Methane SIBO Diet in 2026 - What to Eat With IMO Without Over-Restricting

0:00You can eat the most perfectly constructed low-fod map, low fermentation diet in the world, but if you're significantly constipated and your intestinal trans it is slow, diet restriction alone is not going to address that. Hi there and welcome to the Gut Health Dialogues. I'm Alyssa Simpson, a registered dietitian specializing in digestive health and one of the first board certified specialists in digestive health in the country. And I'll be your guide as we unpack what's really going on beneath gut symptoms. Here we focus on building a healthy, resilient gut in a way that keeps food enjoyable and life livable. You won't find fear-based restrictions or overwhelming science dumps here. Just practical evidence-based strategies we use every day in our GI focused dietitian practice to help people feel better. And if you're ready to go a little deeper, I'd love for you to check out

1:04my on-demand gut health masterclass. Inside I walk you through the real reasons gut symptoms linger and the proven root cause approach I use every day in my work. It's free, it's available anytime and it's the perfect next step if you're ready to finally understand what your gut has been trying to tell you. You'll find the link in the show notes. Before we dive into the episode, I want to remind you that the information discussed in this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with your health care provider for any health related concerns. If you're looking for personalized support, we offer free 15-minute consultation calls. You can find the booking link in the show notes. All right and welcome back. If you have nothing SIBO or more accurately called intestinal methanogen overgrowth or email, you've probably spent a lot of time trying to figure out what you're supposed to eat. And

2:05unfortunately, the more you research it, the more confusing it can get because we have fod maps and we know that fod maps ferment fiber, though, can also increase fermentation and bulk. Resistant starch is fermented by a cup microbes as well. High fat meals can also be hard to tolerate when digestion is already moving slowly. And that big raw salad that you thought was one of the healthiest things you could possibly eat can leave you feel painfully bloated for the rest of the day. So what happens is you start taking more foods out. And I see this pattern all the time in our practice. Somebody eliminates the foods that clearly make them feel worse and it helps. So when symptoms flare again, they look for more foods to remove and then more. And eventually you're living off a very short list of foods that you trust because every attempt to expand your diet seems to come with consequences. I had one client that illustrates this really well. She had been struggling for about

3:10three years by the time she came to us and she had eliminated all of the high fod map foods, also all gluten, all dairy, all sugar. And she gradually moved toward eating a very low carb diet as well. And at that point, there really wasn't that much left for her to eat. Most of her meals had become some version of a plain protein with one of the few vegetables she trusted. And she was rotating through the same handful of foods over and over again. Her diet was not just extremely limited. It really wasn't even that nutritious anymore either. Here's the part that's important though. She hadn't gotten there because she was like just unnecessarily afraid of food. It wasn't just like a unfounded paranoia. It was that every time she removed something that seemed to trigger her symptoms, she felt a little better. And then when she tried expanding again, the bloating and constipation would start creeping back in. So of course she went back to what

4:13safe. And over three years though, her diet had gradually become the entire strategy for her with no clear plan for how she was ever going to get back out of bed. And by the time she came to us, the question wasn't really what should I eat? It was like what's left that I can eat? So it was not just about what else should I cut out to feel better. She was asking what is there even left to eat? What can I build my diet with? And that's what I want to help you avoid in this episode. You might need to modify your diet quite a bit for a period of time, especially if you're dealing with significant constipation and bloating and distension and sensitivity to fermentable foods. But needing more dietary restriction while you're highly symptomatic is very different from needing to stay on an extremely restricted diet indefinitely. And we have some really interesting new research from 2025 and 2026 that helps us understand this a little better, including newer

5:20research on diet and methane production and the relationship between methane and slow intestinal transit and even new research on the elemental diet specifically in people with SIBO and EMO. So today, I want to help you understand what we actually know about the methane SIBO diet, what we don't know and how I think about eating with EMO in practice. We're going to talk about low-fod, not fiber, resistance, starch, fat, constipation and motility. When to start expanding your diet and the really important difference between using food to manage your symptoms and actually addressing the methane itself. And most importantly, I want you to come away from this episode knowing how to use diet to give yourself some relief without letting the diet become another problem you eventually have to solve. So what should you eat when you have methane SIBO? Well, when you have methane SIBO or also called intestinal methanogen overgrowth or EMO, I usually recommend eating in a

