Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health [Episode #842]

This week’s topic is: Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health

This is a really important topic because a lot of us don’t want to talk about elimination. We think it’s a bit taboo or strange or embarrassing, however the truth is that a lot of us are constipated to a certain extent, and this can go on for many years and even decades. And this has a profound effect on our health, on our energy, on the rate at which we age, our skin and hair health, many, many things. And I say this from personal experience because I was constipated for a large portion of my life, and I didn’t necessarily label it as that. I didn’t talk about it very much, however it was an ongoing reality where I didn’t go frequently.

I didn’t go every day, and when I went, it was quite hard and difficult to pass through and not a healthy consistency. Along with that, I experienced a lot of anxiety and moods and acne and lower energy and all sorts of things. Then I started to figure out how to actually deal with this issue, which was keeping me from losing weight effectively. It kept me from ever really having a flat belly, even though I slashed calories, I just never felt the way I wanted to feel in my body.

And then when I figured out how to cure it, which we’re going to talk about today in very practical ways on our show, which is a multifaceted approach, it really does take looking at it from a Four Cornerstone perspective. What we’re eating, our foods, what supplements we’re taking, our body, and then emotionally making sure that we’re able to let go time and time again because that holding energy does create in the body and then spiritually as well, which we’ll get into in today’s show.

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Question Answered]

Steph – Oregon

Hello Kimberly, a bit awkward but to cut to the chase, I’ve never been regular in my pooping.  Sometimes I go 1 time a day and it’s a struggle. I understand there are many contributing factors to what could be causing constipation, but where is the best place to start…a cleanse, diet, supplements, mental? Appreciate any thoughts you can share about it.  Thank you Kimberly!

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:

• Comment below
• Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
• Follow the conversation on my Instagram
• Comment on my Facebook Page
• Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly

Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.

The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).

EPISODE SPONSORS

Anima Mundi:

Anima Mundi’s Collagen Beauty Kit is full of plant magic to help support healthy hair, skin, nails, and bones.

USE LINK: animamundiherbals.com and remember to use the code: KIM20 to get 20% off your purchase!

AquaTru:

AquaTru comes with a 30-day Money-Back Guarantee and even makes a great gift. Today my listeners receive 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier!  Just go to AquaTru.com and use code “FEELGOOD”.

USE LINK: aquatruwater.com and use the promo code: FEELGOOD

[RESOURCES]

• SBO Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• YOU ARE MORE
• Beauty Detox Solutions
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Four Cornerstone FREE PDF: Text GUIDE to +1 (855) 741-0602
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• How To Manage The Gut Shame Feeling Connection with Dr. Will Cole
• What Are Living Foods? A Guide to Nutrient Dense Eating for Better Health
• How New Research Sheds Light On The Positive Effects Probiotics Has On Bloating
• Healthy Fats: What Are They and How do they Improve Your Health

LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES

Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:01 Namaste loves and welcome back to our Thursday q and a show. Our topic today is a very important one to discuss, which is Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health. This is a really important topic because a lot of us don’t want to talk about elimination. We think it’s a bit taboo or strange or embarrassing, but the truth is that a lot of us are constipated to a certain extent, and this can go on for many years and even decades. And this has a profound effect on our health, on our energy, on the rate at which we age our skin and hair health, many, many things, and I say this from personal experience because I was constipated for a large portion of my life, and I didn’t necessarily label it as that. I didn’t talk about it very much, but it was an ongoing reality where I didn’t go frequently.

01:06 I didn’t go every day, and when I went, it was we’ll speak openly In this show it was quite hard and difficult to pass through and not a healthy consistency. Along with that, I experienced a lot of anxiety and moods and acne and lower energy and all sorts of things. Then I started to figure out how to actually deal with this issue, which was keeping me from losing weight effectively. It kept me from ever really having a flat belly, even though I slashed calories, I just never felt the way I wanted to feel in my body. And then when I figured out how to cure it, which we’re going to talk about today in very practical ways on our show, which is a multifaceted approach, it really does take looking at it from a four cornerstone perspective, what we’re eating our foods, what supplements we’re taking our body, and then emotionally making sure that we’re able to let go time and time again because that holding energy does create in the body and then spiritually as well.

02:21 In Ayurveda, we say apana, iu, this downward energy, the releasing energy is a part of healthy functionality in the body. So if it’s being obstructed, there’s some sort of imbalance that we really want to correct. It’s very, very important. And then when I started to work with different clients and all these celebrities and all these people, I realized that most people are chronically constipated to an extent, and how different life is truly how differently we feel moment to moment, day to when we are not in a chronic constipated state. So we’ll get into all of this deeper right now. I just wanted to paint that picture as we go into our show, how very important this is. And little reminder to please check out our website, my sauna.com, where you could submit questions for this very Thursday q and a show, anything you want me to answer in a bit more depth.

