Chronic constipation has nothing to do with fiber
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[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sonya and I'm on a mission to fix constipation and bloating for everyone. And I'm starting this series with a question that might seem basic, what is constipation. But I promise you by the end of this video, you're going to understand your body better than any Google search could have helped you and probably any doctor has ever.
Because here's the thing, constipation isn't just an inconvenience. It's not just, oh, I haven't pooped. It's your body sending you a signal that one or more systems aren't functioning properly. And until you understand the systems that have to break down to lead to constipation, you'll never be able to fix it, and you'll always be stuck in a cycle of just managing the symptom.
So let's go deep. So the textbook definition is less than three bowel movements per week, but that is a horrible threshold. In functional medicine, we consider it to be at least one complete bowel movement per day. And when I say complete, I mean that you feel as. Sense of emptiness [00:01:00] and evacuation at the end of that.
So there are a lot of people who are having a bowel movement every day and don't consider themselves constipated, but it might be like little pellets or really feeling incomplete, a very small amount, and they feel still heaviness afterwards. So that means their entire colon has an empty, and that's still considered constipation, even if you're having one bowel movement every day.
To be honest with you as well, if you rely on your morning coffee, which is a stimulant laxative, and without it, you can't have a bowel movement, that's also constipation. Now, there are some other nuances as well. I don't know if you're familiar with the Bristol stool chart, but there are basically.
Different ways your poop can be shaped and formed, right? So different consistencies. It can be a nice formed log. It can be mushy and require a lot of wiping. It can be really small, dry pellets. Those are also an indication of the health of your bowels. In an ideal world, we want it to be fully formed and requiring [00:02:00] very little wiping.
The last little bit is effort. If you require a lot of straining, a lot of pushing, you're prone to hemorrhoids, you get bleeding sometimes. That's also a sign of an unhealthy digestive tract. And then actually lastly, we also wanna consider transit time. So transit time is just the amount of time that it takes for food to get from your mouth through the exit door.
And it's really important that it's not in there for too long because it can ferment. And that fermentation process can lead to the development of a negative bacterial species. So it's very easy actually to test your transit time at home. You can do the beet or corn test. So you can either eat some raw beets or some boiled corn in the cob, and then just write down the time that you see that, that you have eaten it.
Then you kind of have to look at your poop and see how many hours, how many days pass to your poop, either turning purple from the beets or you seeing whole corn kernels in your poop. So if it's longer than 24 hours, that's a [00:03:00] sign of a very backed up colon, a blow transit time. That means the muscle contractions and the overall amount of time it takes for food to get from entrance to exit is too long.
We want it to be ideally. 14 to 16 hours, but not more than 24 for sure. If it's 48 hours or three days, we seriously need to talk because you need to address your bowel. Now by these criteria, a lot of people are like well shocked because they don't realize until now that just quite how constipated they are.
Right? So a lot of people rely on their morning coffee or do have a bowel movement every day, but it feels extremely incomplete. Or a lot of people come to me and they're having a bowel movement every two, three days. Some people once a week. Obviously the latter is an obvious sign of constipation, but we don't realize is the first ones are also constipation.
Now, this is where I'm gonna go beyond what you usually see online and kind of dive deep into constipation, because what I see in my practice is that constipation most of the [00:04:00] time isn't even a colon issue. That's where we think the issue is, because obviously that's what we know to hold our poop. By the time you're having constipation, there's been a cascade of systems breaking down.
So let's get into it. So in functional health, we call this the metabolic chaos cascade, meaning that there are several functional systems upstream that have malfunction and that cascaded down to then presenting as a constipation symptom. Now, a lot of people who have the exactly same. Symptoms had a different starting point.
In the cascade. The symptoms just present where your weakest spot is the end of that cascade. So for example, two people could have the same root cause, but for one of them, the final outcome of that eczema and for another person, constipation. And on the flip side, two people could be constipated, but have a completely different.
Initial problem that created that cascade down the line. So let's get into a few potential cascades that could be causing [00:05:00] your constipation Cascade one starts with stress. It is stress nerve motil slowdown. So chronic stress, and that's not just mental and emotional stress, which is what we instinctively think of as stress.
That can be environmental stress, toxin stress. Our body doesn't differentiate between the different types. Of stress. It all kind of goes into this big stress bucket. So our body holds the stress bucket of all the stressors it takes in. That can be microplastics, that can be your boss yelling at you. That can be some old trauma from your childhood.
That can also be an infection from a piece of chicken that you ate. So all of this goes into a stress bucket. If too many items end up filling up the stress bucket, the stress bucket overflows, and that creates this metabolic cascade that we're talking about now that eventually presents itself as constipation.
So these chronic stressors, mental, emotional, biochemical, environmental, all hit our HPA axis, and that [00:06:00] shifts our nervous system. Them into a sympathetic state, which is a state of survival. When that happens, your vagus nerve, which is your master controller of gut motility, gets suppressed, and you're migrating motor complex, which is a wave-like contraction that clears out all the food debris from your intestines.
