Many of us have “endo belly”, which is a general name for symptoms of GI distress associated with endo. Here are a few scenarios of what that could look like:

This was my tummy 20 minutes after I ate. Do you see the “small soccer ball” at my belly button? Note that I’m also lying down, which means even gravity couldn’t bring this balloon down! Thanks SIBO, and also thanks to my 5-year-old for snapping this picture for me ;)

You wake up, you’re doing just fine. Then you eat brunch out with friend. Within 15 minutes, a pressure arises from within, you can feel it. Your belly starts inflating. You feel bloated, then really bloated, and an hour later you look in the mirror at your pregnancy-level bloat and wonder, “What the heck just happened??”
You wake up with a pretty flat tummy. But over the course of the day, you slowly feel more and more rotund. Now it’s nighttime, you’re taking a shower, and low and behold, you can’t even see your feet your tummy is so round.
Or, maybe you exercise after work and BAM, here comes your endo belly. Or, queue a super stressful week at work and allllll weekend long your belly is as round as your pregnant sister.
Perhaps you don’t actually have much bloating at all, but you sure have pooping issues! Diarrhea, constipation, or both, painful poop, acidic feeling poop, gross or bizarre poop. Your doc said this was due to (maybe) pelvic floor issues or (maybe) IBS. But you sure wonder if you have bacterial overgrowths causing the issues….
In any scenario, you may also feel your belly bloat is associated with your endo symptoms. Pelvic pain, painful sex, painful pooping, or something else. In fact, your endo may be so provoked you may wonder if it was your food causing the bloat, stress, exercise, or is it your endo causing the bloat?

Queue head explosion.

Yes, it can be confusing. Honestly, you can’t see inside of your tummy so you really have no idea what’s going on without LOT of investigating. This is why I’m about to blow your mind with the coolest endo-belly invention since the girdle (kidding! Don’t use a girdle!).

What is it? A breath test device called the Food Marble, and it’s about to make your bloated life a whole lot easier. Short story, it lets you know if your endo belly is due to gases blowing it up (not endo, exercise, or stress), which gases, and which foods are the culprits.

To better understand why this tool is so helpful, let’s start with a fun story about microbes that fart.

Microbes fart when fed

Your very long intestinal tract is filled to the brim with microbes: bacteria, yeast, viruses, archaea, and more. While some are in the small intestine, most are in the large intestine. Some are super helpful, some aren’t great but still normal in small doses, and some probably shouldn’t be there. This is your human microbiome in a nut shell. Oh, and many of them produce gases — i.e. they fart.

Now, these little guys need to eat to stay alive, so when you eat a meal to feed you, you’re also feeding your trillions of intestinal friends (or enemies, depending). When it comes to the farting variety of microbes (because not all of them produce gas), these guys can produce copious amounts of methane, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and/or carbon dioxide after being fed.

Don’t worry, this is not just normal, but beneficial! That’s because, through the process of fermentation, these little buggers often also produce helpful byproducts such lactate, acetate, or short-chain fatty acids—chemical byproducts that contribute to overall gut health. So while they also produce some gas, your body is totally primed to tolerate the microbe farts as long as it’s mostly kept in the large intestine (let’s call it the farting chamber) rather than the small intestine, and in normal levels. We fart too, after all, so no need judge the farters.

The problem: When the wrong farters grow where they shouldn’t, or outgrow their welcome even in a normal place.

When this happens, we can get immediate bloating after eating a meal, where we puff up like a pregnant pufferfish within 45 min after eating. This can indicate an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine, where you DEFINITELY don’t want farters to be (remember, the vast majority of farters should all live happily in your large intestine). However, you can have overgrowths in the large intestine too. In this case you may feel like you slowly inflate all day long as you eat meal after meal that piles up in the large intestine as an endless buffet for these little critters.

And what do farters like to eat? Mainly carbohydrates. So if your body isn’t breaking down carbohydrates correctly (we’ll talk about this soon), or you’re eating way too many, these carbs can now be feeding wayward farters instead—leaving you with some REALLY bad endo belly inflation. This can result in poop issues, pain issues, and even endo issues.