03:25 You can always also find me on social media at underscore Kimberly Snyder. But our website is the hub for all things other podcasts, articles, our amazing supplements and products, our skincare, our courses, our recipes, our plant-based, properly combined recipes, our meditations and more.

Question around the topic of: Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health: Hello Kimberly, a bit awkward but to cut to the chase, I’ve never been regular in my pooping.  Sometimes I go 1 time a day and it’s a struggle. I understand there are many contributing factors to what could be causing constipation, but where is the best place to start…a cleanse, diet, supplements, mental? Appreciate any thoughts you can share about it.  Thank you Kimberly!

Alright, let’s dive right in. Our question today comes from Steph, who lives in Oregon. Steph, thank you so much for being part of our community, sending you much love and gratitude to the gorgeous state of Oregon, which might be a little rainy right now, but we need the rain to create the greenery, don’t we? There’s quite a bit of rain right now in Hawaii as well, and there was over Thanksgiving where I was there, but it was passes through. The greenery is there, the air is so fresh, the sky gets blue again. So it’s all these beautiful cycles of nature. And anyways, my love, you ask.

04:27 Hello Kimberly. A bit awkward, but to cut to the chase. I’ve never been regular in my pooping. Sometimes I go once a day and it’s a struggle. I understand there are many contributing factors to what could be causing constipation, but what is the best place to start a cleanse, diet, supplements, mental appreciate, any thoughts you can share about it? Thank you, Kimberly. So Steph, thank you so much. My love sending you a big hug and we’ll get through this together. But thank you for bringing this to our attention in the community because as I mentioned, I was surprised to see that almost I’ll say many people that I worked with were constipated and they didn’t view it as a big issue that they had to deal with and they didn’t necessarily label themselves as constipated. So it just shows that we don’t necessarily put this sort of attention on this that we do to say if we have a cough or we notice that our nose is running and we deal with things more immediately.

05:32 But constipation is a huge energy drain on our bodies and on our systems. This is something that Ayurvedic medicine talks about at great length. It talks about how the core of health is really the strength of your ugly, your digestive fire, and this ability to assimilate and eliminate efficiently. It’s something that all the great yogis, I’ll not say all, but many of the great yogis have talked about, including Paramahansa Yogananda, how elimination is absolutely crucial to health. And I’m talking about physical health. I’m talking about emotional wellbeing, mental health, because what happens is if we’re constantly inputting matter, we’re constantly eating and then we’re accruing it, it just starts to build in our bodies and it reduces circulation, it reduces our blood flow gets worse, it becomes more coagulated with toxins which are picked up from the colon, from the GI tract and become recirculated in our system.

06:40 Our immunity drops, the dullness in our skin can increase, our energy goes down. We’re the sponge full of toxicity. When we are lighter, we feel that through our bodies and our minds and our lives, and there’s a different spring in our step, we just have much more vitality. There is life force prana able to circulate through our body in a way that is not possible if we are clogged with waste acids, decaying food, petrifying matter, fermented matter. We don’t want to be a garbage can in our bodies. We want to be clear and cleansed. That clarity starts to come through our eyes literally, although little capillaries feeding our eyes and all the different muscles and tissues throughout our body become clear and we see the world in a much brighter way. So to your point here, Steph, it is a multifactorial issue. And so we’re going to talk about all the different aspects here that I would like you to consider focus on when it comes to really combating this issue, long-term in your life.

1. Food Cornerstone and Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health

08:01 So let’s start with some of the more obvious ones. We’ll start with some of the food ones and then we’ll move into all the cornerstones. So firstly, we do want to make sure that we’re getting enough fiber, fiber, there’s so much research around this. I’ll link to a nice general study if you’d like to check it out on our show notes over on the website from the World Journal of Gastroenterology in 2012 found that increased dietary fiber was associated with a lower risk of constipation. Why? Because fiber creates that bulk. It creates that ability to promote regular bowel movements. It means that our food is moving through our system and fiber only comes from plant foods. So it’s interesting to note how there’s all sorts of diets out there. And I witnessed the diets. I’ve tried them myself and also my husband tries different diets.

