Eating out with IBS can feel like a gamble. You can't control how the food is prepared, you don't know exactly what's in every sauce and asking the waiter a dozen questions can feel awkward. Sometimes, staying home or taking your own food feels like the easier option.
But here's the thing. Food isn't just about nutrition. It's birthdays, date nights, family dinners, celebrations and catching up with friends and whenever a plan is put in place to manage IBS, it’s intended to make your world bigger. So if your diet is making your world smaller, something needs to change.
If you're heading out for brunch, celebrating a birthday or navigating the Christmas party season, here are my ten tips for eating out on a low FODMAP diet.
Start by thinking about what you don’t want to miss out on and what you can take or leave. After all, there’s no point eating a Christmas mince tart because its Christmas when you don’t actually love a Christmas mince tart. Instead save your wiggle room for the foods you love.
The thing with managing IBS is that although certain food can irritate your gut, they don’t cause damage and are not dangerous. In fact, some FODMAPs contain prebiotics that are really good for gut health. This means managing IBS is about finding that balance between what you want to eat, what level of symptoms are acceptable, what symptoms you can treat and what is not ok. The point is that you get to decide what matters to you.
Sometimes you’ll choose to push the limits because the experience is worth it and other times, you’ll choose not to. And that’s ok. Neither is a failure. Just promise me one thing, if you do decide to eat the dessert, enjoy it and don’t spend the next three hours scanning for bloating or mentally calculating the amount of possible fructose in it.
Knowing what to expect can be helpful for calming the nerves, so jump online and have a look at the menu. Are there any meals that look to be suitable for you or might be easy to adapt e.g. sourdough bread and poached eggs without the onion salsa or steak and chips without the garlic sauce.
You don’t need to analyse every ingredient, the idea is simply to have a few options so that you can arrived feeling relaxed knowing what your options will be.
Having rhythm and routine with your meals can go a long way towards supporting your gut to have rhythm and routine with digestion while long gaps followed by large meals can leave anyone feeling bloated and uncomfortable, even when they don’t have IBS.
Additionally, when you’re starving, you’re more likely to eat faster and eat more, increasing the potential FODMAP load.
My tip: eat your usual breakfast and lunch, and even have a small snack, like low FODMAP fruit or a lactose free yoghurt before you go out to dinner.
Some meals are always going to be easier to tweak than others. Dishes like grilled fish with potatoes and salad is straightforward while a slow cooked curry that has been simmering for six hours, is not so much.
Meals that are often easier toadapt include:
Meals that can be trickier include:
While it may be tempting to choose gluten free, this isn’t always a reliable option. Onion, garlic, legumes and milk are all gluten free but are high in FODMAPs. While sourdough bread, soy sauce and breadcrumbs all have low FODMAP serves. A lightly crumbed chicken breast might be a perfectly reasonable choice.
Low FODMAP doesn’t mean No FODMAP. All foods have a low FODMAP serve, it’s just that some are bigger than others. This means you do not need to avoid traces nor worry about cross contamination. Picking onion out of a salad or a mushroom out of the vegetables, is still low FODMAP. Additionally, Monash intentionally set serve sizes conservatively to allow for FODMAP stacking. So one extra bite of broccoli is unlikely to be the difference between an enjoyable night out and a disaster.
My tip: focus on ingredients that can’t easily be picked out. Kitchen's are busy and get overwhelmed with a list of 15 foods you can’t have. While picking the two to three foods that make the biggest difference is much easier to manage.
Of course, some people are more sensitive than others. But if you're finding that even the tiniest deviation from your low FODMAP diet consistently causes significant symptoms, it’s likely that something is interfering and making you more sensitive than you need to be, so I'd want to investigate what else might be contributing.
You've checked the ingredients, measured your portions and done everything you're supposed to do. Yet your symptoms are still unpredictable, and your list of safe foods seems to be getting smaller, being stricter isn't necessarily the answer.
At Everyday Nutrition, we look beyond FODMAPs to help you understand your symptoms, get clarity on your individual triggers and work towards eating a wider variety of foods with confidence.
