How a Lifejacket on the Island Ferry Made Me Deal With My Bloating

The crewman got as far as the buckle and then stopped.

He was young, maybe twenty three, and he had a clipboard tucked under his arm because there is a log they have to sign.

“Would you turn a small bit for me there,” he said.

I turned.

He tried again with both hands and it did not close, and he did the thing that people do, which is to try a third time when they already know.

“No bother at all,” he said, and off he went down the boat.

There were maybe thirty of us on that bench, all in lifejackets, all watching him go, because there is nothing else to look at on a pier.

He came back up from the locker carrying a bigger one and he carried it the whole length of the deck.

It took the two of us to close it.

If you are a woman over fifty and you have ever had somebody kind be very, very careful with you in public, you know exactly the feeling I am talking about. It is not the thing itself. It is the carefulness.

Sorcha, my daughter in law, sat in beside me and talked to me about absolutely nothing the whole way across. Forty minutes of it. She is twenty nine and she did that on purpose and I have never said a word to her about it.

I will tell you the other half of it, because the lifejacket is not really the story.

That was my birthday. Fergal had organised the whole lot of it, the ferry, the sandwiches, the two children in matching rain jackets.

My mother was born on that island. She left it in 1961 and she is buried on the mainland and I had not set foot on it in eleven years.

Eleven years of telling my own family it was the drive.

I was fifty five that week.

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What I did that night

We got back at about half six and everyone came in for tea and it was a lovely day, and I mean that.

I did the tea and the sandwiches and I put on the immersion.

And then about half nine, when they were gone, I sat on the step outside the dairy in the dark.

I was not upset about the boat.

I was doing the sum. Eleven years. My mother’s island is fifty minutes and a ferry ticket from my own kitchen and I have not been on it in eleven years, and this year I only went because my son booked it and put my grandchildren in the car.

You can talk yourself out of a place for eleven years, one summer at a time, and never once say the real reason out loud, not even to yourself in an empty yard.

That is what I was sitting there about.

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The way a stomach starts running your life

I am not going to tell you I stopped living. I did not.

But if I write the list down it frightens me.

I have a long grey cardigan and there is a second one the same in the hot press. I have worn one of them in July.

We do farm tours here. Schools, visitors, the odd food writer. Twenty three years I brought people into the ripening room myself and told them about my mother and the milk and why the rind is the way it is.

Fergal does them now. Three years. He is good at it and I told him it was so he would learn the business.

At my niece’s wedding I did the church and not the hotel.

At a food fair in Skibbereen last summer I stayed behind the table for nine hours and got somebody else to carry the boxes.

I have never once refused anybody anything.

I have just arranged the world so that nobody would have to notice.

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Everything I tried between the ferry and February

I will add up the money at the end because it matters later.

The first thing was the most ridiculous.

I cut out dairy.

Me. A woman who has made cheese since 2003. Four months of it, in my own dairy, tasting nothing, going by nose and by the look of a curd.

I dropped a bit of weight and I bloated exactly the same, and that confused me more than anything else that happened all year.

Then a nutritionist in Cork. Eighty euro a session and I went four times. I got a food diary and an elimination plan and a list. I filled in that diary for eleven weeks. There is not one thing in this world I have ever been more thorough about and it changed nothing at all.

Then kefir and sauerkraut, made myself, in jars, on the windowsill in the back kitchen. Six months of it and I was worse, not better, and I could not understand that for the life of me because everything I read said the opposite.

Then a gut reset powder I saw in an ad. Sixty five euro a tub and I went through three of them. It tasted of chalk and I could still taste it at eleven in the morning, which for a woman who noses cheese for a living is not a small complaint.

And last, aloe vera juice from a health shop. Eighteen euro a bottle and I got through nine bottles. It did settle things. For about two hours.

The guts of seven hundred euro. And that is only what I can put my hand on.

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By February I had got to somewhere that is not dramatic at all, which is exactly what makes it worse.

You stop expecting.