6:26way that temporarily reduces fermentation and makes digestion a little easier without restricting your diet more than you need to. For most people, that means a lower-fod-map diet that's also temporarily lower in fiber, especially the raw bulky foods and also lower in resistance, starch and moderate in fat. So not low in fat, but just avoiding the high fat foods. And one thing I want to make clear right from the beginning here is that there isn't one scientifically validated methane SIBO diet. The research on diets specifically for EMO is actually pretty limited. Even the American College of Gastroenterologies Dietary Advice for SIBO is largely based on what we know from IBS, rather than studies testing specific diets in people with SIBO or EMO. So some of what we do comes from available research and some comes from years of working with people who are dealing with that very particular combination of constipation, bloating, fullness and feeling like food just isn't

7:32moving very well. And in our practice, we tend to look at several things at once. We may reduce higher-fod-map foods to bring down the overall fermentation load. We temporarily pull back on fiber, particularly large salads, raw vegetables, raw nuts, certain seeds, brand and other very high fiber foods and foods with a lot of tough skins or rough, rough edge that can be miserable when you're already backed up and bloated. And cooking, fruits and vegetables can make them easier to tolerate. So we recommend cooked foods. We also limit resistance starch and keep fats moderate because very high fat meals can be harder to tolerate and can slow digestion down even more when it's already slow. Let me pause here for a second because if you've been listening and thinking that sounds like me, but I still don't know why my gut isn't getting better. I've created something for you.

8:35It's a free masterclass called Why Your Gut Still Isn't Better, the real reasons you feel stuck. In it, I'll walk you through the real reasons. Gut issues linger. Why strict diets usually don't fix them. And the simple steps you can take to finally move forward. You can find the link to this in the show notes. All right, let's get back to today's conversation. But I don't want that to turn into a diet of chicken and three-stays vegetables either. Plus maybe rice. You still need adequate proteins, carbohydrates, calories and nutrients. And portions matter here. Sometimes the problem is not that you can't tolerate a particular food at all. You might tolerate a smaller amount perfectly well, but not a large serving. Or you may tolerate it on its own, but not when you stack it with several other fermentable foods in the same meal. And that's really how I want you thinking about a methane-sebo diet. We're trying to make

9:37eating more comfortable while you're symptomatic while keeping as much variety in your diet as you can comfortably tolerate. And if you're listening to this thinking, okay, but what do I actually eat? We do have a methane-sebo diet plan. And it's in the show notes. You can download it. It's free. And it takes these different pieces. Low Fod map, low fiber, cooked rather than raw foods, low-resistant starch and moderate fat, and puts them together into an actual food list, a list of foods to eat, a list of foods to limit, and a seven-day meal plan. So you don't have to stand in your kitchen trying to solve this puzzle yourself. So why can eating with methane-sebo get so confusing? They get so confusing because some of the foods we normally think of as incredibly healthy can be the exact foods that make you feel the worst when you're bloated and constipated. You've probably had the experience of looking at a perfectly healthy meal thinking,

10:40why does this make me feel terrible? Maybe it's a big salad loaded with vegetables and chickpeas and avocados and nuts and a garlicky dressing. And on paper, that's a fantastic meal. But when you have methane-sebo, you've potentially combined several different things that can be difficult to tolerate all at once. Onions and garlic, for example, are highly fermentable, which means gut bacteria can rapidly ferment those carbohydrates and produce hydrogen. And the vanogens then use that hydrogen to produce methane, which further slows your motility. Beans also give you a significant amount of fermentable carbohydrate and fiber, which cannot even more fuel to that fermentation process. A large amount of raw vegetables adds fiber and physical bulk, which can be particularly uncomfortable when things are already moving slowly, and you're dealing with constipation, bloating, and distension. And then certain nuts can add

11:41another layer of fiber in thawed maps while avocado adds both thawed maps and fat, depending on the portion. And because fat takes longer to digest and can slow gastric emptying, a very high fat meal can leave you feeling even more full and uncomfortable when your digestive system is already moving slowly. And starches can be confusing too, because when foods like rice or potatoes are cooked and then cooled, some of their starch becomes resistant starch, meaning it resists normal digestion and becomes available for microbial fermentation. And that's normally something we may think of as beneficial, but when you're already dealing with significant bloating, constipation, and sensitivity to fermentation, adding more highly fermentable substrates is not necessarily helpful right now. And then there's something people often miss, and that is that your tolerance is not always about one individual food. You may do perfectly well with a small serving of avocado,

