Listen to the wisdom of the colon.
This is the post that should have been titled Holy Crap.
"Holy crap...I just got dumped" is a lot better than a simple title pun on a poo story, says I.
"I just got dumped" could have also been the title for this one.
This seems right to me. Not surprising that the New Agers I've known are among the most anal-retentive control freaks I've ever met.
Is it okay if I still want a washlet?
"Regularity" spans the range from three times a day
This can't be right. For one thing, the shower drain would clog up for sure.
For one thing, the shower drain would clog up for sure.
You've got to mash it up real good.
How does one read salon now, just log into one's yahoo account? Is there a watch-this commercial for a free site pass option?
The myYahoo thing is freezing on me.
Okay, that was a dumb question. There's a tiny link in the upper right hand corner.
OK, I can't be bothered to read the article. High colonics are clearly freaky, but are these cleansing diets also total BS? I would assume so, but there's also a part of me that thinks that an annual flush-out can't but help.
are these cleansing diets also total BS
The ones that make clay ropes come out of your butt are.
Don't watch television....you're always supposed to be regular, as in normal if you don't poop once a day!!!
and also, why in america is something that costs a lot thought to be more valuable than something that is free...?
www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com
free book!
Little Old Lady: I'm sorry, son. I got this ringin' in my ears. My doctor says it could be related to my heart palpitations.
Beavis: Really? I poop too much.
Little Old Lady: Oh. Maybe you're... lactose-intolerant.
Beavis: NO, NO. I POOP TOO MUCH! Then I get tired.
are these cleansing diets also total BS?
Yes. I've seen any number of nephrologists, nutritionists, etc on tv pointing out that they are total nonsense and based on little or no scientific evidence.
Hey, Lyn. Glad you found your way here from the New York Times. It's enough to enter your blog link in the URL slot, as you seem to have done; putting it at the bottom of your post makes us think you're just coming here to advertise to us, and that doesn't make anyone feel good.
A germane link to a specific post is always welcome, and "germane" is pretty flexible. But if you're just coming to attract readers to your front page, you'll have the opposite effect.
I knew a girl once who would occasionally go on a 'cleansing diet' of nothing but sugar water for several days. Utter nonsense, in my view.
14: Sure, but they have the best infomercials.
The ones that make clay ropes come out of your butt are.
If you take that to the other thread though, it's a premium service.
are these cleansing diets also total BS?
Yes.
There's a whole subculture of detox stuff premised on the idea of purgative diets that get rid of accumulated toxins in the gut ("up to five lbs of undigested meat in one's bowels" and all that). You can even find (paging Apo) some gross photos of people holding bucketloads of what they pooped out after such a diet. Of course, any digestive system truly in the habit of accumulating toxins, old food and other gunk -- instead of actually digesting or expelling them -- would not have served us too well in evolutionary terms. I think the consensus is that the miraculous stuff that people find themselves expelling after such fasts is often bits of their own gut lining, whose cells turn over pretty quickly.
Poop obsession isn't that new. The 19th century had a bunch of examples --- I think the Kellogg brothers and their cereals were motivated by a big focus on healthy regularity and all that.
often bits of their own gut lining
Actually, my research says that the clay ropes that come out of your butt result from the pills they sell you to take during your cleanse. Pills that are filled with... clay.
Go figure.
some gross photos
Googling "mucoid plaque" will get you there.
As a normal part of my household duties I occasionally wipe my just-barely-toilet-trained grandnephew's butt. He almost never needs to have his butt wiped. The toilet paper remains white. There's got to be some kind of metaphor there.
A lot of aging is the degeneration of various sorts of sphincters and valves, you know.
What are these "toxins" that people are talking about? Women's magazines tend to mention them fairly often, as obstacles to losing weight and getting rid of blackheads, etc., but it would have to be a pretty versatile toxin to do both without killing you.
What are these "toxins" that people are talking about?
Oh, you know. Oxidants. Amyloids. Protein. White bread. Milk. Bacon.
All of which come from one magical animal.
One of my best friends has been poo-obsessed for several years now. Thanks for the tip, I think I know what to get him for his birthday now.
Please tell me that you're all familiar with the glorious "Circle of Poo" video clip from South Park:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRL4WkMDysk
I'm used to my dad being very casual talking about stool issues with my grandparents. I definitely do not want this to spread to my generation.