Once you're done eating either slows down or stops your peristalsis, which is these muscle contractions that move stuff through your digest. Have tract closed down. So food starts to sit longer in the colon and your colon does its job, which is absorbing water from the food that's sitting there, and then the stool hardens and becomes really difficult to pass, which constipation.
This is what nobody talks about. Stress also suppresses your secretory IGA A, which is your gut's immune system. And when SIG A drops our mucosal barrier weakens. And bad bacteria start to overpopulate the terrain, which can also create the perfect environment for parasites or fungi [00:07:00] to make a home for themselves.
And those infections become a new source of stress, which even further suppresses that. Sig A, creating a vicious cycle of mucosal barrier destruction, immune system suppression, and the proliferation of these infections or organisms that aren't supposed to be there. And that cycle deepens and gets worse and worse, slowing your motility down, suppressing the good populations.
And without the good populations, you're not able to produce the required George chain fatty acids that help you have that bowel movement. So it just kind of becomes this endless, vicious. Circle. So this ties in with a second cascade. The infection, inflammation, motility, slowdown, cascade. Gut pathogens like h pylori, pathogens, canida, or other fungus.
Bacterial overgrowth can live in your gut for years without being detected. They keep your body in a state of chronic. Low grade stress, h pylori specifically also really suppresses stomach acid production, making you [00:08:00] unable to kill off the other incoming pathogens, and you're also not fully digesting your food, so it gets into your small intestine and ferments there and sometimes makes it to your colon undigested, and then cuties while it's.
In your colon, especially proteins, and that further feeds the opportunistic bad bacteria that have overgrown feeds the dysbiosis and weakens the mucosal barrier. That's why often people who are on a very high protein diet but have dysbiosis have really terrible smelling gas. I have a hard time digesting that protein.
All of this further slows down transit time. Parasites are actually a huge and overlook cause of constipation. I've had clients that came to me that have been struggling for 10 plus 15, 20 years with chronic constipation and we ran a comprehensive GI map, which is a DNA panel that helps us identify what organisms are living in the stool, and they came up positive for paras.
Which has just been undetected for a long time, [00:09:00] and parasites can survive in your body unchecked for decade, and once we cleared up the parasite, the rest also started falling into place as a cascade because the parasite was driving a lot of that inflammation and mucosal barrier damage. Then we, of course, had to rebuild the good guys, but their constipation started resolving thereafter.
I know it sounds quite simple, but once you identify your individual root. Cause and starts to systematically address it, it actually becomes much simpler than people realize. So the third cascade is the dysbiosis that has been created from all of it leading to a lack of short chain fatty acids leading to further motility slowdown.
So your colon relies on short chain fatty acids, especially buty. That's produced by the good bacteria in your gut. Butyrate is the primary fuel source for your colon cells. It feeds the lining, reduces inflammation, maintains mucosal barrier integrity, and stimulates peristalsis when you loses butyrate [00:10:00] producing bacteria from stressors like antibiotics.
Chronic stress, poor diet, infections, surgery, butyrate, production drops, and your colon cells are literally starved of their fuel. Inflammation increases, the mucosal barrier deteriorates, and then motil slows. And because the beneficial bacteria that produce butyrates are depleted, the space that they usually take up is then taken up by opportunistic bacteria, which have been associated with.
Slower motility and constipation through stool testing to population comparison. And this is why taking random probiotics doesn't usually help people because the terrain that the bacteria are not able to survive in isn't being addressed. So it's like throwing seeds onto concrete. They just simply can't make a home.
They can't stay. They can't grow because the home is on fire. You can't paint the walls in a house that's. Still on fire. Now. The fourth cascade is the liver bile colon cascade. Now your liver process [00:11:00] toxins in two phases. Phase one converts fat soluble toxins into intermediate. Now, phase two conjugates those intermediates so they can be eliminated through bile, urine, and sweat.
Now when phase two is sluggish from nutrient deficiencies, glutathione. Lesion mold exposure, heavy metals, or just years of toxic burden, two things happen. First, the toxic intermediates build up, which are actually more toxic than their original form. Second, bile quality deteriorates. Bile becomes sluggish, thick, and difficult to move through your digestive tract.
And this really matters because bile is a direct stimulator of your peristalsis. So sluggish bile directly results in sluggish colon. And if your body can't conjugate and eliminate estrogen through bile, you get estrogen recirculating, which puts you into estrogen dominance, which is driven further by an enzyme called beta glucuronidase, which is produced by those dysbiotic bacteria I mentioned earlier.
And estrogen dominance creates a whole cascade of its own [00:12:00] PMS heavy periods weight gain and makes bile even more thick and sluggish. So it's another vicious cycle. And lastly, we have the fifth. Cascade, environmental, liver, gut cascade, heavy metals, pesticides, mold. These are what we call hidden stressors.