12:41and you may tolerate a particular vegetable. You may even tolerate some beans, but if you put several moderately fermentable foods together in one meal, suddenly you've crossed your personal threshold. I had a client Tracy who described this so well. She had dealt with constipation, bloating, abdominal distension, and other IBS symptoms for years, and she was trying to eat healthy. And the way she later put it was the healthy foods I had been eating were making me worse. And once we understood what was actually going on with her digestion and that she had met things, SIBO, we could adjust how she was eating so those healthy intentions weren't working against how her digestive system was functioning at the time. And that's why I don't want you judging foods entirely by whether they're quote, healthy or quote unhealthy or even by whether they're on the yes or no methane SIBO food list. The more useful question right now is how much of this food can

13:44might digest a system comfortably handle in this form and in this combination. So let's talk about a low-fod-map diet because a lot of people wonder if a low-fod-map diet is going to be helpful for methane SIBO. And a low-fod-map diet can absolutely help reduce bloating and gas and abdominal discomfort and other digestive symptoms when you have methane SIBO or email. What it has not been shown to do is to actually eliminate the intestinal methanage in overgrowth. And that distinction matters because feeling better on a low-fod-map diet does not necessarily mean that the methane is we actually have some newer research that helps us illustrate this in a 2025 study of nearly 2000 people with digestive symptoms just one week of fod-map restrictions significantly reduced bloating of abdominal pain and flatulence. Breath hydrogen and methane levels decrease too.

14:45And that's useful evidence that changing the amount of fermentable carbohydrate you're eating can change both the symptoms and the gases you're got microbes are producing fairly quickly. But these participants were not specifically being treated for email. And the study didn't show that reducing methane on a breath test for a week eliminated the methane-producing organisms called methanagence. And I see this distinction play out clinically all the time. Someone will tell me, I know the diet works because when I eat low-fod-map I feel so much better. And I agree with that. The diet is working if it's helping you feel better. The problem is assuming that symptom relief means you fix the underlying problem. As if you go off the diet the symptoms come right back because the methanagence are still there. And that's also how someone can end up stuck on a restrictive diet for months or even years. Every time they expand their diet the bloating or constipation comes roaring back. So understandably they go right back to the foods that make them feel better.

15:50And at that point the diet is doing an important job and that is controlling symptoms. But it's also giving us information. If you only feel well as long as you keep fermentable foods very low there's probably more work to do beyond diet. And that's actually where addressing methane seabow becomes important. And we have a whole other episode on how to comprehensively actually address methane seabow. And we're linking to that in the show notes for you. So low-fod-map is also only one piece of how we approach diet for methane seabow. Our methane seabow diet plan, which again you can find free in the show notes, it's fully low-fod-map but it goes beyond that because constipation and slow motility are so commonly part of the picture. The plan also takes into account fiber amount and preparation, resistance starch, fat portions and how foods are combined. So if you already know the eating low-fod-map helps you feel better you won't be giving that up.

16:52We're building on that foundation to account for some of the additional challenges we commonly see with methane and constipation. And why does constipation matter so much with methane seabow? Well because methane and slow intestinal transit appear to have a two-way relationship, research suggests that methane may contribute to slower motility and I can tell you we see that in practice. And then slower transit may also create an environment that allows methane producing organisms to thrive. So in other words it can become a bit of a vicious cycle. The connection between methane and constipation has been recognized for years but newer research is giving us an even clearer picture. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 19 studies involving more than 4,500 people. People with intestinal methanogen overgrowth were about twice as likely to have constipation as those without emo and their constipation also tended to be more severe. And a study published in

17:56July 2026 took this a step further by looking not just at whether someone crossed the usual cut-off for a positive methane breath test but at how much methane they produced throughout the test. The researchers compared those breath test patterns with objective measurements of how quickly stool was actually moving through the colon. And the difference was pretty striking. Slow colonic transit was found in 28.9% of people who weren't producing significant methane, 41.7% of lower methane producers and then 69% of the high methane producers. So in other words the more methane people produced the more likely they were to have objectively measured slow transit. The high methane group had more than five times the adjusted odds of slow transit compared to the non-producers even after the researchers accounted for other factors that could have influenced transit time. And that does not prove that methane was solely responsible for slowing down their

