Watch this hilarious video from our own Coach Mark discussing one of the best indicators of your general and digestive health. Yes it is a shitty topic but you will learn so much about your health and hear even more bad poo puns! Thank you our friends at West Enders for the entertaining interview!!
Here is the transcript
| Jules: | Westend, the best end, baby. 4101 for the home run. Hitting you with a little health information today. We’re talking crap. Not swearing mom, because I know you watch these. We’re literally talking about number twos, faeces, poopies, whatever you want to call them. If you’re like me, you’re probably a human being, meaning that you occasionally go to the toilet. What does your poopies, or poop, or plops, or number twos say about you? Are you looking at the bowl after you do that? You most likely are. No one admits it. Someone who knows a lot about it is our resident health expert, Mark Varitimos. Thanks for coming in to Westenders today. |
| Mark: | Thanks Jules, a pleasure to be here. |
| Jules: | Mark, you’re a holistic health and exercise coach. |
| Mark: | Yeah. |
| Jules: | You know a lot about the body. |
| Mark: | Yeah. |
| Jules: | You know a lot about what you should be putting in it, what should be coming out of it. You can tell a lot about people’s insides by what comes out of them. |
| Mark: | Yeah, exactly. Ancient physicians have been doing for many, many years. They’ve been looking at people’s stool samples. Ancient physicians even used to drink people’s urine to get a feel for what that was doing as well. |
| Jules: | Full on. We’re not doing that today. In certain websites you can see that, Westenders is not one of them. |
| Mark: | Look, it’s really indicative of what’s going on down there in the digestive system. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay. |
| Marks: | Having a look at your defecation or your urine can be a really good indication of what’s going on. |
| Jules: | You know there’s actually a woman in Tanzania, they call her the Poo Whisperer, she actually looks at people’s faeces and reads their future. |
| Mark: | Oh, right, okay. |
| Jules: | I made that up. |
| Mark: | I didn’t know that. |
| Jules: | I made that up. There’s probably people out there like that, you know what I mean? There’s all sorts, and that’s fine if you’re one of those people, good on you. |
| There’s so many different poo puns, I want to say, “You really know your shit. We’re talking crap.” I want to dive right into it, so we’ve got a chart up here of poos. What are we going to refer to them as? Poos, poops, faeces? | |
| Mark: | Yeah, we can call them poos, or they’re called faeces, or defecation, whatever you want to call it. I’m happy to call it poos. |
| Jules: | Okay, sweet. |
| Mark: | The human body’s got really three main detoxification pathways. 70% is through your breath, 20% is through your skin, this is approximation. 20% is through your skin and about 10% is through defecation or urine. |
| Jules: | Right, okay. |
| Mark: | If you think with the breath, and people are a little bit shocked about, the average human breathes about 20,000 plus breaths per day, right? If someone’s had a big night on alcohol you can really smell that coming through. |
| Jules: | 100%. |
| Mark: | Similar with the skin, if someone’s had a big night on alcohol you can really smell that coming through. Then around about 10% is through the defecation. People with bad breath or people with skin issues, it can be a digestive system issue as well. Today we’ll focus on, in the deep end and we’ll go from there. |
| Jules: | Yeah, absolutely. Just going back to what you said about skin, what percentage was it that actually detoxifies through skin? |
| Mark: | Approximately 20%. |
| Jules: | That’s a huge amount. That makes sense. I just think back to, if you had a massive night on the booze, you can literally lick your skin and get drunk again, where you taste tequila coming out of your pores. Let’s dive into it, we’ve got this chart of poos. Where’s this from? How did it come to be? |
| Mark: | I’ve actually taken this from a book called, How To Eat, Move And Be Healthy, by Paul Chek, a fantastic book on holistic health, if anyone’s ever interested. I think it was printed around about 14 years ago. Some of the concepts back then were quite foreign. They’re probably become more prominent this day and age, with all the information out there. He did design this chart a few years before that, so we’re going to go through that. I have cross-referenced and I like to cross-reference everything that I do and teach clients, so I have cross-referenced this with the chart called The Bristol Stool Chart, which had come out of the … |
| Jules: | It sounds like an Indie band by the way. Weapon of Bristol Stools Chart. Got an introverted bass player, we do. Sorry, go on. |
| Mark: | … Which comes from a hospital in Bristol in England, so that chart is pretty good. I just find this chart probably a little bit more extensive in terms of what’s going on. |
| Jules: | Okay, alright. Let’s start right into it. Starting off, we’re going to go from right to left? |
