How to Improve Digestion While Bulking

When I first started bulking, I made a slew of healthy changes to my lifestyle. I started lifting weights, getting better sleep, and eating a more nutritious diet. I expected to have more energy, feel more powerful, and look better. That wasn’t my fate. Instead, I felt tired and looked pregnant. It wasn’t fat, either. I still had abs. But instead of being flat, they curved outwards like a turtle shell.

As I continued to pound down the calories, I started feeling perpetually full, bloated, and gassy. I’d often get indigestion, I struggled with acid reflux, and sometimes I’d get diarrhea. My digestive system had never been strong, but now I was suffering from the classic symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I was clearly doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.

I considered going back to my older, smaller, less nutritious diet, but that would mean going back to being skinny, and I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Fortunately, there are several proven ways to improve digestion. By making a few key changes to my diet, I was able to strengthen my digestive system and banish my digestive woes.

That was 12 years ago. Since then, we’ve helped over 10,000 other skinny people bulk up. Many of them struggled with digestive issues, including IBS. I suspect that’s why so many of us are skinny to begin with. These are the methods we use to manage their symptoms while helping them build more robust digestive systems.

Eating a more abundant, varied, and nutritious diet can be incredibly good for us, especially if we’re skinny. If combine that diet with a good workout routine and a healthy lifestyle, we can build muscle, gain weight, and bulk up. These are all great things. But it doesn’t always go smoothly. Eating so much extra food can cause problems: bloating, indigestion, gas, constipation, and/or diarrhea.

One of the reasons why most skinny guys have trouble with traditional bodybuilding diets is that our stomachs are often smaller than average. If you’re a so-called “ectomorph,” with a thinner frame and a shallower ribcage, that means there’s less room for your stomach. If we compare that against the average man, not only does he have more room in his torso for his stomach, but he also has a history of overeating, which can stretch his stomach, making it bigger.

To make matters even more complicated, skinny guys are often “hardgainers,” in the sense that our metabolisms are more adaptive than normal. When we eat more calories, we spend more time standing, fidgeting, and pacing, burning off the extra energy (study). It’s totally subconscious. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. But it can burn off as much as 950 extra calories per day:

So we have a situation where some skinny guys have more meagre appetites and smaller stomachs, but we also have much greater calorie demands. So we shovel mountains of food down, and we wind up feeling bloated and cramped, and we struggle with acid reflux and indigestion.