What would be the best way to change the timing of my bowel movements?
For the past 2 or 3 years, its basically been at the same time every day which was fine when I was in high school. Now that I am in college, I can’t stand the idea of using a public bathroom and hate having to travel the ten miles back to my apartment just to use the bathroom.
Is there any way to push the timing right when I wake up or late at night?
Easiest way is to change your eating habits and if you have to go while you’re at college, just go instead of driving ten miles. People do it all the time .
You mean you’re one of those mutants that goes once a day? Ha-ha! I go three times before noon, bubba! How do you think I know so much. It’s bathroom reading!
All joking aside (and however fast this might go to IMHO) my sister and I were talking about this last night. I had no idea until a few years ago that people didn’t dump repeatedly over the course of a day. She was telling me last night that her old boyfriend only went once a day. It shocked me a smidge, I can tell you.
As for the OP and the intent of the post all I can say is, “Push?” I say that with only small bit of tongue in cheek. Don’t you usually go after a big meal? When’s your once-a-day? Inquiring minds want to know!
PS. No worries.
Yuki: Well that’s the thing. Is there any specific foods I should be eating that will help me out? And if I just went at school, then I wouldn’t need to change the timing really, it;s just that public bathrooms arent’s exactly my favorite place to take a crap.
MonkeyMensch: Multiple times in one day?!? You must be crapping out full meals :). But its usually right around midday, basically the worst time, since I have class or am in between classes.
Should I basically eat food that will help along the process (“dried plums”, metamucil, etc) or what?
I must be a freak, then. I go, at average, once every other day. Sometime more frequent, sometime less. I almost never go more then once on any given day, though.
Also, my. . . ahem. . .movements are not at all regular. There’s no rhyme or reason to when I have to go, and if I have the urge at an inopportune moment, I can almost always delay it by several hours without discomfort. The urge just . . . goes away. . . after a while.
So, are my irregular, sparse bowel movements an anomoly? Do I belong in the sideshow next to the bearded lady and the human pretzel? Are my bowels silently crying out to me for regularity? Enquiring minds want to know.
When I used to eat Wendys for lunch and a greasy dinner I’d go to the bathroom several times a day. A year ago I quit all those bad habbits (mostly b/c it got too expensive) and now eat about half the calories (~2000 a day) as I did then. The result? I go to the bathroom once every 3 days on average…it’s kind of odd at first when you think “hey it’s been 3 days, what the heck is wrong with me?” but I guess it’s ‘normal’. Hopefully one day I can re-afford the all-you-can-eats again!
You can try consuming copious amounts of caffeine combined with laxatives.
That should pretty much get you to go on demand.
Or you can take a long plane flight somewhere. My digestive system takes about 3 days to catch up to where I was before.
I find a coffee and a Marlboro will execute a BM expeditiously.
Start out your day with a smoke and a Starbucks.
How`s that for sound medical advice?
Ah, finally a question that is right up my alley (double entendre gleefully intended).
I work with patients with spinal cord injuries and one of the complications they face is control of their bowels. The process of getting themselves to go once a day at a particular time so that they don’t have accidents and do regularly empty their bowels despite their SCI is called bowel training or management. You can find out more about it through the link below, but basically it means using the body’s reflexes plus laxatives to get the bowel regular. I wouldn’t recommend laxatives for a healthy person, but things like caffeine and prunes (as mentioned above) and just eating (to take advantage of the gastrocolic reflex) would probably work. The key is to consistently use those things at the same time every day, not throughout the day.
http://www.spinalcord.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=21574
Info sheets 9 and 10 are especially good.