More New-Age Mumbo Jumbo

The squatty potty!

I spend my otherwise wasted commuting hours listening to podcasts from many different places and on many different topics. I love the BBC and am a new convert to RadioLab from NPR in the US. However, over the last few months I have been listening to a lot of health and fitness shows, one of which was about having the perfect poo.

I am quite a convert to the idea of functional health and fitness and also the ideas of evolutionary medicine. The basic idea of which is that our bodies evolved in a certain way, but modern society is pushing us to use them in another way. There are many examples of this -  we don't get enough sunlight, we sit down too much, we don't move correctly and we don't sleep enough.

One of the things that many of us (me included) are not able to do as adults is squat correctly because we have poor mobility and flexibility. Apparently the structures that stop your poop from coming out when you don't want it to are only really properly allowed to open up when you are squatting. When you are sitting as you do on a normal toilet, things aren't quite aligned as they are supposed to be

We haven't bought a squatty potty, but we have a range of different sized plastics steps around the house for the shorter members of the household to reach things (that's everyone else in the house). After a bit of experimentation, I can conform that the 20cm high Ikea step works fine and you really do notice a difference when you use it.

I heartily recommend giving it a try with some sort of step or box so you can make your own minds up. I am also going to get DK to try a step to see if we can save 20 minutes of our evening that we normally spend waiting for him on the loo.