All of my clients know exactly what I mean when I ask them: “What’s your transit time looking like this week?”
Your transit time is a key indicator of what your motility is like. To put it more directly, your transit time measures the time in which it takes the remnants of your food to move through your digestive and intestinal systems, from ingestion to elimination 💩🚽.
Too slow of a transit time and you might be experiencing constipation. Too quick and you’re most likely dealing with some kind of undiagnosed medical condition whereby you’re not absorbing the nutrients from your food (ex: Celiac Disease, Crohn’s, Colitis, bile acid malabsorption, etc).
– The fastest transit time I’ve ever worked with: 6 hours
– The slowest transit time I’ve ever worked with: 3 weeks
And of course, I’ve seen everything in between! An ideal transit time is 12-18 hours if you’re starting the test at dinner, and up to 28 hours if you’re starting it at breakfast. Anything slower than that, and we’re talking constipation. Anything faster and there needs to be some investigative work done.
So now you might be wondering, how do I check my transit time? And how often should I check it? Glad you asked!
I recommend checking your transit time every week or two in the beginning stages of your journey, and once a month from there on out.
Here are the instructions for how to check your transit time:
Wait up to one week to see the corn, perhaps longer if you often skip BMs during the week or typically have low volume BMs. If you feel as though you should have seen the corn but didn’t, try again after a week. It will look different in the toilet/in your stool vs when you ate it, but you should definitely be able to see it.
Corn is a useful tool here because the outside of a corn kernel is made of cellulose, which is undigestible by humans and our gut microbes. This means that corn will leave your body virtually the same way it went in. With that being said, make sure you’re eating a full 1/2 cup of corn, choose organic if you can (it’s brighter in colour and it’s non GMO), and don’t chew it as well as you should the rest of your food!
Checking in on your transit time weekly will allow you to adjust doses of fibre supplements, motility agents, and other foods that you’re currently utilizing to keep your rhythm going.
If you discover that your transit time is too slow or too fast, I encourage you to look into my online course OR apply to work with me so we can get to the bottom of it together.
Let me know if you have any questions! 🌽
With love and gut health,
Ros
