Constipation and Diarrhea

Can you have constipation and diarrhea at the same time? Yes.

In this video, Dr. Vikki discusses the parameters of constipation and diarrhea. A healthy bowel movement should occur once to twice a day, with stool that is easy to pass and holds its shape. Doctors don’t discuss bowel movements enough with patients and may even offer false information.

Dr. Vikki warns about a type of constipation called “overflow diarrhea” which can result in impacted stool and subsequent diarrhea. She advises consulting a physician to address this issue. Stool is a toxin that the body needs to excrete. Constipation has negative effects such as gas, bloating, and increased intraabdominal pressure.

The video also discusses the role of gut health in overall well-being: an unhealthy gut leads to ill-heath conditions.

Transcript of the video

By Dr. Vikki Petersen
Can you have diarrhea, “explosive diarrhea”, and still be constipated? Absolutely. I want to talk to you about the parameters of being constipated, which include diarrhea. And I know that sounds very strange, but let’s explain it, and more importantly, why it’s so critical to your overall health.

Constipation: Let’s be clinically candid

Constipation is explained by frequency and also consistency. So we’re going to get a little graphic about poop, but basically you should move your bowels once to two times a day. It should be a nice brown banana. As I tell my patients, meaning it’s easy to pass. It doesn’t fall apart in the water, but it holds its shape. It’s about the length of a banana or longer is even better, and it’s an in-and-out kind of experience, if you will. I often have patients tell me it can be a 20 minute experience in the bathroom for them and it shouldn’t be.

You feel the urge a lot of times. First thing in the morning, sit down, it’s a done. There’s new, I don’t know if it’s that new, the expression “ghost poop”, which means that when you wipe, there’s really nothing there to wipe. So these are the parameters of a really healthy bowel movement.

Why don’t doctors talk about constipation?

Unfortunately, doctors don’t talk to their patients about their bowel movements. When they do, there’s a lot of false information being given to patients. If someone says they move their bowels twice a week (believe me, I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years) their doctor can say, “well, that’s fine. That’s normal for you”. I’ve had a patient move their bowel once a month and been told, believe it or not, “well that’s just you. That’s fine.” It’s absolutely not. And you will, when you regain a healthy GI tract, you will be moving your bowels once or twice a day.

There’s also the aspect of incomplete vs. complete evacuation. So complete evacuation is what we’re going for, which is just that feeling of you’ve moved your bowels and you feel like everything has been excreted, versus moving your bowels and feeling like “Mmmh, there’s a little bit more in there”. Okay, that’s called incomplete evacuation.

All of these things are not normal, not ideally healthy.

Overflow diarrhea

Now, there’s a type of constipation that’s called “overflow diarrhea”. What happens here, and this is a serious kind of constipation that has to be addressed properly because you can have what’s called “impacted stool”. This is dry stool that’s in a part of your colon and it’s been stuck there for a period of time. The body, of course, is trying to move things through and it has to get around it. And so, water is flowing around it and you can get “explosive” or just diarrhea. It’s diarrhea, but it’s due to chronic impacted stool, chronic constipation.

It is pretty serious because if you try to eat more fiber for a healthier colon, this is going to backfire on you because of the impaction. So there has to be, and not everybody can afford to go to a gastroenterologist and get a colonoscopy to see the status of this, but you do want to consult your doctor and make sure that the impaction has moved along.

There’s different types of magnesium that are very specific to this. So you want to do that with a doctor and definitely feel free to call us and we can work with you on this.

More about constipation

So we’ve got a parameter of constipation, including one that manifests as diarrhea. And why is all of this important? Because stool is a toxin. It’s what your body wants to excrete. And if that’s not happening once or twice a day in the easy brown banana length that we talked about, that means a lot of different things.

One is there’s methane gas that’s produced due to constipation, and you can get gas and bloating. Gas and bloating can be very painful, uncomfortable. It can cause something called Hiatal Hernia Syndrome (if you’ve never heard of that, I have multiple videos about HHS), just literally due to increasing intraabdominal pressure. The pressure in your gut increases because of the gas, and pushes up your diaphragm and your stomach and can create a host of symptoms associated with HHS.

But getting back to the gut itself, you have 10 trillion cells in your body. It’s estimated 38 trillion cells in your large intestine, in your colon, and these are organisms that are not inert. They are creating either health when there’s a healthy population, or they’re creating disease inflammation, craving for sugar, causing you to hold on to weight, moving in the direction of diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s…

Gut health and ill-health

Every degenerative disease that you don’t want to get, including cancer, has an association with an unhealthy bowel.

Am I saying that’s the only cause? No, but I think we can state pretty categorically that with an unhealthy GI tract with a lot of inflammatory organisms versus anti-inflammatory healthy organisms, when that constituency is imbalanced, what results is ill-health.

And I think we can also say it’s pretty impossible to be ideally healthy with a gut that’s not functioning optimally and doesn’t have that good balance.

I’m going to do another video right after this on probiotics, so stay tuned for that and let me know if this is helpful for you. Let me know if you’re somebody who’s been told “it’s normal to move your bowels every few days, it’s normal for you. It’s totally fine”.

I really hate when this happens from pediatricians because that unhealthy bowel in children is moving them forward toward ill-health later in life. And it’s so much easier to do it early on, but the body loves to heal and you can change the constituency of your bowel, it’s not that hard and it feels so much better. Your health profile will change dramatically.

Can we help?

So if this is you, and you’re not sure what to do about it, you’ve taken fiber pills (which are not the answer), reach out. That’s what we’re here for. This is one of the key areas that we’re very good at handling naturally. And yes, it’s not just swallowing a pill, it’s dietary and lifestyle changes, but getting to the root of that and having ideal health of the gut, goes such a long way to ideal health in the rest of the body. Increasing longevity, brain health, mood, energy, good weight, it’s incredible. And I’m not overstating it. So reach out. We’d love to help.

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Additional resources

An interesting research paper on the use of flaxseed oil to treat constipation