I Stopped Eating to Avoid Pooping. Big Mistake

Short answer: it does not work. Your body keeps forming stool whether you eat or not, and eating less usually means less fiber and less fluid, so what eventually arrives is harder and drier than what you were trying to avoid. My bleeding eased for a while. The constipation underneath got worse the entire time.

This is the least flattering thing on this website and the part I most want someone to read before they lose a year to it. I was not on a diet. I was not doing anything anyone would have recognised from the outside. I was just quietly not eating, so that I would not have to go to the bathroom.

Why would anyone stop eating to avoid a bowel movement?

Because the logic is airtight, right up until it isn’t.

Food goes in, stool comes out, and the coming out is the part that makes you grip the edge of the sink. So you remove the input. No food, no bowel movement, no pain. It feels less like disordered thinking and more like problem solving, which is exactly why it is so easy to keep doing.

And in the short term you get rewarded for it. You go less often. You bleed less. The fear that was running your whole day backs off a little. When you are in that much pain, a day of relief is worth a lot, and you will pay strange prices for it.

I called it managing my condition. What I was actually managing was my fear. Those are not the same job, and I did the second one very well for about three years while the first one got quietly worse.

Does not eating actually stop bowel movements?

Not the way you are hoping.

Eating less reduces the volume and stretches out the intervals, so it feels like it is working. But stool does not only come from what you ate this morning. Your gut keeps producing regardless, and what accumulates in the meantime keeps losing water the longer it sits there.

So the trade you are actually making is: fewer bowel movements, each one worse. That is a terrible trade for a fissure, because a fissure is a tear that gets re-torn by hard stool. You have not removed the injury. You have just spaced out the injuries and made each one bigger.

Why does skipping meals make the real problem worse?

Because the treatment for what you have is more fiber and more fluid, and you have just cut off the main supply of both.

The self-care guidance for constipation from MedlinePlus is unusually direct about it. Their list of what to do when you are constipated opens with “do not skip meals”, and everything after that is about adding fiber and drinking more, not subtracting. NIDDK’s material on hemorrhoids says the same thing from the other direction: high-fiber foods and fluids make stools softer and easier to pass, and a low-fiber diet with constipation is listed among the causes in the first place.

So the intervention I invented was not neutral. It was the precise opposite of the treatment, applied daily, for years. Meanwhile the underlying cause of the pain was never addressed at all, because I was too busy avoiding the symptom to look at what was producing it.

There is a second cost too, one I did not think about at the time. Eating that little does not leave you in good shape to heal anything. Your body is trying to repair a tear in an area that gets used every day, and you have put it on rations.

What worked instead

The turn came from flipping the goal completely. Not “eat less so I go less” but “eat right so going does not hurt.” Once I said it out loud it was obvious, and it still took me years to get there.

In practice that meant real meals again, daily psyllium husk with a full glass of water every time, and enough patience to let it work. Nothing happened in week one. Week two, maybe slightly softer. It turned in weeks three and four, and by around four weeks the fissure had healed and the bleeding had stopped. The full routine is written up here, and it is boring, which is the point.

If eating normally feels impossible right now because of what comes next, start with the fiber and the water rather than the food volume. Get what is coming softer first. The meals get much less frightening once you have a few comfortable trips behind you. The fear cycle itself is worth understanding separately, because that is the engine underneath all of this.

When this stops being about hemorrhoids

I want to be careful and honest here, because I know some people reading this are further into it than I was.

Restricting food to control a symptom can drift. It starts as a practical response to pain and it can quietly become its own thing, with its own rules and its own anxiety, that outlasts the reason it began. If the not-eating has taken on a life of its own, if you feel out of control around food, or if it carries on after the pain has settled, that deserves real support from a professional rather than a strategy you found on a website.

The National Alliance for Eating Disorders runs a free helpline answered by licensed therapists who can help you find the right kind of care, whatever stage this is at. There is no threshold you have to meet before you are allowed to call them.

And on the physical side, this is where I have to say the thing I always say. Bleeding, pain that will not settle, or anything that has been going on for weeks needs a doctor, not a blog. I never saw one, across four years, including a full year after I found blood in my underwear. That was my biggest mistake and it is the one part of my story I would erase. Here are the red flags worth knowing. This site is my experience alongside published sources, not medical advice.

The next meal

Eat it. Not a heroic high-fiber overhaul, just a normal meal, with a glass of water, and fiber added gradually over the next week or two rather than all at once.

The bathroom is going to happen either way. The only question you actually get to answer is whether what arrives is soft or hard, and starving yourself has never once been the way to make it soft.

If you want to see how long I spent learning that, it is all in my story.