| Mark: | Yeah, sure. We’ll go from right to left. On the right side, you’ve got a guy that looks like a policeman, he’s called the poopy policeman, okay? That’s what actually a really good poo should look like. Light brown, cylinder in shape, easy to pass, not smelling that much. Should almost have a little bit of an earthy smell to it. That’s why we call him the cop. |
| Jules: | He’s like the dominant, the authority, he’s the model citizen. |
| Mark: | He’s the model citizen, yeah that’s right, he’s the model citizen. |
| Jules: | He’s the model poo, yeah, okay. I thought you were going to say, “If your poo comes out in a police uniform, you’re doing really well for yourself.” I understand these are caricatures. Okay, so that’s a lot like, when you do one of them you can look at that with a certain amount of pride. It’d be like, “I’m living the good life, I’m obeying nature’s law.” |
| Mark: | Yeah, exactly. To that, that’s the ideal poo. I have had a client show me a photo of their poo before that did look like that. |
| Jules: | I remember that, I do remember that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is ironic, because we were actually at a Christmas dinner there, and we were all just talking generally. |
| Mark: | Yeah, we’d just had the egg salad and … |
| Jules: | Yeah, I just got my phone out, “Mark.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| Mark: | That’s what it ideally should look like. A healthy digestive system, if your eating pattern’s right, you’re eating enough for your body, you should pass around about 12 inches per day. |
| Jules: | 12 inches a day? |
| Mark: | Yeah, about 12 inches a day. |
| Jules: | That’s like a foot long, 30 centimetres. |
| Mark: | 30 centimetres, yeah, yeah, 30 centimetres. |
| Jules: | 300 millimetres. |
| Mark: | Yeah. |
| Jules: | 300,000 micrometres. |
| Mark: | Yeah, potentially. I don’t know what micrometres are. |
| Jules: | If you had a millionth of kilometre and times that by 300, that’s how much stool you’re supposed to pass every day. |
| Mark: | I’d have to think about it, but yeah. |
| Jules: | About a Subway length. |
| Mark: | About a Subway length, yeah, about a Subway length. About that much, and you can do it in one sitting, but ideally you’d do it probably after a couple of main meals, or once in the morning and after lunch and after dinner, for example. That’s the poopy policeman guy. So, he’s the model citizen. |
| Jules: | Moving on to the character on the left of the poo policeman. Who is that guy? What does he represent? |
| Mark: | That little character, who’s got a little cape on him there, is carrying a little bit of stuff, that’s normally representative of undigested food particles in the system. That could be as a result of say some food intolerances, leaky gut syndrome, that kind of stuff. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay. |
| Mark: | Potentially, not even just chewing your food properly. There’s a range of things going on there, but generally represents undigested food particles. |
| Jules: | Right. Any character generally wearing that kind of cape, is either a superhero or just dodgy as heck, and is hiding something. Next one on the left, who’s that? |
| Mark: | That slippery character is essentially like diarrhoea. |
| Jules: | It’s a slippy character indeed. |
| Mark: | He’s a slippery character. Whether you’re going through a period of constipation, or diarrhoea, or whatever it might be. This guy can really use a lot of your body’s resources to get toxins out of there, if you’ve had something pretty severe. That’s generally what diarrhea’s about. It will grab anything it needs to just flush the toxins out of there. |
| Jules: | Right, okay, okay. It makes sense. This guy on the left, with the cap backwards and by the looks of it a handgun. That’s an incredibly rebellious bloke. |
| Mark: | Look he’s a pretty cool character. That shows a little bit of dehydration in the system. Maybe a little bit of inhibition for peristalsis, so that’s just a wave like contractions in your gut to help you push food through your system. It’s around the dehydration and potentially some disfunction in peristalsis. |
| Jules: | Okay. These are some big words, which I imagine we’ll unpack later. I’m going to make an assumption and say the next character on the line up is like a bodybuilder poo, because that poo has arms. |
| Mark: | Well done. That’s awesome. Well done Jules, well done. |
| Jules: | Thank you. Is that like too much protein, too much meat? |
| Mark: | Yeah. It can be a bit of dehydration, but it’s a lot of protein shakes, or protein bars, or even a little bit of processed foods there as well. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay. |
| Mark: | It is a bit of dehydration along with something like too much protein shakes, for example. |
| Jules: | Yeah okay, right. If your poo has arms check that you actually haven’t had a miscarriage, because this could be really, really serious. Coming up on the left. |
| Mark: | Yeah, that guy who’s looking a little bit different to everyone else in colour. If you’re coming up with that then it just shows that you’re not really digesting your fat that well in your body, so there’s undigested fat. Potentially you’re not producing enough bile to digest your fat properly. Yeah, that’s something that you need to look at, essentially. |
| Jules: | Yeah, yeah, definitely. Just before we get to the last one, should you be looking at your stool every time you go? |
