Discomfort 4 hours after dinner
Forgive me if I posted about this before. I can't remember.
It's just a feeling of discomfort very low down in tummy. Not pain. It always happens 4 hours after my dinner. I eat around 6pm so it starts usually around 10. Sometimes it's later, 5 hours after. My lower tummy swells up a bit. It feels like something is being stretched low down, perhaps in my colon.
I usually pass some wind but not a lot. Maybe 3 or 4 times. No obvious relief from doing that.
Before that, during those 4 hours after dinner, I feel fine. And there's no problem when I'm eating or just after, with stomach etc.
It doesn't seem related to what I eat. I more or less always eat the same kinds of foods: veggies that suit me, steamed. Some fish, or eggs, and some carbs that I'm used to and usually suit me fine (maybe rice, or potatoes, cous-cous, etc.)
It doesn't happen every day. I can get periods of time without it. Sometimes I can get weeks without it.
The discomfort lasts usually not much more than an hour then fades. But when it happens, I get an almost-anxiety-like feeling, and my heart rate feels weird too. Heart jumping all over the place, and missing beats.
I also get a horrible emotional feeling with it. It makes me want to cry because suddenly nothing means anything to me any more! (weird)
Not caused by my thoughts. It started tonight when I was concentrating happily on creating oil lamps for winter.
This is peculiar. I am no doctor of course but sounds like perhaps there is an issue with the lower part of your intestine. So as the food moves lower in the area that's when you have your symptoms. I'm sorry that the anxiety heightens when you get these episodes. I can relate. When my Crohn's was bad and I would flare, I would also get panic attacks and it was absolutely horrible. You aren't alone in feeling this way. I wish there was something I could suggest to help but in my case it took me healing my gut for the panic attacks to stop. -Elizabeth (team member)
specific details are different, but I have long known a connection, in myself, between unwelcome GI symptoms, often cramping and distending abdomen, and accompanying lowering of mood, enthusiam, and motivation.
Yes, I believe there is indeed a connection. Great observation. -Elizabeth (team member)
Yes, I get that too. In my case I don't know whether a time of low emotion sets off the tummy, or if something happening in the gut set off a lower mood.
I had a feeling that there was a war going on in my stomach/colon after meals. I had no pain or gas at that moment but there was a disturbing low level turbulence that was not normal. I was told I was gluten intolerant by a Naturopath. I already had been avoiding /eliminating dairy.
Have you found any improvement since eliminating gluten? -Elizabeth (team member)
Very similar. Have written AGAIN to NIH Digestive Diseases for info on the digestive process to try to ascertain where in the process mine breaks down causing extreme overreaction. I've long maintained that IBS is physical. Everything is worse with stress but this is very much physical. Increasingly, I feel it's not about actual food - removing various foods yields only ltd temp relief - but about breakage in the digestive process. I, too, feel as if a muscle is pulled and I swallowed some razor blades. Immodium works eventually but I'd like to understand why and how. As MDs are less than forthcoming about the actual physiology of what happens, I urge everyone to email these guys. I get nausea in addition to explosions after dinner. Also explosions often occur w/o any warning. I often feel during explosion like I'm about to get a terrible flu replete with the despair you describe but it quickly dissipates. 
