A Guide to Menstrual Bloating Relief PDF DownloadIf you get bloating after your period ends, there’s a reason for it. You will have to figure out why your body is doing this – as well as how to reduce bloating before period, during your period and after.
This article will give you a minimum of 7 ways to stop period bloating.
Bloating, by the way, may occur 3-4 weeks after your period. You could also be bloated 1-2 weeks after your period. All women who are feeling bloated after their period will ask the same question, how long does bloating last after menstruation and how can it be prevented.
Causes of the Bloat After Your Period
To find out the answer to the question why am I still bloated after my period, ask yourself these questions:
1. Have you eaten something that has made you sick?
2. Have you eaten something that you are sensitive to or allergic to?
3. Do you have constipation?
4. Have you been eating a processed food diet with a lot of sugar, salt and foods known to have pesticides or GMOs in them?
You’re asking the question, is it normal to bloat after period. The feeling of bloatedness is not a normal feeling. It means something is wrong with your digestive system. So the first thing to do is go after the most common causes of bloating, not the least common ones. If you’ve eaten something to make yourself sick, such as food that was a little too old in the refrigerator, the mold content of the food will cause extreme bloating and nausea. You may even throw up.
Stop the Food Reactions and Stop the Bloating
If certain foods you eat give you symptoms that include bloating, then you’ll have to search farther to find out which ones they are. Doing this on your own is the most inaccurate way to find out, as the body reacts to all foods you eat for four days.
Running a blood test called the ALCAT test (find it online) will give you a list of foods your body reacts to. When you rotate or eliminate these foods, all the bloating disappears. This test does not need your doctor to order it for you.
If you truly want to prevent bloating, you’ll have to eliminate constipation. Going once a day is not enough, and the waste matter is accumulating in your intestinal tract. Just as a compost pile ferments in the back yard, so does the food you eat. When it does, it produces gas. When waste matter in your intestines ferment, they also produce gas and the gas can go nowhere except inside your intestinal tract. You end up bloating.
Your First Line of Defense Against Constipation and Bloating
Eliminating constipation is your first line of defense against regular bloating and home remedies will include enemas and/or prune juice, or at a minimum, more magnesium. When you take magnesium, get a 400 mg tablet and only take one per day.
Most women in their period years are usually deficient in magnesium. This is the reason why they get migraine headaches, body aches and pains and inflammation, too. Magnesium deficiency stops up the gut, making colon motility cease to a halt.
How Diet Influences Bloating After Period
What you eat affects your digestive tract. Your digestive tract is the site of the bloating. Thus, you have to put two and two together to understand the source of the bloating. Some people will focus mistakenly on exercise and yoga poses when they have bloating but this is foolish. Bloating means there is excess air in the abdomen and you have to get it out. All the exercise in the world won’t get it out – and neither will yoga poses.
Thus, it has to come out as gas expelled from the body, or you have to consume something that will soak up the gas. No magical exercise or yoga pose is going to alleviate the gas – and there’s no scientific proof of any mechanism where this will happen with either exercise or yoga! Yoga for bloating is a myth.
So what will expel the gas? There are several main remedies:
1. Peppermint tea – You can buy excellent peppermint tea already in teabags at the grocery store. Keep them on hand. When you feel bloated, take a tea bag out of the box and place it in a coffee cup. Fill the cup then with boiling water and let it steep. Then let it cool to room temperature and drink. The menthol in the peppermint absorbs the excess hydrogen ions found in gas and takes them out of the body. This herbal remedy is very mechanical and scientific.
2. Chamomile tea – Just like peppermint tea, you can use chamomile tea to work directly on the digestive system. One of its functions is to calm down the digestive system, and improve its functioning. Although it’s not known how exactly this is done, what we do have evidence of is that this herb has been used for centuries for this purpose. Use the same instructions as for peppermint tea when using chamomile tea. Both chamomile and peppermint tea – herbal remedies for period bloating – have no toxicity so you can drink them all day long without worry of side effects.
3. Change your diet. Let’s face it – we all have to continually make changes in our diet. We go for a while being good and then revert back to old ways such as eating potato chips and corn chips. These foods are high in sodium, which means you can bloat from them.
Too much sodium in the body causes bloat because it will draw water to itself. Your goal of sodium is 3000 mg per day, but many people consume 5000 or even 6000 mg per day. One can of soup may have in it 1200 mg sodium! Three ounces of processed meat can have 1500 mg in it! If you had a can of soup and a sandwich with processed meat, you’re already at 2700 mg sodium. Knowing what foods to eat and which foods to avoid matters.
4. Another dietary change to make is to stop eating the GMO foods. These foods were created to kill you, never to build up your body. Follow the money and you’ll see that GMO foods are part of the agenda to kill off a majority of the population.
People in other countries already figured this out and ban GMO foods. Are you going to fall for them? After about 20 years of eating them, the immune system starts to show signs of breakdown, easily allowing in cancer among other things.
William Davis, M.D., author of The Wheat Belly notes in his book that bloating is one of the top symptoms of eating the top GMO food – wheat. A wheat belly is a bloated belly. You don’t have to be gluten sensitive to eliminate wheat from your diet. For many women the answer to how to get rid of bloating during the period is to eliminate wheat and other GMO foods.
Vitamins and Minerals for Period Bloating
Again, you want to be scientific about what helps with bloating – and the only way to consider vitamins and minerals helpful would be to discover which vitamins and mineral deficiencies cause bloating.
Magnesium deficiency does, as stated before. Other minerals such as calcium, iron, boron, zinc, copper, iodine, phosphorus, molybdenum, selenium, and strontium don’t play a role in bloating although they may still function in the digestive system.
But a deficiency of many of the B complex vitamins does cause bloating. These vitamins assist in the breakdown of food in digestion – and if food is not broken down properly, bloating can result.
To take a B complex, make sure there’s at least 10 mg vitamin B1, B2 and B6 in it with at least 40 mg vitamin B3 in it, and 300 mcg biotin. Of course there should also be at least 6 mcg vitamin B12 and 400 mcg folate in the supplement, plus extra pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) helps.
Your easiest way to get all the vitamins and minerals to take for bloating into your body is to take a Period Vitamin. This makes sense as all vitamins and minerals are not equal to each other. Some are made for the elderly, some for pregnant women, some for men, some for children, and some for athletes. A period vitamin is created for you – women who are menstruating. You have completely different vitamin and mineral needs than your mother, grandma, father, brother and baby sister.
The period vitamin is a one a day supplement – and it makes a lot of sense.
As you can see from this article, the question of what helps with a bloated stomach is easily answered with tips once you think through the topic logically. You do have answers. Do what’s logical first – and save the other remedies that aren’t substantiated by science for last – or not at all because you eliminated the bloating with what works.
