How often should we go to the toilet?

One of the most common questions about bowel habits is “how often should I go?” Most would say “once a day”. But it’s not that simple. It’s quite a journey from meal time to splash down, as our bodies absorb from our food, the nutrients we need to live.

As part of the digestion process, the food we eat travels through our small intestine. Funnily enough, that’s long, about five metres long. But that length alone isn’t enough to absorb all the nutrients we need from our food. So on the inside of the muscular tube, which makes up our small intestine, are hundreds of thousands of finger-like projections called villi.

Now if anyone ever felt the urge to lay those villi out flat you’d end up with a surface about the size of a tennis court. All of this is to make sure everything that should be absorbed will be and the rest passes out as waste. But the big question is, how often should that happen?”

Well, there are a lot of myths about how often you should go to the toilet and some people are quite fixated on the need to go every day. But that’s neither necessary nor statistically correct,” says gastroenterologist, Dr Katie Ellard.”The issue is how comfortable you feel. If you go once a week and you feel perfectly comfortable and don’t have to strain, that’s absolutely fine. And if you go four times a day and you’re quite comfortable, that’s also fine.”

Bottom line? Less than once a week, things might need help moving along, but everyone’s different. So regular is not as regular as you might have thought. But, we all know the system gets thrown out of whack from time to time. One day you’re constipated, the next you’re house bound with diarrhoea.