Food for the Soul (and Your Hole)

Don’t Be Like Billy

“So, what are you getting?” It’s my favorite question, and today I’m asking my friend indecisively while we peruse the brunch menu at one of our favorite queer spots.

“Oh, I’m not eating right now. I’m bottoming later.” The grim expression painted on their calorie-deficient face told me all I needed to know. Let’s call my friend “Billy.” Now repeat after me: Don’t be like Billy.

No one ever sounds excited about skipping meals or starving in order to bottom and with good reason. Sacrificing feasting for fucking isn’t necessary. The Bottom’s Digest is my digital platform where I prove just that by destigmatizing the obstacles that come with bottoming and help people who are into butt stuff learn how to eat for their bodies and overall health.

Just as Mira Bellwether’s iconic zine ‘Fucking Trans Women’ lifted up individual bodies and preferences, The Bottom’s Digest is meant to be a bottom enthusiast’s almanac with tips, tricks, and recipes as well as the low-down on how to tailor and adapt what works best for your body and lifestyle. Life is short, and I (w)holeheartedly believe that food and sex should be orgasmic. After a little practice and exploration, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to strike a balance.

So, grab a snack, and let’s get to the bottom of bottom-friendly food: What it is, why it’s important, and whose butts can benefit.

WTF is Bottom-Friendly Food?

Before I dive ass-deep, I need to stress that this is not a diet. This is about getting in tune with your body and avoiding the foods that make you feel crappy (literally) before sex. Sure, eating a cheeseburger before sex can make you think that eating before bottoming is a no-go, but what if it was the caramelized onions this whole time and not the rest of the burger?

Bottom-friendly eating is simply consuming the foods that work for your body in combination with high-fiber components, and avoiding trigger foods, especially before bottoming. Trigger foods are the culprits that make you feel gassy and bloated soon after eating them (~30-60 minutes after consumption). Before you start tossing away every can of beans in your pantry, some of these trigger foods can be very healthy for your overall health, so do not give them up forever. Just avoid them before sex when possible. Again, this is not a diet.

People can hyper-fixate on messes and accidents in the bedroom. You might even read this and think…I do that. News flash: gas and bloating, not poop, are the most immediate after-effects of eating some of your favorite foods. The food you’re consuming now won’t make love to your porcelain throne until at least 24 hours later. If you do feel a bowel movement coming on after eating, that’s a previous meal your body’s emptying out to make room—and I can only hope you got enough fiber in it. Gas and bloating, on the other hand, can be a real cockblock in the heat of the moment by causing discomfort.

There are two lanes when it comes to bottom-friendly foods: how they’ll make you feel within the next hour and how they’ll move through your body over the next day or two. Some of us can pound fried chicken and feel fine afterward, but it may not be the best poop of your life later on. That bowel movement doesn’t matter as much when you’re eating that chicken on a date and looking to kiss your ankles in the next couple of hours. If you were looking to head to pound town tomorrow, you would want to accompany that finger-lickin chicken with high-fiber foods and maybe even a supplement to make sure it journeys through your body nice and easy when the time comes. So yes, be in tune with your body’s reactions to certain foods, but also be aware that digestion has its own course. It’s up to you to decide the timeline of your slutty endeavors.

Why Is This Even Important? 

This part is a little more serious, so let’s get it out of the way ASAP. Proper sex ed is lacking in our society (and forget queer sex ed). Toxic masculinity and patriarchy are still active forces in the gay community and dictate a lot of the sex ed traditionally spread by word of mouth.

When we focus on shame and anxiety centered around accidents that haven’t even happened or are out of our control, we forfeit pleasure and autonomy in the bedroom. Eating foods that are bottom-friendly to your unique body is essential because you want to be as comfortable as possible during sex. Not because you’re fearful of minor accidents or how someone else will react to them. After all, both eating and sex are meant to please your senses.

Forget messes. Shit happens. When you focus on how food makes you feel instead, you’re taking ownership of your comfort and pleasure. Life is too short to be sacrificing your favorite foods. What if this is a first-time hookup, and the sex isn’t even good? Hell, what if they cancel? Maybe you wouldn’t be so upset and flustered if you’d eaten that pasta beforehand.

Here are a few tips to hone in on your trigger foods:

1. Keep a food journal using your notes app on your phone. To keep things easy, only track the meals that make you feel off so that you can start to dissect the individual ingredients that could be your trigger. The good ol’ process of elimination will reveal answers over time. 
2. If you have insurance or the financial means, find a nutritionist to help you run tests and determine if your body is sensitive to certain foods. 
3. Ignore it and enjoy yourself! Sometimes you already know what your trigger foods are, but baby, when in Nashville, do as they do and have the hot chicken. That’s life, and this is not a diet. Practice your foreplay skills! Sex is more than penetration.

I Don’t Bottom! What About Me?

When I say “bottom-friendly” at The Bottom’s Digest, I have two different meanings for the phrase 1) awareness of the foods that make you feel marvelous vs. not so marvelous, and 2) awareness of the foods that benefit your gut health and in turn, your butt health. My recipes at The Bottom’s Digest are meant to serve as a foody framework, ready for you to customize ingredients to your liking and your body’s mutual agreement.

I pride myself in making dishes that are as close to the original as possible but way healthier than you would ever imagine. I’ve created dairy-free cheese sauces that have tricked the pickiest of mac n’ cheese connoisseurs, creme brulees without the cream, and classic dishes like lasagna and enchiladas with a sneaky nutritional boost, all in the name of gut health.

A happy gut is the biggest secret to stellar bottoming, but it’s also a solution that takes time and not an overnight fix like some sham supplements will promise. Tim Spector, epidemiologist and author of Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well, recommends a diverse range of 30 plants a week for the happiest gut microbiome. Thirty plants may sound like a lot, but remember, herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruits are all plants. It all adds up quickly, and your gut (and your butt) will thank you for your efforts.

Great bottoming is a plus side to a healthy gut microbiome, but avoiding trigger foods and increasing plant diversity benefits all sorts of people who may not be looking to be bent over the bed. People who can experience menstrual periods, or people with Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, or stomach sensitivities like lactose intolerance, all benefit from this information. In fact, over the last two years at The Bottom’s Digest, some of my most active followers are the IBS gaggles. But let’s not forget about the dom mommies that want their boyfriends and husbands to take it like a champ, too. As Tarō Gomi’s book title states, everybody poops.

Bottoming Out

I recently watched the first season of The Other Two, and in one episode, Cary (the gay brother played by Drew Tarver) is on a date. Both men talk about how neither has eaten all day in case they ended up having sex afterward. The whole scene was a little too nonchalant to reference eating disorder-like behavior. The show’s creators are under fire for creating a toxic work environment, so it’s not surprising to see the show normalize toxic behavior for a community starved of proper sex ed. For too long, we’ve let the toxic misinformation and behaviors of a few dictate what the rest of us are doing with our bodies. Those days are numbered, y’all.

As Tim Spector (a scientist, not a toxic character on a TV show) says: “We all have unique microbiomes, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition that suits everybody’s gut bugs. Importantly, no single food—or single microbe—will make or break your gut microbiome.” It’s solely up to you to discover what works best for your body. Had Billy done this at the beginning of our tale, they would’ve been able to have their cake and have it eaten, too (cake being their ass).

Cheers to your journey, and bottoms up!