Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinegel, and I'm joined

today by my friend and my colleague, Tamara Duker-Freumann. Long time listeners of the podcast

will remember Tamara from several previous episodes, most recently, on clearing up the

confusion around so-called leaky gut syndrome. But Tamara is my go-to expert on all things

digestive. She's a registered dietitian. She's based in New York City, and she's a nationally

known expert on nutrition therapy for gastrointestinal diseases. Her first book was called The Bloded

Belly Whisperer, and she has a new book out this month, April 2023, and it's called Regular,

the Ultimate Guide to Teaming on Rooly Bowls and Achieving Inner Peace. Welcome back to the

podcast, Tamara. Thank you, Monica. It is so good to have you. Okay, so you're suggesting here

that being regular is actually the key to achieving inner peace, which may sound like an exaggeration.

But the truth is that chronic constipation really can have a huge impact on somebody's quality

of life, and a surprising number of people seem to struggle with this. Why is that? I mean,

this seems like a really straightforward process. Food goes in one end of the tube, and eventually

it comes out the other end of the tube. So what is going wrong here? Right, so a lot of things can

actually go wrong along the way from the food going in your mouth to a formed perfectly moist bulk

bulky stool that gets to the exit before it gets too dried out, and then all the muscles and

nerves that have to coordinate to allow a stool to pass from inside to outside have to coordinate

exactly properly for that to happen. And so a lot of things can impact either the form of the stool

or the transit time of the stool or the muscle coordination that allows the stool to pass,

and anything that goes wrong along any of those dimensions could actually result in irregularity

or in this case constipation. Wow, you're right. There is a lot that can go wrong there,

and you didn't even mention anything about diet and lifestyle, which is usually all we hear about

...