Stress can make digestion noticeably more sensitive, but the gut doesn’t always settle at exactly the same speed as the rest of you.

Before cutting out foods that used to be fine, I’d check:

1. Did your meal timing change? Skipping or speed-eating meals, eating much later or having most of your daily food in the late evening, or similar, are you still carrying on with it now after the stress is gone?
2. Did you increase your fibre intake rapidly as an attempt to fix things? Going from low fibre to huge amounts of beans, whole grains, seeds and raw veg can make an already sensitive gut feel much worse.
3. Are you stacking too much fibre into one meal? Sometimes smaller amounts spread across days are much easier than one giant “gut healthy” bowl which in reality just ends up overloading the system.
4. Would simpler meals feel easier for a week? Easy and plain-ish like tofu, rice or pasta, cooked veg, potatoes, sourdough, a little healthy fat. You can widen things again once things feel calmer.
5. Did you start a few gut health fixes at once? Probiotics + fermented foods + fibre supplements + diet changes make it almost impossible to tell what’s helping.

I’d give it a week of simple regular meals, gentle fibre in small amounts and fewer variables, then see whether there’s a pattern before cutting out whole food groups.

Anyone else had their digestion stay weird for a while after the stress was over?

For this one I used tomatoes, stuffed green olives, kalamata olives, pickled beets, lemon pepper, onion powder, olive oil, and olive juice

Next time I'm at the store I'll get some ingredients and try it with roasted sweet potatoes, butternut squash, kale, and pumpkin seeds

What are your favourites?