| Mark: | Yeah, look I think it’s a natural thing. I think a lot of people actually do it, probably without even saying it. |
| Jules: | Nobody says it. No one just gathers around, like conversations at the bar and, “You know I was looking at my poo the other day.” Yeah. |
| Mark: | Yeah. I think it is a good thing to do, just to have a little health check, and even just a little bit of smell to see what’s going on there. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay. |
| Mark: | Actually, it’s a good segway into the last one. This last one’s the real stinky guy. This is the guy, if your body’s quite toxic, if you’ve been exposed to a toxic environment. If you’re having lots of processed foods, toxic foods, medical drugs, or drugs in general, this is the guy that stinks a lot. It can sink down into the bowl, you can’t really flush it, it’s that kind of thing, the one that will smell quite a lot. |
| Jules: | Just nasty all round. Yeah, okay |
| Mark: | Yeah. We’ve gone through each one individually but there can also be a combination, for example. Not anyone’s got ever just one thing, the human body’s pretty complicated. It could be a combination of things that are going on in your body all the time. |
| Jules: | Okay right. Just quickly on the topic of defecating, pooing, crapping, plopping. People experience sometimes difficulty doing that, constipation. What’s that about, what does it mean? |
| Mark: | There’s just some inhibition to clear your bowels essentially. That could be a few things, it could be food quality, it could be, again I’ve seen it a lot with people that have food they’re intolerant to, it can just really block them up. It can be a hydration thing as well. Yeah, it’s actually really prevalent, I’ve even seen statistics that said 90% of people actually having some kind of constipation. |
| Jules: | Right. I was actually on a constipation forum and I couldn’t log out. I log out, yeah. There was actually a movie about constipation but it never came out. Alright, alright, done, enough. What about diarrhoea? |
| Mark: | Diarrhoea is around, your body has absorbed a few toxins there. It’s just really trying to get it out as quickly as possible. It will take hydration from other areas potentially, and then just flush the toxins out as quickly as possible. If you’ve got consistent diarrhoea that’s actually a fair issue and you should probably go see someone about that. It may happen for a day or two, if you have something really bad. If it’s consistent then it’s worth seeing a professional. |
| Jules: | Yeah, right. It’s actually hereditary I understand, because it runs in your jeans. Enough. Now that we’ve covered all the different kinds of poos, is there things we can do to improve the quality of what we’re doing in the bathroom? |
| Mark: | Yeah, look, sure. Again, just from my experience in dealing with clients, I’ll probably give the top three. There’s loads of different things you can do, it depends where your diffison in your health. The first one is the obvious one, which is around nutrition quality, okay. Just the quality of food you’re putting into your body. I have read a saying that said, “If it wasn’t around 10,000 years ago then you don’t really need to have it. You should avoid it. Now we live in a modern day society so you don’t want to walk around living like a monk and being so pedantic in what you eat all the time. That in itself can be a little bit of a sickness. That’s essentially a general rule of thumb. Just sticking to the basics is the best thing for your gut really. |
| Jules: | Okay, okay, cool. |
| Mark: | That would be the first thing. The second thing I’d probably say is hydration. Your digestive system needs hydration for the whole process. From saliva all the way down to your colon. It needs the hydration to adequately digest all the food particles in there. |
| Jules: | Is that a general rule of hydration? Something defining how much water we should be consuming per kilogramme of body weight? |
| Mark: | Yeah. No, good question. There’s actually a book called, The Body’s Many Cries For Water. That shows in that book that as a general rule of thumb, you’d want to have about 0.033 times your body weight. For example, if someone’s 100 kilogrammes, times that by 0.033, that’s 3.3 litres per day for someone of that weight. That can vary quite a bit. I’ve seen with clients in terms of season, in terms of level of activity as well. That’s the general rule of thumb. |
| Jules: | That’s pretty manageable. That’s not chugging gallons or anything. Very, very doable. What was the third one? |
| Mark: | The third one I’d actually say is stress. In some ways that could even be the first one. It plays a significant role in digestive systems. If you can think from an ancestral point of view, where we’re fluctuating between fight of flight and rest and digest. Our autonomic nervous system is fluctuating between these two things, which is called sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system. If we’re eating at a time in stress, and we’re in fight or flight dominance, it actually takes away a lot of the blood from the digestive system and puts it to the periphery. Into the skin in the muscle skeletal system. From an ancestral point of view, it’s because you’re in fight of flight, you’re not going to concentrate on eating food, you’re just going to get the hell out of there, right? |
