Last night I had pasta, garlic bread, a glass and a half of red. And I woke up flatter than I've been in 3 years.

This is me. The one on the left was the end of last summer and the one on the right was three weeks ago. Same bathroom, same morning light...heck even the same shirt, but no sucking in on either of them.

I still don't quite recognise the woman on the left, and that's the part that's hardest to write about, because for a long time I didn't know how to say so out loud.

But the reason I'm writing any of this down is that the explanation I finally got, after six years of doing what every gut health book on the market said to do, was so simple that I sat at my kitchen table for about a half hour after I heard it and just stared at the wall.

I turned 47 and put on weight I hadn't put on before. But that part wasn't unusual, my mother had warned me of this. What was unusual was the bloating...

I'd wake up flat and by lunch I'd be uncomfortable but by dinner I'd look about five months gone. And it got to the point my husband stopped asking if I wanted to go out for food. Because I'd been making excuses for so long that he'd just absorbed it as part of the new shape of our evenings.

Meanwhile I did what you're supposed to do, cutting gluten, dairy on top of it and felt nothing.

I tried the FODMAP thing with the colour-coded app and the little spreadsheets and I lost some weight but the stubborn bloat insisted on staying.

I bought some many probiotics and digestive enzymes that the woman at the health food shop near my office knew me by name and would press the new ones into my hand the way you'd hand someone a prescription.

After the fourth new bottle I started feeling something close to embarrassed every time I opened the fridge.

But I decided enough was enough at my nieces pool party. I was stood poolside in my swimsuit when one of her friends (maybe 12 years old) asked when I was having my baby...

In that moment I realised not how honest kids are but how if that little one said it, every parent there was likely thinking the same thing.

The friend who told me what was actually going on isn't a doctor and she'd be the first to tell you so. She's a woman my age who'd been through worse than I had and come out the other side.

So I swallowed my pride and pinged her a text asking if we could have a chat... thinking if anyone knew it would be her.

I didn't need to explain for long before she pointed out I'd been chasing the wrong thing for all these years.

And the explanation is the part that made me sit at the kitchen table afterwards for half an hour...

She said the gut has good bacteria and bad bacteria. And the good ones keep the gut lining sealed calm and quiet.

And the bad ones produce gas and inflammation and the slow steady pressure that turns a flat stomach into something that looks five months pregnant by dinnertime.

But what nobody had ever told me, in any of the books or any of the appointments or any of the supplement bottles, is what the bad bacteria do to stay alive.

She said they build a coating, like a sticky protein shell that wraps around the colonies like armour. Researchers call it a biofilm.

The closest thing she could compare it to was the plaque that builds up on teeth, except it's in the gut. So the bacteria inside it sit there for YEARS.

Untouched, multiplying and producing gas every time I ate something they like, which is most things.

So if the bad bacteria are hiding inside a coating, every probiotic I'd ever taken had been bouncing off the outside of it. And even the good ones I was paying a fortune for couldn't get through to do their job.

The bad ones inside it couldn't be reached by anything I ate or didn't eat. And every food I'd cut out of my life over six years had been an attempt to starve a thing that was sitting comfortably behind a wall, eating whatever else I gave it, completely undisturbed.

I hadn't been failing but I'd been fighting something I couldn't reach.

And once she said it that way, I couldn't unhear it. Because it's the only theory I'd ever come across that explained why two women can eat the same lunch and one of them looks pregnant by dinner and the other one doesn't.

The lunch was never the variable. The biofilm was.

She told me there's a paper from 2023 that measured how protective the coating is. The bacteria living inside it are roughly 1000x more resistant to anything trying to clear them than the same bacteria living out in the open.

Which is why the probiotics I'd spent thousands of pounds on over the years had done about as much for me as drinking tap water.

Three things, in a particular order, and the order was the part most get wrong.

The 2023 paper she'd read said bromelain destroyed the biofilm structure by something like six times more than anything else they'd tested. It comes from the stems of pineapples, the part nobody eats, and its job is to break down the protein structure of the biofilm so the bacteria hiding inside it have nowhere left to hide.

Without that step first, she said, nothing else you take afterwards even reaches the place it's supposed to reach.

Followed by Berberine to regrow the good gut bacteria called Akkermansia, that we lose with age. The ones that should have been there all along, keeping the gut lining sealed and quiet, not inflamed.

"It's what makes the change actually last instead of going back to how it was the moment you stop" she said.

Black pepper extract unlocks it as studies show it increases absorption by up to twenty times. But most companies don't bother adding it because it costs more and most customers don't know to ask.

She said the only place she'd found all three together, in the doses that actually do something, was a small company called Nuora.

I ordered it the way I'd ordered a hundred things before it. Half hopeful, half bracing as I'd been here too many times to let myself believe anything in advance.

And at first, not much did change but I stuck with it and around the week 2 mark was when I started noticing the difference.

I'm two months in now. I had pasta last night with garlic bread and a glass and a half of red. And the picture on the right is from this morning.

I keep coming back to this picture. Not because I want anyone to be impressed by it. But because I spent so many years not wanting to be photographed that the existence of the right one still feels like something I have to look at to believe.

And there's a version of this I could write where I tell whoever's reading it what to do next. I'm not going to.

But if any of this sounds like an evening you've had recently, the link to the one I've been taking is just below.

It worked for me and it worked for my friend who told me about it in the first place. Either way I hope the next time you sit down to dinner you get to thoroughly enjoy it.

With hope,
A Woman Who Figured It Out