Hi Rob,

Thanks for your post. You said having the condition is physically and mentally draining.

BUT later you also said that you get pleasure from holding onto your shit... AND that it's comfortable.

So my question is, "if you get pleasure from it and it's comfortable, what's the problem?"

Do you think you SHOULD go for a crap everyday, and that anything else is abnormal?

The colon exists to reclaim the vast amount of liquid that is injected into digestive tract to enable the digestion process. It also reclaims and absorbs valuable mineral salts. To do that it needs TIME. Point is, we are designed to walk around carrying shit in our colons.

I have IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). As a result, I get a lot of gut pain, bloating, excessive gas, malabsorption, probably leaky gut. The list goes on. For me, when I have a shit, it gives me pain relief. If i don't I get what someone here called 'that crabby, tummy-yukky feeling' all day long. So for me I almost need to have a crap everyday.

However, if I didn't have IBS, and it felt comfortable and problem free, I'd LOVE to just be able to crap once every few days, safe in the knowledge that my colon was reabsorbing every last scrap of goodies and compacting my poo to a better consistency.

In my case, the poo isn't staying in my colon for long enough. How do I know? Because of the consistency of it. (looser stools/diarrhea means the colon hasn't had enough time to absorb enough liquid out of it. At the other end of the spectrum, hard rabbit pellets of poo means it's stayed in there too long).

Which leads to my final question for now: What is the consistency of your poo? If you don't know, the next time you take a crap, BEFORE you wipe your bum, get up, turn around and have a look at it in the toilet bowel.

Then google "the bristol stool scale" and find an image for it and compare.

Let me know how it goes.

That's probably enough for one post. The ritual thing is probably linked but also separate. We can come back to that.

cheers,
Baz