-How Long Can You Hold Your Poop Comparison

There are few universal, unequivocal truths in the health world. One of them is that pooping is good for you. Sure this is a shyness-inducing topic but the truth is - everyone poops. No one wants to take a dump at work or in a public bathroom, but if you hold in your poop out of shyness, you could be doing some damage. Here's a list of things that could go wrong if you hold your poop. Believe us when we tell you - they're not pretty.

How long can you hold your poop? It's been two days until you last pooped, which seems unordinary, but eventually, the time will come, right? Then it's three days, and four until finally, you've gone a week without pooping. Yikes!

Chances are you've experienced the above uncomfortable scenario. Having few bowel movements impacts about 42 million Americans at some point every year according to the FDA.

Simply put, poop is a combination of waste material and bacteria, as a result of your body’s digestive process. After you eat, it takes your body a little less than 53 hours for it to do its thing and push that spaghetti and meatballs from your mouth through your digestive tract and out the other end (fun fact - the food spends roughly 40 of those hours just in your colon). When the digested food finally reaches the end, the rectal walls are stretched, and that sends a complex signal to the brain that it’s “go-time.”

The list of bad things that can result from holding in poop is longer (and grosser) than you probably realized. Not allowing yourself a bathroom break can result in uncomfortable side effects, as well as more serious conditions that can ultimately require surgery. The message is clear - when your body says it's time to go, then go.