Carnivorous / Zero Carb Approach / Re: Bowel Movements
« on: March 16, 2011, 11:35:18 pm »Bowel movements can range in frequency and in composition for a variety of factors. Did you know you can poop during deep fasts without having eaten anything for weeks? Yep, it's true, been there done that. This happens because the body is constantly eliminating, whether its because of turnover of dead cells, intracellular waste products, or the indigestible foods you've eaten and look like their now poking out your backside (think whole corn).
In regular dietary digestion and elimination the bulk of food eaten at a single setting can strongly influence what makes it from your mouth to out your anus as waste product. Waste product bulk and consistency of a bowel movement also depends upon the absorption rate of the chime (the meal you've eaten that your stomach is starting to breakdown), which is also influenced by the frequency of your peristalsis (your intestine muscle wave contractions that speed the bulk along) and the quality of your feed (the organic, raw, blended, synthetic, crap that either have or do not have additional enzymes to speed chemical bond breakdown, or already arrive broken down and ready to go).
You can strongly change and influence all aspects of your entire digestive processes above simply by being stressed, adding stimulants to your diet and even exercise. And this doesn't even touch upon the organic composition of WHAT you decide to eat, HOW MUCH you decide to eat in a single sitting and HOW FREQUENTLY you eat. There's a lot of variables here.
I've found some principles for stabilizing digestion and having perfect bowel movements by playing around with these variables over the years.
1. Eat 100% raw
2. Eat less than 16oz of any raw meal at any one sitting, no matter what composition you eat (carnivore, vegan, omnivore).
When I do this I tend to have perfect poops (i.e. it just comes out easy shaped perfectly like a banana and I don't even need to use toilet paper--there's no residue or sludge whatsoever and no constipation or hardness--a real smooth move.) I can also have an occasional perfect poop on other diet combinations, but these are not as frequent, as repeatable or as easy as when eating on the above two principles.
As I'm a competitive soccer player, I've been surprised at how much less food I can eat and still maintain a dominating edge on the field. Of course I'm not trying to bulk up or gain massive amounts of muscle, just refining my energy for explosive power, speed and finesse. I used to eat all the time playing competitively in college, but most of what I ate ended up in the toilet (huge dumps, or many dumps per day) and I never felt as consistently good overall as I do today (as best as I can recall). My teammates on road trips used to tease me that I should just take my food and throw it in the toilet, as I didn't seem to be using any of it because I'd crap immediately after eating and sometimes I'd have to get up during a meal. The fastest transit time I noticed in that period was 90 minutes, from raw spinach--in and out and it didn't look much different in the bowl than it did on my plate. And I knew it was the same spinach I'd just eaten cause I'd not eaten any for quite some time before that.
Now I just eliminate once every day in the morning when I get up, like clockwork. Don't need coffee, tea, exercise or even happy thoughts... just one good smooth move every day.
But then again, a more constant and balanced lifestyle produces more constant and balanced results, and back in the day I was seriously against anything approaching constant or balanced... and my crap sure told the story.