Everyday Health Tips

Your daily dose of wellness

Tuesday, a little after seven, and the second cup of coffee has not done its usual job. Third morning in a row. The tub of fiber powder you bought on Saturday sits by the kettle, a gray film still drying in last night's glass. You have done the bran flakes, the big salads, the pear at lunch. Yesterday the waistband of your gray trousers left a red line across your stomach by four. You feel fuller than the day you started, and you cannot tell whether it needs more time or more fiber.

Worth a look

Eating well but still heavy by afternoon? A gut doctor says some of it may not be fat.

Dr. Gina Sam is a New York gastroenterologist who spends her days on one question: how fast food moves through you. When it moves too slowly, things back up. Part of that heavy, swollen feeling around your middle can be waste your body has not cleared yet.

She calls the three usual fixes, fiber, laxatives and probiotics, a band-aid. They may give you a day of relief, but they rarely change how your gut moves on its own. Her answer is a morning step she jokingly calls the 7-Second Flush, built around Emma, a plant-based formula she helped create to support regular, comfortable mornings.

Watch Dr. Sam's short video and see the 7-Second Flush →

What's happening

You were right to wonder about the fiber.

Fiber works by holding water and adding bulk. Softer and easier to pass: that is the promise on the tub. In a gut that moves at an ordinary pace, extra bulk gives it something to push against. In a slow gut, more bulk can mean more traffic.

A team in Munich saw this play out. They gave psyllium, the husk in most fiber powders, to 149 people with long-running constipation, average age 53, most of them women. Everyone took it daily for at least six weeks. The team also timed how long things took to travel through each person. Among those with a normal pace, 85 percent improved or cleared up completely. Among those with a slow pace, 80 percent got no relief at all.

Read that again. Same tub of psyllium, opposite results. Doctors call the second group slow transit. That's the colon taking far longer than usual to move what it holds toward the exit.

Fiber loads the truck. It cannot change the speed limit. When the road itself runs slow, a heavier load sits longer, and you feel it in your waistband by four.

So what sets the speed limit? A few times a day, your colon makes a strong, sweeping squeeze that carries its contents a long way at once. Most of these pushes come after you wake and after you eat. In a study that tracked the colon around the clock, healthy volunteers averaged about ten of these pushes a day. People with slow transit averaged fewer than two, and their colons answered waking and meals more weakly.

Fiber cannot add a push your colon is not making. That is why the quiet window after breakfast matters, and why the numbers below look the way they do.

This slow road is what Dr. Sam built her 7-Second Flush around. If it sounds like your mornings, her short video shows how it works →

The pulse: the speed of your gut

1 in 7 Adults worldwide who live with constipation that lasts for months, across surveys from many countries	2x How much more likely women are than men to have it, and the odds climb with age
80% People with a slow-moving colon who got no relief from six weeks of daily psyllium in a Munich study	~10 a day Strong pushes a healthy colon makes in a day. People with a slow colon averaged fewer than two

Sources: Suares & Ford, American Journal of Gastroenterology (2011); Voderholzer et al., American Journal of Gastroenterology (1997); Rao et al., American Journal of Gastroenterology (2004)

What matters most

Fiber adds bulk, and bulk helps a gut that moves at an ordinary pace. When the colon runs slow, the same scoop can leave you feeling fuller and heavier.
In the Munich study, most people with normal transit got better on psyllium. Most of those with slow transit did not, after six weeks of trying.
Your colon moves things along in a handful of strong pushes, mostly after waking and after meals. In slow transit those pushes are fewer and weaker.
A transit test can show your pace. Blood in the stool, weight loss you cannot explain, or a sudden change in your usual pattern deserve a call to your doctor this week.

What you can do today

Start small: tomorrow after breakfast, sit for ten unhurried minutes with something warm to drink. Your colon is at its busiest after waking and after a meal, so give it that window.
Put a low step stool in front of the toilet. Knees above hips straightens the last bend of the bowel, so less of your effort goes into straining.
Try two peeled green kiwifruit a day for four weeks. In a 2023 trial, that added about one and a half complete bowel movements a week, with better comfort than psyllium.
If extra fiber has made you more bloated, ease back to your usual amount for a week. If the slowdown has lasted months, ask your doctor whether a transit test makes sense.

Why this matters

A slow gut rarely keeps to the bathroom. It picks the loose dress over the fitted one and skips the dinner out on Thursday. Some mornings it sends you to the scale for a number that has nothing to do with fat. Then it orders the plain salad at lunch to make up for it.

For most of the last century, constipation was treated as a report card on your diet. Not enough roughage, not enough water, not enough walking. The answer was always more of the same, and when more stopped working, the blame landed on whoever was holding the spoon. That story left out the road itself: the nerves and muscles of the colon and the pushes they make, which set the pace no matter what goes on your plate.

So let me say this plainly. If the fiber made you feel worse, you did not do it wrong. Your gut may run on a slower clock, and that comes down to biology, not discipline.

Our take

Two things can be true here. Fiber still helps most people, and it belongs in your kitchen. The Munich study is decades old, and the round-the-clock colon studies were small and run in specialist clinics, so they may not describe your gut at all.

If you have been reading these letters for a while, you know the scale moves for reasons that have little to do with fat. This is one more of them. And if a slow road sounds like your week, Dr. Sam's video is worth a quiet look with your coffee. Watch Dr. Sam's video here →

Tomorrow morning, leave the psyllium tub on the shelf for once. Peel two kiwis, pour something warm, and rest your feet on the step stool for ten quiet minutes. A slow road still moves. It moves better when nobody is honking at it.

When things slowed down, what did you reach for first: fiber, prunes, coffee, or something else? Hit reply.