Introduction: Let's Talk Sh*t
It’s time to have an honest conversation about poop.
Western societies are obsessed with what we put into our bodies. In the eighties, nineties, and early aughts it was all about fat-free, sugar-free, and carb-free diets. These were geared toward weight loss, even if they tried to maintain an illusion of health. Though fad diets haven’t gone away, we’ve gotten wiser as we’ve learned more about the gut and its relationship to our overall health.
In recent years, our attention has shifted toward the quality of our food and achieving balance in our diets. We’ve learned that what we eat impacts our gut, which impacts our brain as well as our waistline, which impacts how we feel mentally and physically. We’ve also learned that food, in combination with sleep, stress, and other lifestyle factors, can have a big effect on our inflammation levels, which can set off an epidemiological chain reaction. Basically, our gut health is the key to everything.
But how can we tell if our gut is healthy? That’s where poop—and the philosophy of
Good Sh*t—comes in.
Poop is the most consistently reliable barometer of your overall health. The problem is that many of us were raised to do our business and flush the toilet as quickly as possible. That’s like deleting text messages without reading them. Our gut sends us regular reports about our health, but if we don’t read them because of shame—or don’t know how to read them out of ignorance—then we’re doing ourselves a disservice.
We understand the discomfort. Many Western societies have constructed a range of taboos on the subject of poop. If someone asks you how you’re feeling, it’s unlikely that you’d brag, “I’ve had a fantastic poop every morning for a week—thanks for asking!” But a week of good morning poops is a big victory! You might feel more comfortable telling your friends that you’re feeling happier, more energized, and more mentally alert without realizing that those positive updates are connected to your great morning poops. Making that connection is key, though. If you don’t know the underlying cause of your good—and bad—feelings and moods, then you’ll have a harder time replicating the good and controlling the bad.
If we all talked more openly with our friends and family—or, at the very least, with our doctors—about pooping, maybe we would understand why stool checks are so valuable, and how to do them. But until we can all get more comfortable doing that, we (the authors of this book) offer this book to you (yes, you!) as a guide to the best poop of your life. Think of us, and this book, as the friends you can finally talk sh*t with, free from shame and self-consciousness.
In this book, we’ve used our backgrounds as professionally trained and certified Ayurvedic lifestyle and nutrition coaches to help you understand your health in a more holistic way. In communities where Ayurveda is the foundational belief system, pooping has been a primary source of information for diagnosing overall health, state of mind, immunity, and well-being for thousands of years. We encourage you to adopt a holistic approach toward poop by telling you how to do it and how to observe it. We’ll ask you to do stool checks for a week to monitor how your poop looks now, without any lifestyle adjustments. You’ll learn how to monitor the frequency, shape, consistency, smell, and color of your stool on a daily basis. If you’re not used to doing this, it might feel strange at first. Just remember: there is no clearer indication of your health than what you leave behind in the toilet bowl.
As you progress through
Good Sh*t, you’ll pick up tips and tricks that will help you make simple and achievable adjustments to your morning routine, diet, sleep, and self-care practices. You can track the effects of those changes in a three-week tracker at the end of the book. If you want to continue noting your observations beyond that, you can photocopy the poop tracker pages.
Much of what we include here is common-sense advice for developing a relationship with, analyzing, and improving your poop. We are not medical doctors, so if you experience discomfort or pain, or see blood in your stool, we recommend that you visit your own healthcare provider. However, the likely outcome is that you’ll feel less foggy, lethargic, and moody once you take control of your gut. After all, this part of your body produces 95 percent of the feel-good hormone serotonin. So if your digestive fire is properly kindled, you’ll increase your energy, immunity, and overall happiness.
Wishing you lots of happy, healthy pooping!
Copyright © 2021 by Julia Blohberger and Roos Neeter. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
