Fixing Your Heartburn Without Wrecking Your Life

Listen, I get it. You already know that if you lose weight and polishing off a bottle of wine each weekend you probably will stop getting heartburn. And yes, I hear you, you might not want to make that kind of sacrifice. Well, first off, I have to get it out of the way that your health is hardly sacrificing, and if your unhealthy lifestyle choices are causing you pain and suffering, it doesn't really seem rational to continue on that track.

However, I can introduce to you the 90/10 rule. If you are familiar with business at all, no doubt you have heard about the 80/20 rule, which states something like 80% of your profits come from 20% of where your time is focused. Not really relevant to our 90/10 rule, except that they are both rules with fractions!

The 90/10 rule is one which states if you are following a certain diet plan, generally you can get away with doing what you aren't supposed to 10% of the time. Note that this does not apply to serious health conditions (diabetes, brain cancer, etc) but more from a body composition and a general health stand point.

The bottom line is simple: if you eat 3-4 meals a day, you have 21-28 meals per week. As a result, 10% of the time (i.e. 2 meals out of the week), you can probably eat what you want and get away with it. Chronic heartburn is more likely to be the result of consistently eating bad things until the stomach can no longer function. If you diet all week, going out to dinner on Friday night and having a few glasses of wine is not likely to set you off. However, you can't binge all night Friday and into Saturday and Sunday and expect to have any health benefits.

You also have to give your stomach to recover from your previous bad lifestyle. After you drop a few pounds and follow a good acid reflux diet for awhile, you will see that eating out once in awhile is likely to be something you can handle.

For example, drinking a few glasses of alcohol regularly can lead to gastritis, which is known to cause reflux (the bad kind of reflux that hits you all day). It will take a few weeks (or maybe even a few months) of not drinking in order for your stomach to heal up. Your body is resilient, but its healing processes are not instant - just something to remember.

The point of this quick article is just to know that you aren't married to your heartburn - just be good most of the time and you will likely find that a night or two out on the town each week won't ruin your holistic plan to reducing your reflux.



Yeah, sure, this 90/10 rule isn't exactly about acid reflux in the video above, but the principle applies. Serve your body 90% of the time, and 10% of the time you can get away with what you want!