Random thought:
As a dietitian, I sometimes have to talk about .... poop.
Now for some people, this may seem like an odd topic, but most medical professionals find themselves unmistakeably discussing defecation (the fancy word for pooping lol) from time to time, and in my family, this has always been an open topic.
The other day, my husband called me at work to ask me how much weight he could lose while releasing stool, so of course I had to research it. Before I go any further, I already know we're weird lol.
So the questions of the day are:
How often do people go, what affects how much your poop weighs, and how much weight can you lose when you excrete it?
Surprisingly enough, there are some credible resources on the subject, but it seems poop wasn't popular after the 90's.
If you're one of those people that doesn't go every day, don't despair. The reality is that most people don't go every day, and very few people go multiple times a day. The norm is actually to be irregular. (Heaton, et al., 1992) Crazy.
How much poop you make is dependent on what you eat. This makes sense since that's what poop really is - the leftovers from your diet that didn't get digested. The 2 big kickers we look at are fiber and water. The more fiber you eat, the heavier your stools are. Also, as fiber intake increases, frequency of elimination often does as well (Cummings and Stephen, 1980).
We also look at water because soluble fiber binds to water adding weight to the stools. Your poop is something like 75% water, so if you're dehydrated or if it's been in there a while, that's going to have an effect on the weight (Picco, 2012)
A study done in 1984 (I know it's old) showed that in a 24-hour period, people poop somewhere between 19 and 278 grams (Eastwood et al., 1984). Relying on Google to do the conversion, that comes out to be between .04 and .61 pounds per day. So in essence, you really could lose like a half pound of poop in a day, and if you were sick, I don't think it's unreasonable for you to lose a whole pound or so depending on how much was in there to begin with.
On a weird side note:
Did you know we probably don't poop right? According to this study, people strain less when they squat than when they sit on a toilet. My sister-in-law was right. They do have it figured out in China.
