I'd already decided, before we even landed, that I'd sit out the pool photos again.

It's a small thing I do without really thinking about it anymore. Pack the swimsuit that "works," plan meals around how I'll feel after, angle myself in photos so the heavy, full feeling from lunch doesn't show. I've done it on every vacation for years.

There's a version of this that plays out almost every day away. Lunch is fine going down, and by early afternoon I'm sitting with a towel or a cover-up pulled across my lap, not because I'm cold, because I don't want the outline of my stomach to be the thing people notice. Everyone else gets up to swim, or walk down to the water, and I stay in the chair a while longer than I'd like to admit, waiting for the feeling to pass.

I'm 61. I figured that feeling, the fullness that shows up after nearly every meal, tight waistbands by early afternoon, the general sense of not quite fitting right in my own clothes by day two of any trip, was just part of getting older. So I left it at that. You do, after a while.

What I didn't examine, until Ellen brought it up, was how much I'd quietly rearranged an actual vacation around it. Which lounger was closest to the bathroom. Which restaurant we'd already been to, so I knew what wouldn't catch me out. Whether today was a "swim" day or a "sit and watch everyone else swim" day.

The cover-up drawer

Before this trip, like every trip, I spent an evening scrolling through swimwear looking for a cover-up. Not the sheer, pretty kind other women wear over a bikini like an accessory. The structured kind, built to conceal rather than complement, cut looser through the middle, longer at the hem. I own four of them now, bought at four different times, always for the same reason.

I look fine in the mirror before we leave, every time. That used to frustrate me more than anything. On paper, nothing's wrong. But by lunchtime on day one, "fine in the mirror" and "how I actually feel in this swimsuit" have almost nothing to do with each other.

Turns out I'm nowhere near alone in that gap. One 2023 survey of nearly 1,000 women found more than three-quarters feel more self-conscious once swimsuit season arrives, and around two in five said they actively dread it. An older, widely cited study of over 50,000 adults found roughly a third of women felt too uncomfortable in a swimsuit to properly enjoy wearing one. I'd always assumed that discomfort was just me. It isn't. Most of us are quietly doing the same math from the same lounger.

Survey figures above are drawn from published consumer research on swimwear and body image. As with any survey, specific sourcing should be verified before relying on the exact numbers; they're included here to reflect one reader's account of feeling less alone.

What nobody quite says out loud is that the discomfort was never really about how I looked. It was about how my stomach felt under my own hand when I sat down. You can look perfectly fine and still not feel it, because feeling like yourself has very little to do with what's visible and everything to do with what's going on underneath your clothes. Nobody was going to compliment me out of that feeling. It was never a confidence problem wearing a swimsuit. It was a stomach problem, wearing one.

This is the part that changed without me really planning for it to. Three weeks in, I wasn't scrolling for a fifth cover-up before this trip. I packed the two I already owned and didn't reach for either of them once.

I want to tell you what actually happened between sitting out those pool photos and writing that. A friend from my walking group kept going on about these little kombucha gummies. I gave them a go. I didn't expect much, if I'm honest.

Why “just getting older” only tells half the story

Here's the part I didn't know. It's not just age. Vacations themselves are genuinely harder on digestion, for reasons that have nothing to do with willpower.

Flights alone do a number on you. Sitting for hours, cabin pressure changes, dehydration, and a schedule that's completely different from your normal routine, all of that can slow digestion right down before you've even had your first vacation meal. Add richer food, later dinners, a glass of wine you wouldn't normally have on a Tuesday, and a gut that's already changed with age has very little chance to keep up.

Because here's the other half. As you move through your fifties and sixties, digestion naturally slows and the balance of good bacteria in your gut can shift. That's a normal part of getting older, exactly like I'd assumed. But it's also exactly why a system that was already working a little harder gets tipped over the edge the moment you add a transatlantic flight and a week of restaurant meals on top of it.