You can't see them, you can't feel them directly, but they're replacing a constant toxic burden on your liver and detox pathway. And when your body's detoxification system is overwhelmed, everything downstream suffers. Bile quality, gut lining, integrity, immune function, hormone metabolism, and the gut as the body's largest.
Immune organ and elimination pathway directly suffers as a consequence. Now you understand why drink more water and eat more fiber is such a frustratingly narrow piece of advice because it could address an issue in just one of the potential five or six cascades that are leading to constipation. Not to mention that all these systems are interconnected.
It also explains why so many women [00:13:00] have tried everything and then nothing works. They've tried the probiotics, the fiber, the. Supplements, the elimination diets, but none of these have ever actually investigated the cascades upstream that are leading up to the constipation. Nobody looks for parasites, h pylori, liver congestion, butyrate producers, and an environmental toxic load.
So when I work with a client, we always start out with a comprehensive health history where we look at when did this actually start? Was there a specific event that kick started it? Was it a round of antibiotics? Was it food poisoning? Was it. Surgery. Was it a stressful life event? Maybe mold exposure at home or heavy metals or travel?
These aren't random questions. It's detective work. 'cause we try to find what it was that started this cascade to begin with and that something is always findable. And I want you to understand the real cost of constipation because it goes so much further than just. Discomfort. So there's toxic recirculation.
When stool sits in your [00:14:00] body for a while, your body reabsorbs the toxins that were meant for the exit toxins Your liver had already processed for the exit. So your overall toxic load increases as the toxins are recirculating once again in your body. Then there's. Estrogen dominance because estrogen mainly leaves your body through the colon.
So if your poop is sitting there, you're reabsorbing estrogen. That's what often creates that imbalance between estrogen and progesterone for women. And this leads to PMS, heavy periods, weight loss, that's very resistant to dieting and other efforts of yours. So this often results. In PMS, weight loss resistance, heavy periods, lots of cramping during periods, and hormonal acne.
Many women start treating these symptoms separately, not realizing that their acne is driven by their constipation, gut imbalances. Then there's microbiome degradation because when stool sits around for a while, it favors the development of opportunistic negative bacteria rather than the good guys. That we want more of.
So sadly, the longer you're [00:15:00] constipated, the worse your microbiome gets, and the worse your microbiome gets, the more constipated you get. Then there's immune suppression because 70 to 80% of your immune system is in your gut. So chronic gut dysfunction creates immune dysfunction that. You get sick more often, makes you more susceptible to diseases.
And lastly, brain and mood, because a lot of people don't realize, but 95% of your serotonin is produced in your gut. So gut dysfunction in para serotonin production, which affects your sleep, your mood, your motivation, and ironically motil itself because your serotonin is actually a driver of your migrating motility complex.
So I hope by now you're understanding what I'm saying. Constipation is a. Systemic problem that comes from different bodily systems. But having said all that, don't worry, I'm not going to just leave you without any action steps. But I do have to be honest with you that the action steps usually really depend on what your body needs because it, we need to know which cascade it's coming from and we can kind of only get that from [00:16:00] functional lab testing.
But I'll still provide you with some foundational recommendations that everyone can benefit from. But what everyone can start today with. Is doing an at home transit test with the beets in the corn, like I mentioned, to understand what your transit time is in the first place. Secondly, start paying attention to the form, completeness and consistency of your stool and not just frequency.
Begin a basic vagal tone routine. It just involves hummings. Singing, gargling, creating any sort of vibration in the back of your throat. Breath work also works, but basically you just wanna be activating the back of your throat, which is where your vagal tone passes through. Now, snacking. No more snacking.
We're in a culture of snacking, and I am not saying like you have to be 100% rigid about it, but 90% of the time you should just be having three meals per day spaced out by four to five hours. That's because the migrating motor complex. Takes about three to four hours after your meal to turn on and actually create that wave to clear out the leftover food [00:17:00] debris.
So if you're eating every two to three hours, it never gets a chance to switch on, and food bits will sit and ferment and create dysbiosis in your gut. So no snacking. So unfortunately, some of these basics don't resolve it, and you do want to resolve your constipation. Ideally, you need to do some functional lab testing to understand what it is that is creating this.
Cascade inside of you specifically. So this is stool testing like GI Map or GI Zoomer to really get to the bottom of what's going on in your gut. So I'm gonna be making an entire series on constipation, all the possible root causes, all the remedies, what work? What's bullshit, and I'll be sharing all of that here on my channel.
So subscribe and follow along if you wanna get more of this. And if you are just really done with dealing with your constipation and you're ready to get to the bottom of your cascades and what's going on in your body and you want to take some functional tests. If you're just done dealing with your constipation, you're ready to heal and get some functional lab tests done to figure out what's going on in your gut, then I'm dropping a link [00:18:00] below in the description to book a three discovery call and understand if I'm the right person to help you get there.
If not, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
