YOU CUT THE FOODS. YOU TOOK THE PROBIOTIC. HERE’S WHAT’S STILL MISSING FROM THE LIST.

Garlic and onion usually go first. Then wheat, then dairy, then a low-FODMAP app that decides which fruit is allowed and how much of it. After that comes the shelf: a probiotic, a fibre powder, digestive enzymes with meals and peppermint capsules for the hard days. Most people with afternoon bloating have worked through every one of them, often for months.

Each item on that list is a reasonable thing to try. Cutting certain foods genuinely helps some people, and so do probiotics, fibre and enzymes. Nobody who suggested them was being careless, and following the advice wasn’t a mistake.

So if you’ve done all of it and still feel full and tight by mid-afternoon, the effort wasn’t wasted and you didn’t do it wrong. It points to something the list left out. The rest of this page is about that missing piece, and none of it asks you for more discipline.

Between meals, your gut runs a cleaning wave that sweeps everything along and moves it through. Mayo Clinic researchers described it in 1969, and the medical literature gives it a nickname that sums up the job: the gut’s “interdigestive housekeeper.” Most of the advice you were given never mentions it.

That housekeeper works to one rule. It only runs while you aren’t eating, and it stops every time you eat. During the day it rarely gets a long stretch without being interrupted, so most of its uninterrupted work happens overnight, in the hours between dinner and breakfast.

Grazing through the day and eating late both keep cutting that work short. When the wave doesn’t get to finish, food sits longer and ferments, and that is the hard, full feeling that builds by mid-afternoon. An elimination diet changes what is in there. How long it stays was never on the list.

The first change costs nothing. Give your gut a longer stretch without food: finish eating a little earlier in the evening and skip the late snack, so the cleaning wave gets more of the night to do its work. It’s the one item the old list never included.

The second is a nightly routine that doesn’t rely on laxatives. Korē Daily Gut is one sachet stirred into water once a day before bed. Each one holds a 4-fiber prebiotic blend, DigeZyme® digestive enzymes and fennel, with no senna, cascara, aloe or sorbitol. If fibre has bloated you before, start with half a sachet for the first few days.

Nothing else on your list has to go. The foods you’ve found you can eat, the probiotic you like and the peppermint for hard days can all stay where they are. One habit added, one sachet a night, and nothing taken away.