But, how do you know if it was farters, or if was it the exercise, stress, or endo? This is where the confusion comes into play. Because, yah, you can have endo belly that’s caused by swelling within the pelvis or abdomen caused by inflammation, NOT farters. Or you can have food allergies, stress, or poor sleep causing bloat, NOT farters. You can have water retention around your period, or core dysfunction. And then, you can have farters causing or contributing to it all.

“How do we know???!?!?!!” You scream.

The Food Marble, duh.

The Food Marble: Discovering if your farters are out of control

The way to know is by measuring bacterial, umm, farts (a.k.a. gas levels). You can do this through a breath test, which seems random, but it works.

My bloat-tastic companion, the Food Marble Aire 2

Traditionally, you would order a test from a lab, breathe into a tube to capture the gases, then sand back to the lab where they would measure the levels of hydrogen, methane, or hydrogen sulfide within that exhale — this is how we can measure farter activity. It’s also how you test for SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth). Because if you have a lot of farter activity right after you drink the test solution (within 45 min), this indicates you have a bacterial overgrowth and/or dysbiosis in your small intestines (where it should never be).

The problem with this testing is that it’s expensive (around $300 for a SIBO test), and it’s a one-time-only test. That means you drink a sugar solution one time and get results based on that mornings breath. While that’s helpful to diagnose SIBO, it’s not very helpful for your sanity if a) you don’t have SIBO but you still have symptoms, or b) you do have SIBO and have no idea which foods trigger you, or how your treatment is going.

This is where the Food Marble cuts through all the clutter and tells you in real-time what your farters are doing! It’s a handheld breath test that’s as accurate as a SIBO lab test, cheaper (only $249, or $187 with my coupon code below), and you can breathalyze to your heart's content to see how much farter activity you have on a day-to-day basis. It pairs to your phone so you can see immediately what your fermentation, err, farter scores are, and which foods are provoking you.

There are two types, and in my opinion, the Food Marble Aire 2 is the best as it measures both hydrogen and methane levels when you take 5 seconds to breathe into the cute little square. This can show you:

If you have high methane or hydrogen levels (which are treated differently, why it’s important to know).
If you’re reacting FAST to foods soon after you eat (indicating an overgrowth in the small intestine, or a certain carbohydrate malabsorption like lactose or fructose).
If you react to high FODMAP foods, and which ones (take allllll the guesswork out of it, you can see today if you react to lactose, fructose, or any other FODMAP).
If you’re having trouble beyond FODMAPs and losing your mind, uncover if you’re reacting to sugars and starches (like, are they feeding you or feeding your bacterial overgrowths instead). This is common with intestinal damage of the small intestine but often overlooked piece of the healing puzzle.
If your gases rise slowly over the day to peak levels in the evening, this may indicate an overgrowth in general, somewhere along the line. Now you can investigate the causes while also lowering your trigger foods to bring relief.
You can even use it to test for SIBO (with as many follow-ups as you need)!
OR, find out if it’s not farters at all. Seriously, how soothing to have an endo bloat flair, take a breath test, and see it's not even a belly fermentation issue. Now you have a MAJOR clue that it’s something else, like endo, stress, core dysfunction, etc., rather than deciding to cut out another major food group for zero reasons while crying in confused despair.

This is why I’m so pumped about the Food Marble. It puts the power back in our hands to take control of our digestive issues once and for all, at a fraction of the cost of 10 breath tests. In fact, you can take 10 breath tests per day, and you should, to follow clues about what’s happening inside.

How to use the Food Marble

It’s SUPER EASY. You hold your breath for 3 seconds, blow into the little dude for 5 seconds, and it’s done! Check my quick video to see how easy it is, and what it looks like on the app.

What Happened When I started Using the Food Marble

My dad passed away 4 months ago and it was a hugely sad and traumatic loss to watch him quickly, and painfully, pass away. If you’ve lost someone very close, you’ll understand the grief and stress that comes with it. For me it happened fast, and every day I could feel my stomach eroding more and more from the emotional rollercoaster of it all.

Queue my stomach issues flaring up like a MOFO. Pain in my abdomen, burning feeling after eating, bloating, constipation, it was like 10 years ago all over again! Yes, from stress alone, this happens, and it’s called “crap, I had a relapse.”