09:03 When he met me, he became vegan for a time more recently. He’s tried the carnivore diet as you could imagine. We’re living here. We do cook in separate kitchens thankfully, but we’re living completely opposite diets. And so when he was on that diet, and he’s not on it anymore, thank goodness he’s introduced fiber again, but he was literally having a fiberless diet with dairy and meat and all the things I teach not to eat. Anyways, there’s a big difference in bowel movements. You start to see that the body isn’t able to expel waste in the same way. So if you look across your diet, you want to make sure that you’re eating plants throughout the day, starting in the morning. Sometimes we start to create more glue like situation in our bowels. If we’re just eating a bagel or bread or gluten eat foods or something more dense, it’s good to always have plants, fruit, the glowing green smoothie, things that start your system off on a really great note.

10:13 And then no matter what you’re eating, it’s a great season for soups and salads still. And also greenery that you can throw in the soups just to make sure. And same thing for dinner that you’re really having fiber continuously. And this will make sure that your GI tract is moving in a more efficient way. Another easier fix that I want to tick off the box here is hydration. When we are dehydrated, detoxification greatly slows down in the body and we aren’t able to really make sure that we are eliminating as well. There’s a different consistency to our bowel movements. We look at our waist, what we’re excreting, it tends to be more hard. It sinks to the bottom of the toilet versus when we’re hydrated and we’re having fiber, it’s softer, it’s still formed, but it tends to not sink all the way down. These are signs that our body is wanting more hydration, it’s wanting more fiber, it’s wanting more balance in our diet.

11:25 So this time of year, it’s very dry, especially for those of us in the northern hemisphere. I notice it. My house plants, I need to actually water my house plants more often because we have the heaters going at times. It’s still California, but it can be quite chilly in the mornings and so on. And so it becomes really important for us to make sure that we’re drinking enough water continuously through the day. And speaking of hubby, a great practice he does actually, you can do this with a hydro jug or a Yeti, is to get one of those bigger half gallon or gallon water containers and fill it up. Therefore, you can monitor throughout the day how much water you’re actually consuming. And that becomes a really important part of hydrating because sometimes we don’t keep track and we think we’re having more water than we actually are.

12:25 So it’s nice sometimes to measure it and to have that actual a quantifiable amount of water that we know that we’re continuously drinking. So also from a food perspective, an Ayurvedic principle for digestion is to make sure that your food is fresh. So digestion tends to slow down. If we’re eating an abundance of microwaved foods or processed foods, frozen dinners, things that come from bags, junk food. We want to furnish our body with the freshness so that the food is able to be utilized and then excreted in a really efficient way.

2. Body Cornerstone and Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health

So let’s move on to our body. And by the way, I’ll say that we have so many hundreds of free recipes for you guys on my site. Also in my earlier books, there’s a lot of recipes. So if you’re looking for ideas, if you’re wanting to expand your meals, if you’re looking to understand how to eat in a more simple but delicious and nutritious way, please check out all those recipes.

13:44 So when it comes to the body, what we have to understand is that our gut, gut health is something that constantly needs to be tended to. Again, when we think of the Ayurvedic term ugly fire, to me gut health is sort of like tending a fire. We don’t want it to get too huge, which could accrue into the opposite, which is diarrhea. We don’t want the fire to get too dimm, and then that’s where the constipation comes in. We need to keep this fire healthy and consistent. So there’s a couple supplements that I do recommend. I don’t take a lot of supplements. I admit that freely. I get a lot of medicine from food and eating really balanced meals. But I do believe because we live in this world of stress and sugar and impurities in the air and the products and water and so on and so forth, we really do need to tend to our microbiome on a daily basis.

14:48 So first of all, we want to make sure that we’re taking probiotics every day. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2014 found that certain strains of probiotics were effective in preventing and treating constipation. This is because when we have a really healthy microbiome, it’s able to perform its natural duties efficiently. And in contrast, if the state of the gut is in dysbiosis or it’s worn down or just not able, the bad bacteria has taken over, it isn’t able to do its duties and to expel and excrete efficiently. So we want to make sure every day it becomes a daily practice. Those of you that have been with me for a while know that I’m a huge fan of SBO probiotics, which perfectly aligns with our philosophy of being in harmony with nature. So all our ancestors used to get eat soil on unwashed fruits and veggies and eat some of that incredible bacterial mix, which gets through and really nourishes the body.

15:54 So please check out our website. Our SBO probiotics clinically researched, highly effective. I’ve been taking them for years. All my clients take them, and I wouldn’t recommend them to you unless I wholeheartedly believed in them. Another thing that we want to do for our gut health, speaking of our body, is to make sure that we’re moving our body. An Ayurvedic practice is to walk for about 15 minutes after we eat meals. That may or may not always be possible. I know for me it’s not possible after dinner when it’s dark and cold, and we live on the mountains here. So that’s not something I do after dinner, but I certainly walk midday and I’m walking at least five times a week. And so when we have this dynamic energy flow in our bodies, it helps to prevent stagnation everywhere. We know that walking is great for circulation.

