With the gut playing such an important role in your chronic inflammation and therefore your Endometriosis, your bowel movements are a powerful tool for monitoring your gut health.
Constipation, diarrhoea or alternating between the two are common Endometriosis symptoms. When you start to change your diet to help manage your Endo, it helps to develop the habit of monitoring your number two’s. And to be able to do that, you need to know a little bit more about the different types of bowel movements you can have, what healthy looks like and how the non-healthy ones affect your health.
The Bristol Stool chart is a helpful tool to learn more about healthy and unhealthy bowel movements. To be able to monitor your number two’s effectively you need to monitor what your stool feels like and what it looks like.
Let’s start with what you are aiming for: a perfect stool! When you feel the urge you should be able to hold it until you get to the toilet without too much difficulty. Then, when you sit down it should take no effort to produce a long, smooth thin sausage. You shouldn’t need to strain to move the stool.
If you are more on the constipated side of the scale, your stool will have a thicker, shorter shape, and will take some effort to push out. The more constipated you are the more difficult it is to have a bowel movement and it can be quite painful as well. The worst type of constipation is when you produce little pellet-like stools.
Besides it being very uncomfortable to be constipated, it also has an effect on your health. If you are constipated, your stool can’t move through your gut at the speed it should and ends up just sitting there. Your faeces is made up of all sorts of waste products, not just food related, but also by-products of various body processes, dead cells and hormones. If it stays in your colon, your body starts to re-absorb these toxins.
On the other side of the scale is diarrhoea. You won’t need to strain to have a bowel movement, but the more watery the stool is the more difficult it will be to hold in. The problem with diarrhoea is that it moves through your system too quickly and you can’t absorb enough nutrients from your diet.
If you develop the habit of quickly assessing your stool each time you go, you’ll be able to notice when something is off. Your diet plays a key role in your bowel movements, especially food intolerances. But stress, not enough fluids or being sick also affect them.
If you’ve had a healthy stool for a while and suddenly you’re constipated or have diarrhoea, you can take this a warning sign: did you eat something that you know you’re intolerant too? Or are you going through some stressful times?
Developing a habit of quickly checking your stools each time will give you a simple and powerful tool to keep an eye on your gut health.
If you suffer from constipation or diarrhoea regularly and would like to chat about how nutrition can help, you can book a free 30-minute Endometriosis SOS Call: https://theendometriosisnutritionist.online/endometriosis-sos-call/.