Latest / Privycast / Ep. 178 How Much Work Does it Take to Poop?
Transcript
- 0:00We weren't even really sure if science was real a lot of the times.
- 0:03Science had more to do with growing food and like, apparently Montana had lots of very dope dinosaurs that people had found throughout our history, but like, I know a lot of us
- 0:14went through public education moderately skeptical about whether science was even real.
- 0:25Welcome back to Privy.
- 0:27Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
- 0:34I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
- 0:37Welcome back, everyone.
- 0:39Thank you for being here.
- 0:39Thank you for joining me here in my home bathroom.
- 0:43I got to admit, the way that I've structured my recording timeline, it's been a minute since I've sat down and recorded.
- 0:51I kind of had a bunch.
- 0:53banked in the hopper.
- 0:54And then that coupled with the nonsense that America's Best Restroom pulled again this year.
- 1:01More on that coming up.
- 1:03Probably my guess is October, which is usually when we're trying to dive fully into spooky season, but the America's Best Restroom competition via the Centus Corporation decides,
- 1:16you know what?
- 1:16Yeah, we'll put out all our information about who won the thing.
- 1:20I don't understand.
- 1:21It's an, I'll rant about this in the future, but it's an online poll.
- 1:24It's an online vote.
- 1:26So like once all of the votes are in, you ought to be able to just hit like tally, enter, and it will like total out each bathroom score.
- 1:39I don't really understand why it takes so much time and energy to sort out who won, but alas, that is how they've done it.
- 1:51I also got a note.
- 1:52I've got a bit of a rumbly tumbly this evening and I'm not sure what it is.
- 1:58I think I might've eaten too many Parmesan garlic kettle chips with not enough liquids on the system.
- 2:04Either that or it was the um chocolate peanut butter pie, which was delicious, but something's given me a rumbly tumbly.
- 2:14So who knows?
- 2:16Like we might be visiting.
- 2:19in real lives this week's topic this evening.
- 2:24Who knows?
- 2:26This episode is being recorded prior to, but is coming out at the end of what was for everybody a long weekend.
- 2:34I'm staring down the extra day off at the point of this episode's record.
- 2:40Here in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, or these United States, the kids just started back to school.
- 2:48Now I got to know, I know that there's a lot of folks throughout our country whose kids have already returned to school and you're probably better off for it.
- 2:56But our kids here in Oregon, we go back to school like the week after Labor Day.
- 3:05So yeah, that's what we got going on.
- 3:08It'll be fully September and no school will have started by tomorrow at the point of this record.
- 3:15But the kids just finished their first week.
- 3:18Good job.
- 3:19You guys made it to the end of your first week at the end, at the time this comes out and every year, this time of year.
- 3:26when it's in its back to school season.
- 3:28Everybody's got their new backpack.
- 3:30Everybody's got their new lunchbox.
- 3:32Everybody's got their assortment of new pens and pencils.
- 3:37Everybody's all bright eyed and bushy tailed for a brand new year of learning.
- 3:42And every time that happens, I debate and I toy with the notion of doing a back to school episode wherein we discuss school bathrooms.
- 3:51And every year I just, can't, I can't bring myself to lock it down.
- 3:55I'm sure it'll happen one year, but this year isn't it.
- 3:59I don't know why.
- 4:01I think, I think there's some sort of concern that I have with like fully delving into school bathrooms because I know that I will need to record it from a school bathroom,
- 4:15which I have ample access to, but it's still like a barrier of entry.
- 4:23Not sure.
- 4:25But we just celebrated here in the United States, Labor Day.
- 4:30And since we did so, I thought we could talk about some things related to the history of Labor Day and use them to springboard ourselves into a conversation about the bathroom.
- 4:50For our purposes in this episode, I want to look at a brief history of Labor Day.
- 4:56And I promise it'll be brief.
- 4:58We're going to keep it short here.
- 4:59And to begin, there is some disagreement and like it's kind of up in the air about who was the first guy to come up with the idea of Labor Day.
- 5:13Now, some records indicate a bloke named Peter McGuire, MC Guire,
- 5:20of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and the co-founder of the American Federation of Labor is the one that suggested this Labor Day as a holiday for the working class.