The question was, relapse of what, so I went to testing. Turns out I had developed a case of SIBO (honestly I’m pretty sure I used to have it, but I never tested). This time it was in my upper small intestine (the duodenum), causing the burning sensation. Methane was at the heart of it, which is more associated with constipation.

While I needed to be on antimicrobials for the overgrowths, I also needed to deal with symptoms. Seriously, my stomach burned, it was awful. With the help of the Food Marble I was quickly able to eliminate the specific high FODMAP foods I found to be most triggering for my own body while I worked on antimicrobials to rid the wayward bacterial invaders.

But something was still off. Even though I was eating lowFODMAP I’d still have bouts of pain that directly correlated with high fermentation levels (thanks Food Marble for taking the guesswork out of it for me!). Through tracking my foods and fermentation levels, I could see starches and sugars from grains, while allowed on the lowFODMAP diet, were also triggering my flairs. Turns out disaccharides and me currently don't get along.

While it was tricky at first learning to avoid so many of my former food favorites that were triggering the symptoms (like sweet potato, honey, and cauliflower), it was a HUGE relief to have the symptoms go away so I can live in peace without burning-stomach-pain while I heal. It’s exciting to think that, by eliminating my triggers as to not feed the wrong bacteria, I can hopefully start reintroducing my fav foods back in over time as my gut heals. THIS IS THE GOAL FOR EVERYONE. Always cut out with the goal of reintroduction rather than living a restricted mindset.

Here is an image below of my fermentation scores over the first 6 weeks I diligently used the Food Marble Aire 2. The blue line indicates hydrogen levels, the purple line is methane. Notice how both lines minimize over 6 weeks as I uncover trigger by trigger to bring my body back to relief! [BTW this image is from my clinical back end, on your iPhone app it looks a little different]. That picture at the beginning of the post of my with a small soccer ball in my belly? Yah, that doesn’t happen at all anymore.

What will happen if YOU start using a Food Marble

Imagine if you could test when you had an endo belly flair and see immediately if it’s due to fermentation, or not? Like, maybe you slept poorly and you realize poor sleep makes you bloat (serious, this happens). Same with stress, or poor exercise habits. Maybe you bloat before your period really bad and you now KNOW it’s your uterus not your intestines.

If you find fermentation at fault, imagine if you could uncover the specific food triggers without crazy amounts of restrictive diets, trial, and error. You can literally do a specific food test with the Food Marble, where you eat a portion of food on an empty stomach first thing in the morning and test every 15 minutes (over the course of 2-3 hours) to see if you react. Now you KNOW if you react to yoghurt… or not. Or honey. Or that avocado you love but sometimes seems to provoke symptoms.

Heck, I even discovered a certain supplement I was taking was causing some serious fermentation issues! What will you uncover?

You can even use the Food Marble to uncover SIBO and then keep retesting for it every few months as you work with a doctor or naturopath to get rid of it. This will save you, literally, hundreds of dollars.

And to reiterate, long-term restriction is never the way to heal! So I’m not saying use the Food Marble to cut out 100 foods that may trigger you—at least right now. But with the help of the Food Marble (and maybe along with the help of a professional), you can remove your triggers short term, work on gut health and healing, then try reintroducing foods in a few months as you heal. As your intestinal lining heals, chances are you may be able to tolerate some of these foods again, first in small portions, then maybe even in larger portions. With the Food Marble, you can even track which portion sizes you do well with, so you know you can have 1/2 a piece of cake, for example, rather than no cake (half is better than none, I say!).

Seriously, this is the best endo belly hack out there.

I’m also going to do a number of follow up blogs about what carbohydrate malabsorption is and how it might even look on a stool test. This stuff is really cool if you’re interested in ROOT CAUSE endo issues here, so stay tuned :)

If you want to buy a Food Marble I have a discount code for you!

If you want 15% off a Food Marble device, enter 15ENDO at checkout. As a note I am an affiliate, but only because I bugged them for a month to become one, I’m that excited about getting the word out about this device.

Check out Food Marble for more information.

And if you’re curious about how endo belly issues make endometriosis (the disease) worse, make sure to read my book! There are chapters dedicated to understanding the dysbiosis-endo connection, and why it’s important to address endo belly rather than hiding it under large frocks :)