If it feels like everything you eat causes a problem, it can be incredibly frustrating.

You eat something and you bloat.

You eat something else and you get diarrhea.

Another food causes constipation. Another gives you stomach pain. Another makes you feel nauseated.

Pretty soon, you have a list of foods you “can’t eat” that is getting longer and longer.

But why?

There isn’t one answer to this question. And despite how tempting it is to find one thing to blame, digestive symptoms are often the result of several things interacting with each other.

So let’s look at some of the possibilities.

Your gut has to do a lot of work

We tend to think of digestion as a pretty simple process: eat food, digest food, absorb nutrients, eliminate waste.

But your digestive system is doing all of that through a complicated combination of digestive juices, enzymes, muscles, nerves, hormones, immune cells, and microorganisms.

Food has to be broken down.

It has to move through your digestive tract at the right pace.

Nutrients have to be absorbed.

The gut has to distinguish between things that are harmless and things that need an immune response.

And your gut is constantly communicating with your brain.

So when something isn’t working quite right, the symptoms can show up in lots of different ways.

Motility matters

Your digestive tract is not just a tube that food falls through.

It has muscles and nerves that coordinate the movement of food from one end to the other. This is called gastrointestinal motility.

If things move too quickly, you may have diarrhea.

If they move too slowly, constipation can become a problem.

And sometimes the problem is not simply fast versus slow. The coordination of movement can be disrupted at different points along the digestive tract.

Motility problems can also contribute to bloating, abdominal discomfort, nausea, and the feeling that food is just sitting there.

This is one reason why the same food can seem perfectly fine one day and terrible another day. What is happening in your digestive system at the time you eat it matters.

Your gut may be more sensitive than it should be

Here’s another piece that is easy to miss.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that there is something terribly wrong with the food or even that there is an enormous amount of gas in your digestive tract.

It may be that your gut is more sensitive to what is happening inside it.

This is called visceral hypersensitivity.

For example, gas and stool are normal parts of digestion. Everyone has them. But people with disorders such as IBS can experience pain or significant discomfort from amounts of gas or stool that might not bother someone else.
This is one reason I don’t like the idea that digestive symptoms always mean, “This food is damaging me.”

Sometimes your gut is sensing something that is happening normally, but the signal is being experienced as much more uncomfortable.

And that doesn’t mean the symptoms are imaginary.
The symptoms are very real.

Your brain and your gut are talking all the time

This is another place where the old idea of “it’s all in your head” has done a lot of damage.

Your brain and your digestive tract are in constant communication. The gut has its own nervous system, and signals travel in both directions between the gut and brain.

That means stress, emotions, expectations, and the way the brain processes bodily sensations can influence digestive symptoms.

It also works the other way around. What is happening in your gut sends information back to your brain.

So if you have a gut that is already sensitive, being worried about what you eat can become part of the picture.

• Maybe your motility is sluggish.
• Maybe your gut is more sensitive.
• Maybe certain carbohydrates are particularly difficult for you to digest or absorb.
• Maybe there has been a change in your microbiome.
• Maybe you have an underlying gastrointestinal condition that needs to be diagnosed and treated.
• Maybe stress is amplifying symptoms that already have a physical cause.
• Maybe several of these things are happening at the same time.

That is why I am much more interested in the pattern than in a list of supposedly “good” and “bad” foods.

What do you do when everything seems to bother you?

This is where I would resist the temptation to keep eliminating foods forever.

A short-term elimination can sometimes be useful. The low FODMAP diet, for example, can help some people with IBS identify dietary triggers. But it is designed to be followed by reintroduction and personalization, not indefinite restriction.

If your diet keeps getting smaller, I think it is time to step back and ask a bigger question:
Why is my gut reacting to so many things?

That question may lead you to a very different solution than simply eliminating another food.

And sometimes the answer is not about finding the perfect diet at all.

Sometimes the goal is to help your digestive system become a little less reactive, understand what is actually triggering your symptoms, and gradually figure out what you can comfortably eat.

That’s a much more useful place to end up than being afraid of your next meal.