas I'm a much bigger fan of cutting out.

Peter Lap: 9:10

Actually, just keep doing what you're doing and keeping a food journal and write down what you had and the reaction it caused. And it takes about, I don't know, a minute. So, on three, based on three meals, that's three, three minutes a day you just journal what you, what you ate and whether that caused any bloating or not, and that allows you then to narrow down what can actually be the problem. So if you find that you bloat after chili and you bloat after pasta, you bloat after I don't know shepherd's pie, you bloat after Chinese food, that's. Then you can say, okay, what do all these things have in common, right? And then you can say, okay, all of them contain onion. Well, maybe I should cut out onion.

Peter Lap: 9:56

That, to me, is a much more sensible approach than, say, I'm cutting out onion, I'm cutting out corn, I'm cutting out dairy, I'm cutting out eggs, I'm cutting everything out that could potentially be an irritant, and then I'll slowly try to be introducing one at a time again. So I'll introduce some onion. No, this is fine and that takes a long time, but you can just sort it out in a week or two. You can narrow down what causes that type of thing within a week or two just by journaling and keeping accurate track of the food you eat and the reaction you have to the foods. So this is not like my fitness-powered food-logging type thing that I tell people to do, not at all.

Peter Lap: 10:45

There's no calorie counting, there's no portion counting, not saying I had two bowls of spaghetti and that caused this reaction, or, but just say I had a glass of milk, so I have milk, fine. And if after milk you are fine. And then if I say in the morning you have your cereal and you have your, you know you wheata your wheatabixes in the morning you have your wheata to wheatabixes comes with milk and you find you're fine after that. And then in the afternoon you go to a cafe Nero or a Christmas market or something. You have a hot chocolate and also the bloat is back. Then you know hot milk could well be something, especially if you then could also say oh, I have the same reaction after cappuccino or or latte, that type of stuff. Warm milk tends to bloat anyways. Right, everybody bloats after a hot chocolate, by the way, that is completely normal, but it's that is.

Peter Lap: 11:43

That is the way I would go about it, I think, cutting out a whole bunch of foods in the hope that you can then reintroduce things slowly but surely. I mean, maybe you're okay with a little bit of onion, maybe you're not okay with too much onion, oh. But then on that day that you just increased onion intake, you also upped the dairy intake or the egg intake a little bit, and now you're confused about which one of the two. So you cut out eggs, but you find you're still bloating. And then you're like I've just done the FODMAP diet and on the day I introduced eggs again I started bloating. Yeah, but I was actually caused by an increase in onions or whatever it is it. Just, you know it's a messy way of doing it. It's very restrictive.

Peter Lap: 12:24

And who was it again from the Wits aaaaaand a a and podcast podcast podcast that I had on, because I love that saying I mean just Philip, philip, was it Philip i Waits? See, now I'm in Jackass because I can't remember Whitsun Waits Waits because podcast. I can't find it Because I'm such a dingus Whitsun. Yes, you're going to have to listen to me Google this Waits podcast, right? So, because when I do want to give a who shout out Philip Pape, that's what it is. something, I knew Pape, it was Philip, something Philip Pape like he was saying and definitely check out his podcast, by the way. He was saying it's about creating an atmosphere of abundance, right, what he does, body composition and all that sort of stuff and diet advice.

Peter Lap: 13:22

And I really like that approach, because almost everything that we do in the health and fitness world is restrictive in one way or another. It tends to be don't do this, don't do that, don't do that, don't do X, don't do Y, don't do Z, whereas a much healthier approach is saying no, do this, do that, do that. So, for instance, when it comes to postpartum training, I don't tell you not to do anything. If you can perform an exercise correctly, you can do that exercise. It is not going to hurt. So instead of saying no planks, no crunches, you can do all the planks and all the crunches in the world.

Peter Lap: 14:03

Whether the crunches will help you get closer towards your goal is a completely different matter, but if you like doing crunches and you perform them well, as in, your body knows what to do, you survive muscles at the right time on all that sort of stuff and you exhale through the exercises, I always say there is no reason at all why you can't do crunches. You love doing crunches, you do crunches, who cares? It's not going to make the entire stats worse. Also, if you're pregnant by the way, I had this question from someone who used to train with somebody else and is now training with me, who is very early on in the pregnancy journey, and she was asking whether she could do crunches because it might squeeze the baby. I don't know what some personal trainers are telling their clients, but no, that is not how crunches work. That's also not how babies sit and all that sort of stuff. And if you're early on, babies are so tiny anyways but they don't sit in your rib cage. Babies don't get squeezed by crunches. That doesn't mean you should be doing crunches. Babies are early postpartum. They don't get squeezed by doing crunches and all that sort of stuff. That is just not how that works. But postpartum especially, there's no reason why you can't do crunches. They just don't necessarily help heal your diastasis rectiol though Now I know what you're thinking If you're part of the healthy postnatal body program.

