Bloating Is Not a Personality Trait

At some point in the last decade we collectively decided that feeling like a hot-air balloon after a protein shake was simply the price of having goals, and I went along with it for an embarrassingly long time, the way you go along with a bad haircut because admitting it would mean admitting you paid for it.

I started training to get my head straight, which worked better than I expected, and almost immediately I needed far more protein than I could reasonably get from eating, unless I wanted to spend my evenings negotiating with a third chicken breast. So I did what everyone does, which is read a few reviews online, trust strangers with suspiciously strong opinions about mixability, and order a tub of whey on Amazon.

The whey did what it said on the label for my muscles, and something nobody had mentioned to my face. The breakouts arrived quickly and decided to stay, and they were not the occasional spot you cover with concealer and forget about, but the deep, painful kind that hurts when you smile, hurts when you sleep on the wrong side, and turns every mirror into a small daily ambush. I have written before, in Being Hot Is Infrastructure, Not Identity, about having skin that reports on my stress levels before I have said a word, but this was something else, and it got into my confidence in a way I was not prepared for. I started planning meetings around lighting, angling myself away from people in conversations and avoiding cameras, which is an inconvenient habit for someone who was, at the time, trying to build a brand on Instagram.

It took me an unreasonable number of mornings to connect the acne to the thing I was drinking on every one of them, but eventually even I noticed the timing, and the penny dropped: it was the dairy. So I did the sensible thing and switched to plant protein, bought a tub with a nice label and a sentence about being clean, and my skin cleared up, at least until I decided to launch two businesses while working a full-time job, which is a different problem and not one a protein shake can fix.

What I had actually done, though, was swap one problem for another: the plant protein left me heavy and bloated by mid-afternoon, so I bought a different tub with a nicer label and a longer sentence about being clean, and then another, and every single one did the same thing. I would get about halfway through, decide that my body was the problem, and abandon the rest of the tub to what I have previously described as the supplement graveyard under my sink, which by that point had the population density of a small European capital.

What I did not do was ask whether feeling like that was normal. Everybody around me seemed to treat it as a kind of tax on being disciplined, something to joke about in the gym and quietly suffer through in meetings, and I was so busy trying to be someone who hits her protein goals that it did not occur to me that the protein might be the thing that was broken. As it turned out, the problem was never my personality, which has plenty of other problems, but the powder.

Can Protein Powder Cause Acne?

This is the question I typed into my phone at 3am more times than I would like to admit, back in the whey days, and the honest answer is more boring than the internet would like it to be.

The strongest evidence links acne to whey and other dairy-based proteins, which seem to set off breakouts in some people, and there are plenty of stories, mine included, from people whose skin was at war with their protein shake. It doesn't happen to everyone, which is exactly why it takes so long to spot, because the person next to you at the gym is drinking the same thing and looks like an advert for it. The evidence for plant protein causing acne is much thinner, and anyone who tells you with total confidence that a particular powder will clear your skin is selling something, possibly a course.

If your breakouts started around the same time as your protein habit, the dairy is the first thing worth looking at, ideally with someone who actually knows skin. It was for me. The catch, as I was about to find out, is that leaving dairy behind does not automatically mean your gut is going to enjoy whatever you replace it with.

Why Does Plant Protein Make You Bloated?

The short answer, which took me a year of lab reports and several conversations with manufacturers who clearly wished I would stop emailing to understand, is that most protein powder is perfectly good nutrition delivered in the wrong format, and then padded with things that make the format problem worse.

Protein is made of long, folded chains of amino acids, and your gut has to break those chains down into much smaller pieces before your body can use them. Plant proteins like pea and rice are big, tangled molecules, and when you drink 25 grams of them in one go, on an empty stomach, in the seven minutes between a workout and a meeting, you are asking your digestive system to do a lot of heavy lifting very quickly. Whatever doesn’t get broken down and absorbed higher up keeps travelling, and the bacteria further along your gut are delighted to ferment it for you, which is a polite way of describing where the gas comes from.