| The stress component can be massive, it’s very much an unknown, and I think probably a little bit ignored in the industry as well. It can happen at a conscious level, so day-to-day stress. Or it can even be a subconscious level, so people carrying on to their past or past emotions or adverse emotions can still effect your autonomic nervous system, I’ve seen in clients. | |
| Jules: | It’s definitely not just a reflection of your physicality, it’s also your mentality as well. |
| Mark: | Yeah, exactly, exactly. The stress component is massive. I think this day and age there is so much awareness around food, and I think it’s fantastic, but I really do think the next thing to do is address stress. I think that’s even becoming more prevalent with so much going on. There’s even little tips with stress like trying to eat in a calming environment, not with loud music, not in a stressful environment. That kind of thing can just help the digestive system a little bit more. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay, okay. Talking all things toiletry, these poo stools, have you heard of these? Those poo stools. |
| Mark: | I have heard of poo stools. Yeah, I have heard of poo stools. I essentially use one as well. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay. They prop your feet up? |
| Mark: | Yeah, exactly. |
| Jules: | How does it work and what’s the benefit? |
| Mark: | Yeah, okay. The toilet was actually popularised by a guy called Thomas Crapper in the late 1800s. |
| Jules: | That makes a lot of sense. |
| Mark: | Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. |
| Jules: | Is that how the word crap came to be used? |
| Mark: | I assume so, I don’t actually know, but it’s a pretty strong assumption that, that’s what happened. Popularised by a guy in the late 1800s and it’s become pretty prevalent in western society since. What actually happens is, your legs are at about a 90 degree angle from your abdomen, and actually cuts off or really blocks up part of your colon. You’re just not going to get the pass through that you can. If you actually put your foot up onto a stool, you bring your legs up, the colon’s just released a little bit more, and you can get a lot better flow with your bowel movements. You can see it a lot more in eastern culture, for example. If you can think again, from an ancestral point of view, we were doing that a lot. |
| Jules: | We were squatting, when pooping, yeah. |
| Mark: | Squatting a lot when we’re working. I’ve even seen depictions of people squatting around and just chatting around, so that was like a fairly common movement that we would always do. |
| Jules: | Alrighty. Colonics. Heard this term being used, got a friend who raves about it. You know who you are? What is it, how does it benefit you? I have absolutely no idea what it is. |
| Mark: | Yeah, sure. It’s a concept that started, I’ve read some material that said 1500 BC in Egypt, some material that said in Greece. It’s a concept that started where you actually put water up your bowel, through your colon up your bowel, to evacuate some of the stuff that’s in there. |
| Jules: | Kind of flush it out. |
| Mark: | Sort of flush it out. It can be pretty effective for flushing out. People that have come from a background where they’ve had a lot of toxic food, or have been exposed to a toxic environment, or they’ve got a history of fungi or parasites. It can be pretty effective in flushing that out. So, go up the colon, so up to the ascending colon. Then if you have a few treatments you’ll get to the transverse colon. If you have a few more treatments, then it will go down to the descending colon, and just really clean it out. If you decide to do one of those, and I think it is a case-by-case basis, you’d want to have some probiotics, or probiotic food, or fermented food pretty soon after and really just load the gut up again with good bacteria, so it can actually rip out a lot of the good bacteria out of the colon. |
| Jules: | What’s a fermented food? |
| Mark | Fermented food would be like … it’s becoming really popular last two or three years, I’ve seen them everywhere now, like sauerkraut, fermented cashew cheese, I’ve seen products like coconut kefir, actually the most popular one’s probably kombucha. Foods that have a lot of good bacteria in there that can just recolonize the gut with good bacteria. |
| Jules: | Yeah, okay, right. |
| Mark: | If you decide to do that, that would be recommended, or you go with a course of probiotics if you feel as though you’re not going to implement the food thing. |
| Jules: | Right. You really know your shit. |
| Mark Varitimos, thank you so much for imparting your knowledge onto us. I hope you guys at home have had lots of takeaways from that. I’ll definitely be checking more so to see what my stools mean and I’m actually going to look into getting one of those poo stools. I know a few people who’ve actually got one and they rave about it. This sounds like a plug, we’re not selling anything at all. Thank you so much for coming into Westenders, please come back again. | |
| Mark: | No worries Jules, see you soon. |
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