- 5:34Other sources indicate that it was a machine operator named Matthew Maguire, M-A-G-U-I-R-E, who came up with the idea.
- 5:47I'm not going to say that it doesn't matter because it doesn't matter.
- 5:51But like the fact that the two guys who they're pretty sure came up with Labor Day, the fact that their names are so close is just a bit suspect to me.
- 6:03Like I just I have some questions about how these two blokes his names were so close to each other.
- 6:13It's kind of wild if you think about
- 6:17But it's really hard to tell what's going on, but it should be noted that at those earliest and those first Labor Day celebrations, both of these guys were in attendance and
- 6:29they were on board with it.
- 6:32With names so similar, it gets lost in the shovel.
- 6:36But they wanted a day to observe and honor and give back by giving time off.
- 6:45to the American worker.
- 6:49Nowadays, it just feels like a day to get some sweet online deal.
- 6:54I feel like if you hop on social media anytime within a one week window of Labor Day, everybody's got a discount code.
- 7:02Everybody and their brothers got a code for you to slap down in that code box only to have you find out, you didn't put enough crap in your cart for the Labor Day sale to work.
- 7:13You better go spend more money.
- 7:17Just feels like a day for a deal.
- 7:21What's interesting is, and it turns out Labor Day has an interesting start here in Oregon.
- 7:28While there were Labor Day recognitions and activities and local ordinances that go back as far as 1885 and 1886, New York was the first state to introduce a bill regarding the
- 7:42day.
- 7:43And Oregon was the first state to pass the law
- 7:47in stating Labor Day, 1887.
- 7:52It's interesting to me because it feels like nowadays there's a lot of folks in Oregon that would really do everything they can to avoid doing any labor at all.
- 8:06It's like, brother, I need ciggies and beer.
- 8:10Like just hook me up.
- 8:12I'm going to sit here and throw my trash along the side of the road.
- 8:16And please give me, gimme, gimme, gimme.
- 8:19Now people, people come hard times fall on everybody.
- 8:22And I'm not disparaging those who have come by hard times, but like when you're actively asking people for free stuff and then they give you free stuff and then you take the trash
- 8:38that is produced by that free stuff and you scatter it, hither and yon all over everywhere.
- 8:47It makes me less incentivized to give you free stuff.
- 8:51So please, like you, must follow the same rules that we must follow as people that share a society.
- 8:59Quit throwing your crap everywhere.
- 9:00It wasn't until 1894 that Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September a legal holiday, Labor Day.
- 9:13While in the past, the day was celebrated with
- 9:16speeches dedicated to the worker and parades to give the worker time to be recognized and a day off to celebrate.
- 9:25As I said, nowadays, most people get a day off, not all of them, which is pretty rad, but you celebrate via various online and in-person sales.
- 9:39It's less compelling.
- 9:42It's Labor Day.
- 9:43The history's short.
- 9:44See, not too crazy.
- 9:46I know a lot of times here on the show, we don't like to draw a direct straight line to our end goal.
- 9:51And we're not in this episode.
- 9:53But not every line drawn has to be a crazy conglomerated zigzag.
- 10:00We can get to the point without getting to the point.
- 10:04But before we get to the bathroom, which is where we're headed, you know I'm to be headed to the bathroom later.
- 10:10We need to go back a little further than the first Labor Day to talk about yet another aspect of work, energy.
- 10:28As I've said before on the show, I'm not a scientist.
- 10:32Not me.
- 10:34I grew up Montana public education.
- 10:36We weren't even really sure if science was real a lot of the time.
- 10:40Science had more to do with growing food and like, apparently Montana had lots of very dope dinosaurs that people had found throughout our history, but like, I know a lot of us
- 10:51went through public education moderately skeptical about whether science was even real.
- 10:57Ooh!
- 10:58But one thing I remember learning about in science class was energy and how really energy was somehow related to heat or like the amount of heat or something that something can
- 11:13create.
- 11:14I don't remember all the specifics.
- 11:15It's not important.
- 11:17And while that's not entirely the case, that idea of energy and heat and like the amount it gives off was
- 11:28Really like the understanding that Nicolas Clement had in the early 1800s.
- 11:35Now again, this would be 70 to 80 years before Labor Day existed.