The Scrubs poo song is also a winner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnIk0npINiE
I do believe there are people who should be paying attention to their shit, if only because large amounts of what they eat isn't actually food. If you eat a lot of processed products and not enough green veg, you don't digest well. If you're not interested in changing your diet, a detox program might be a good idea. The thing is, most people who are doing detox are hippy organic vegans who don't even abuse alcohol anyway.
And as far as toxins go, again, yes, some of this is bullshit, but some of it really is a problem. If you have poor circulation, especially, there are pockets of lymph and other stuff that don't get processed properly. You can help it by staying very hydrated, getting your blood and sweat moving regularly, etc. But if you don't do that, it's not a bad idea to get a lymph massage every so often. I got one once when I was 17, and it was really freaky. It moves your lymph into your blood for reprocessing, and for about 24 hours afterwards, you're weak as a kitten and pissing strange colors. After that, you feel great.
Re: 30.1, particularly several of the professors where I teach need to be paying more attention to their shit. My office is next to the faculty bathroom, and I don't know what the fuck those guys are eating, but that whole hallway becomes uninhabitable for half an hour afterwards every time. Evil, evil smell. Satan must smell like that.
30: How does a lymph massage work? Does the masseur/euse dig his/her knuckles into the places where your lymph nodes are, sort of they way they attack knots in your back muscles with their elbows and so on?
31: Classically, the Goth Prince of the Nether Regions smells of brimstone, but the hot springs in Iceland don't smell as bad as a dirty and/or abused public bathroom, and their mud is yellow with sulfur.
Initial impulse: Jesus Christ this country needs another terrorist attack. As a priority-rearranging colonic, if you will.
Upon reflection: Interesting that 'your body contains hidden wisdom in your poo' goes along so well with 'you must detox, fight against that dirty body and make your poo perfect!'
Further reflection: Initial impulse is completely correct.
32.1, Yeah kinda. At the spa where I used to work, it was listed as a separate service from a muscular massage, and they focus on your stomach/groin and armpits and neck/chest. It feels sort of weird, but the effects are really obvious within a few hours. I went home and tried to help my mom unload groceries from the car, and could barely lift a jug of milk. It feels like you've been mildly poisoned, which, in a sense, you have been.
I wouldn't expect that the "pockets of lymph that don't get processed properly" would be in the same place as the lymph nodes, if it was the result of poor circulation. There's lymphatics everywhere in the body, just like the circulation.
They do the rest of you, too, but it feels obviously more like they're working your circulation rather than deep muscle stuff.
Let's hire a lymph masseur for the next UnfoggeDCon. That'll play great in the Times Style section.
I don't doubt that it might be helpful for some, AWB, but for a normal healthy adult, isn't keeping toxins from being released into the bloodstream all at once what the lymph nodes are for?
and for about 24 hours afterwards, you're weak as a kitten and pissing strange colors.
I remember parties like that.
for about 24 hours afterwards, you're weak as a kitten and pissing strange colors. After that, you feel great.
Well sure you do. You're no longer weak as a kitten and pissing strange colors!
41: Yeah, I think so. But isn't this the problem with the health discourse? As Ogged suggests, the only people to whom it would occur to do all this expensive and time-consuming upkeep are the people who probably don't have these health problems.
A friend of mine's mom became obsessed with health stuff like this after her divorce, and it's gotten insane. Monitoring her diet, doing detoxing stuff, learning new exercises, measuring fluids and juicing stuff all takes as much time as a full-time job. She can barely make time to go to work. In rebellion, my friend spent the last ten years gaining 50 pounds and smoking cigarettes. Now that she's trying to lose some of that weight and cut back on smoking, her mom has become even more annoying. I'm all for being healthy, but there's something creepy about people that obsessed with never dying.
This from the pan who told us all about his poo just before surgery.
You're forgetting your Darwin. It's entirely possible (though not necessarily true) that things could build up after 30 or 40 years and we wouldn't have evolved to deal with this naturally- by that point your genes were passed on and who cares if you die of a clogged colon.
23: Thank goodness someone called the alternative medicine folks out on this. Blaming everything on "toxins" sounds scientific, but isn't. It's like blaming societal problems on "people."
It's like blaming societal problems on "people."
Which is pretty damn hard to argue with, really.
Toxins are the opposite of vitamins, naturally.
Massaging the toxins from your cerebrospinal fluid?
Okay, keeping your colon clean is pretty damn important. When I was 16, I had to spend a day shadowing a doctor for Bio II and, luck of the draw, I got a gastroenterologist. Colonoscopies for the first five hours of the day, referrals on terminal patients the rest of the day.
