Do our elimination habits provide us insight into what we are like as a person? Loose? Stuck up? Hard to come out? Free flowing? A little rough around the edges?

While it may not match our personality traits exactly, our stool and how it moves through our body does tell us a lot about how our system reacts, eliminates and can provide clues as to what is going on when we simply don’t feel the best.

From One End to the Other – How Should I Be Eliminating? 

Some poop researchers used trackable capsules swallowed by healthy and non-healthy participants and found out the average time for a healthy participant is 15.4 hours from end-to-end.  It’s like the equivalent of a good Netflix binge.

In our office, we tell our patients a healthy body should have a system from end-to-end that passes food through in 8 – 18 hours. 

Time to figure out your transit time – eat some corn (about a cup) and start your phone timer.  

(Hint: Also watch for more than one stool passing through with corn  in it because that will tell us some more about your body).

Our clinic record is someone that passed corn on Days 7, 8 and 9.

Where The Food Goes During That Time…

While it’s one pipe from top to bottom, food has a few stages it goes through. 

Food moves through your mouth (where saliva coats it to start digestion) and then passes into the stomach (where it gets broken down more), and then it empties within 2- 5 hours into the small intestine. At this point it should look a bit like oatmeal.

The small intestine is your own personal 22-foot long conveyor belt. (Note: that’s the distance from the 3-point line in a basketball court to the basket.) This is where over the next 2-6 hours that most of your water and nutrients get absorbed.

From there the small intestine dumps contents into the large intestine and colon, where the waste is turned into stool. This process averages around 10 hours.

When you get bloated 2 hours or more after a meal you know that it’s most likely in the small intestine!

What Exactly is Constipation Then?

While stool not moving, or moving without completion are both considered constipation. The word constipation can mean so many things depending on who you talk to, and what the comparison of their own system. 

Here is a semi-official list on what is considered constipation – it can be any or all of the following:

• Straining (25%+ of the time) – feeling of stuckness
• Lumpy or hard stools (25%+ of the time) – think rabbit poop
• Sensation of incomplete evacuation (25%+ of the time) – I feel like it’s not done, but not moving
• Sensation of obstruction or blockage (25%+ of the time) – worse feeling of stuckness
• Manual maneuvers to get things moving (25%+ of the time) – calling in for reinforcements
• Laxative use – support to get things moving
• Pain or bloating – the more stuck, the more back up
• Stool that is not coming out – the official recommendations say at less than 3x per week, but in our experience if you aren’t getting stool every day and you are eating every day, something is not moving well. 

If I Have Loose Stool I Can’t Be Constipated?

It depends. Loose stool can be an indicator of a blockage in the passage and stool liquefying to pass by, so loose doesn’t mean that you aren’t backed up. Try the corn test above and see what the timing is.

How Much Stool Is Enough Stool?

Hold up your arm, look at the distance from your wrist crease to elbow crease. The length of this is the equivalent of measuring all your stool stacked up together for a day. So not super scientific but gives you an idea.

Officially, in quantity terms it is 30ml of stool for every 5kg of body weight. 

An average 70kg person (150lbs) works out a half a kg (1 pound) of poop per day (like a pound of butter).

Once their bodies are regulated many people will find that they fall into a pattern – food in, stool out – eliminating up to 3x per day.

Is There Such a Thing as Missing your Poop Window?

The MMC (migrating motor complex) is the signalling system from the brain to the intestine that keeps the conveyor belt moving. For many people the MMC brings the signal to eliminate in the morning on rising (or after a cup of coffee) as everything has moved towards the exit at night.

Some patients claim that if they miss their poop window, that they won’t get the signal again until the next day. 

It’s generally not that the window of time has passed, but instead that the stress signalling system has been up-regulated and the need to poop has been shut down. (Read more about that here: link to Blog 4 – Stress and Gut.) Your body needs to wait until it can relax again for the stool to be pushed through the system.

Why Does Fiber Not Help Me?

Everyone at some point has been told to take fiber for their constipation! But just like no medication or health plan is the same for everyone – fiber is not the answer for everyone. 

Who fiber works for – people who don’t eat any fiber – think low food, low vegetable and fruit intake (think grandma – so yes prune juice and fiber supplements can help her). 

However, in the average person who eats vegetables and fruits, this often isn’t the case. In fact, because fiber absorbs more water, if you tend to be someone who is under hydrated this can make the stool even harder to get out. Think cemented in there.

If fiber isn’t working for you, it’s a bigger clue to what is going on inside your system. 

You are not alone! We are a planet filled with constipated people. (It’s at least 1 Billion folks with the same issue as you).

Want to investigate further, start with our Gut Health Checklist. 

Research Resources

• Bhate PA, Patel JA, Parikh P, Ingle MA, Phadke A, Sawant PD. Total and Segmental Colon Transit Time Study in Functional Constipation: Comparison With Healthy Subjects. Gastroenterology Res. 2015 Feb;8(1):157-159. doi: 10.14740/gr642w. Epub 2015 Feb 14. PMID: 27785288; PMCID: PMC5051174.

• Jamshed N, Lee ZE, Olden KW. Diagnostic approach to chronic constipation in adults. Am Fam Physician. 2011 Aug 1;84(3):299-306. PMID: 21842777.

• Lee YY, Erdogan A, Rao SS. How to assess regional and whole gut transit time with wireless motility capsule. J Neurogastroenterol Motil. 2014 Apr 30;20(2):265-70. doi: 10.5056/jnm.2014.20.2.265. PMID: 24840380; PMCID: PMC4015195.