When you’re dealing with both diarrhea and vomiting, the priority is fluids first, food second. Your body is losing water and electrolytes fast, and eating the wrong things too soon can make everything worse. The good news is that most cases of stomach illness resolve within a few days, and what you eat during that window can meaningfully speed your recovery.
Start With Fluids, Not Food
Your body can’t keep up with the fluid loss from both ends, so rehydration comes before anything solid. After your last vomiting episode, wait 30 to 60 minutes before even sipping anything. Then start with small, frequent sips of clear liquids rather than gulping a full glass, which can trigger more vomiting.
The best option is an oral rehydration solution like Pedialyte, which has a carefully balanced ratio of sugar, sodium, and water designed to maximize absorption. Adults with active vomiting or diarrhea need roughly 3 liters of rehydration fluid per day. Children need about 1 liter, and babies and toddlers need about half a liter. These are minimums, not targets to stop at.
Sports drinks are a common substitute, but they’re not ideal. They contain 250 milligrams or more of sodium per serving, yet their sugar content is significantly higher than medical rehydration solutions. That excess sugar can actually pull more water into the gut and worsen diarrhea. If a sports drink is all you have, diluting it with water helps. For children, stick with a pediatric rehydration solution rather than sports drinks. Breastfed infants should continue breastfeeding throughout the illness.
Skip fruit juice entirely, especially apple juice. Full-strength fruit juices can loosen stools further, making diarrhea worse.
When to Start Eating Again
Once you’ve kept clear liquids down for about 6 to 8 hours without vomiting, your stomach is ready to try small amounts of solid food. Don’t wait until you feel hungry. Your appetite may not return for a while, but your body needs the calories and nutrients to recover. Start with a few bites at a time and see how your stomach responds.
Starchy, bland foods are easiest to digest at this stage: plain crackers, dry toast, white rice, or simple cereals. These foods are low in fat and fiber, so they move through your irritated digestive tract without demanding much work.
The BRAT Diet: Useful but Limited
The classic advice is the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. These four foods are gentle on the stomach and unlikely to provoke more vomiting. Bananas are particularly helpful because they replace potassium lost through diarrhea. Rice and toast provide easy calories. Applesauce contains pectin, a type of soluble fiber that can help firm up loose stools.
That said, the BRAT diet was never studied against other options, and it’s nutritionally thin. It’s fine for the first day or two, but restricting yourself to just those four foods any longer than that slows your recovery. As Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Jacqueline Wolf recommends, once your stomach has settled, expand to more nutritious bland foods: cooked squash (butternut or pumpkin), cooked carrots, sweet potatoes without skin, avocado, skinless chicken or turkey, fish, and eggs. These are all easy to digest but provide the protein and micronutrients your body needs to heal.
Why Soluble Fiber Helps
Not all fiber is created equal when you’re sick. Insoluble fiber, the rough, bulky kind in raw vegetables and whole grains, can irritate an already inflamed gut. Soluble fiber does the opposite. It dissolves in water and forms a gel-like substance that slows down digestion and helps absorb excess fluid in the intestines.
Good sources of soluble fiber during illness include oatmeal, bananas, applesauce, and peeled cooked potatoes. Research on children with acute watery diarrhea found that adding soluble fiber to rehydration solutions reduced both stool output and the overall duration of illness. You don’t need a supplement for this. The foods themselves provide enough to make a difference.
Foods That Will Make Things Worse
Certain foods actively worsen diarrhea through specific mechanisms, so avoiding them matters as much as choosing the right ones.
- Fried and fatty foods. When your gut can’t absorb fat normally, undigested fat reaches the colon, where it breaks down into fatty acids that force the colon to secrete fluid. This directly triggers more diarrhea.
- Dairy products. Illness can temporarily reduce your ability to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Even people who normally tolerate dairy fine may find it causes gas, bloating, and looser stools during a stomach bug.
- Caffeine. Coffee, tea, energy drinks, and cola speed up the digestive system, pushing contents through faster than your colon can absorb water from them.
- Sugary drinks and candy. Excess sugar stimulates the gut to release water and electrolytes, loosening bowel movements. People who consume more than 40 to 80 grams of fructose per day are likely to develop diarrhea from sugar alone. Artificial sweeteners like sorbitol, mannitol, and xylitol (found in sugar-free gum and candy) are even worse offenders.
- Gas-producing vegetables. Broccoli, peppers, beans, peas, corn, and leafy greens can cause painful bloating on top of an already upset stomach.
- Processed and greasy fast food. High in both fat and additives, these are among the hardest foods for an inflamed digestive system to handle.
Probiotics May Shorten Recovery
Probiotics, the beneficial bacteria found in yogurt, kefir, and supplements, can reduce how long diarrhea lasts. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials in children with acute gastroenteritis found that probiotics shortened the overall duration of diarrhea by nearly 8 hours on average. Diarrhea frequency was noticeably lower by day 2, and the effect grew stronger by day 5.
The strains with the most evidence behind them are Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces species, commonly available in over-the-counter supplements and fermented foods. If you can tolerate a small amount of plain yogurt (many people can, even when other dairy is problematic, because the bacteria have already partially broken down the lactose), it’s a reasonable addition once you’re past the worst of the vomiting.
What to Feed Children
Kids follow the same general principles as adults, with a few important differences. Their smaller bodies dehydrate faster, so fluid replacement is more urgent. Pedialyte or Infalyte are the best choices for rehydration. Babies under 2 who are vomiting for more than 12 hours need medical attention. For children under age 2, the threshold is 24 hours.
Once a child is ready for food, start with the same bland starches: crackers, plain cereal, toast, rice. Avoid full-strength fruit juices, fried foods, pastries, donuts, and sausage. If dairy seems to worsen symptoms, cut it out temporarily. Don’t force large meals. Small, frequent offerings work better than three big plates.
Signs of Dehydration to Watch For
The real danger with combined vomiting and diarrhea isn’t the illness itself but the fluid loss. Watch for dark-colored urine (it should be pale yellow), sunken eyes or cheeks, and skin that doesn’t flatten back right away after being pinched on the back of the hand. In young children, fewer wet diapers than usual, no tears when crying, and unusual drowsiness are all red flags.
For adults, vomiting that lasts more than two days warrants a call to your doctor. Recurring bouts of nausea and vomiting lasting longer than a month suggest something beyond a simple stomach bug. High fever combined with a stiff neck requires prompt medical attention, as it may indicate a more serious infection.