Your poo can tell you a lot about your health. In this episode, Jen answers all of the secret poo questions you’ve been wondering about but haven’t wanted to ask. You’ll learn what your poo should look like, what deficiencies it can reveal, how frequently you should go and how much it can impact your health if you’re not emptying well.

Did you enjoy the podcast today? Please let me know by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Every month I draw one lucky reviewer to have a free one-hour consultation with me. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you’re tuning in from so that you always catch the next episode.

SHOWNOTES

My father would often say, “If you don’t eat you don’t shit and if you don’t shit you die.” And he was right. If you don’t eat properly, you don’t shit properly – and you die.

You might remember I talked about Bum Glue in episode 4, this is often what is to blame for you not pooing properly. Bum glue is the refined and processed grains we consume – the white breads, rice and pasta – they clog up your system and prevent you from emptying properly. If you haven’t listed to this episode yet, please go back and listen to it. 

Some of the things I mentioned in that episode include how 70% of headaches originate in large intestine and bum glue has a direct impact on that. I also spoke about skin ailments, like psoriasis, eczema or dermatitis, any of those things. If toxins don’t come out properly in your poo and pee it will come out in the skin.

In a textbook world you would eliminate waste within 30mins to an hour after eating and you would get rid of the waste from 1 ½ meals. But in the real world this isn’t always possible. You may not be able to go at the time you need to, so you hang on. So, we teach our body not to poo when it’s meant to. Or we eat to many refined and processed grains and it becomes literally too sticky to move on time.

Ideally, when you eat you chew, which in the textbook world is around 20 times. The food in your stomach heads down into your small intestine where you absorb all of the water-soluble and fat nutrients. Then what is in your small intestine gets triggered to go into your ileocecal valve near your appendix. What is in your ileocecal valve should go into your large intestine and what is in there should start going out as waste.

If your transition time is slow, whether you’ve been hanging on a lot or you’ve been constipated for some time,  when you’re eating and all of those triggers aren’t happening like they’re meant to you start getting backed up.

So, think about it. If you’re eating 2-3 meals a day, you should be pooing 2-3 times a day. The reasons why people get backed up or constipated is lack of hydration or lack of the right oils (Omega 3, 6 and 9)

Another one is that people are sitting at the wrong angle. Our western toilets where we sit at a right angle to the ground is not the right position to poo properly. Your bottom is meant to be angles down. All the way through Asia, squatting toilets are the go – and they are right, it gets your bum in the right angle to eliminate effectively.

We can’t get squatting toilets here easily in Australia, so what I use is a pooping stool and Squatty Potty is the one I’ve used forever. It’s a little stool that lifts your feet 8-9 inches up off the ground so your body sits the way it should on a regular toilet.

Now, perhaps you have heard of the phrase “scared shitless”. This was another favourite of dad’s. When we’re stressed, we dump magnesium. Magnesium is needed for our large intestine to relax. Our intestine is made of smooth muscle, just like our heart. So, really important guys, never strain to poo because when we do, we put a direct strain onto our hearts.

So, we dump magnesium and this is what sits behind things like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). In an earlier episode I spoke about how we hold our stress somewhere, for me it’s my nose, but for others it’s their large intestines. They hold their stress; they dump their magnesium and they live in the world of IBS.

When a person is stressed, they literally hold their sphincter closed and don’t poo. It’s not even big stresses that do this either, it can be the day to day stress. So they don’t poo, they hang on and what happens when they do eliminate, is that it’s compacted, like you’ve been constipated. But what sits behind this, is what I call a poonami, that really watery poo that sits behind and that’s why the person thinks they are always constipated, but it’s because the stress isn’t being let go.

So, don’t just take a laxative for constipation, we want to work out how your body is dealing with life, then we can work out what we need to do. Magnesium rich foods are a great place to start, so go back to episode 7 where I talk about magnesium rich foods. Then you may want to bring in some adaptogen herbs, these are the herbs that help our body adjust to stress. I spoke about these in episode 1 and have included a link below to the ones I use if you want to check it out.

What is the ideal transition time?

In the ideal world, when I eat breakfast, I should within the next hour and a half, poop out half of my dinner and the rest of my lunch  from the day before. Lunch time today I eat I should be pooping out the last part of my dinner and half of my breakfast. Dinner time tonight I should be pooping out the rest of my breakfast and my lunch today. That’s how it is meant to work. Eliminate a bit of the meal before and the last of the meal before that. That is the ideal transition time.

You can test your transition time if you want. The best way is to eat corn or beetroot, this will show you your transition time as you’ll know when you ate it and it will be very visible when it comes out.

What does the perfect poo look like? 

It should hold together, be dark brown in colour and be like a submarine. If you’re finding yours are floating and you have to break them up to get them to go down, you’re not digesting fats properly. If your poo slams on the bottom and splashes you on the way past (a stinky sinky), you aren’t digesting proteins properly. Your poo should be like a submarine where it goes gently to the bottom. 

If you’re getting a skinny poo then you’ll want to get some psyllium husk, I spoke about this in the bum glue episode too, this will make a bulkier poo.

So, the Healthy Life Hacks in this episode are:

1. Stop eating bum glue – stop feeding the problem

• Bring more magnesium rich foods into your diet, like spinach pumpkin seeds, almonds, pecans, walnuts, etc. 

• Look at your hydration of water and healthy oils (avocado oil and coconut oil for example – make sure you use avocado oil in a cast iron pot) 

• Teach your body to poo properly. Get a SQUATTY POTTY, the link is below

Links from this episode:

• Link to the Squatty Potty 
• Link to the Adaptogen herbs Jen uses 

Did you enjoy the podcast today? Please let me know by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Every month I draw one lucky reviewer to have a free one-hour consultation with me. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you’re tuning in from so that you always catch the next episode.

Are you looking for more great resources? Get a free copy of my Feed Your Body ebook here and be sure to explore my blog while you are there.