Eating a healthy diet is a great start for overall well-being, but it doesn’t guarantee regular bowel movements. Even with an excellent eating plan, you may still become constipated due to the many factors affecting your digestive system. This common issue can be frustrating and uncomfortable, leaving you wondering why your healthy choices aren’t translating to smooth bathroom visits.
While fiber-rich foods are often touted as the solution to constipation, sometimes they’re not enough on their own. Factors like hydration, stress levels, embodied trauma, medications, environment, and physical activity also impact your digestive health. Understanding these interconnected elements can help you address the root causes of constipation and find effective relief.
How Healthy Pooping Supports Detoxification
When you poop consistently, you help eliminate waste products and toxins that can build up in your digestive tract. Stool contains metabolic waste, toxins, and other substances that your body needs to expel.
Consistent bowel movements help maintain a healthy balance of gut bacteria and prevent the overgrowth of harmful bacteria. Healthy pooping can also reduce bloating and inflammation in your gut, allowing your body to more efficiently absorb nutrients and eliminate toxins.
If you are constipated, existing toxic conditions can worsen. Relieving constipation is an important step to detoxifying your body.
Root Causes Of Constipation
Constipation is a symptom of one or multiple root causes. Understanding these causes is helpful for effective management and prevention.
The Easy Ones – Diet And Water Intake
Insufficient fiber intake is a common culprit. Aim for 25-30 grams of fiber daily from whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Highly processed foods can worsen constipation, so eat fresh foods and avoid additives.
Related reading: The Return of Fiber Trend is Good for Bowel Cleansing
Hydration is equally crucial. Water helps fiber do its job and and helps tp prevent you becoming constipated. Aim for 8oz every hour for the first 8 hours of your day… or search for an online water calculator to input your personal factors.
The Most Overlooked – Stress, Anxiety, And Trauma
Stress can significantly impact your bodily functions, particularly digestion and elimination. When you’re under intense stress, your body’s fight-or-flight response kicks in, which can disrupt the digestive process. This reaction may cause the muscles in your intestines to tighten and contract erratically, often resulting in constipation. If you’re constantly under stress, you may become accustomed to it. Personally, I had normalized my chronic stress and accepted the downstream results as the cost of doing business. Hustle culture was killing me.
Embodied trauma, where past traumatic experiences are held physically in the body, can contribute to constipation. Trauma can change how your body perceives and reacts to internal cues, including those related to bowel movements. I used to notice tight spots in my abdomen when I rubbed my belly. Just as shoulder tension can trigger headaches, the tension in my gut was causing a blockage. Recognizing these emotional and psychological factors is essential for understanding and addressing these “invisible” causes of constipation.
Structural Issues – Fascia, Posture, and Muscle Tone
Your body’s structure plays a role in digestive health. Poor posture can compress abdominal organs, impeding digestion and bowel movements. Maintain good posture throughout the day, especially when sitting for long periods. Better yet, balance sitting with standing and walking.
Pelvic floor dysfunction can cause chronic constipation. If the muscles that support your pelvic organs and control bowel movements are too weak, or too tense and tight, the colon cannot push out your poop. Symptoms include straining during bowel movements and feeling incomplete evacuation.
Fascia, the connective tissue surrounding your muscles and organs, can impact digestion when tight or restricted. Learning to release and reshape fascia through compression, movement, and stretching can improve circulation and digestion.
Somatic Fusion Exercises Strengthen And Energize The Gut
Somatic fusion exercises offer a powerful multimodal approach to relieving chronic constipation. These targeted movements integrate mind-body awareness to optimize gut function, release tension, balance your nervous system, and revitalize your digestive meridians.
Related reading: Foods to Boost Energy Before and After Exercise
Regulate The Autonomic Nervous System
Somatic exercises can help regulate your autonomic nervous system, particularly the vagus nerve. This nerve plays a vital role in gut health and digestion. By stimulating your vagus nerve, you promote a state of relaxation conducive to improved elimination. Regular practice can enhance gut motility and support detoxification.
Release Embodied Tension In The Gut
Stress and tension often manifest physically in your gut area. Somatic exercises are designed to release this tension, improve muscle tone in your gut area, can enhance overall digestive function an dprevent you becoming constipated.
“Wake Up” And Energize The Gut Meridians
In traditional Chinese medicine, specific energy pathways or meridians are associated with the stomach and intestines. Energizing these meridians through movement can positively impact your gut health. The Intestine Pump exercise, where you repeatedly draw the lower abdominal muscles in and up, can help stimulate digestion, release gut tension, and increase blood flow to your gut.
Conquering Constipation is a course that teaches Somatic Fusion techniques specific to relieving chronic constipation by ensuring your digestive system functions optimally.
Note: When you sign up use the code SANDY at checkout for a generous discount.
Healthy Diet But Still Constipated? – Somatic Fusion Addresses The Root Causes Of Constipation For Long Term Relief
You’ve adopted a healthy diet, yet constipation persists. Somatic Fusion offers a solution by targeting the root causes of this miserable condition.
Somatic Fusion techniques address:
- Stress or trauma-induced muscle tension in the gut
- Poor posture affecting digestive organs
- Low energy or dissociated gut
- Inefficient breathing patterns
Somatic Fusion combines specific movements, breathing exercises, and mindbody awareness practices to retrain your nervous system and gut.
You can achieve long-term relief from constipation. Somatic Fusion complements your healthy diet, and detoxification, by ensuring your digestive system.
Jon Simmons
Jon brings 30 years of holistic experience teaching and practicing yoga, partner acrobatics, and hapkido to help students thrive and love their body. Jon writes about relief from chronic constipation at GetPooping.com
SOURCES
Toxins From the Gut
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4566437/
Resolution of Severe Gastric Dysmotility Disorder With Acupuncture