Peter Lap: 15:32

There are crunches in the HPNB program, but they tend not to be the standard crunches. We do bicycle crunches, we do crossover crunches, so mainly abdominal oblique work rather than straight up crunches. There's some toe reach crunches in there. I know they're in there for the top two, basically top two abs, because they're just nice to get in there, but they come after, I want to say after leg raises and after some oblique stuff again. So our TVA work, so we don't do a hundred of them, but they won't hurt you, I mean, if you are a member of the HPNB program and I won't keep banging on about that, but it's just if you are a member, by the time you get to those crunches, to toe reach crunches, they're not a problem for you anymore. You'll be completely fine to do them. They're in, the program is in order for a reason. So there isn't a single exercise and it's the same with deadlifting.

Peter Lap: 16:40

Like I said, I was asked about deadlifting postpartum and this was from someone who's an athlete. They sent an email asking when they could do deadlifts again and they told me what they're. They weigh 65kg at the moment and their personal best for deadlifts is round about 120kg mark and she'd like to increase that. Now. She doesn't deadlift for a living, by the way, but you know she's strong. hat's That's what I'm . If you are deadlifting almost twice your body weight, you're doing nicely. The equivalent of that for me is lifting 190. 190kg. I weigh about 92, 93kg and so you know, when you think 130 or 120, 130 doesn't sound that impressive, it is. If you're 60, 65kg, that is really really good going. Like I said, this person is really strong and really good. But they asked if she could do deadlifts, so we had a little zoom call and we just saw that everything is moving fine.

Peter Lap: 17:48

You know how to perform the exercise and therefore, yeah, you can do whatever you want. You can't screw this up If your body knows how to do an exercise such as a deadlift or squat or whatever, and you don't brace during dance movement, so you don't hold your breath. But that's fundamentally what I mean with brazing and you teach your body to when you exhale on the effort, so, on the deadlift, that's on your way up, right, you inhale on the way down and exhale on the way up, and that means your core tightens as you do because you're using the core breath. Right. I'm making several assumptions here. You're using the core breath, as you'll find out on our YouTube channel, and you know the first thing that the first email you get the first exercise you see when you do the program. But it's like I said, it's also on our YouTube channel.

Peter Lap: 18:48

If you're not a member, if you exhale like that through the motion, you can't injure yourself, at least not by size of a rectile right, and if your form is good, you will never injure yourself during a deadlift. I very, very deadlift is one of the safest exercises in the world to do for people who know how to do them Right. It is really, really difficult to injure yourself doing the deadlift if you execute the deadlift well and that, to be fair, that kind of goes for most exercises. But it's much easier to injure yourself running or walking or anything like that Than it is to do it during a deadlift, and this goes for any big lift. If you are athletically inclined or you like lifting really heavy things, you know, then go and do that. Just make sure your body's ready for it.

Peter Lap: 19:43

And you know, one of the worst pieces of advice I think women generally speak and are given postpartum is don't lift anything. That's terrible advice. First of all, it's not practical because you know you have to lift stuff in your day to day life. But also lifting weights is the single fastest way for you to recover postpartum, for you to get stronger postpartum. There isn't anything else. Running isn't going to do it, cardio isn't going to do it, trx style training is not really likely to do it. You have to resist, you have to do resistance stuff, and that can be banned. And it can be catabels and it can be all that stuff. And, to be fair, it can be TRX as well, just not the way most people use a TRX, but it's. Then it can be body weight training, but you have to have some sort of resistance element in it, otherwise the muscles simply won't recover, won't get stronger and won't start functioning well.

Peter Lap: 20:50

Right, it always comes back to the beginning. We work on the rehab element a little bit and then we immediately jump into strength and conditioning. That is what any good postpartum program is like. Just four to six weeks, right, we're working on the rehab element, and after that we do the strength and conditioning bit. We strengthen everything up by strengthening everything up. That should technically be part of rehab, but if you look at quite a few postpartum programs, they ignore that bit.

