BAD BELLY

What kind of food gives you a stomach ache?

Isn’t food meant for the tummy, a large bag hanging at the bottom of the food pipe. Doesn’t shrink, doesn’t grow. Why would it rumble and run, grabbing my attention from the inside out. I almost lost my job because it could not keep still for just an hour of my presentation with the board members. My work mates now call me stopper because for some reason when the boss decides to stop by right before lunch to make a random speech, my whole torso went into a revolting protest.

“Okay Tim,” he said, “thanks for the reminder. I think we have to STOP now and attend to body matters,” the whole office roared in laughter as he made a stiff exit.

I cannot put this down to one reason. It groans with hunger pangs just like it does when gassy. The sounds get louder when I have a run in the toilet and sometimes I suspect it rumbles just to embarrass me when I am with my friends. 

Someone whispered to me that they went to the doctors and tied up their tummy. I went and asked mine, serious about going under the knife. When he said, he cannot guarantee that it will stop the sounds, the runs and the gas, I walked away in defeat.

“I think what you need is a body reset,” my elder sister mentioned while on a video call. She looked younger than me and I was curious. “My boyfriend introduced me to a juice diet. It’s cleansed everything including what comes out!” By day four of the recipes she sent me, I was practically living in my toilet and called in sick twice in one week.

I went to see Nanna, the woman who had dedicated her life to taking care of my sister and I when we became orphans. I figured that maybe it had something to do with a condition I had as a child, or if I inherited this anomaly from my parents. If that was it, then she would know. I drove up to her two-bedroom country house, overlooking the river bed where she had planted all sorts of vegetables. She brought some of them to the kitchen, tall dark green leaves that looked like they needed to be boiled for hours to be edible. She said she used to cook them for us all the time and we would never get sick. I had a vivid memory of tossing those leaves in the bin when she was not looking because they reminded me of the taste of medicine.

“You need to get out of the city and move here with me,” she concluded when I told her about my situation. “There is no good food in those places. You are busy running around all day, have to get ready made meals and when you can’t afford it, you reach out for the cheap junk in the streets,”

I ate the butternut soup and bitter leaves in silence. Partly because she was right. I didn’t have time to cook with my busy schedule. But I did try my best to order in fresh food and, I would not call myself a junk foodie. One or two burgers a week should keep the gut cravings at bay.

Needless to say, I knew I was going to have to do something about this. I thought maybe it would be good to find out from an expert.

She asked me about my relationship with food

What do you mean? It sounded awkward.

How do you treat food when it’s on the table?

It didn’t make sense. Food is cooked, put on a plate, it lands in my tummy and out the other way like a cycle.

She tells me that I probably start thinking about food long before it lands in my tummy. You may be eating out of stress rather than to nourish yourself. You may be eating your emotions, feeding into a bad day or a merry moment. You may relish a flavour that you override the signal in your brain that tells you to stop. She said it would be important to understand what different nutrients do to my body and how I can blend in more of them at once.

“You see as much as the brain controls the body, the stomach has a brain of it’s own and we have to pay attention to what it trying to tell us,”

I am still learning this new revelation. I still have the runs but I decided to incorporate all these advices. The morning recipe juices from my sister’s boyfriend still make me gag but I have found a way to make them taste better. My nanna decided to get a friend who drives trucks to the city and sometimes delivers the leaves and herbs from her farm and my food scientist is helping me build my gut relationship.

I hope it works this time around.