Home // Natural Healing for Constipation
Constipation is an uncomfortable and unfortunately common condition. Almost everybody experiences trouble passing hard, dry stools once in a while—in fact, it’s the most frequent gastrointestinal complaint, producing 2.5 million visits to the doctor in the U.S. every year. For some people, though, constipation is a chronic issue that can make it hard to go about their daily activities.
How do you know if your constipation is considered chronic? After all, there can be a wide variation in normal stool elimination. Some people have multiple bowel movements every day, while others may have one every other day or so without problems. While symptoms of chronic constipation can vary from person to person, they include:
If you’re consistently feeling several of these symptoms over a period of a few months, your constipation may be chronic.
Constipation is caused by food moving too slowly through the digestive tract. When food moves through your colon, the colon absorbs water, forming the waste products that ultimately leave the body as a solid stool. When the muscle contractions that move the stool are slow or sluggish, too much water is absorbed, resulting in hard, dry stools that are difficult or painful to eliminate.
Constipation isn’t just an uncomfortable annoyance. When it isn’t addressed, constipation can lead to serious complications, including:
While anybody can develop constipation, some risk factors may make it more likely. These can include getting older, being a woman, having a low-fiber diet, dehydration, a sedentary lifestyle, or taking certain medications. Health conditions that affect your hormones, such as diabetes, pregnancy, hypothyroidism, or hyperparathyroidism, can also lead to constipation. It may very well be that after consulting your doctor and ruling out any obvious blockages or underlying health issues that could explain constipation, you don’t have any clear reason for why you’re suffering.
When this is the case, clients are usually advised to undertake dietary and lifestyle changes to relieve their symptoms and prevent their constipation from returning. This generally includes increasing fiber in the diet, staying away from processed foods, increasing water intake, and exercising more, which is all generally good advice as far as it goes. When this doesn’t work, though, the next step is often laxatives or other medications to try to regulate your bowel movements. If you’re not comfortable at the idea of relying on pharmaceuticals, perhaps long-term, to relieve your constipation, you’re not alone.
If you’ve seen your doctor, tried the recommended lifestyle changes without success, and are looking for answers that don’t involve drugs, the Natural Healing Center can help. While the dietary advice that is typically given for constipation is a step in the right direction, it’s also a basic, one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t account for the variations in each individual’s health and body. Instead, we use Nutrition Response Testing as part of a holistic evaluation of each client to pinpoint exactly which nutrients your body lacks and the deficiencies that are negatively impacting your organs’ normal functions. From that analysis, we build a personalized wellness plan that uses whole-food nutrition and other healing modalities to rebuild your health and eliminate troublesome conditions like constipation, fatigue, sleep problems, anxiety, and more.
If you haven’t found a solution to your constipation, it’s time for a visit to the Natural Healing Center. Our method is designed to help harness your body’s ability to heal itself for lasting well-being that allows you to reclaim a healthy, pain-free lifestyle. Contact us here to schedule a free initial consultation today.