16:53 It even brings better blood flow to the brain. It’s great for our mental health, it’s also great for our gut health, and it’s great for our digestion. It starts to bring more of that circulation to our GI tract. It’s very healthy to walk or other forms of exercise that you may enjoy. And that’s a really important part of this piece. So this puzzle. So Steph, if you found yourself to get a little bit more stagnant, maybe because it’s raining a lot in Oregon, it’s a great idea to roll out your yoga mat or try some indoor exercise activities or there’s areas that are covered inside. You can walk around or go to a gym or a dance class or whatever it is, but just to make sure that even in the winter, we’re staying completely active regularly. Now, while we’re talking about the body, another thing that I cannot help but mention because it is absolutely essential to my life today, to my life years ago to my life in general, is detoxy.

18:05 And coming from a background of constipation and still, to be completely honest with you, falling into constipation with all the measures that I take, it is kind of easy for me to get off track for different reasons. It’s how my body’s attuned. I have a high Vata constitution, which means air and wind, which means our body types tend to be a bit more prone to constipation. I also can get into that holding pattern in my mind of wanting things to be a certain way, which I know creates some of that as well. So for all these reasons, I still take detox almost every night. I skip some nights here and there. Everybody’s body’s different. Some people do well with this. This is another sauna, one of our other few supplements that is oxygen, magnesium, and stable vitamin C based. And it’s not a laxative, which is something I don’t recommend for chronic constipation because we don’t want to exhaust the bowels.

19:10 We don’t want our bowels to become dependent on an irritant to expel that would weaken the body’s processes, the natural circadian and other rhythms. We want the body to be strong. We want the body’s natural peristalsis to strengthen. So what I love about Detoxy is that it’s oxygen based, as I mentioned with the magnesium. So it relaxes any tension in the bowels and it just helps to naturally remove acids and toxins from your body. It’s really effective. I don’t think I could live without it. I used it all through my pregnancies. I use it when I’m traveling every day. I do go back and forth to Hawaii in la. I just love it. And even when I’m here, I’m actually looking it at my desk right now. I take it almost daily. So if you’ve suffered for constipation, Steph and all of you listening to this, it is an essential aid because it’s not a laxative and it’s not habit forming.

3. Emotional Wellbeing Cornerstone and Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health

20:12 And I think that we need some aids in our bodies. Ideally, we could say, oh, we don’t need anything at all. But I think we need some things that help the body function at its peak. So yes, we can try to get vitamin C for instance, from our foods and having citrus and lemons and things versus taking a vitamin C supplement. But there’s certain things like the SBO probiotics, like the detoxy, which wouldn’t be possible from food alone. It comes from supplementation. So certain things to think about there, and also I’ll mention sleeping well is always great for our regulation of our bodily systems. It also regulates our hunger, ghrelin, leptin, those hormones well, it keeps us on a good cycle, a good system, and therefore everything tends to function better, including our digestion. So now let’s move into emotional wellbeing. This is a big one because as I’ve spoken about before in a prior podcast with Dr.

21:20 Rollin McCraty, director of research from the HeartMath Institute, he says a really great quote, which is, this is where the psychological becomes the physiological meaning, our emotions, our thoughts, our feelings start to really affect how our physical body works. And one of the big factors is stress. The Journal of Neuro Gastroenterology and Motility, very long word from 2017 found that cognitive behavioral therapy had a positive effect on bowel habits and quality of life and patients with functional constipation. So they were dealing not with the physicality of the constipation, but they were dealing with emotional, mental patterns that play out in life.

22:16 And then this study goes on to talk about how stress and anxiety impact bowel function. So if we have tools to deal with stress and anxiety, whether that’s meditating, which is such a huge part of my life, taking some deep breaths, simple tools, scanning the room horizontally, grounding ourselves before we get swept up into the sensations that we feel, these big emotions and the big feelings before we get swept up into feeling or being overly reactive. What we want to do is calm ourselves, come back to a nice place of calmness and equanimity. And this really does help with long-term constipation. So you asked Steph, which one should I focus on first? All of these I think, play in together. So you don’t have to do everything perfectly, but you can start taking your SBO probiotics and your detoxy and drinking more water and working on stress management tools, for instance, concurrently, right?