- 11:44Nicolas Clement, he was, I believe, French and I believe a chemist, but he used something that he called a calorie as a unit.
- 11:54of heat that is measured and generated by steam engines.
- 11:59So was like the steam engine produces this much calories of heat.
- 12:05This stood, the calorie, stood as a common way to measure energy until 1928, well over a hundred years there, when they came up with the term joule as a measurement of the amount
- 12:21of energy it takes to perform some things.
- 12:26Some people burn lots of jewels.
- 12:28Some people do not do much jewels.
- 12:30know, everybody's does more or less jewels than other people.
- 12:35Some people do none jewels and they are basement dwellers.
- 12:40But a calorie at that time was more commonly held in the world of nutrition and how much energy or heat it would take your body to burn something or to burn off so much energy.
- 12:55I should know.
- 12:56This is Hunter's incredibly simplistic way of describing a calorie.
- 13:05I don't really understand calories.
- 13:07I know that they're in food and I know that if you exercise you burn them.
- 13:14Like how I understand it, if you get more calories in your body, then your body burns.
- 13:22It usually results in you gaining weight.
- 13:24Like you've got surplus energy stores and you got to put it somewhere.
- 13:30The actions that we do burn calories by using that energy and consuming those calories.
- 13:41When we use up or burn more calories than we consume, we should theoretically lose weight.
- 13:47At least that's the idea of all this.
- 13:49It's like if you have not enough calories and you're burning more than what you put in in a day, you should like get smaller.
- 13:58I think that's what the idea of calorie deficit is.
- 14:01And I understand, like there's a whole conversation about metabolism and body weight and all, but this is the basics of calories.
- 14:12goes to follow.
- 14:14The idea then that when we do work, it uses up calories and burning calories is tied to us doing work and using energy with Labor Day being about work and celebrating and
- 14:30recognizing the worker and all the calories being burned when those workers do work.
- 14:37We have a question then of are they related?
- 14:40And even more importantly, how does any of this, this get us into the bathroom?
- 14:55Unfortunately, this episode of privy contains math.
- 14:59know.
- 15:00What a bummer.
- 15:02Math.
- 15:04The concept of converting work to calories or vice versa is a simple mathematic conversion.
- 15:13An equation must be performed in order to change the energy.
- 15:19Yes, I just removed my socks.
- 15:22Chill out.
- 15:23But must be, it's hot.
- 15:25It's a blustery August day.
- 15:28That's why I'm slurping the spin drift this evening, but you have to convert it.
- 15:35gotta, you gotta do a mathematical conversion, which is always a bummer, but, this mathematical conversion is what every smartwatch exercise machine and anything that
- 15:46converts the exercise that you're doing into the amount of calories burned.
- 15:51has a program in it that does this conversion and
- 15:55The most simple way of proceeding forward on this episode, wherein I don't like and don't feel like doing math is if you exert four joules of work, which I don't, it's a
- 16:08measurement.
- 16:09I don't know how they measure it, four joules.
- 16:11You would burn about one calorie.
- 16:13So one calorie equals four joules of work.
- 16:18I should note here, the math is not exact, but like I don't like decimals or fractions.
- 16:26And this show isn't here for science.
- 16:28It's for bathroom exploration.
- 16:30So for our purposes, four joules equals one calorie.
- 16:34like, okay, now we got our conversion chart, but why are we on this Labor Day weekend and this week after Labor Day talking about work and calories and labor?
- 16:50Well, because my friends,
- 16:53Sometimes you wake up at two in the morning and you really do some work and you really burn some calories grunting a stumpy out in the middle of the night.
- 17:05I mean this thing just keeps coming back.
- 17:08It's like it's one of those where you give 15 minutes of dedicated turd time and then you stand up you wash your hands and it's threat level brown.
- 17:19You're back at it again.
- 17:21It's like brother.
- 17:23There's so much going on.
- 17:25There's so much work that is wanting to be done now.
- 17:29And all I want to do is get back to my evening slumber.
- 17:34So with the idea then that about four joules of work is about burning one calorie,
- 17:43And in honor of Labor Day, I got to wondering.
- 17:48How much work and as an extension, how many calories do we burn when we go to the bathroom?
