What is a normal bowel movement?

These days our modern diet and lifestyle habits are so far removed from what was normal 100 or more years ago that many people no longer know what good health feels like. And most people definitely do not know what normal bowel movements should be like.

Healthy bowel movements should be:

• Regular – 2-3 times per day or once for every large meal
• Soft
• Mostly odour free
• Leaving the body with minimal effort
• Expelling the same amount of food as what was eaten the previous day
• Expelling food 12 – 24 hours after it has been eaten, this can be tested by eating beetroot or activated charcoal with your breakfast. Your next morning’s stool should be pink if you had beetroot or black if you had charcoal. If you pass food too fast you may not be absorbing a optimal amount of nutrients. If you pass your food too slowly the food wastes sit in your gut too long and has more time to putrefy.

If the above does not describe you, your bowels are more sluggish than they should be, and you probably have less energy than you could have! If this is the case, do not despair, follow the advice on this website and your health care practitioner and you will see an improvement.

To those who have struggled for years with bowel troubles and have lost hope of being healed, be encouraged by the words of Dr John Harvey Kellogg, one of the top digestive doctors from the early 1900s:

‘Every person who undertakes to combat constipation should know at the start that his efforts, if thoroughgoing and persistent, may be expected to win ‘¹

 

 

 

¹John Harvey Kellogg, Colon Hygiene: Comprising new and important facts concerning the physiology of the colon and an account of practical and successfull methods of combating intestinal inactivity and toxaemia, 1915, p203