18:58digestion. We also know that the relationship can potentially work in the other direction because when things are moving slowly and sitting around longer that environment may favor methanogens. But taken together with earlier mechanistic research showing that methane can affect intestinal motility, it gives us a pretty compelling reason to pay attention to both sides of the equation. And this is why when I'm working with someone who has methane, Cebo, I don't look at their diet and only think how can we ferment less. I also want to know, are you actually moving your bowels? Because if you're not improving bowel regularity and supporting motility needs to be a part of what we're working on, you can eat the most perfectly constructed low-fod map, low fermentation diet in the world. But if you're significantly constipated and your intestinal transit is slow, diet restriction alone is not going to address that. And that's why our approach to methane Cebo in practice on nutrition resolution includes helping people improve bowel regularity and

20:04motility alongside addressing the overgrowth itself rather than focusing only on which foods produce the least gas. Now, do we have a problem if we're eating too restrictively and cannot make methane Cebo harder to manage? So an increasingly restrictive diet can create its own problems even if we're moving foods initially makes your symptoms feel better. I want to be careful about what we're saying here because we don't have evidence that a restrictive diet causes or perpetuates nothing Cebo. But I do see people get trapped in a cycle where their diets get smaller and smaller because you're moving foods is the only tool they have for controlling their symptoms. And honestly, it makes sense how they get there. You eat something, you blow, you take it out, you feel better. Then another food starts bothering you so you take that out too. And eventually you're down to a handful of foods you trust. And understandably, you're terrified to add anything back because every

21:08attempt seems to confirm that your body can't handle it. That's what had been happening to the client I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. She was not failing at the diet. The diet was actually doing what restriction often does very well, helping her control her symptoms. The problem was that over time, diet had gradually become the entire strategy. Instead of just being there to help her get through a symptomatic period, her safe food list just kept getting smaller. It was the end all be all of her plan. And there are some legitimate reasons we don't want that to continue indefinitely. Research on the low FODMAC diet has found changes in particular groups of gut bacteria, including reductions in bifidobacteria. And the longer and more restrictive your diet becomes, the harder it can also be to maintain nutrition and enough variety in what you're eating. And there are also just practical consequences. The fewer foods you eat, the harder it becomes to

22:09get enough variety and meet your nutritional needs. But it can also start to make your world smaller. After enough, that experiences with food, eating itself can start to feel threatening. You start scrutinizing every ingredient on the ingredient list. You're worrying about restaurants, you're worrying about travel, you're turning down social plans because you don't know what you're going to be able to eat or you're avoiding foods. You're not even sure bother you because it just feels safer not to take the chance. And food starts taking up an enormous amount of your mental space. And over time, that can affect your relationship with food, your anxiety around eating and just your overall happiness and quality of life. And that's a very different place from using dietary restrictions strategically for symptom relief. So it's a slippery slope. And this is where I want the diet to have a very specific job. Use it to make eating more comfortable while you're working on the bigger

23:09digestive problem. But don't let removing more and more foods become the substitute for figuring out why you still need to remove them. If your diet keeps getting smaller just to keep your symptoms under control, I don't see that as evidence that you need an even stricter diet. I see it as a reason to step back and ask what else needs to be addressed. So let's talk about how restrictive your diet should be for methane seabull. Well, it should be restrictive enough to make eating more comfortable and your symptoms more manageable, but not any more restrictive than it needs to be. So that's a little subjective. I don't want you eliminating foods just because they appear on somebody's avoid list if removing them isn't actually helping you. And one of the ways I think about this with clients is restrict with a reason for a reason and with a plan for getting back out. So in other words, I want you to know why you're restricting a particular food. What we're hoping

