Mairlyn Smith, a cookbook author and self-proclaimed Queen of Fibre, recently took to TikTok to explain her and her husband's nightly ritual of fartwalking. Yes, fartwalking. "You fart when you walk," she explains. "That's why I named it that."
The purpose of a 10-minute fartwalk an hour after you eat, according to Smith, is to help reduce the risk of diabetes by getting all that gas out of your system.
According to Self.com, there is some validity to this claim:
"When you are moving, your GI tract is also moving," Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, DO, a gastroenterologist at NYU Langone Health tells SELF. This helps trigger gut motility, or movement of your intestines, which is essential for properly breaking down food. "There needs to be motion to help move the food along," she says. "When you're walking and moving around, you're basically helping the motility part of the digestive tract." (That might explain why you often feel so damn bloated after eating on an airplane or a train, where you can't move around freely.)
And research backs this up: Post-meal activity has been shown to speed stomach emptying and colon transit, and, according to a separate study in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, even mild activity after a meal was enough to significantly reduce bloating. What's more, boosting your gut motility and moving the food out quickly can also help with heartburn or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), Dr. Ganjhu says—there's simply less time for the digestive acids to do their thing.
Fartwalking: it could save your life!
