A big problem that many face, when they begin to add back a larger variety and quantity of food, is that they may experience bloating and other digestion symptoms. For some, it can even be quite painful. 

Why Does This Occur?

There is a simple explanation for this– When you are restricting, and your metabolism is lowered, your body slows down digestive function to conserve energy. It does this in multiple ways:

  • For one, the contractions of the gut, also known as gut motility, slows down to allow maximum absorption of calories.
  • Additionally, the body reduces the amount of digestive enzymes and stomach acid that it produces.

These two things occur because there is no need for the body to waste the calories require to keep digestion at full speed when the amount of food consumed is greatly reduced.

Why Do These Digestive Symptoms Persist?

The reason that these symptoms occur for a few weeks even after adding back more food, is that the body takes some time to readjust. It needs to make sure that the extra calories are not just temporary before it uses more calories for digestion.

The Mechanism Behind This

While the exact mechanism behind this is complex, the simple version is that the body uses the amount of the hormone leptin as a signal of how fast digestion should occur. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, leptin is the master hormone that fluctuates short-term based on how much you eat and long-term by your level of body fat. Thus, in order for these digestive symptoms to go away, you need to consistently eat to satiety long enough to raise your leptin and thus speed up your digestion.

There are to schools of thought as to how to best handle these digestion problems:

  1. Your body simply isn’t used to digesting certain types of foods anymore. (e.g. dairy, fibers, legumes, etc.) 
    • Implication: You should slowly add back these problem foods, so your body can get used to digesting those foods again.
  2. Your digestion, in general, is slowed down temporarily and will begin functioning optimally again once your metabolism increases. 
    • Implication: The main goal should be to improve digestion in general by increasing your metabolism. Your digestion of “problem” foods will not improve independent of your metabolism or digestion speed. Therefore, in theory, you could speed up your metabolism first by only eating foods that you can handle, then when you later add in “problem” foods you will be able to digest them just fine.

While both of these approaches have merit, the second of these theories seem to be more consistent with my experience and the experience of others.

I’ll share my experience to illustrate this:

Around May of 2018, while interning in New York City, I decided that I was done restricting and that I want to eat like a normal person, rather than the strict keto diet I had followed for the past year or so. At the time I weighed 175 pounds, which is quite lean for me, and therefore I knew that most of my symptoms were caused by a decrease in my metabolic rate.

Nightmare of Symptoms

I was super motivated to start eating all food again, however, that motivation began to fade upon the realization that I had a hard time digesting almost everything, dairy, fiber, bread, you name it. For the two weeks that I tried eating anything to satiety my stomach was the size of a bowling ball and was very painful. One of my friends even asked me if everything was fine because I looked swollen, which I did.

I felt horrible…

Within the end of the second week, I was convinced that maybe some foods really are the devil and decided to go back to my strict keto diet. Now at this point, it sounds a lot like either these foods were problematic for me, or I needed time to adjust to them, much like the first theory mentioned above. However, my second experience of recovery a few months later changed my opinion on this.

A Different Approach

After this first recovery attempt, despite my new-found fear of these problem foods, I decided that I would at least try eating as much as I wanted to satiety, even if it was from a very limited number of foods. Therefore, for the next five months I at my strict keto diet to satiety, which brought my weight up to almost 200 pounds, an almost 25-pound increase. This large fluctuation in weight was nothing new, as my weight has been all over the place for years. Also, keep in mind that as a 6ft tall muscular guy, 200-pounds is close to a “normal” weight for me.

Final Attempt = Sucess

Five months after my first attempt, despite expecting the worst, I decided to add back all food again. This time to my surprise I had zero digestive trouble from any food that I ate, and at any quantity. The only difference was that I was closer to my bodyweight setpoint. There is no longer a single food that I avoid.

Healthy Metabolism = Healthy Digestion

My best explanation for this, consistent with the second digestion theory, is that once my metabolism sped up along with my digestion, I could handle these foods without having to adjust to them. When your metabolism is functioning optimally all of the systems in your body seem to function optimally as well.

Takeaway

The takeaway here is that recovery and its symptoms can be hard enough as it is. Don’t feel obligated to eat the foods that cause you obvious digestion problems. You can always stick with the foods that you tolerate until your metabolism speeds up. Once your digestion is up to speed, you will most likely handle those problem foods just fine.

Isn’t this a type of restriction?

Yes, this is a type of short-term restriction, but not the type of restriction we are trying to avoid in recovery. What we want to avoid is the irrational restriction of foods based solely on something that we’ve read or some belief that we hold, despite them causing us no apparent problems.

I can assure you that normal eaters would not force themselves to eat something that makes them feel like that– being a normal eater is our goal.

Keep it simple and listen to your body. When your digestion is back up to speed, you’ll be able to handle these foods just fine.