24:12that restriction will accomplish and when and how we're going to start expanding your diet again. This is also where I think people can get too caught up in whether food is allowed or not allowed. Your tolerance can be much more nuanced than that. If you tolerate a vegetable cooked but not raw, eat it cooked. If you tolerate half a cup of something but a full cup leaves you miserable, you may not need to eliminate it completely. And if you feel fine eating several foods individually, but you get bloated when you combine them in one meal that doesn't necessarily mean you've suddenly become intolerant to all of those foods. And I also pay attention to whether a restriction is actually earning its place. If you remove a food and it makes no meaningful difference in how you feel, why are we continuing to restrict it? Every food we take away should have a purpose. Otherwise, it's very easy to accumulate restrictions over time without realizing how many of them may no longer be necessary. And if your diet is getting more restrictive every month,

25:17that's important information too. At that point, I don't think the answer is to keep searching for the next food to eliminate. Something about your strategy needs to change. So how long should you follow a methane-cebo diet? Well, a restrictive methane-cebo diet should generally be a temporary tool, not your permanent way of eating once you have methane-cebo. But there's not a scientifically established amount of time that someone with emo should follow a restrictive diet. So I don't think it makes sense to give everyone the same arbitrary number of weeks here. You may have heard the recommendation to follow a strict low-fod-map diet for four to six weeks before beginning reintroduction. And that comes from the way the low-fod-map diet is typically used for IVS. The initial restriction phase gives symptoms time to settle and gives you enough time on the diet to establish a clearer baseline. From there, foods are systematically reintroduced so you can identify

26:18which fod-maps, imporctions, and combinations actually trigger your symptoms. Well, with methane-cebo, we're using the diet somewhat differently. It's primarily a tool for symptom relief while we're actively addressing the methane and working on bowel function and motility. That process takes different amounts of time for different people. So I wouldn't automatically apply the IBS four to six week timeline to somebody with emo. Instead, I think about the diet as one part of a larger process. Early on, you may need more restriction because you're extremely bloated and constipated, and reactive to food, and we're trying to get you some relief. But at the same time, we should be addressing the methane itself and working on bowel-regularity and motility. Diet can help with that, but many people also need additional support to get their bowels moving consistently, especially because we're limiting fiber with this. In our practice, we typically keep someone on the more restrictive version of the diet while we're actively working on bringing the methane down. But we're looking for

27:23opportunities to expand it as soon as their body is giving us signs that it's ready. We're not waiting for an arbitrary number of weeks to pass. We're watching what happens to their bloating and other symptoms, how consistently they're moving their bowels, whether they're beginning to need less support to maintain those bowel movements, and what we're seeing as we continue to assess their methane levels. So the diet is on its own timeline. It moves along with the rest of the process. As the methane comes down, motility improves, and someone's digestive symptoms become more tolerant, we can start challenging foods and gradually expanding the diet, rather than keeping them on necessarily restricted. And that's why I don't love the idea of picking a date on the calendar and saying, okay, at six weeks, you're going to start eating everything again. But I also don't want someone staying on the most restrictive version of the diet for six months, simply because no one ever told them what happens next or because they've come to believe that the diet itself is the

28:25treatment for the methane. How long you need the diet should depend on what's happening with your symptoms, your bowel function, where you are in the larger clinical process, and how you're doing as you begin testing more foods. So the important thing is that there should be movement in the direction of a broader diet. You may not be ready to expand everything at once, and you don't need to be. But if months are passing and you're still eating the exact same highly restricted diet or your safe food list is actually getting smaller, that's a sign that it's worth looking at why you need so much restriction rather than simply continuing the diet indefinitely. And if you're listening to this one drink, but what do you mean? What are we supposed to actually do about the methane? That's outside of the scope of today's talk, but we are linking to our episode that's all about that in the show notes about how to comprehensively address methane seabulls. So check that out if you're wondering what does that step look like. All right, so when do you start adding foods

29:28back? Again, there's not an evidence-based reintroduction schedule specifically for email. So I don't think you should start adding foods back simply because you've reached a certain week on the calendar. I want food expansion to be guided by what is actually happening with your symptoms, your bowel function, your tolerance, and where you are in the larger process of addressing the methane. This is another place where I think it's important to separate what we know from what we don't. We have established reintroduction frameworks for the low-fod map diet in IBS, but science has not actually established a post-emo reintroduction protocol. So when you see very specific instructions telling everyone with methane seabulls exactly when or how quickly to reintroduce foods that's not coming from research that's been validated on a particular schedule for email. I'll tell you what we do in our practice. In our practice, we look for signs that the digestive environment is changing. Maybe you're bloating in distinction or coming down. You're