Why he could order anything, and I couldn't

On our third night we both ordered the same thing at a little place near the marina, pasta with clams, a basket of bread, a glass of wine each. Same table, practically the same plate. An hour later he was ready for a walk along the water. I was sitting with that towel across my lap again, doing the mental math on how long until I'd feel normal.

I used to take that personally, if I'm honest, like my body just didn't work as well as his. It was Ellen, on one of our walks, who explained the actual biology behind it, and it made me feel a lot less broken about the whole thing.

A woman's gut bacteria are genuinely different from a man's, and not just in a general sense, specifically because of hormones. A 2022 study following nearly 300 women found that as oestrogen declines with age, a woman's gut microbiome changes measurably, becoming less diverse and shifting to resemble a male gut microbiome far more than it did before. Before that shift, a woman's gut runs its own distinct balance, one that's more sensitive to how quickly food moves through and how much gas that process produces along the way.

In plain terms: it was never that my body was worse at digesting the same meal. It's that a woman's gut runs on a different system to begin with, one that keeps changing through your 40s, 50s and 60s, so identical plates were never going to produce identical results. He wasn't managing anything. I was managing a completely different internal environment, and had been the whole time without realizing it.

That reframe mattered more than I expected. I stopped comparing my stomach to his plate and started paying attention to what actually helps mine.

The friend who wouldn't stop talking about them

Ellen and I have walked together three mornings a week for about four years now, rain or shine, mostly to gossip and get our steps in. Sometime last spring she started bringing up these kombucha gummies, unprompted, more than once. The way you do when something's actually working and you can't quite believe it yourself.

I brushed it off the first two times. I'd tried enough things over the years, a fiber supplement here, a probiotic there, cutting out this or that before a trip, none of which made a real difference. But Ellen isn't the type to go on about something for no reason, so eventually I gave in and ordered a bag.

I didn't expect much, if I'm honest. That's important to say, because I think low expectations are exactly why I noticed the change when it came.

What three weeks actually looked like

One gummy in the morning, tastes like berries, no hassle. That was the whole routine, easy enough that I never once forgot it, even packing for a trip.

The first week and a half, nothing much. Around day twelve, I noticed I'd gotten through a big lunch out with Ellen's walking group without that familiar heaviness setting in by mid-afternoon. By three weeks in, I felt so much lighter in myself, genuinely, not just "less bloated" but lighter, more like the version of myself from ten years ago.

That's when the vacation came up. We'd booked a week away months earlier, and normally I'd have spent the two weeks before it quietly dreading the swimsuit and mentally rehearsing which restaurant meals to avoid. This time I packed the gummies in my carry-on without a second thought and didn't think about my stomach again until I was writing that caption under the pool photo, the one I actually let myself be in.

What's actually in it

One gummy is roughly the probiotic equivalent of a full glass of kombucha, with two botanicals most gummies leave out.

The pool photo

My daughter took that photo on the last afternoon of the trip. I almost handed her my cover-up and sat it out, out of habit, before catching myself and realizing I hadn't thought about my stomach once since we'd landed. Not on the flight, not at the seafood place our second night, not the morning after.

The bigger thing, the thing the photo doesn't show, is that I got up. After lunch that day, instead of pulling a towel across my lap and waiting it out, I walked down to the water with everyone else. It sounds like nothing written down. It didn't feel like nothing.

I posted it mostly for my sister, who'd been asking how the trip went. The "lifesaver" caption wasn't planned. It's just what came out, because that's genuinely what it felt like, three weeks of one gummy a day undoing something I'd quietly accepted for years.

What I used to do before every trip, and what it actually got me

Figures reflect one reader's personal experience. Individual results and costs may vary.

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I can't promise your next trip will go exactly the way mine did. I can tell you that after years of quietly planning around a feeling I'd decided was just "getting older," I packed a bag of gummies instead of a mental list of foods to avoid, and came home with a pool photo I actually like.

If any of this sounds familiar, the guarantee means trying it costs you nothing but two minutes.