Find more about out how I can help here
The reality is that your gut and brain are constantly communicating, and things like sleep, stress, hormones and previous experiences can influence how sensitive your gut feels. If you've had a bad experience eating out before, of course you might feel anxious about doing it again.
The thing is, telling someone to “just relax” is not a reasonable strategy. And with good reason, your body and your brain don’t actually speak English. Instead, they speak their own language of sensations and feelings. This is important because if you want to speak to your body and calm your gut brain-axis, you need to do it in a language your body and brain understand. Think of activities that make you feel relaxed, for example you don’t sing when you’re in danger, so the act of singing tells yourbody that you’re safe and it doesn’t need to be stressed. Other ideas might be a walk outside inspecting the neighbours’ gardens, reading a book, talking to afriend. All of these stop your body from making your gut the centre of attention. And what you focus on you amplify. You can read more about stress and IBS here.
I know this sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people with IBS have forgotten how to simply enjoy a meal. They're scanning for onion, worrying about portion sizes, checking how their stomach feels and mentally reviewing everything they've eaten that day. Meanwhile, everyone else is enjoying dinner.
Food is supposed to be pleasurable. It tastes good. It brings people together. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with eating something simply because you enjoy it. Chew well, talk to your friends, smile, laugh and enjoy the flavours and order something you actually want toeat.
Alcohol and fizzy drinks are gut irritants. Alcohol affects gut motility and all those bubbles in fizzy drinks have to go somewhere. While this in itself is not going to cause a disaster, too much can make you more sensitive to FODMAPs.
While you don’t need to avoid them completely, it’s also good to go easy. If you know that three glasses of sparkling wine leave you feeling bloated, maybe one glass is a better choice. You might alternate alcoholic drinks with water or choose a mocktail instead of a coke.
Moving after a meal helps to stimulate motility and supports digestion, easing feelings of fullness or bloating. The rhythmic nature of a stroll is also soothing for the vagus nerve and helps your body to feel less stressed. It’s a small soothing ritual that signals to your body that you’re safe.
You've had a lovely evening. You enjoyed your meal, had a laugh and maybe even tried something you wouldn't normally eat. Now it’s time to go back to your usual routine and let your gut do its thing. You never know, you may actually get away with no issues. If you have pushed the boundaries too far and you feel extra bloated, remind yourself that a healthy gut is not silent and know that it will pass. Then put your management plan into action. If you don’t have a management plan, check out myblog on Managing a Flare here.
My tip: IBS fluctuates andsometimes it’s good to just let a symptom be a symptom
Finally, a successful IBS management plan doesn’t mean never experiencing symptoms. Instead, it’s much more about having the tools to manage a flare and the confidence to live a life you love, even when your gut isn’t perfectly behaved. Because food is never just about nutrition. Food is about connection, memories, travel, pleasure and so much more.
If you’re finding you’re stuck in a loop of being too nervous to eat out, know that it doesn’t have to stay this way. You can learn to make informed food choices without analysing every ingredient. You can understand your triggers without becoming afraid of food. And you can enjoy meals with friends and family, even if your gut isn't always perfectly behaved.
Imagine choosing a restaurant without spending hours researching the menu, ordering something you actually want to eat and enjoying the evening without constantly second-guessing yourself. That's what we're working towards. At Everyday Nutrition, we help people with IBS reduce symptoms, understand their triggers and build confidence around food, without unnecessary restrictions. We know that you need strategies, not just a list of foods to avoid.
Because managing IBS should make your life bigger, not smaller.
Breath Testing has been commonly used to diagnose intolerances to certain fermentable sugars (e.g. fructose and lactose) that are associated with symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) including gas, bloating pain, constipation or diarrhoea. But how accurate are they and can we use them to determine your diet?
You’re standing in the kitchen, staring into the fridge. You’re hungry, but also unsure. Will this meal sit well? Will it cause symptoms later? Is it the “right” choice? You realise that your focus has shifted from living with ease to avoiding symptoms at all costs.