- 17:57I should note, the simple path forward would be a Google search and a brief search on the internet, which by the way, I got to tell you right
- 18:09My Google search history and my algorithms for most of my social media are just shot.
- 18:16They're shot from doing this show.
- 18:19I get every advertisement for every type of soap, every type of toilet paper.
- 18:27If there's a strange dude wipes are up on my grind.
- 18:31Like I get so many dude wipes ads and they got pumpkin spice dude wipeys.
- 18:37I'm not gonna lie, I gotta seek this out.
- 18:41Mostly because I gotta know if they taste like pumpkin spice.
- 18:48They ain't no-
- 18:51But if you Google how much calories does pooping burn, which is what I did enter into my search bar, it says it doesn't really burn many calories.
- 19:02Now that's not acceptable for me because like many is still some.
- 19:08So pooping is like a normal body function.
- 19:12If it's not, please go see your doctor.
- 19:14I'm not your doctor and I'm not a scientist as I stated at the beginning, but like it's a normal body function.
- 19:20And on average, they say that you only burn five to 10 calories per bodily movement.
- 19:27Now, I also looked up, well, like how long does a normal bowel movement last?
- 19:33Like if they're saying five to 10, that seems low.
- 19:36And they said that an average poo job takes 30 seconds to two minutes.
- 19:40Now,
- 19:43I like to think that I, my bathroom constitution is pretty consistent and it's not, I wouldn't describe it as difficult, but 30 seconds is incredible.
- 19:56Like, I don't even know if you've got a sphincter.
- 20:00If it's coming out of you 30 seconds flat, that's quick.
- 20:03Like I believe that's diarrhea.
- 20:05I'm not sure, but it just seems suspicious to me.
- 20:10But you could say that in about a minute of pooping, when you're having an okay time of it and everything is smooth sailing, get it, you're not working hard, you would burn about
- 20:21five calories per minute going to the bathroom.
- 20:24So for a five minute drop, you'd be staring about 25 calories burned, as long as everything's smooth and coming out okay.
- 20:33But the thing is, in my experience,
- 20:37If you're worrying and if you're even halfway concerned with how many calories you burned while you were pooping, it wasn't smooth.
- 20:45Like nobody ever had a smooth deuce and said, I bet you I really worked hard and burned lots of calories getting that one out.
- 20:53It's usually when things are difficult, when you're plugged up, backed up, things are not smooth, consistency is whack, you have to work harder to make your deposit.
- 21:06Just like at the gym, when you work harder, you burn more calories.
- 21:11So what about on a particularly challenging job?
- 21:15How much work, and as an extension, calories do you burn on one of those?
- 21:20Now.
- 21:24They estimate that depending on your body weight, if you sit upright for one hour, you can burn 120 to 150 calories.
- 21:34So if you sat up for five minutes, you would burn 10 calories.
- 21:39So now you have 15 to 15 calories for an easy poop or 15 to 40.
- 21:49One frame of reference and I began to wonder, well, is there any other actions that people do wherein they strain and push in order to push something out of their body?
- 22:01And as I thought about that, my brain naturally went to childbearing.
- 22:07Now, childbearing, needless to say, ladies, if I had to say it, I'm sorry, but childbearing is actually harder than pooping.
- 22:15Go figure.
- 22:16It's obviously more difficult and it's
- 22:18takes longer.
- 22:20You can learn something though from the process of straining and pushing and the work it requires.
- 22:26Now, they note that a typical label late labor and delivery can burn anywhere between five and ten thousand calories.
- 22:35That's a lot.
- 22:36That's like two to three days worth, maybe four or five days worth of eating that are burned in like a session of of like pushing a child.
- 22:46It's wild.
- 22:49Most of those calories are burned, however, from contracting muscles to help push the like fat baby head out.
- 22:56I mean, that's just, that's just how that works.
- 22:59It's not the same, but from it, we know that when you grunt one out, whether it's a baby or a lot of work on a poop, it expends more work and as a result, more calories.
- 23:15So I decided that the process of weightlifting
- 23:18like, you know, like we're we're straining lifting weights.
- 23:21And by the way, if you're making noise lifting weights, you're letting you're not.
- 23:25Anyway, don't do that.
- 23:29but it's not hard, like heavy.
- 23:31So I said, let's do casual weightlifting.
