Beauty Comes From Within

The key to your best health and looks? Achieving the perfect bowel movement, says Tonya Zavasta.

 

Your external beauty is at its best when your internal organs are in the best possible shape, consistency and colour. Beautiful is not something extra the body needs: to be beautiful both inside and out is the natural state of one’s body. The vitality of internal organs, working properly, transcends your skin and brings a radiance to your face. This is when beauty does penetrate the skin.

So when we admire sparkling eyes, fabulous skin and lustrous hair, in a way we are admiring the teamwork of a healthy liver, colon, kidneys, and so on. How profound the direct meaning of the phrase “beauty comes from within” really is. Many negative skin conditions, such as acne or rosacea, are not skin problems, they are gut problems. So if you want to have a beautiful complexion, achieving an ideal bowel movement is a good place to start.

And here I’m going to tell you about the ideal bowel movement. I am calling it an “ideal” movement because, in my research, I found that there is simply no consensus about what is “normal” bowel movement wise. There are levels of normal, and every person is going to have a different level.

Your digestive system breaks down food so it can be absorbed into the bloodstream and delivered to the various parts of your body. A bowel movement, properly considered, actually starts with your first bite. When you swallow your food, it goes down the oesophagus and into your tummy. The stomach is about the size of a clenched fist, and enlarges the more you eat. An adult’s stomach holds about one litre of food, a child’s just a little bit less.

Here your food churns around for two to four hours until it is broken down into a soupy mush called chyme. Chewing, saliva, peristalsis (the involuntary contractions of gastrointestinal muscles), bacteria, hydrochloric acid, digestive enzymes, bile and other secretions all work to give each meal the consistency of pea soup. Digestive cells absorb sugars, starches, fats, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients, while waste products continue travelling down the line.

The chyme is gradually squeezed out of the stomach and through a long, coiled tube – the small intestine. Here the mashed food that you’ve eaten is absorbed into the bloodstream and the remainder passes on into the large intestine. The small intestine is more than three times as long as the whole body – in an adult, about 21 feet long! Your food may spend as long as four hours in the small intestine, where it becomes a thin, watery mixture. The small intestine breaks down the food even more so your body can absorb all the nutrients. The small intestine extracts nutrients with the help of the pancreas, liver and gallbladder. These organs send different juices to the small intestine, helping it to digest food and allowing the body to absorb nutrients. Your pancreas produces juices that help the body digest carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Your liver makes bile, which helps absorb fats into the bloodstream. The gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it.

Nutrient-rich blood flows directly to the liver for processing. Your liver filters out harmful substances and wastes, turning some of this waste into more bile. The liver even helps figure out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage. For example, the liver stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy.

The leftover waste – remnants of the food that your body can’t use – goes on to the large intestine, or colon. At 2.5 to 4 inches around, your large intestine is fatter than the small intestine and is almost the last stop in the digestive tract. Like the small intestine, it is packed into the body, and would measure 5 feet long if you spread it out. The whole path from the mouth to the anus is about 30 feet long.

In the colon, the body gets its last chance to absorb water and some minerals into the blood. All the leftovers are combined in your colon, packed together, and partially dehydrated. As water leaves the waste product, what’s left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid. What remains – our faeces – consists of water, indigestible fibre, undigested food (such as small seeds), sloughed-off dead cells, living and dead bacteria, intestinal secretions, and bile.

Bowel Transit Time (BTT) is a measure of how long it takes food to pass through your digestive system from one end to the other. BTT varies from one individual to the next. If you put beetroot in your juice or eat blueberries, you can determine your own BTT. Simply calculate how long it takes the red or black colour to show up in your stool. If food travels through your body too quickly, not enough nutrients get absorbed. But if it travels too slowly,
the pressure in your intestines increases and excess toxins are absorbed instead of being eliminated.

Worn-out red blood cells in bile give human excrement its distinctive brown colour. A healthy stool should be medium to light brown. It should be well formed, cylindrical, fairly bulky, somewhat textured, and easy to pass. And it shouldn’t smell – much. At the very least, you should find no strong, pungent odour.

If your stool is dark in colour, it’s been in the colon longer than it should have been. Exception: when you’ve eaten some type of food that is very dark and it’s obvious that what you’re seeing is only a colour thing. Remember, your stool is composed mostly of dead bacteria, sloughed-off dead cells, and some fibre that has not broken down. Dead bacteria are light brown, and healthy stool displays this light brown. Other colours can indicate the presence of undigested food or, in more serious cases, blood. Stool can also be off-colour as a result of taking medication or vitamins.

A healthy digestive system produces stool with no sign of undigested food. Undigested food particles usually mean accumulated debris is preventing proper digestion. There should be no mucus in your stool. During the detoxification phase, as you move nearer a more fully raw-foods lifestyle, you’ll most likely see some mucus in your stool. However, in most healthy digestive tracts, mucus is not present in or on stool.

When you eat meat, dairy and a lot of cooked food, your bowel transit time is too long. Water and toxins are pulled out of the faecal matter and absorbed through your colon wall. This makes your faecal matter stiff and hard. Your colon will now have a tough time moving this hard faecal matter through its sections and out of the rectum. You’ll literally feel this result as you go about your business – the result is a great deal of puffing, grunting and groaning in the bathroom.

If you eat raw foods, it’s about 24 hours after swallowing your first bite that faeces are pushed out of the body. To determine whether your bowel movement is healthy, look at its colour, smell, the difficulty of evacuation, and degree of hardness.

