Why do I feel bloated after eating?

The tradition’s picture of a meal is a sorting. The stomach receives; the spleen separates the clear from the turbid; the clear rises to become qi and blood, the turbid descends to leave. A belly that swells after eating is a sorting that has stalled, with the turbid part sitting in the middle instead of going down. Everything a Chinese physician asks about bloating is a question about why the sorting stalled.

There are four usual reasons, and they feel different. The weak spleen bloats after every meal and worse when tired. The damp middle bloats with heaviness, and worse after sweet, dairy and cold food. The stalled meal bloats after too much, too late, with sour belching. And the bound liver qi bloats with the mood: it comes and goes through the day, is worse under stress, and a sigh or passing wind relieves it. Under all four sit the plain causes, which are eating fast, eating large, and eating cold.

The rule of clear and turbid is in the Suwen’s fifth chapter, and it gives both failures in one sentence: the clear going the wrong way makes loose stools, the turbid going the wrong way makes the belly swell.

Two more lines are quoted in every later book on the subject. The chapter on the granary gives the spleen and stomach their office; the chapter on obstruction gives the commonest cause of the office failing, which is simply too much.

Four pictures. The timing, the stool and the tongue usually decide between them.

• Seven parts full, 七分饱. Stop while you could still eat more. The Suwen’s doubled food injures the stomach is the whole of it.
• Warm, not cold. No iced drinks with meals, no fruit straight from the fridge after them, no salad as the main event from October to March.
• Slow. Chew until the food is soft; eat sitting, away from the screen; put the fork down between mouthfuls.
• A hundred steps after the meal, 饭后百步走. Ten minutes of walking is the tradition’s answer to the turbid that will not descend, and it works on all four pictures.
• Nothing heavy in the evening: no dairy, no fried food, no large raw salad, no dessert. The stalled supper is the bloating you wake with.
• Do not eat angry. The tight-and-moody picture is made at the table as much as at the desk; wait ten minutes and breathe out first.

None of that is a promise, and we make none. It is the floor, and seven parts full is the plank.

• Tangerine peel 陈皮, a piece in hot water after the meal, for every picture: the tradition’s first answer to qi that is stuck in the middle.
• Ginger 生姜, fresh, in the cooking, for the weak-and-tired and the heavy-and-sticky: it warms the sorter.
• Poria 茯苓 and Job’s tears 薏苡仁 in a morning congee, for the heavy-and-sticky.
• Hawthorn, 山楂, as a sour tea after a meal that was too big, for the full-and-sour. It is the tradition’s answer to meat and fat that will not move.
• A little chrysanthemum 菊花 in the afternoon cup for the tight-and-moody, which the tradition reads as heat in the liver as often as not.

Four finger-widths below the kneecap, a thumb’s width outside the shin bone, is Zusanli, Stomach 36, 足三里: the stomach channel’s great point, which the old rhymes give to every complaint of the belly. Thumb pressure, a minute each side, on the walk after the meal. It is not a needle and it is not a claim about outcomes.