30:33moving your bowels more consistently, or maybe you previously needed a fairly high amount of something like methane citrate or mirror-lex to keep your bowels moving. And now your stools are getting softer so we can reduce the amount of that bowel support, or you get to the point where you're going regularly without any bowel support. And those things are useful information. They tell us that your bowel function is improving rather than simply being propped up by the same amount of support. We can also continue assessing the methane itself. In our practice, we use breath testing with real-time results, which gives us another piece of information about how someone is progressing. We don't make food decisions based on one number alone, but when methane levels are consistently coming down and bowel function and symptoms are improving, those pieces together help us decide that it's time to start pushing the diet forward. And then we actually test foods. Sometimes that means a straightforward food challenge, so that introducing a specific food or portion and seeing what happens. We do it carefully in small

31:39amounts to test the waters when we do it that way. In other cases, we can use a breath testing device while challenging fermentable foods to get additional information about how the food is fermenting. So that way, if something goes, well, that's a food we may be able to bring back rather than continuing to restrict it unnecessarily. And then if it doesn't go well yet, that doesn't automatically mean it's off limits forever. It just means we're not ready for that. A male or for that particular food yet. And this is one of my favorite shifts to see happen with clients because early on the question is so often, what do I need to remove next? But as we make progress, I want the question to start becoming, what can we bring back? And we keep doing that as we move through the larger process. As methane comes down, bowel function improves, symptoms settle, and we move into the later phases of rebuilding the digestive system, we're looking for opportunities to bring back more thought maps, more fiber, and more overall food variety. Most of the people we work

32:43with are ultimately able to return to a much broader diet. And that's the direction we're working toward, not a lifetime of eating from a methane seabull food list. And let's talk about what diet can do and what it can't do. So we know diet can bring symptoms down, but can it actually get rid of the methane seabull? Well, it depends what kind of diet we're talking about. A regular food-based methane seabull diet has not been shown to eradicate the intestinal methanogen overgrowth. It's primary rules helping you manage symptoms while you're addressing the methane itself and the factors that may be contributing to it. So if eating a low-fod mapper, following a lower fermentation diet makes you feel dramatically better that's valuable, but feeling better on the diet doesn't necessarily mean the methane-producing organisms are gone. There is one important exception we need to talk about here, though, and that is the elemental

33:44diet. An elemental diet is not simply an extremely restrictive version of a methane seabull diet. It's a therapeutic nutrition intervention in which regular food is temporarily replaced with a nutritionally complete formula made up of nutrients that are all the way broken down into their building blocks and designed to be very easily absorbed, leaving much less available for microbes to ferment. And they're absorbed very early on in the intestine, so no food is really making its way all the way through the intestine to feed microbes. And we now have some really interesting research specifically in people with seabull and evil. In a 2025 perspective study, 30 participants followed an exclusive elemental diet for two weeks. Average maximum methane levels dropped from 41 parts per million to 12 parts per million. And Methana Breva-Bacter Smithy, I, one of the primary methane-producing organisms in the human gut decreased, and 73% of participants

34:49had normalization of their miraculous breath test. 83% also reported adequate overall symptom relief. So those results are really exciting, particularly because we haven't historically had much perspective research looking at the elemental diet specifically in people with evil. But it was a small, uncontrolled study with short-term follow-up, so I wouldn't take 73% breath test normalization to mean we've established a 73% long-term cure rate. But it does give us a preliminary evidence that an elemental diet can directly reduce methane and methane agents in a way that an ordinary food-based symptom management diet has not been shown to do. It's important to distinguish an elemental diet from simply becoming more and more restrictive with food. An elemental diet is a specific therapeutic intervention used for a very defined period of time, typically two to three weeks. And it's one of the tools we use in our practice when we've determined that it's appropriate

35:55for a particular person with methane seabull. If that's the direction we decide to go, we have a whole process for it, and we walk you through what needs to happen beforehand, how to transition into the elemental diet, how to get through it successfully, and how and when to transition back to food, and how we assess whether or not it actually is working. From there, we're still working on bowel function and motility, rebuilding and expanding the diet afterwards, and the other pieces that can affect whether progress holds like addressing root causes. So if you're considering an elemental diet and you want help figuring out whether it makes sense for you, we're also going to put a link in the show notes where you can apply to work with our team. So if it's the right tool for your situation, we'll walk you through the entire process. You won't have to figure it all out on your own. And if your diet's currently the only thing keeping your symptoms under control, I don't want the takeaway to be that you need to become even better at avoiding food. I want to know why you