Experts disagree on two stool characteristics: the number of pieces and their buoyancy. Sadly, most of them do not have the first-hand experience with the raw foods lifestyle that would inform them of the highest degree of normalcy for bowel movements.

After being raw for 12 years now, I believe I have a perfectly working digestive system. (Okay. Now. For the squeamish, here’s where to brace yourselves...) The stool is one long, smooth evacuation if the colon is not spastic, impacted, constipated or dehydrated. Each bowel movement should be in one piece, about the shape of a well-formed log, tapered at the end. Some websites say it should be of the size of a banana. From my experience, the product of a good, cleansing bowel movement is much longer,

more like two bananas end by end. This makes perfect sense because the stool should be an exact replica of the internal space of your colon.

Strive for a soft, smooth, snake-like stool between one and two feet long. If you think that is impossibly long, you’re in for a big surprise when you stick to a raw foods lifestyle. One amusing aside: When I shared this fact with one raw food enthusiast, she looked concerned and asked, “Will I need a bigger toilet?”

Fret not, friends – your old standard “throne” will do.

This one- to two-foot length makes perfect sense. The typical colon is about five feet long, depending on the size of the person. If you’re small like me, your colon may run as short as three feet.

Your stool’s length should conform to the segment lengths of a clean and healthy colon. Each of the colon’s three distinct anatomical segments – ascending, transverse, descending – is about a foot long. Passed stool tends to break at these segment junctures. So your stool should be at least one foot long. A person six to seven feet tall might have a colon about six feet in length. So that tall person’s stool should be about two feet, the length of the descending part of the colon.

What, then, if your stool is much shorter? A shorter stool usually indicates the colon is unable to process food properly and that the stool produced lacks the right moisture balance. Your stool’s diameter should be roughly 1.5 to 2 inches. A smaller diameter indicates constriction, perhaps due to a deformed colon or to accumulated layers of encrusted mucoid matter. A larger diameter indicates poor colon muscle tone – likely from a lack of fibre in the diet.

Floaters or sinkers? One school argues that stools should float. Some experts say buoyancy is a sign the body has absorbed the minerals in the food and that these nutrients are not contained
in the waste. Another camp believes healthy bowel movements should touch bottom because of their bulk and fibre content. Yet a third group believes that buoyancy is not an issue – your poop can sink or swim so far as they’re concerned.

In my experience, a healthy stool half-floats and half-sinks. Stool that floats high, right on the surface, is usually filled with undigested fat or gas from fermentation. Stool that sinks fully usually includes undigested minerals or is compacted from lack of moisture.

When you eat raw foods, a bowel movement should be an easy thing, taking no more than a minute. If you’re in there for more than five minutes, pushing and squeezing to have a painful bowel movement, then you’re constipated. Consistent straining to have a bowel movement leads to haemorrhoids, varicose veins and fissures. There are those who will tell you that hard stools mean you have not been drinking enough water. In my experience, this is not true of people who follow the raw foods lifestyle. I do not drink any water and my stool is never hard. This is again to show how the rules for eaters of cooked food simply do not apply to those who eat 100% raw.

After a stool is formed inside you, you’ll feel the urge to “go.” You should have one bowel movement roughly 24 to 36 hours after every meal, or three a day if you eat three meals. (On a 100 percent raw food regime, you’ll find it’s almost always just about 24 hours.) Your first bowel movement should take place in the morning when you wake up or soon after you have had breakfast. Typically, you should experience the urge for a bowel movement 20 to 30 minutes after you eat. The other bowel movements should be during the day. If you eat two or three meals a day and have one bowel movement, then the second and third meal are backing
up in your colon, staying there too long and, over the long haul, inviting disaster from toxicity.

Your stool should not be messy. You should find no smear and almost no faecal residue on your toilet paper. Imagine what you’ll save—no more minivan-filling 84-roll bundles! But please, don’t short yourself, lest you be farther afield from the ideal than you think. Even after 12 years 100% raw, I do not have an ideal stool all the time.

Little need of toilet paper is a good indication that no faecal matter is left sticking to your colon walls. Remember...movement of the bowels is really the elimination of all faecal matter that passes through your colon from the food you’ve eaten in prior meals. Let me talk plainly for a moment: If poop sticks on your paper, it most likely will stick to the interior wall of your colon. Get “unstuck” through good eating practices, and you’ll not need expensive “bidet” toilets, either. On raw foods, life gets easier and easier.

However, it might be years before you have your ideal bowel movement. Just take my word for it: it is worth striving for.

When you begin to eat mostly raw foods and the detox effect kicks in, you might see the most awful things in your stool. (Check on the internet...many colon hydrotherapists’ websites display galleries of coarse pictures of the most awful bowel movements – but they are not for the faint of heart!) If your colon is toxic, you might temporarily see loose, clumpy, mucus-covered stool or even the most weird stuff leaving your body. This should be temporary.

And don’t, as they say, “sweat the small stuff.” It’s time for celebrating! Your colon is cleansing itself, thanks to an ever- improving raw foods diet. These petty annoyances are a good sign you’re getting healthier and healthier.

 

Bio

Tonya Zavasta is the author of Your Right To Be Beautiful, Beautiful On Raw, Quantum Eating and Rawsome Flex. For more information or to order Tonya’s books and other beauty products go to beautifulonraw.com.

 

This article is an extract from the Spring 2009 issue of Get Fresh!. To read more informative articles, subscribe here.