Fergal asked me one evening did I want to take the Wednesday tour, a small group, six people. And I said “ah you are grand, sure at my age it is what it is.”

I heard myself saying it.

I heard that it was not an explanation.

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Now here is the strange part

Carmel has had a cheese and deli counter in the English Market in Cork for twenty six years.

She is sixty three. She has taken my cheese since 2012, which is fourteen years, and in fourteen years she has never once taken a wheel she was not happy with and never once paid me late.

She drives up in a van she loads herself. She brings her own flask because the price of coffee in town is a scandal, and she will haggle with you over the price of a box.

She came down in March for a collection and I was watching her lift a crate and something did not add up.

Carmel was always a big woman. Not heavy. Big, and for fourteen years she wore a fleece over everything, indoors and out.

That March she had a plain jumper on and it was tucked in.

I said nothing. You do not ask a woman that.

She put the crate down, straightened up and said:

“What are you at, looking at me?”

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The woman who shut the counter on a Saturday

I did not ask her that day. I am not that sort.

It was five weeks later and it was over something else entirely.

She rang me on a Friday to say she would be down the following morning.

I said that was grand and asked her who was on the counter.

“Nobody. It is shut.”

The English Market on a Saturday morning is the busiest hour of that woman’s week. Fourteen years I have been dealing with her and I have never known that counter to be closed on a Saturday for any reason at all.

I asked her was she all right.

“I am. I have a delivery coming here and I want to be sure of it.”

I stood in the yard with the phone in my hand and I did the sum on that too.

That is a woman who will argue with you over two euro on a crate. In front of you. Twice.

I do not know what she takes on a Saturday morning at that counter but it is a great deal more than the price of anything I have ever bought.

And she shut it, for a parcel.

I did not know what was in the box. I only knew what it had cost her to be at home for it.

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Six capsules

She came the following Saturday for the collection.

We loaded the van between us the way we always do, and the passenger door was open the whole time because she leaves it open when she is going in and out.

The bottle was in the door pocket.

Dark glass, white label, nothing to it.

I am not going to pretend I am better than I am. I knew exactly what I was doing.

Fourteen years that woman has handed me an envelope and walked away from it. Fourteen years I have taken her word on a price over the phone with nothing written down.

I twisted the cap and tipped six of them into my hand and put them in the pocket of my coat, and then I went back in for the last crate and asked her about her grandson.

I know what I did.

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What is this

I read the label after the van went out the gate.

NoBloat. Underneath in smaller print, the company. Bioprime Science.

I had never heard of it.

I had never heard of them either, and I have been at food fairs and markets and trade days for twenty three years and I would generally know who sells what in this country.

Two a day with your main meal, it said. Six lasted me three days.

And on the fourth day I felt like a fool.

Here is what I was thinking at that stage. That woman has spent money on something that does not work and she shut her own counter over it, because people believe in whatever they have paid for. And I went into her van like a child.

That was my setting by then. After seven hundred euro, every new thing is “it will not work, and then I will feel stupid for having hoped.”

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The conversation in the ripening room

She was back a fortnight later.

We did the wheels and then she stood there with her arms folded and did not go out to the van.

“Why did you take my capsules?”

I put the cloth down.

Do you know what it is to be fifty five and caught like that. There is no dressing it up and there is nowhere to put your hands.

I opened my mouth and she put one up.

“I am not asking to make you go red, Nuala. I am asking because if you want them I will get you a bottle, instead of you rooting in my van like a child.”

Then she leaned back against the shelf and told me the following.

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Everything we eat is broken down by enzymes.

Not by sitting there. Not by willpower. Not by tea.

Every kind of food wants its own one. Protein wants one thing, fat wants a bit of preparation before anything can get at it, complex carbohydrates want something else again.

At twenty five that system runs the way a good dairy runs. It comes in, it gets broken down, it goes out, nothing sits.

After forty the production of it starts to fall away. Quietly, gradually, and without giving you any notice at all. `[SUBSTANTIATION NEEDED: sourced figure for the decline in digestive enzyme secretion with age]`

And from there the simple thing happens.