23:26 It doesn’t have to be one or the other, although you may want to focus on a few and then add a few more, however that feels to you. But I do think it’s important to look at it from a physical and non-physical perspective. So when it comes to just our emotional wellbeing, when we think about the energy of the gut and how easy it is to clamp down to feel tightness in the gut, which we may not even be aware of, it’s become so normalized. What we want to do is relax the body as much as possible where that’s also in the shoulders and the tightness that we feel. We want to relax our bellies and take some nice deep breaths in and out of our bellies. And then we want to just let go more and more. Let go of trying to control life.

24:19 Let go of feeling anxiety that something isn’t a particular way or it’s not exactly how we wanted it to be, or the timeframe is a little bit different than what we originally expected. The more we stay in this free flow state of moving with life and not being so rigid about what we expect, this does translate to your gut functionality. This does translate to your bowel movements because I really do believe that our guts and our bowels emulate our energy and our attitude in life. So when we’re going with the flow and we’re moving along, guess what? There will be more flow through your gut and your GI tract and your bowel movements will flow better and everything will feel more natural and less forced and less rigid. So I think it’s a really powerful practice to just watch and to notice I’m getting rigid here or tightening.

25:24 There’s a tightening in my jaw, there’s a tightening in my shoulder, which probably means there’s tightening in my belly. And then just to consciously release and relax your body, focus on that with your full attention and then move on to the next thing or proceed with life or write that email or do whatever we have to do. But the more loose we can stay, the better.

And at the end of the day, this crosses from emotional wellbeing to physical body. Cornerstone is to stretch. And I talked about this last week on our, or was it earlier this week perhaps? Yes, it’s been a long week on our solo cast about how important stretching is because everything is energy. And so if we’re able to release more when we’re stretching and we’re able to open the body and open the mind, this will definitely help to open the bells as well. We don’t want energy to build, which helps us, keeps us in that cycle of feeling like we have to control things and then clamp down, and then our bowels become more difficult and arduous.

4. Spiritual Cornerstone and Chronic Constipation: How To Improve your Body’s Elimination Efficiency for Better Health

26:31 So our last cornerstone is spiritual growth. And I think this plays in with what I was just talking about with stress. When we’re more connected within to the stable center within us, what happens is that we become less reactive and susceptible to the ups and downs of life. We create more equanimity, and that’s what our guts really need is regularity to be regular. So akin to waking up the same time eating our meals at the same time, going to sleep at the same time. If we’re able to create that nice sense of regularity in our nervous systems, then our bowels will be more efficient. This means that no matter what’s going on in the news, no matter what’s going on, drama in your personal life or with your friends or whatever, there is this stable place inside of you known as the true self. And you can touch that in stillness and nature and meditation, and you want to connect to it regularly during the day.

27:31 Sometimes for me, that means just placing my hands on my heart and knowing that there’s this place inside of me that is a solid sanctuary from the rocking waves of life. And I feel that this is a part of my healing journey as well. I used to be quite anxious. I used to worry a lot. I used to have a lot of insomnia, worry about how things were going to turn out, worry about if I ate enough, too much calories, micromanaged things in my mind. And as I started to blossom spiritually, it really did go hand in hand with much more easefulness in maintaining my weight and a toned body. And I would say it’s a significant part of the journey and one that isn’t as tangible. So people tend to overlook, they tend to say, okay, I get it. The fiber, the water, the probiotics.

28:21 Yeah, I like taking things. That’s all important. But again, I just want to emphasize these other portions, the stress management, the breathing, the stillness. This creates a really stable environment inside of you. What’s going on in your mind starts to calm down. Your emotions start to be easier to navigate and to process, and then your body starts to feel more calm again. The psychological becomes the physiological. So when we start to calm ourselves, and that’s why spiritually, whether it’s prayer, meditation, knowing that we’re part of something much greater, a much higher, bigger intelligence, and that ultimately we are going to be okay, that does start to calm the body. It does start to calm the mind, and it does start to calm the gut. So once again, please check out our website for many resources from meditations to help you calm spiritually to our amazing detox and probiotics, to our recipes that are full of fiber to our elixirs, which are another great way to get more hydration in, as well as digestion friendly herbs and plants in ginger. You can make a nice simple ginger tea or peppermint or again, we have so

Kimberly: 29:40 Many on there to check out as well. So I encourage you to focus on a few of these and then maybe add some more. Be sure to spread them out over the cornerstone so we don’t get micro focused on just one cornerstone, because that’s really the best way is to take a holistic approach. I’ll be back here Monday for our next interview show. Until then, sending you so much love, so much support. Remember to reach out to me. I’d love to help you in any way that I can. Lots of love and see you back here soon. Namaste.