If you go on a strict starvation diet for let’s say a week, will you still continue to poo in any form. I have read articles about people that have gone to special “cleansing” camps in which they only had water for a week and they said that they continued to poo our some stringy substance the whole time. The camp sponsorers claimed that this was the cleansing of the colon from meat trapped for years. I doubt that is true but what about burning your own fat. Does that produce anything?
Well, after a week, you would probably still be pooing.
After a month, you wouldn’t. Once your colon was empty, and you wern’t putting anything in, there wouldn’t be anything to come out.
See, with a starvation diet, your body will burn some fat, but also a great deal of muscle. In addition, your body will only burn what it needs to survive. Being that poo is all the excess stuff that your body doesn’t need, burning your own mass doesn’t generate any poo.
Can anyone address this claim?
In addition to remnants from the food you eat, poo consists largely of dead bacteria (up to 1/3 by dry weight), and used up blood cells that have been taken out of your system. So you’d still have stuff coming out even while fasting. The leftover meat theory is crap. Pun intended.
Well, I don’t know if it’s crap per se - my cousin is a physical therapist that specilizes in colon clensing. According to her, the North American diet typically doesn’t contain enough fiber and does contain too much fat (this seems like a reasonable supposition.) This allows stuff to build up in the colon, and colon clensing can help get it out. Basically, she has a machine with a single headed, double tube type mechanism. Insert said tube into your butt, pump - slowly - warm water up said butt while doing abdominal massage, switch directions and suck all the poo filled water out. She has reported getting hardened dried fecal matter out of people with particularly bad diets (eg no fruits and vegies, all fast food) and apparently the people report feeling better - so much so that they continue to see her. I think she charges about $400 for a session. (Hey - it is poo.)
Anyhow - the clensing farm stuff does seem like a crock. Poo that has been trapped in the colon for years looks like dried poo - not the meconium-like substance the participants were reporting. (If you must know, I’ve done a clense diet, and I’m essentially veggie - AHEM - TMI, TMI, TMI…
I got similar results. Anyhoo - no meat around to have built up.
Maxim magazine had a very thorough article on this a few years ago focussing mostly on the scatalogical details rather than the health benefits. The staffer went to a camp in Thailand for 21 days. He did report the stringy stuff, and that it continued most of the trip. I think he said it eventually tapered off, no pun intended. His diet was limited to liquids after the first day. One of the pleasant side effects was that he lost a few inches around the gut, which is some anecdotal evidence of junk being stored or trapped there. I think one of his buddies passed a coin he swallowed, perhaps several years earlier. (the article did mention a coin, I don’t recall when they said he swallowed it).
Quackwatch article on colon cleansing:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/gastro.html
I love the reader response at Joe Mahma’s link:
It really doesn’t get much better than that.
Well, I’m not saying one way or the other if the colon clensing works - I’m just suggesting that the poo generated by the folks at the camps is not actually years of undigested meats.
Furthermore, after a month of fasting, I still think a person would not be pooing.
Highschool wrestlers do all sorts of interesting things to lose weight. A couple years ago several fellows went on all-liquid diets, and were completely wasted by practices (there simply aren’t enough calories in a couple stomachfuls of fruit juice and milk to allow a young man 3 hours of medium to intense exercise), but they DID lose a great deal of weight. One fellow was in the 189-pound class in preseason, 171 for the first match, and 160 thereafter (you can only drop one class in a season; it’s to keep wrestlers from killing themselves). He gradually went back to solid food and protein shakes (ewwww) and gained muscle mass suddenly.
I wonder how well your large intestine’s e coli are doing after a month of no solid food.
“and used up blood cells that have been taken out of your system.”
It’s called ‘billirubin’, I do believe we have a doper by a name like that.
No you wouldnt. the bacteria would have nothing to feed on so there would be nowhere near as much bacteria in there, and no need to poo as the bacteria would remain at a low level.
Didn’t Cecil address this impacted meat poo issue some time ago?
Why yes he did!
So that’s what they mean by $hit for brains?
I was just about to say, sounds like he had his head up his ass. 
Here’s a twist on the OP – what about people who are fed intravenously, due to stomach cancer, vegetative state, etc.? They get enough nutrition to survive, but do they still poo?