My body embarrasses me in public. What did people do about the blush, the stomach and the smell?

Three pages in this library are about a body doing something in front of people that you would rather it did not. Say ‘I’m blushing’ before they do is the red face, and the rule for the rest of the room. Push your belly out to quiet it is the stomach in an exam, a meeting, a first date, a pew. If you shower and still smell is the odour that ordinary washing does not reach. Each ends with a doctor for the version that is not embarrassment at all, and two of them have a first move that costs nothing.

Name the blush yourself, then move your attention off your face. Say ‘I’m blushing’ before they do is for the face, or the neck, or the chest, that goes red when you speak or are spoken to or when someone looks at you a beat too long, and for the person for whom fear of the red is now what brings it. Three separate conversations on that page describe the same move: when you feel it start, say it, lightly, and carry on, ‘ha, you’ve got me blushing’, ‘yep, I do that’. The fear underneath a blush is of being caught, and you cannot be caught at a thing you have just announced; one account says it put the moment back in their hands. Five conversations say the red does not read to other people the way it reads to you, as authenticity, one even calls it a superpower, and two conversations say it reads as trustworthy; two accounts say the only thing that made it a defect was treating it as one. One caution says owning it aloud is not for every blusher, and one account’s nephew chose to hide it despite the advice; the page offers the sentence and does not insist. Then the loop. Three separate conversations say attention to the heat feeds the heat, and the thought ‘I’m going red’ is what turns pink to scarlet. Two conversations say the way out is to move your attention onto the conversation, the other person’s words, the next thing you want to ask, and that the red fades quickly once you stop monitoring it; one caution says the switch takes practice before it works like one. One account gives small resets no one reads as anything: a slow breath out, a rub of the eyes. Two conversations say the longer cure is the same as the short one, repeated, keep going into the rooms where it happens, because one account says avoidance is what turned a flush into a life, and one caution says progress stalls or slips back. For the exact second someone points at your face, the page says its conversations answer thinly: one account says the plain version, ‘yep, I do that’, said flat, and back to what you were saying; one says a laugh and ‘it happens’; and what not to do, from two conversations, is leave the room or skip the meeting, and, one account adds, call in sick. The rule for the rest of the room is shorter: five separate conversations and one contraindication say do not comment on someone’s red face, or their silence, or their nervousness, however kindly you mean it. The person already knows, and two conversations say being told is what locks it in and sends them out of the meeting. Three conversations say the comment is worse than rude when the redness is rosacea or another condition, and two say ‘you look tired’ and ‘you look ill’ across a table are the same wound; one correction gives the exception, a doctor asking whether you are nervous is ruling out a medical cause for a racing pulse. And when it is more than blushing: three separate conversations say redness that is not emotional, rosacea, eczema, hives, a reaction to heat, alcohol or a food, is a matter for a doctor, and one caution says it gets waved off as a ‘glow’ while a diagnosis waits. Three conversations say a doctor can also help with blushing that is running your life, with medication that blunts the physical response in severe cases; the page names none of what those accounts took, because one caution says the advice came from patients and one drug suggested there is not a first-line treatment. Two conversations say a course of cognitive behavioural therapy reduced it over several sessions by working on the attention rather than the skin. Two contraindications from the accounts’ own list: no tanning beds to hide it, and no niacin, a vitamin that causes flushing. One prerequisite, from a fifteen-year-old’s account, says a doctor will want a parent in the room, and the age rule differs by country.

Push the belly out, gently, and take a daily noise to a doctor. Push your belly out to quiet it says every instinct in a silent room says clench and hope, and five separate conversations found that the instinct is the problem: when the rumbling starts, do not suck the stomach in or clench, push the abdomen gently outward, relaxed, as if making room, and the sound drops. The one account who tried the opposite, sucking in, says it did not work, and the page carries the five over the one. One account presses fingertips into the soft place under the ribcage when they feel it coming; one sits up straight, because a slouch folds the gut; one breathes slowly from the diaphragm and finds the panic goes with the noise. One correction for your dignity: it is not your stomach, one account explains, it is the intestines digesting. Two cautions say the belly trick is a stopgap and fills nothing, so one account carries a snack bar into long meetings, and another says a glass of water quiets it, briefly. The people there argue about whether any of this is a problem worth solving, three accounts to three between ‘it is embarrassing and I want tools’ and ‘it is a body doing what bodies do, let it’, and three to two between ‘nobody notices or cares’ and ‘my friends have made jokes about it, so they do’; the page thinks both halves are right, keeps the tool, and would add that the room has heard stomachs before. For the bloat after, three separate conversations lie on the left side and say the gas moves and the pain eases; one correction gently says the stomach actually empties to the right, so the relief is real and the reason is probably something else, and the page keeps the position and drops the explanation. Two conversations pull the knees to the chest lying down, and one rocks gently, to squeeze the trapped gas along; two take a slow walk after eating rather than sitting or lying; three suck a peppermint, with one exchange, one account each way, in which mint makes the other person vomit, so it is a try-it, not a rule. On ginger the page says real ginger works for plenty of the people there and the fizzy drink named after it mostly does not: three separate conversations say ginger settles an upset stomach, nausea and bloating, in tea, pressed juice or a strong ginger beer, and the correction, made twice, is that the common ginger ales the accounts checked contain little or no actual ginger. The limits are the page’s own: one contraindication says avoid ginger with an ulcer, one says it is harsh on reflux, one says anyone who gets heartburn or a reaction from it should use mint tea or fennel seed instead, and one caution says a lot of it causes diarrhoea; the page prints no dose because the accounts gave none. The pineapple advice you may have heard, that an enzyme in it relieves the bloat of overeating, is taken apart by four corrections on that page, and one contraindication says never eat more of anything to fix being too full. The last thing is the people there who ended up at the doctor. Two separate conversations and three cautions say daily noise, pain and bloat that survive sensible changes, more fibre, fewer triggers, slower eating, are a pattern worth a proper look; single accounts were diagnosed with irritable bowel, coeliac disease, reflux, a hiatal hernia, a failing gallbladder and a bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine. One caution rated high is the one the page says to read twice: the blood test for coeliac disease is only reliable while you are still eating gluten, so do not cut it out before you are tested. Keep a food diary, the page says; two cautions say an elimination diet is a slog and not meant to be permanent, and three accounts say do it with a dietitian’s support.