Food does not get broken down the whole way. Whatever is left keeps going down and it reaches the large intestine, and waiting there are bacteria, and to a bacterium undigested food is dinner. They get stuck into it. And they make gas.

So the gas is not the cause.

The gas is the consequence.

The cause is that the thing which does the breaking down is not there in the quantity it used to be.

Then she asked me which foods take the most enzyme work.

Beans. Cabbage. Wholegrain. Raw salad. Anything fermented sits in that company too, because fermenting it does not do the job your own body was meant to do.

I had six months of sauerkraut on a windowsill.

I had eleven weeks of a food diary.

I had four months without the one food I have made with my own hands since 2003.

“You did not fail at it. You were solving a different problem.”

And I started laughing, standing there in my own ripening room, and Carmel looked at me the way you look at somebody who is not right.

Because here is what I have said out loud in that room to every school group, every visitor, every food writer, for twenty three years.

Milk will not set on its own.

You can mind it all day and all night and stand over it and pray over it and it will still be milk.

It takes rennet. A few drops, twenty minutes, and it is a different thing entirely.

There is not one wheel on those shelves that got there any other way.

Twenty three years putting the thing that breaks it down into other people’s milk.

And it never once crossed my mind to ask whether I had any of my own left.

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What is actually in it

Before I ordered it I went through it, the way I go through anything.

And I will be straight with you. I was going through it hoping to find filler, so that I would be entitled to dismiss the whole thing and go back to being resigned, which at least does not hurt.

That is not what I found.

Bromelain, 150mg.

An enzyme, out of pineapple.

Not a herb. Not something to settle you. An enzyme, doing the same class of work that rennet does, on protein, which is the part of any meal that takes the most doing and the part most likely to be left half finished.

I read that line about four times.

Dandelion root, 400mg.

This one works on the fat side and I learned something here I did not know. Fat is not taken up straight off by an enzyme. It has to be broken into small enough pieces first for the enzyme to have anything to catch hold of. If that step is slow then everything after it is slow.

Slippery elm bark, 150mg.

That is the one that surprised me, because it breaks down nothing at all. It coats. It lays a soft layer over the lining and it makes the whole business bearable while the others do the work.

Ginger 250mg and peppermint 200mg are on the movement side, so that nothing is left sitting on the way.

And lemon balm, 300mg, is for the connection between the stomach and the nerves, which every woman over forty knows about even if nobody has ever given her a name for it.

The six are not thrown in together. They do three separate jobs.

They break down. The bromelain and the dandelion go at the cause itself.

They move. The ginger and the peppermint see that nothing sits, because sitting is what gives the bacteria their time.

They settle. The slippery elm and the lemon balm make it bearable while it happens.

Break down. Move. Settle.

And that is where the whole of the last year finally explained itself to me.

Cutting out dairy took one food off my plate and put more vegetables on it. It never touched the question of why anything was going through me half finished.

The nutritionist gave me a plan for what went in. There was not a line in it about what happened after.

The kefir and the sauerkraut were adding bacteria. My trouble sat before the bacteria, not at them. I was feeding them undigested food and then making them reinforcements in jars on my own windowsill.

The powder was fibre. Fibre moves things along. Moving is one of the three jobs.

And the aloe settled things, for two hours, which is the third job and the only one of the three that does not fix anything on its own.

I had bought the settling five separate times and never once bought the breaking down.

The rest of what I looked at is duller but it mattered to me. It is made in the EU to EU standards. Two capsules with your main meal, so it is not another ritual at six in the morning on an empty stomach, and at six in the morning I am in the dairy. And the doses are printed on the label instead of hidden behind the words “proprietary blend”, which after a year of tubs that would not tell you anything meant more to me than it should have.

I ordered it that night at the kitchen table with the good glasses on.

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What actually happened, week by week

Nothing happened for the first few days and I want that said plainly.

One thing did happen and it is not a result.

