Are you ready to beat heartburn? Recurring heartburn can disrupt your eating habits AND your sleeping habits. Believe it or not, food isn’t generally the cause of recurring heartburn.
Stanford University reviewed one hundred different studies on heartburn and gastroesophageal reflux disease to figure out the most effective remedies. Stopping the late-night snacks or changing what you eat in the evening didn’t make the list. Here’s what did.
- Lose weight. Dropping twenty pounds or more can reduce your heartburn or GERD symptoms by as much as forty percent! Doctors think that the weight loss does two things for you: it reduces pressure on your stomach and decreases the output of stomach acids that cause heartburn.
- Elevate your head. Using a wedge-shaped pillow in bed will put gravity to work, keeping your stomach acids where they belong.
- Sleep on your left side. In studies, people who slept on their left side had half the reflux problems that people who slept on their right. Sleeping on your right seems to relax muscles at the top of the stomach — that lets the acids creep up into the esophagus.
Of course if there is a particular food that gives you trouble, then reducing (or eliminating) it in your diet will help cut down on the heartburn. However, these three lifestyle changes will do more for you than any diet restrictions will if you have chronic heartburn.
If the big three changes don’t work, you may want to talk to your doctor about medication to ease your heartburn symptoms. And it doesn’t hurt to talk to your doctor before embarking on any weight loss programs — some of the medications you take may base their doses on weight, or you may have other health issues to consider in your weight loss efforts.