Have you ever felt all stacked up just because your early morning motion wasn’t great, and you did not clear it up? Generally when the stomach is not getting cleaned well, we do feel the same way and those who aren’t facing this issue might not relate.What can be the reason for not having a good bowel movement or not clearing one’s motions? It can be caused due to low fibre diet, repeatedly ignoring
the urge to go, less hydration, a lack of exercise, particular supplements or sometimes even stress and less sleep.
What should we do in order to help ourselves? And your answer lies in all the above mentioned problems. The first thing to do is to start adding more of insoluble fibre into your meals. Insoluble fibre helps hydrate and move waste easily through your intestines so ultimately, it helps prevent constipation and keeps you motion regular.
Salads are a good source of fibre which will also provide you with digestive enzymes and anti-oxidants
to keep your gut health in check along with their minerals and vitamins as well. Try to include an array of veggies that contain insoluble fibre — from cucumber, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, onions and bell peppers. When we increase our fibre intake, we need to make sure that our hydration levels are optimum, otherwise the fibre soaks up water in the intestine and can lead to all the more dehydration.
So don’t forget to drink more water and stay hydrated to avoid constipation in future.
We need to keep ourselves active to improve blood circulation, only then the nutrient uptake in the stomach improves and eases constipation. It also helps constipation by lowering the time that food takes to move through the large intestine. This limits the amount of water absorption by your body from the stool. When water absorption happens the stools become dry which are harder to pass. Thus, it helps in improving constipation as well as overall blood circulation.
Along with the above pointers that helps in easing constipation, take a look at few things that should be avoided.
• We generally reach out for a quick fix whenever we are suffering from anything, and constipation is no different. We try and take a laxative to improve the bowel moment and it actually works by stimulating bowel activity. We should be really careful when using such stimulants or laxatives as our body can get dependent on the same and won’t function properly without them.
• A diet high in cheese, butter, oil and other low-fibre/high-fat or high protein foods like too many eggs and meat throughout the day can slow down your digestion, and lead to constipation. The obvious solution? Go slow on your intake of such foods, and increase fibre.
• For some people, caffeine can also lead to dehydration and constipation as they act as diuretics which
eliminates water from the body. Limit your caffeine or coffee intake.
• Avoid too much of dry food as that too causes dehydration, that’s why water is really important for enabling gut movement to happen well. Keeping the tips and pointers above in mind, choose your food wisely! Stay healthy and be happy!
(The writer is a clinical nutritionist with a focus on healthy lifestyle choices.)