There is no taste off it and there is no smell off it.

I know how small that sounds. I nose cheese every morning of my life. That chalk powder was still with me at eleven o’clock and it is the reason I gave up on it, not because it did not work.

The second week something turned up that I was not looking for at all.

I slept flat.

I had been going up on two pillows for I could not tell you how long. It came in so gradually that I had stopped counting it as anything. One morning that second week I woke up flat on the bed and lay there trying to work out when it had last happened.

The fourth week was the first real difference and it was not dramatic.

I measured it on the belt of the dairy apron, because I have no other instrument. Twenty three years buckling that thing and I know the hole.

It was not gone. But it was noticeably and undeniably less, and at seven in the morning and at eight at night it was the same hole, which had not been true in years.

I will say one thing here so there is no confusion about it.

My weight has not changed. It is what it was. My stomach is just my own stomach.

The second month was not a symptom at all. It was something I had stopped doing.

I stopped putting the cardigan on to answer my own door.

I could not tell you when I started doing that. I can tell you the day I noticed I had not.

The third month was when somebody else said it out loud.

Sorcha was here on a Sunday and she looked over at me and asked me had I lost weight.

I had not.

And she is the woman who talked to me about nothing for forty minutes on a boat, so I gave her a straight answer, and that was the first time either of us had gone near it.

One evening in June I was locking up and I caught myself in the window of the ripening room, dark outside and the bulb on inside, which is a thing I have walked past every night for twenty three years.

I did not stop to look at myself. At fifty five I am not going to start.

But I did not look away either, and that is what I had been doing.

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A few honest things

I am going to tell you what nobody told me, because I spent seven hundred euro on promises.

This is not a miracle. It works on the body’s time and not on the internet’s time.

The quickest part, the heaviness straight after eating, came inside a week. The real part, being the same at night as I am in the morning, took about four weeks. The whole of it, which is that I no longer give the subject any thought at all, came around the third month.

That is normal. A body does not reorganise itself in a fortnight, and anybody promising you faster is selling you something.

So what I would do is get enough for two or three months at once. One bottle will show you it works. Two or three will show you what actually changes.

Bioprime give thirty days, so that risk is neither mine nor yours.

The real risk is the other one. It is buying a single bottle, feeling the first few things, and stopping just short of the part you bought it for.

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It is not just me

I have turned into one of those women who brings it up when nobody asked. I know. I am aware of myself.

But since I started talking about it, things have come back to me. Here are three that stayed.

“I have three grandchildren and they are in the pool in Sligo every Saturday and for four years I sat up in the gallery with my coat on. Four years. This July I went down and got in with them. I am not going to tell you I lost weight because I did not, I am the same as I ever was. I just got in.”

Assumpta, 61, Co. Sligo

“I do the buying for a health food shop, so everything for bloating crosses my desk and most of it is peppermint and fennel in a nicer box. That is not me being cynical, that is the buying list. This one tells you what is in it and how much of it, in milligrams, and the six things in it do six different jobs rather than the same job under six names. I started taking it myself in March, which I have not done with anything else I stock.”

Bríd, 46, Co. Galway

“I was certain it was rubbish. I had money spent on all the ones that sit at eye level on the shelf. A European company I had never heard of was the last thing I was going to believe in. Two months in, my husband asked me had I done something different with my hair. MY HAIR. There is nothing wrong with the man, he just does not look at anything, and apparently something changed enough that he looked.”

Clodagh, 43, Co. Meath

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Where you get it and who makes it

NoBloat is not in the chemists. It is not in Boots, it is not in the big chains, it is not on Amazon and it is not on the discount sites.

It is sold off the Bioprime Science site and nowhere else.

When I ordered it I knew nothing about them except the name. Once it worked I got curious and looked them up.

A small European outfit. They make it to EU standards and they have `[CUSTOMER COUNT]` customers, with no television advertising and not one shop anywhere.

Which means the whole of it came from women telling other women. Which, when I think about it, is exactly how I heard, off a woman leaning against a shelf in my own ripening room.