36:59still need that much restriction to feel okay. And what if you're following a methane seabull diet, but you still feel terrible? If you're already eating carefully and you're still significantly bloated, constipated or unable to expand your diet, the answer may not be another round of food elimination. At that point, we do want to step back and see what else might explain why you're struggling. And one of the first questions I would ask is, have you actually been tested for methane? I'm continually surprised by how many people come to us believing they have methane seabull based on their symptoms or because certain organisms have showed up in a stool test, but they've never actually had a breath test to confirm it. Now, let's say you were tested in the past, have you been retested recently enough to know whether the methane is still elevated and how much progress you've actually made? That matters because simply getting below the standard positive cutoff is not always

38:00the whole story, particularly when constipation is the predominant symptom. We find that some people with constipation don't really return the corner with their symptoms and their motility until methane is very low, sometimes below three parts per million. So we're looking at the actual methane levels alongside what's happening clinically. Are your bowels moving more consistently? Are you needing less support to keep them moving? Is your bloating improving? And are you becoming more tolerant of foods? From there, we're looking at the rest of the picture. How significant is the constipation or slow transit? Is there something contributing to persistence or recurrence that hasn't been identified? Does the sequence of what you've already done make sense or is there another digestive issue contributing to symptoms that have been attributed entirely to methane? And these are the kinds of questions we work through because two people who look very similar on paper can need very different things. So if you're still highly symptomatic, I want to understand what we're missing rather

39:04than continuing to make decisions based on symptoms alone. And we are going to again include our process for addressing methane seaboe in the show notes so that including the different pieces we consider when methane and constipation are not resolving the way we expect. So we go deeper in that episode. Now what's the best way to get started eating for methane seaboe? If there's one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it's that having methane seaboe does not mean you need to keep taking more and more foods away until you've finally found the perfect diet. Diet can be incredibly helpful. It can reduce fermentation, make bloating and distension more manageable and make eating a whole lot more comfortable while you're working on the methane constipation, the motility and whatever else may be contributing to the bigger picture. But I want the diet to have a specific job. Restrict with the reason for a reason and with the plan of getting back out. And if you're currently staring at a very short food list thinking,

40:10but every time I try to eat more normally, I feel terrible. I don't want you to hear this episode is me telling you to just start eating everything again. That's really not what I'm saying at all. I want you to know that where you are right now doesn't necessarily have to be where you stay. And if you need some help figuring out what to do in the meantime, download our free methane seaboe diet plan. It's fully low-fod map, but it also takes into account fiber, fat, resistant starch, fat portions and food preparation and gives you actual foods and meals to work from. And you'll find a link to that in the show notes. And if you've been doing all this for a long time and your diet just keeps getting smaller, that's when I think it's worth asking a different question. Not what else do I need to stop eating, but why do I still need to restrict this much just to feel okay? And if that's where you're at, that's exactly the kind of thing we help people work with at nutrition resolutions. You can apply to work with our team through the link in the show notes and we

41:13can help you figure out what may still be keeping you stuck and what needs to happen to start moving forward. So guys, this is your gut check for today. Your methane seaboe diet should be a tool that helps you feel better while you work on the bigger problem. It should not become the bigger problem. And make sure you listen again next week for your weekly gut check. Thanks for listening to the gut health dialogues. If today's episode helped you connect a few dots, check out my free on demand gut health masterclass. It's the next step toward understanding your symptoms and starting to feel better. The link is in the show notes. Take good care of your gut and I'll see you in the next episode. Quick pause here. If you've been listening to this podcast and thinking this is exactly what I'm dealing with, but I have no idea where to start, I want you to know you don't have to figure it out at nutrition resolution. We offer a free 15 minute consultation call where we'll talk through

42:18what's been going on with your gut. Everything you've already tried and whether our process is the right fit to finally move things forward for you. It's a simple way to get some clarity, support and feel heard. Click the link in the show notes below to schedule your consultation call. Spots are limited so schedule your call today. All right, let's get back to the episode.