Then there is everything else in the tub. A lot of protein powders use gums, usually xanthan, guar or carrageenan, to make a thin, gritty drink feel thick and creamy, and those gums are themselves things that some guts ferment with great enthusiasm. Add sugar alcohols for sweetness, a bit of soy for cost or texture, and a list of “natural flavours” that could mean anything, and you have a drink that is quite good at producing a protein number on a label and quite bad at leaving you alone afterwards.

None of this means plant protein is bad or that everyone who drinks it feels terrible, but if you are one of the people who does, it is probably not because you have a uniquely dramatic gut so much as because you have been drinking a format your gut finds difficult, wrapped in ingredients it finds annoying, and blaming yourself for the result.

What Is Hydrolysed Protein?

Hydrolysed protein, which sounds like something you would need a lab coat to pronounce, is simply protein that has already been partly broken down, usually with enzymes, before it reaches you. The long, tangled chains are cut into much shorter pieces called peptides, so a good part of the work your gut would normally do has already been done somewhere far better equipped for it than my stomach at 7am. It is the same pea and rice protein, just pre-snapped into smaller bits, and when I first read about it my reaction was the one I have to most good ideas, which is a brief moment of excitement followed by a much longer moment of irritation that nobody had told me sooner, given that I had spent two years blaming the brand, the flavour and my own lack of commitment when the real question was what shape the protein was in.

The other piece of the puzzle turned out to be kiwifruit, which I did not expect to be writing about in an essay about protein. Green kiwifruit contains an enzyme called actinidin that keeps breaking protein down in your stomach, and a standardised kiwifruit extract called Actazin® has been studied for digestion and regularity, which does not make it magic, because nothing in a tub is magic, but does make it an ingredient doing a job rather than sitting on the label looking expensive.

What to Look For on a Vegan Protein Label

I learned to read protein labels the way I used to read contracts, which is suspiciously and from the bottom up, and these are the things I look for now, whatever brand it is.

Whether the protein is hydrolysed. If it says “pea protein isolate” and nothing else, the chains are intact and your gut is doing all the work. If it says “hydrolysate” or “hydrolysed”, someone has done some of it for you.

Whether there are gums. Xanthan, guar and carrageenan are the usual suspects. They are not poison, and plenty of people are fine with them, but if you bloat easily they are the first thing worth cutting out.

Whether it is a complete protein. Pea and rice together cover all the essential amino acids, which is why so many vegan powders blend the two, and why the old line about plant protein being “incomplete” is mostly out of date.

How long the ingredient list is. A shorter list is not automatically better, but every extra ingredient is one more thing your gut gets an opinion on, and one more suspect when something goes wrong.

Whether anyone has checked the numbers. In What I Learned Spending Eight Months Building a Gut Health Product I wrote about amino spiking, where manufacturers add cheap amino acids to make a powder look like it contains more protein than it does, so I now look for brands that test every batch independently and will actually show you the results if you ask.

Starting a Supplement Brand With No Experience

Naturally, having worked out what I wanted, I discovered that nobody was selling it, at least not in a form I wanted to drink, and this is the point in the story where a reasonable person writes a slightly bitter review and moves on with her life.

I would like to be clear about my qualifications at this stage, which were none. I had never worked in supplements, never formulated anything more complicated than a smoothie, and had no contacts in the industry beyond the customer service inbox of every protein brand I had ever been disappointed by. My previous experience of food science was, broadly, ordering it. What I did have was a gut that had stopped cooperating, skin that had already made its feelings about dairy very clear, a stubbornness my family has been describing to me, unprompted, for most of my life, and a husband who for some reason did not try to talk me out of it.

So we did the only thing two people with no idea what they are doing can do, which is try something every day and see where it takes you. There was no grand plan and no formulation roadmap, just a kitchen, a notebook that is now mostly stains, and a daily routine of mixing something, drinking it, writing down how it felt a few hours later, and changing one thing for the next day. Most days nothing much happened, a few days something got noticeably worse, and every so often something got slightly better, which was just enough encouragement to keep going and nowhere near enough to be sure we were going anywhere.