They ship from inside the EU as well, so there is no customs charge the way there is with half of what you order in from across the water. I found that out the hard way with something else.

And then the price caught me on the hop.

After three hundred and twenty euro on a nutritionist and a food diary. After a hundred and ninety five on a powder that tasted of chalk. After a hundred and sixty two on aloe vera, eighteen euro at a time, nine times. After four months without the one thing I make for a living.

A bottle is €39

Thirty nine euro. For a month.

I read it twice because I was sure I was looking at a sample size.

Two bottles are €59 and three are €75, which means the third one adds sixteen euro. And since I have just told you honestly that the real change comes around the third month, that last line is the sum that matters.

Delivery is `[FREE SHIPPING THRESHOLD]` and it usually comes inside `[DELIVERY WINDOW]` working days.

One thing I will say, because it caught me out the second time. It goes out of stock.

Not in the fake way with “only 3 left” and a number flashing at the side of the screen. Actually out of stock, because they make it in small batches and they do not sit on a warehouse full of it.

The first time mine came in three days. The second time I waited nine, and I was poor enough company in this house for those nine days.

So if you are looking at it in stock now, I would not leave it.

30 day guarantee · ships from within the EU

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What it does, in short

It breaks down. Bromelain 150mg and dandelion 400mg. The enzyme goes at the protein and the dandelion works the fat side. This is the part that deals with the cause rather than the consequence.

It moves. Ginger 250mg and peppermint 200mg. So nothing is left sitting on the way, because sitting is what gives bacteria their time.

It settles. Slippery elm 150mg and lemon balm 300mg. A soft layer over the lining and a quieter line between the stomach and the nerves while the rest of it works.

It asks nothing of you. Two capsules with your main meal. No ritual at six in the morning, and at six in the morning I am in the dairy. That sounds like nothing, but it is the only reason I take it every day, and every word above only counts if you take it every day.

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What actually changed

I would love to tell you my stomach settled and leave it at that.

But that is not it.

What changed is the cardigan on the hook instead of on me.

What changed is that I do not work out where I am going to sit before I walk into a room.

And one more thing changed, and it is the one I find hardest to say out loud.

Since May I do the tours again.

Twenty three years I brought people into that room and told them about my mother and the milk, and for three of them I handed it to my son and told him it was so he would learn the business, and he took it and never said a word, because he is his father’s child.

I think about what would have happened if Carmel had left that van door shut. Or if she had opened her counter that Saturday like a sensible woman.

And I will be straight with you, I nearly did not order it.

I sat at that table with the good glasses on and I nearly put the phone down. I had hoped so many times and it had come to nothing so many times that hope was starting to look like a thing I could not afford any more.

I think there is a great number of women sitting in exactly that spot. You stop trying, because trying and failing again is worse than not trying at all.

I did not put the phone down.

Oh, and one more thing.

We went back out in July. Same boat, same pier, and I would say the same young lad, though I would not swear to it.

The buckle closed the first time and he was gone on down the deck before I had thought about it.

I spent the crossing at the rail looking at the island.

I brought Cian and Éabha up to the house my mother was born in and I told them which window was hers.

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If you recognised yourself anywhere in this, I think you ought to try it.

If you are flat in the morning and a balloon by the evening.

If you have given up food you love and it has made no difference.

If you have a cardigan you wear in July.

If you have caught yourself saying “sure, that is just my stomach.”

That is not just your stomach. Something stopped being made and nobody told you.

Try it properly, not one bottle and a shrug. Two or three, and enough time for your body to answer you.

The link below goes to the Bioprime Science site. If it is in stock, do not be overthinking it. If it is not, leave your email for the notification, because it goes quickly when it comes back.

I nearly did not bother.

Bioprime Science · 30 day guarantee · Ships from within the EU

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Food supplement. Not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle. Do not exceed the recommended daily dose. Keep out of the sight and reach of young children. Individual experiences vary.