constipation and the Role of the Lungs
Pooping is SO important for your overall health! If you’re not pooping 1-3 times per day, please read on.
With regard to constipation, we often hear fiber suggested as the magic bullet remedy, & while fiber is absolutely important to gut health, we also need to remember hydration. If you’ve been hanging around my blog or social media, you’ve heard me talk about how hydration is not simply water; it’s warm, wet food—soups, stews, whole grains, oils, & fats, including saturated fats.
hydration is not simply water; it’s warm, wet food—soups, stews, whole grains, oils, & fats, including saturated fats.
Most of us were raised believing the propaganda put out by the America Heart Association & still believed by many today—that fat is bad, especially saturated fats, & that we should avoid it at all costs—but we now know that this is not true and that fat contributes to hydration from the view of Chinese medicine.
Drinking enough water, eating enough fiber (prebiotics), & including fats in your diet will help create bulk in your stool, which is great for intestinal health to ensure that the stool isn’t too dry & therefore doesn’t have a hard time passing through.
Have the opposite problem? Loose stools & diarrhea?
This is also not a happy sign, for two reasons: 1) if food moves through your body too quickly, there’s not enough time for it to be properly assimilated, & 2) diarrhea can actually be a result of constipation, as the material in your bowels finds its way around the bolus stuck in the intestines. (This is good ol’ Chinese medicine, but for a more modern take, read Fiber Fueled by Dr. Bulsiewicz to learn more about how you can strengthen your gut microbiota).
Dietary factors are a huge part of gut health & healthy poop, but we also need to understand how the lung is related to the large intestine, how we breathe, & how we deal with grief.
You’ve probably noticed, at some point in your life, that times of stress can cause constipation, diarrhea, or both. This is because the lungs have an elemental relationship with the large intestine.
Each element (fire, metal, earth, water, wood) has a yin-yang pair.
The metal element is made up of the lung (yin) & large intestine (yang). The lung descends qi to all of the organs, & when this isn’t happening well—often because we are stressed or angry or have a lot of cold in our bodies (either from a cold diet or cold emotional experiences)—the liver can prevent the downward flow of qi, & we get get constipation. Contrarily, if we are taking focused, deep breaths through breathing exercises, qi gong, tai chi, meditation, or yoga, we can help relax the liver, which frees the lung, & voila! Poop. But, what if you have alternating constipation & diarrhea or loose stools?
This situation can be thought of as the vacillation between “letting go” and “holding on” too much.
Yin organs hold & store (lungs), while yang organs release & move (large intestine). A lot of times (actually most of the time), our issues with elimination have emotional roots. What we are struggling to let go of are those uncomfortable things that we don’t want to feel anyway.
I had a patient that had had GI problems since she was 8, & I asked her if anything significant had happened around that time in her life. At first she said no, & then she said, oh, my parents got divorced. And then her eyes got wide. She had never associated the two things before, especially because it had been that way for so long.
Eating a high fiber diet is great, including warm, wet foods and drinking plenty of water, but also make time to take some deep breaths and book an acupuncture appointment, where we can really get to the root of what’s preventing you from good digestive health.