- 23:34And they say if you are casually lifting weights, like you're not overdoing it, but you're just going safe, moderate pace, they estimate that you burn about 150 calories in 30
- 23:45minutes.
- 23:46That means casual weightlifting for five to 10 minutes burns 20, 50 calories.
- 23:51So on top of the sitting upright and the regular, like calories burned during poop,
- 23:59you would burn between 75 and 125 calories for a particularly difficult 5 to 10 minute bathroom job.
- 24:12God forbid you do a 20 to 30 minute stint.
- 24:16You could be staring it upwards of a hundred plus calories if you're, if you're on there.
- 24:24And I think a good metric for me, as I think through these things, I think a good metric is to estimate that you burn about, you could say about, if it's a tough one, if it's a
- 24:37tough guy, you could say that you probably burn about a hundred calories for a 10 minute difficult job.
- 24:44And you know, I think as you back it off, medium job, probably 75 for 10 minutes and an easy one, easily 50 calories burned for a
- 24:54Easy 10 minute job.
- 24:55So this Labor Day, in honor of the work that people do, I wanted to take a crack at all of this at a shorter episode in honor of the working man and the working man's turd.
- 25:10So as they carbo load before a long session of whatever they're going to go do for work, just remember the more nasty bathroom job that they have coming later, it's going to burn
- 25:21more calories in the long run.
- 25:24It's not a crazy amount, but it is work and it's work done producing a grumpy.
- 25:33I want to also note before we move to close out the episode that there's people that weigh themselves before and after pooping, subtract the difference, and they have found how much
- 25:44their poo weighs.
- 25:45Now, I should note there are instances in usually medical settings wherein people do that process where they weigh themselves poop and then weigh themselves, but they also weigh
- 25:55the poop.
- 25:55And what they found is the difference, the discrepancy is your
- 26:01change in body weight is not always the same as the poo.
- 26:05Sometimes you actually lost more weight than the poo weight.
- 26:11And it's something to think about.
- 26:12Perhaps that way is made up in calories burned, producing the job.
- 26:18Something to think about.
- 26:18It's not much, but it is enough to make you ponder.
- 26:21This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
- 26:25Thank you so much for being here.
- 26:26Thank you for listening.
- 26:27Share the show with a friend.
- 26:28Word of mouth is huge for podcasts and September is like podcast awareness month.
- 26:34Tell a friend as you're standing around, say, Hey, I listened to this show and it's okay to be a little embarrassed about.
- 26:41I get it, it's a podcast about bathroom.
- 26:43I'm pretty self-aware about this.
- 26:44Just tell them, like, yeah, you know, I listen to Privy, you know, it's podcast, and word of mouth is huge.
- 26:50Share the show on social media, do all those things, but the biggest help that you can do is leaving the show a rating review.
- 26:57If you do one thing to podcast awareness or whatever month September is, leave the show a rating or review.
- 27:04You can do that on Apple Podcasts, the Spotify podcast.
- 27:07The five star options are preferred.
- 27:09Doing so helps people find the show.
- 27:11It pops it up higher into lists about history in bathrooms.
- 27:15And that's about what we got going on here.
- 27:18But it also is a way for us to give back to Wounded Warriors and Living Water International.
- 27:24A dollar for every rating left.
- 27:27If you do a written review, we'll bump that up.
- 27:29As a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
- 27:32This free world was not always free and in pursuit of cleaner water for all.
- 27:37Not everybody has it.
- 27:38and we're pursuing it for others.
- 27:41We want to thank Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music.
- 27:44You can find their links in the description below.
- 27:46Follow the show at privycast on social media.
- 27:49us an email privycast at gmail.com.
- 27:51Check out the website privy-cast.com.
- 27:55We're still working on some, some store and we got some sticker items on there.
- 27:59Go check those things out.
- 28:02We would also encourage you check out the privy's Facebook group.
- 28:05We've got lots of Facebook pranks, memes, and jokes.
- 28:08Available on there and shout out to a bunch of the guys that keep fresh bathroom jokes coming.
- 28:14I appreciate you guys this brings us again to the another episode and Thank you so much for being here.
- 28:22Keep pooping in the free world own your stank and Don't work too hard busting them grumpies and now as always Don't forget to flush