Fitness Model Reveals the Diet Change That Cured Her 15-Year Bloat

08/31/2017 03:35 pm EDT

When personal trainer and fitness model Chloe Madeley shared a photo of her bloated belly last year, her followers empathised and praised her for keeping it real. What many didn't know, however, is that Madeley had been struggling with severe and painful bloat issues for 15 years. But now, the 30-year-old says she has found the solution to her bloating problems.

"I remember being a prepubescent teenager and wanting to be like all my friends and wear belly tops," Madeley told Healthista. "The Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera were our icons. But I would really struggle with bloating every day, even though I was really skinny growing up."

Madeley says that as she grew older and more involved in the fitness scene, her bloating issues worsened, and oftentimes made her look "pregnant." She said that she would wake up with a flat stomach, and the bloat would get worse and worse as the day went on.

"I always had a flat tummy in the morning so that's when I would take my selfies, but by the end of the day, I often looked pregnant."

"Ironically, as I got older and more into health and fitness in my twenties it got worse," she said. "I was manipulating my fibre and water intake and implementing things like cheat meals, then I started to get this terrible pain and was always bloated by the end of every day; kind of like a feeling of having really bad trapped gas, every day; a sharp, stabbing pain below my ribs. It was awful."

Because Madeley spent a lot of time in the gym, she says she had to majorly increase her protein intake, which didn't help with her bloating issues. "The body finds it hard to metabolise protein, especially when it is synthetic," she said. "I was consuming a lot of protein powders at the time and really seeing the side effects — more bloating, more gas, and more pain."

At the urging of her rugby player boyfriend, James Haskell, Madeley began taking probiotics — and much to her surprise, she began noticing a decrease in her bloat symptoms as well.

The particular probiotics supplement Madeley tried, Afflorex (known in the U.S. as Align) was proven in clinical trials to help decrease abdominal pain, constipation, bloating and gas. In general, probiotics help to establish a balance of the good bacteria in your gut, which when upset can lead to problems as wide-ranging as eczema, depression and obesity and they are well-proven as a leading cause of bloating and irritable bowel syndrome.

After three weeks of taking the probiotic supplement, Madeley said she "noticed that when I went to bed at night, my tummy was just as flat as it was in the morning — which was a first for me. I have a flat tummy throughout the day now."

And after eight months of taking Afflorex and not changing anything else in her diet, Madeley says her bloat issues have completely disappeared.

"I still eat a lot of fibre and protein, I still chug water but I never have any reactions or flare-ups," she says. "It's made me much more confident about what I wear now – finally after all the training and dieting and 15 years of suffering bloating, I can wear what I want without worrying about whether my stomach looks bloated or not."

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