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If you are expecting your doctor to tell you if you are constipated or not, his answer may be no if you have a bowel movement every three days. Discover what you need to know about whether you are constipated or not.
Article:
Most doctors don't ask you if you are constipated. This is the first thing that they should ask you. They may think it is not important to have a bowel movement every day. In fact, some doctors think its ok when you have 2-3 bowel movements a week. They only get concerned when you only have one bowel movement in 5 or 7 days.
If you have one, two or more bowel movements a day, you may still be constipated. If you are leaving fecal matter along your colon walls, this is constipation. Constipation is when you don't remove all of the fecal matter that is passing through your colon daily.
If you sit on the toilet and have to stay there over 5-10 minutes pushing, straining, or paining to have a bowel movement, then you are constipated. Straining to have a bowel movement, overtime, leads to hemorrhoids, varicose veins, or fissures. Your doctor needs to tell you that you are constipated, if you take more than 3 or 4 minutes to have a bowel movement.
Is your doctor telling you, if you eat three meals a day, then you should have three bowel movements each day? The first bowel movement should take place in the morning when you wake up or soon after you have had breakfast. Typical you should experience the urge for a bowel movement 20-30 minutes after you eat. The other bowel movements should be during the day and just before bedtime.
In her book, Healthy Digestion the Natural way, 2000, D. Lindsey Berkson defines constipation as...
"A healthy person should have at least one bowel movement a day. Medical textbooks state that individual variation goes from several times a day to several times a week. However, having worked with people for many years on improving their health, I would define constipation as not having one to several daily bowel movements, or having too long an intestinal-transit time."
If you eat three meals a day and only have one or two bowel movements, then the second and third meal are backing up in your colon and staying there too long.
When your fecal matter stays too long in your colon, water and toxins are pulled out of the fecal matter and absorbed through your colon wall. This makes the fecal matter stiff and hard. Your colon will now have a hard time moving this hard fecal matter through its sections and out the rectum. The result is puffing and straining in the bathroom.
To complicate matters, if you are not eating enough fiber or drinking enough water, your fecal matter in the colon will be even harder and more difficult to move through your colon.
The thing to remember and use as a guide is that you need to have at least two bowel movements per day, if you are eating three meals a day. If you are having only one, then just start eating more fruits and vegetables to get the fiber. Just because your doctor tells you its ok if you have a bowel movement every three day, this does not make it ok. You need to take charge of your health and make sure you have bowel movements everyday.
