Since I write a lot about nutrition and health, I mostly talk about what we put into our bodies: food, beverages, supplements, etc. Today, let’s change gears a bit and talk about what comes out of our bodies. Or, rather, what doesn’t come out. Yes, that’s right: we’re talkin’ chronic constipation. It’s the poop post!
Well, not really all the poop. Just constipation. It is beyond the scope of one lil’ post to cover all the details of what does or does not happen in the small and large intestines (and the gallbladder!) that could result in diarrhea, gas and bloating, steatorrhea (“fatty stools,” a.k.a. science-speak for oily poop), black or tar-colored stool, or even clay-colored/whitish stool. (Yikes!) If you want to learn more about different kinds of stool and what they mean, start with the Bristol stool chart. You can find modified versions of it in two of my favorite health books: Paul Chek’s How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy, and Diane Sanfilippo’s Practical Paleo, in which she paid homage to Chek’s version, which was the inspiration for her own.
We’re going to leave all the other poop stuff aside and just talk constipation. I have to assume that if you’re reading this, you experience chronic constipation or want to help someone who does. So there’s no point in me going on about diarrhea or “ideal stools” anyway. If you had either of those, you wouldn’t be wasting your time with this blog post. Unless, of course, you just enjoy my writing and would read anything I write (in which case, thanks! [And you obviously have good taste]), OR, you have an odd fascination with difficult defecation, even when you, yourself, don’t experience it (in which case…well, perhaps I’m not the blogger for you; there are lots of other people who specialize in freaky fetishes, hehheh).
