Basically the title, why when you’re digesting a big meal do you have to focus on breathing?
In: 19
Not as many believe, breathing is an action generated in the diaphragm (your cute tummy), not in your mouth or in your nose. When you ingest a big quantity of food (or water) both your chest and your diaphragm experience an anormal, but not dangerous, pressure from the inside, all that food is pressuring your diaphragm so you have to force those muscles to get all the air your lungs need.
(Like, imagine if you are being crushed by someone, you are laying facing to the floor and someone sits on your back, is the same kind of pressure your chest is holding)
Because we mostly breathe with our [diaphragm](https://maidstoneosteopaths.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Breathing-in-and-out.jpg), a muscle surface that sits below the lungs and above the stomach. So when the stomach is full the diaphragm can’t move down as easily, no space.
You can also use your chest muscles / ribs to “inflate” your chest to breathe, but it’s more “effort”.
Your diaphragm is a flat muscle that sits horizontally under your lungs and above your stomach and intestines. To breathe, your diaphragm moves downwards (towards your feet), which creates a vacuum. It’s like pulling up the piston in a syringe, which sucks air into it.
So for your question, when your stomach is full of food, that’s taking up a bunch of space right below your diaphragm, right in the space it usually drops down into to pull air into your lungs. So now it has to work harder and smoosh that down and out of the way as it drops, which takes more effort than usual.
? I….don’t? I breathe just fine, lots of food or not….
It is literally a full stomach stops the lungs fully expanding.
As you inhale, as well as going out the way a bit, they expand down. This is because the diaphragm (a large thing muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen) contracts and lowers, making more space in the chest for the lungs to expand. The stomach is directly under the diaphragm and the spleen and liver are are on either side and the small intestine below, so if it’s full and can’t be squashed to make space, it has no space to move into to make enough space for a big, deep breath comfortably.
Others have already answered well but I want to add you reeeeeaally shouldn’t be eating so much it’s hard to breathe after. Try to stop a bit earlier and see if you feel more comfortable.
Your stomach becomes larger when full, meaning less room inside you.
Near the stomach is the diaphragm, the muscle that controls the expansion and contraction of your lungs.
When your stomach is full, there is now much less room for the diaphragm to expand your lungs into, meaning you cannot take in as much air as before you were full.
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