If you keep throwing up, the most important thing to do right now is stop eating, take very small sips of water or an electrolyte drink, and rest in an upright or side-lying position. Most vomiting caused by stomach bugs or food poisoning resolves within one to two days. Your immediate priorities are staying hydrated, keeping comfortable, and knowing which warning signs mean you need emergency care.
Start With Small, Frequent Sips
The biggest risk from repeated vomiting isn’t the vomiting itself. It’s dehydration. Every time you throw up, you lose water and electrolytes your body needs to function. Replacing those fluids is the single most important thing you can do at home.
Don’t gulp down a full glass of water right after throwing up. Your stomach is irritated, and a large volume of liquid will likely come right back up. Instead, take small sips of water, an oral rehydration solution (like Pedialyte or a similar electrolyte drink), or diluted broth every few minutes. The goal is to rehydrate as quickly as possible without triggering another round of vomiting. If you can keep small sips down for 15 to 20 minutes, gradually increase the amount you’re drinking.
Avoid sugary sodas, full-strength fruit juice, coffee, and alcohol. These can all make nausea worse or pull more water into your gut, worsening diarrhea if you have it.
How to Tell If You’re Getting Dehydrated
Watch for these signs: excessive thirst, a dry or sticky mouth, dark yellow urine, urinating much less than normal, dizziness when you stand up, and feeling unusually weak. In children, look for fewer wet diapers, no tears when crying, and sunken eyes.
You can do a quick check at home by pinching the skin on the back of your hand or your abdomen. Normally, the skin snaps back into place immediately. If it returns slowly or stays “tented” for a moment, that suggests moderate to significant fluid loss. Skin that’s very slow to return to normal indicates more serious dehydration that needs prompt treatment.
What to Eat When You Can Keep Fluids Down
Once you’ve gone a few hours without vomiting and you’re tolerating liquids, you can start reintroducing food. You may have heard of the BRAT diet (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast), and those foods are fine as a starting point, but current medical guidance no longer recommends sticking to just those four items. Relying only on the BRAT diet for more than a day or two can leave you short on protein and other nutrients your body needs to recover.
Instead, aim for a wider range of bland, easy-to-digest foods: eggs, broth, plain crackers, skinless chicken, fish, cooked carrots, cream of wheat or rice cereal, tofu, and low-fat dairy or nondairy milk if you tolerate it. Eat small portions. Skip anything greasy, spicy, or heavily seasoned until your stomach feels more settled.
Things That Can Help With Nausea
Ginger has genuine anti-nausea effects. Clinical trials in pregnant women found that 250 mg of powdered ginger taken four times a day reduced nausea and vomiting. You don’t need capsules specifically. Ginger tea, ginger chews, or even flat ginger ale with real ginger can help. The effective range in studies was roughly 1,000 to 1,500 mg of ginger per day, split across several doses.
Acupressure on a point called P6, located on your inner wrist, can also ease mild nausea. To find it, place three fingers flat across your inner wrist just below the crease where your hand meets your arm. The point sits right below those three fingers, in the groove between the two large tendons that run down the center of your wrist. Press firmly with your thumb for a few minutes. It shouldn’t hurt. Wristbands designed for motion sickness work on the same principle.
Over-the-counter bismuth subsalicylate (the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol) can help settle your stomach. Do not give it to children or teenagers with flu-like symptoms, as it contains a compound related to aspirin and carries a risk of Reye’s syndrome in young people recovering from viral infections. It’s also off-limits if you have an aspirin allergy.
Common Causes and How Long They Last
The two most common reasons for sudden, repeated vomiting are viral gastroenteritis (a stomach bug) and food poisoning. They feel similar but have different timelines. Food poisoning tends to hit fast, often within hours of eating contaminated food, and typically passes fairly quickly. Viral gastroenteritis usually lingers for about two days, sometimes longer.
Other common triggers include motion sickness, migraines, medications (especially antibiotics and painkillers taken on an empty stomach), heavy alcohol use, and pregnancy. If you’re pregnant and vomiting is severe enough that you’ve lost 5% or more of your pre-pregnancy weight, you can’t keep any food or fluids down, or you feel unable to carry out daily activities, that may be hyperemesis gravidarum rather than typical morning sickness, and it requires medical treatment.
Warning Signs That Need Emergency Care
Most vomiting runs its course at home, but certain symptoms mean you should get to an emergency room or call 911:
- Vomit that contains blood, looks like coffee grounds, or is green: this can signal bleeding in the digestive tract or a bowel obstruction.
- Chest pain alongside vomiting.
- Severe abdominal pain or cramping that isn’t relieved after vomiting.
- High fever with a stiff neck: a possible sign of meningitis.
- Confusion, blurred vision, or significant weakness.
- Fecal material or fecal odor in the vomit: a rare but serious sign of intestinal blockage.
You should also seek medical attention if you’re showing signs of dehydration (dark urine, dizziness on standing, dry mouth, weakness) and can’t get enough fluids in by mouth.
When Vomiting Has Gone On Too Long
For adults, vomiting that lasts more than two days warrants a call to your doctor. For children under two, the threshold is 24 hours. For infants, it’s 12 hours. These aren’t arbitrary cutoffs. They reflect how quickly smaller bodies run low on fluids and how likely it is that something beyond a simple stomach bug is going on.
If you’ve been dealing with recurring bouts of nausea and vomiting for more than a month, or you’ve noticed unexplained weight loss along with the vomiting, those patterns point to something that needs investigation rather than home management.