This is a post about poop

Hi! Thanks for being here. We have a bunch of new readers here this week, so I’m sending a warm welcome!

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Have an easeful Monday!

Rae

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“Bad digestion is the rood of all evil,” wrote Hippocrates in 400 B.C. Well, now. That seems a little overstated. I mean, the root of all evil?

And yet the more I learn about my own body and its systems, the more I see his point.

For years I saw an acupuncturist, Dr. E, in a little office nestled next to Golden Gate Park. The office always smelled of herbs; it had a green wall, and a glass container of raw water, and a little library of books with titles like “Healing the Body with the Mind.” Dr. E helped me immensely with chronic foot pain when no conventional doctor could, helping me move from a state of barely being able to walk a few blocks to being able to run, (or “run”) three miles. She also introduced me to ideas to which I have returned a decade later, like the benefits of eliminating gluten, diary and sugar. This was prescient advice, given my later Hashimoto’s diagnosis.

Dr. E also held beliefs that eventually led me to stop seeing her, like refusing vaccines for herself and her children. Perhaps most impactful, she planted in my mind the idea that I can heal myself if only I try hard enough, an idea that can be empowering but also insidious, placing the blame of any ailment and the weight of fixing it on the individual. I carry both gratitude for and frustration about my time working with her, and the legacy of that work is still unfolding in my life.

The bathroom in Dr. E’s office was large and bright and always had a diffuser going, earthy-smelling essential oils wafting up on wisps of steam. As if to balance out the nice smell, on the back of the bathroom door there was a poster about poop:

In a crazy twist, Tamara from Half Moon Hustle read my original post and sent me a photo of THE VERY POSTER I WROTE ABOUT, because she went to the same place and had the brilliance to take a photo of it.

Although I saw this poop poster almost every week for many years, I did not internalize the information. I believed that the consistency and look of poop could tell something about a person’s health, and at the same time the characteristics of my own poop was just incidental and did not suggest any concrete changes. I think my ability to hold these two conflicting ideas at once was a protective mechanism—I wasn’t ready yet to make the types of changes to my diet and lifestyle that would have been required to address my varying, non-normal poops. I think this is an important point about any health-related advice: we have to come to it when we’re ready. And when that is, and what it is that we are coming to, is going to be different for every person.

The topic of poop returns

Last April, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, where the immune system attacks and damages the thyroid organ. As I begin to learn about the disease and work with a Functional Medicine doctor to manage it, poop quickly took on a central role. As I discussed in more detail here, a leading hypothesis about a potential cause of Hashimoto’s (and many other autoimmune diseases) is that damage to the gut lining allows particles to seep out of the gut, contacting the immune system and causing dysfunction. The gut: the root of my autoimmune disease. The gut: where poop is made.

Functional Medicine practitioners are typically western-trained doctors who focus on evaluating and supporting whole-body systems, with a particular focus on the digestive, endocrine (hormones), circulatory and nervous systems. My Functional Medicine process started with a stool test to evaluate my gut microbiota, which showed severe gut dysbiosis, or overabundance of certain bacteria and underrepresentation of others. I did a test through Genova Diagnostics, and here’s what some of the summary page looked like:

This is just what you would expect of someone with Hashimoto’s. To address this, I began a program of dietary changes and supplementation. (This is not a how-to post, but if you are curious about the details, please leave a comment!) The most clear and obvious difference caused by the diet and supplementation regime is that I have moved from having constant constipation to having about half normal and half constipated poops. I am going to be re-testing my stool within the next couple of weeks, so poop has been on my mind. Have I been able to make a change in my gut?

Um, maybe it is the root of all evil

Once I started considering my digestion and poops more seriously, the topic seemed to appear everywhere, like when you learn a new word and then hear it constantly. I found myself reading about Enteric Nervous System (ENS), a network of neurons that controls digestion through motor function and secretion of enzymes. The ENS is sometimes called the “second brain,” because of the number and density of its neurons, and it communicates bidirectionally from the gut to brain and brain to gut (the so-called gut-brain axis). Researchers think that problems like constipation and diarrhea can cause common psychological issues like anxiety and depression, and also the other way around. About 95% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut; I happen to have low serotonin levels and have been on medication for it for the better part of two decades.

Most recently, I became captivated by the vagus nerve after stumbling across an exercise that led me to feel a noticeable relief from anxiety. I am now less shocked to discover that this nerve also connects to multiple digestive organs. Over and over, seemingly disparate body topics have been leading me back to my gut, and have focused my attention squarely on my poop.

It’s weird to say but…I will keep you posted on my upcoming poop results.

—Rae