Peter Lap: 21:27

Physios tend to do that as well. They tend to really focus on range of motion and all that sort of stuff. If you have a sore shoulder and you go see a physio, they'll focus on range of motion, make sure you can move pain-free and all that sort of stuff, and then they'll send you on your merry way. They're saying you're good to go. Where's the best way to then? The next step would then, should that be go and strengthen those muscles up so that you'll be protected in the future from preventing future injuries. The best way to prevent any injuries is always by having strong muscles and if it's a head injury, wear a helmet. But other than that, that really is the go-to. So that lifting heavy yes, you're fine. Squatting heavy yes, you're fine.

Peter Lap: 22:22

Fencing I had a fencing client who likes to fence and when they say likes to, I mean, does it again at a fairly high level? Yes, completely safe. Fencing isn't even as high impact as I thought it was, to be honest, because of the agility with which they move. It's astonishing when you see it. It's much more similar to dancing than it is to I don't know gymnastics or anything like that. You know the impact, wise, I mean, and movement wise, kung Fu, kickboxing you can do all that sort of stuff post-Python. You just have to make sure that you've done that rehab stage first and then strengthen things up a little bit Right. Kickboxing by itself again would not get the muscle stronger, but all the conditioning stuff you tend to get with it would. So you know, you do any sort of post-Python recovery program and then you go focus on the strength element. After that you shouldn't get injured again. You can do whatever you want.

Peter Lap: 23:32

The goal of any postpartum program, any rehab program I know I've said this before, so apologies if I bore people with this is to get you fixed and get you out the door. You shouldn't have to pay year after year after year for a recovery program. It's not that interesting and it doesn't take that long. As I always say, I give the first three months, first 13 weeks, actually four months. You get to see the first four months of the program if you sign up for HPMP HPNB and you get that for free. If you then hang around, you can hang around and focus on other areas. But that is not so much necessarily the pure size of recovery, early stages of post-Python recovery, sort of stuff. That is much more of the. I want to work on my legs, I want to work on my core, I want to work on my posture, I want to work on my back and I want to turn up and all that sort of stuff.

Peter Lap: 24:33

You can also do that by yourself in a completely safe manner. If you've completed the first 13 weeks of the program properly, you don't need to stick around, and I make that very, very clear when I send out the emails, or in the system sends out the emails that tells you that your program is coming to an end, that your free trial is coming to an end. Listen, if you want to stick around, great. But if not, go have fun at the gym, go do what you want to do. You should, at that stage, be completely and utterly ready to do whatever it is you want to do. If you find you're not, then you can always just pause, stop the program there, pause the program whatever you do, cancel the subscription and then start up again later and just run that last month for a little bit longer.

Peter Lap: 25:18

But most people and by most I mean 90-95% of people find out. We did a survey on this. We did a survey on this saying most people have no dinosaurs or reptile issues anymore after a certain amount of time. I can't remember what it was, I think it was 13 weeks or four months or something like that. It's on the MASIC website, the MASIC S-I-E-C website, because I did one for them to show the efficacy and effectiveness of the program and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, there you go.

Peter Lap: 25:57

You do an early rehabby bit, then strengthen the muscles up which you can do by yourself as well and then you're completely free to do whatever it is you want. Whether you deadlift twice your body weight, or whether you're a tennis player, kickboxer, whatever it is, just go do your thing. Whether you like to run, you go and run. It really doesn't matter that much. Right, I think that's covered everything. I'm 26 minutes in. We're flying through this thing. So there we are.

Peter Lap: 26:25

That, my friends, is it for this week. I'm completely done. I'm completely pooped as well, to be honest. We're going for a walk on the beach tomorrow. We charged the batteries a little bit. Like I said, it's coming up to December, or it is December now. It's coming up to Christmas. So there will be one or two from default episodes. I have a beautiful episode. It's two hours long. There's somebody's depression journey and an interview with the social worker after that who helped her recover after that. But I'm getting that ready now, waiting on approval and all that sort of stuff. That might be a January sort of thing. Several guests lined up, but peter Peter@healthypostnatalbody. at healthyplusnatalbuddycom, if you have any questions yourself, you take care of yourself. Have a tremendous week and I'll check in on you next week. Bye now.

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