Why I built Minthe
I have had bloating for more than ten years. This is the short version of what that was like, what I tried, and why I ended up building a tracker instead of buying one.
Ten years of not knowing
It started long enough ago that I no longer remember what normal felt like. Most days, some combination of distension, discomfort and the low-grade drag that comes with it. Not dramatic enough to be an emergency, persistent enough to be a daily reminder in the mirror and to decide what I ate before a lot of things.
I saw doctors. That was the right thing to do and I would tell anyone reading this to do the same, because the first job is ruling out the things that need actual medical treatment. What it did not give me was an answer to the question I kept asking, which was simply: what is doing this?
Everything I tried
Keto. Low FODMAP. Slow carb. Caveman. Fasting. Probiotics, then prebiotics, then both. Fermented foods. Cleanses. If you have spent any time in this world you already know the list, because it is more or less the same list for everybody.
Some of it seemed to help, for a while. That is the trap. When your symptoms come and go on their own, anything you happen to be doing during a good week feels like it worked, and anything you happen to be doing during a bad one feels like it failed. I would cut something out, feel better, feel worse again three weeks later, and have no idea whether the food had anything to do with either.
What I actually accumulated over those years was not knowledge. It was a shorter and shorter list of foods I was willing to eat, most of them removed on evidence that would not survive five minutes of scrutiny.
The questions I could never answer
They were not complicated questions. They were just impossible to answer by memory and vibes:
- Is gluten actually a trigger for me, or did I decide that in 2019 and never check?
- Is it high fat rather than any particular ingredient?
- Is the afternoon slump, the low energy that arrives after lunch, connected to what I ate, or is it just what afternoons are?
Every one of those is answerable. You need enough logged days, a comparison against how often you feel bad in general, and the discipline to not fool yourself. None of that fits in your head.
Why I ended up building it
I went looking for an app that would do this properly. I wanted the full array of tracking in one place: the food, but also the timing, the sleep, the stress, the stool, the delayed reactions that show up the next morning rather than the same hour.
What I found instead were food diaries that just stored what I typed, calorie trackers wearing a gut-health hat, and a newer wave of apps that would photograph your lunch and confidently announce a correlation percentage from about nine days of data. That last group bothered me the most, because a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer. It sends you off eliminating a food for six months on the strength of a coincidence.
So I built the thing I wanted. Log quickly enough that you keep doing it, compare against your own base rate rather than against nothing, be honest about uncertainty, and then actually test the suspects instead of stopping at a correlation. The full method is published here, including the parts that limit what it can tell you.
What I deliberately left out
No streaks. Nothing that punishes you for a day you did not log, because the days you do not log are usually the bad ones and guilt does not improve data.
No calorie framing. The moment an app like this starts counting calories it becomes a diet app, and the relationship you have with it changes completely. This is a relief tool.
No confident answers on thin data. Minthe says "not enough data yet" a lot, especially early. That is deliberate, and it is the feature I am most attached to.
Where I am now
Still on this journey. I have found some things that clearly matter for me, and I have put back several foods I had been avoiding for years on no real evidence, which was its own kind of relief. I am not going to tell you what my triggers are, because mine are almost certainly not yours, and handing you my answers is exactly the mistake this whole category keeps making.
If you are somewhere in the middle of the same thing, I would genuinely welcome your company and your feedback as I keep going. Email is support@vitaloom.xyz and it reaches me.
Frequently asked
Are you a doctor or a nutritionist?
No. I am someone who has had bloating for over ten years and got tired of guessing. That is exactly why Minthe is built to measure you rather than to hand you my conclusions, and why it tells you to see a clinician when something looks like it needs one.
Did you fix your bloating?
Not completely, and I would not trust anyone selling you a gut app who says they did. I have found some things that clearly matter for me and ruled out several that I had wrongly blamed for years. Ruling things back in turned out to be as valuable as ruling them out.
Why should I trust an app built by one person?
Judge the method rather than the founder. The full statistical approach is published, including the parts that limit what it can tell you, which is more than any comparable app discloses. If you can find a hole in it, I want to hear about it.
Can I send you feedback?
Yes, and please do. Email support@vitaloom.xyz. Minthe is still being built and the things people ask for genuinely shape what gets made next.
Minthe is a wellness and self-tracking tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose or treat any condition and isn't a substitute for professional medical advice. If you have red-flag symptoms such as blood in your stool, unintentional weight loss, difficulty swallowing, persistent vomiting or a fever alongside gut symptoms, see a clinician rather than tracking them.