After seeing a fuckload of people's colons, I learned:
(a) People who eat a lot of black pepper and seed-based foods are likely to develop diverticulus of the colon, where little bits of the walls of the colon are eaten away into tiny pockets. This is a lot more likely to occur if the colon doesn't get swept clean by roughage often enough.
(b) People with diverticulus get food caught in those tiny pockets. That food, plus bacteria, causes infection. Diverticulitis, man. Gross.
(c) Diverticulitis is a bitch, but even worse when the infection creates a big polyp around itself.
(d) Polyps can also mean cancer, so either way, you've got to go in and get the damn things snipped out and sent to a lab.
Ever since that day, I've been sort of obsessed with eating green veg and going easy on black pepper. Shudder. That's not to say that colonics and all that crap are any good for you. But do take care of your colons, friends!
Diverticulum, I think. Don't remember. Hrm.
take care of you colon, and it will take care of you, AWB.
medical interns always seem to have amusing/distressing colon related stories.
That's why Brock needed to eat more vegetables and less red meat!
Isn't diverticulitis going up in the US?
The one friend I had who came down with diverticulitis, of course, was a young man who was a very healthy eater (and vegetarian) and possibly the most fit person I knew. It's never a guarantee, just a change in the odds.
Do you think that high colonics and the like are a means of uh, getting pleasure while claiming it's a medical procedure?
58: There is, I understand, a fetish for it, but that most people find it really uncomfortable.
As far as colonoscopies go, I can tell you that absolutely every patient we saw screamed out in pain. I never figured out why, but he gave them, instead of pain-killers, amnesiacs. Half an hour later, we'd visit them and they'd happily schedule their followup colonoscopy.
This afternoon, my stool had a large number of drops of orange oil in it. People, if you're going to eat a lot of cashews and not much else, expect the drops of orange oil to appear in your stool.
That is all.
Didn't SNL do a diverticulitis sketch?
Allow me to clarify. The oil in question is orange in color, not in origin. No oranges were consumed.
That is all. Again. For real this time.
62: I don't think it came out all that funny in the end.
Those are some gnarly zits, man.
65: Jesus board-certified dermatologist Christ.
"an individual level, we're trying to control our bodies, including our poop: when we poop, how often we poop and what we poop, including the right size, consistency and color"
Who's we? I don't give a shit about controlling my shit.
My FIL practices medicine in a community with a lot of clueless New Age types (the kind who fulminate against the hazards of flouride in tap water but will cheerfully pop "natural remedies" consisting of god-knows-what herbs from China). One time he had a patient come in who appeared to be suffering from a drug overdose: heart palpitations, profuse sweating, dizziness, etc. He kept asking the woman to tell him what drugs she had taken. She insisted that she never touched drugs, that she was a vegan and wouldn't poison her body like that, etc. He asked if she had done anything unusual before she felt ill, and she helpfully mentioned that she had gotten a coffee high colonic earlier that day. The natural absorbtive properties of the colon ensured that she got a caffeine overdose.
I don't give a shit about controlling my shit.
Ginger Yellow likes diapers.
Recently received an e-mail with subject line: "Flush out 25lbs from your colon today with Colonmate" (for some reason not caught by the spam filter).
And I am moved to repost the bit from Al Franken's Why Not Me where he has a bowel movement in the shape of question mark, but can't interest anyone in admiring it with him. In the end:
Tried to save shit but question mark shape started to deteriorate by lunchtime.
I did the seven-day-long clean-you-out fast at this place.
The thing I remember is drinking coffee at the airport on the way home. It was the first thing I consumed after the fast, and it felt about 50x more caffeinated than normal coffee, even though it was just normal crappy coffee.
Also, looking at the former contents of one's colon in a toilet strainer is overrated.
74: Sure, but what if it's the former contents of Gary Busey's colon?
Oh, come on, Apo. If you're going to buy anything from that site, it has to be *Crispin Glover's* "fecal matter."
As a last resort, we will attempt to verify our specimens by comparing our test results to various body-fluid tests conducted during periods of the individual's incarceration, if available.
This faq is a work of deranged art.
The best thing about that site is the range in prices.
75: I'd just be too worried that I wasn't getting the right person's feces. They'd tell you that it was a collectors' item whose price would go up, but maybe when you go in to take your profit they'd just laugh at you because it was just anybody's feces. Or maybe they had enormous backlogs of feces so that the price would never go up (that's what happened to baseball cards, overproduction.)
Celebrity Bacteria is definitely my next band.