Wash is not reaching where the smell is made. If you shower and still smell starts with the part that is not about you: the smell is not the sweat, which is close to odourless when it arrives; what produces it is bacteria on your skin breaking down what the sweat softens, and what it softens is keratin, the dead skin sitting on the surface. That is why a shower can genuinely fail, the page says: soap and water lift what is loose and do not reach bacteria living in and under a layer of dead skin and in blocked pores, and they do not remove that layer. There is a name for odour that persists through ordinary washing and deodorant, bromhidrosis, a recognised thing rather than a personal failing. For tonight, alcohol is what people used, hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, an alcohol wipe, wiped on and allowed to dry, and the page says to treat it as an emergency measure rather than a routine, because the people who used it every day ran into dryness and irritation, and because, the correction its conversation made to its own most popular tip, killing the bacteria does nothing about the sweat that feeds them. The fortnight that changes it is three things. Exfoliate the area, gently, a washcloth or a soft brush, or salicylic or glycolic acid without scrubbing, not straight after shaving and not hard. Use an antiperspirant, at night, on dry skin: the page says this is the one most people get wrong, because the aluminium salts form a plug in the sweat duct, cannot get into a duct that is actively pushing sweat out, and are diluted below the strength they need on damp skin, while at night you are sweating least and the product has hours to work; the plug takes something like ten days of use to build, so if you tried an antiperspirant for two mornings and decided it did nothing, you stopped before the mechanism started. Deodorant and antiperspirant are different products, the page says, one masks and one reduces the sweat, and plenty of people using a ‘deodorant’ faithfully have never used an antiperspirant at all. And suspect the clothes: odour lodges in fabric fibres and survives a normal wash, so a clean body goes into a shirt that reintroduces the smell within the hour; if your clothes smell faintly of it when dry, that is your answer, and white vinegar in the rinse strips it, as does drying fully rather than sitting damp in a machine. An antibacterial or antiseptic body wash, chlorhexidine or a benzoyl peroxide wash, kills more of the specific bacteria than ordinary soap, and the page’s cautions govern it: never leave an antibacterial or medicated wash sitting on skin, lather then rinse it off in the shower, because left on overnight they can burn and scar, and the armpit is thin skin; do not put alcohol or sanitizer on freshly shaved skin, on cuts, or anywhere near mucous membranes, wait a day after shaving, and expect it to sting on any nick you missed; no chemical exfoliant straight after shaving; and if you have delicate skin, scrub gently rather than hard, because aggressive scrubbing of armpits and groin causes its own problems and does not kill anything faster. The page gives no strengths or dilutions for any product, because the answers people gave each other did not agree and a wrong number on a chemical on thin skin is worse than no number. If none of that works, garlic, onion, curry, alcohol and some medicines come through the skin, and a smell that arrived with a new prescription is worth mentioning to whoever prescribed it; beyond that, persistent odour is something a doctor can help with, the specialist is a dermatologist, and the threshold for going is not ‘it is unbearable’, it is that it is affecting your life. Two honest uncertainties the page keeps: people split on whether removing hair matters, with the decider seeming to be whether the hair is dense enough to stop product reaching skin, so trimming is the low-cost test and shaving is not required; and a few people found antiperspirants irritated or seemed to make things worse and preferred plain deodorant with everything else on the page, which it calls a real minority report rather than a failure to try properly.

Who these pages are not for. The blushing page says that if your redness is not about feeling anything, if it comes with heat or food or is there most of the day, its techniques are not the answer and a doctor is; that if you are being bullied for it, one caution says acceptance is not an answer to bullying and the accounts do not pretend the reframe fixes a cruel room; and that alcohol as a cover is refused. The stomach page says nothing on it is a diagnosis, its last answer is a list of what the doctor found for other people, and it de-names every brand because which drink has real ginger in it changes by year and by shop. And the smell page names no products and no prices, so if cost is the constraint, its free half is the exfoliation, the clothes and the timing.