Then came the manufacturers, which is where the learning curve stopped being a curve and became more of a wall. My husband and I split the list between us and started reaching out to anyone who made protein, which mostly meant writing very polite emails to companies who had no reason to answer two people with no brand, no order history and a lot of questions about molecular weight. Plenty never replied. Some replied with minimum order quantities that would have required us to sell the flat, and possibly the dog. A few were lovely and patient and explained things to us that they must have explained a thousand times before, and I am still grateful to them, even the ones we ended up not working with.

And then there were the others, who were very happy to hear from us as long as we paid for samples first. We paid a lot of money for samples, far more than I am comfortable writing down, and it turns out that when you are new, eager and obviously have no idea what anything is supposed to cost, you are exactly who the supplement industry’s less scrupulous corners are waiting for. Some samples never arrived. Some arrived and bore no resemblance to the spec sheet we had paid for. A few companies, on closer inspection, did not appear to make anything at all, except invoices. Most of it, if I am honest, was a scam, and the only thing we got for our money was the ability to recognise the next one a little faster.

The samples that were real, and from people who were real, made it to our kitchen, which promptly turned into a tasting panel of two. We would line them up on the counter, mix them the same way, drink them side by side, and argue about them with the seriousness of people judging a wine competition, except that the tasting notes were things like “chalk”, “wet cardboard” and, on one memorable occasion, “why does it smell like that.” When a manufacturer wanted to add fillers or gums to make a sample feel creamier, we said no, which I described at the time as setting a quality standard and which was also, in fairness, expensive stubbornness. One manufacturer took AED 12,000 and then disappeared with the commitment of a man who had somewhere better to be, which taught us more about contracts than either of us had ever wanted to know.

Not knowing the industry turned out to be both the biggest problem and, occasionally, the most useful thing about us. We asked questions that people inside it had stopped asking, like why a protein needs seventeen ingredients, or why nobody seemed to care how it felt to drink, and because nobody had told us how things were supposed to be done, we did not know which of our ideas were meant to be impossible. Some of them were. A surprising number were just inconvenient.

There were forty-seven versions in the end, from our kitchen to the lab, over more than a year, and forty-six of them were somewhere between disappointing and actively hostile. Number forty-seven was the one I actually wanted to drink, and it became GUTSY.

What We Ended Up Making

GUTSY is a hydrolysed vegan protein made from pea and rice, with 600mg of Actazin® kiwi extract in every serving, no gums, no dairy, no soy, under a gram of sugar and monk fruit instead of anything artificial. Each scoop has 23 grams of protein in around 133 to 138 calories, depending on the flavour. There are two of those: Vanilla Calm, which has reishi in it and tastes like melted vanilla ice cream that has grown up a bit, and Cacao Boost, which has maca and real cacao and tastes like a chocolate milkshake that happens to be useful. It is made in a GMP-certified facility, and every batch is independently tested before it ships.

I am obviously not neutral about any of this, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend this essay is a disinterested review. What I can tell you is what happened to me, which is that I finished a tub of protein for the first time in years, and then another one, and that the hot-air balloon did not come back.

The Point, Eventually

The thing I keep coming back to is how long I spent assuming that feeling bad was the cost of trying to be good, and how normal everyone around me made that feel. We joke about protein bloat the way we joke about being tired, as if both were proof that we are working hard rather than signs that something in the system is not working at all.

The bloating made me uncomfortable, but the acne made me smaller, and neither of them, it turns out, was something I simply had to put up with. If you have a drawer full of half-finished tubs, a skin routine that has started to feel like damage control, and a vague sense that you are the problem, you are probably not. It might be the format, it might be the gums, it might be something else entirely, and it is worth finding out, because hitting your protein goals should not require you to spend every afternoon quietly loosening your waistband under the desk.

Bloating is common, but it is not a personality trait, and you are allowed to stop treating it like one.

---

This is my experience, not medical advice. If you have IBS, persistent acne or any other gut or skin condition, talk to someone who knows your history before you change what you eat.

GUTSY is now live in Dubai. You can get it at alwaysgutsy.com.