Menopause and Bloating: What Is Causing You to Bloat?

We're going to dive right into the lovely subject of bloating. Fun stuff, right? Nobody wants to talk about this, I know, because it's kind of like a thing that girls don't do, talk about gas and water retention and bloating.

But it's something that we do experience while we're going through our perimenopausal and our menopausal years, primarily the perimenopausal years.

Usually when you get into menopause, 12 months without your period, you don't experience as much of a fluctuation in the hormones. But while you're in those perimenopause years, gas, it can be a problem.

Your Body is Producing Less Bile

So to get a little bit technical quickly, and not going too much in depth, pretty much your hormones are out of whack, and that is causing a reduction in the production of your bile. It sounds like a song. But that's what it is.

You are producing less bile, while means that your food is not digesting, which means that it's left to kind of ferment and it's causing gas. At least that's one issue. That's one issue with perimenopause.

If you're already producing less bile, your body is not operating optimally, so anything else you do is just going to exacerbate the problem. So, here are three quick areas where you can alleviate the gas somewhat.

Exercise, Water Intake, and Diet

Now, you know that you have to get the hormones under control. That is one of the things that will help tremendously with most of the problems with perimenopause and menopause.

However, a couple of other areas you might not have thought of, diet, exercise, water intake.

• You exercise, your metabolism revs up, your food digests. It's a great thing. You feel good.
• You're retaining water a lot of the times when you're not drinking enough water. It seems counterintuitive, but you are retaining the water because your body thinks it's going to die of thirst when you don't drink enough water. So it's important to drink as much water as you can, especially in these years. We should constantly be drinking water.
• Avoid eating things that cause you to have gas. There are foods out there that cause you to have gas. These foods are typically high in fiber.

Life Hacks for Reducing Bloating

Now, some other little life hacking things that you can do that will also help tremendously reduces your air intake. There are a few things around that. The air intake is a thing when it comes to bloating.

It seems like common sense now that I know it, but it's kind of weird when you think about it.

But we do little things all day long to cause ourselves to be bloated:

• Chewing gum
• Talking too much or too fast
• Smoking
• Drinking too quickly
• Drinking out of a straw
• Nervous breathing
• Gulping in air

All of those things can cause you to be bloated. Who knew?

So those are some easy things that we can do right now to help stop the bloat. So think about that and what you're doing that is causing you to intake more air than you need.

Keep in mind that there are the things that you can do to help alleviate this little nasty symptom of perimenopause and menopause that we as women experience, and some of us on a daily basis.