Starting here, I should issue a warning - this doesn’t actually do anything. Production of gas aside, the intestines don’t have problems leaving large deposits of filth inside of them. They’re like a greased up toothpaste tube that’s always being optimally compressed. Colon cleanses come in two varieties that vary from a little weird to dangerous. The kind that come from pills and generate big ropy snakes of horror in your toilet (“mucoid plaque”) are straight frauds. Those pills consist of what is essentially the clay you get in kitty litter. When you take the pill, the clay expands and you get a mold of your butt pipes, which you then extrude. The kind that come from a machine do achieve SOMETHING (basically the same thing that any enema achieves, so if you’re not going in for surgery or planning on doing some really adventurous butt stuff, it’s probably not a necessity), but they come with their own dangers, like any medical procedure. Generally, anybody shoving a bunch of water up inside of you needs to be a doctor, because if it’s not a doctor, first you should know that the equipment is old (since it is now illegal to buy that equipment to do general health cleansing), and second, you should know that this is possibly a very crazy person. At the very least, keep in mind that this fellow is weird enough to dedicate a significant portion of his life to shoving hoses up strangers’ butts.
So that’s why I haven’t had one of those.
As for the seriousness, this is one of those situations where I really don’t know, because I don’t know what’s normal, sort of like you never know where your dick fits on the size spectrum because it’s not the sort of thing that there’s a whole lot of charts and graphs for (though in this case, I kind of suspect that there might be more resources for that question). My father basically had a steady breeze going down there for the entire sixteen years that I knew him, but I don’t know if that’s an indication of a family problem or just one of the curious features of our screwed up stupid genes or possibly a side effect of the diabetes (even though I learned from him not to eat Sorbitol - I’ll take this opportunity to warn every human away from Velamints).
What I think I’ve learned, from this thread and my own experimentation, is that the phenomenon is coupled (hard to make the distinction between tight and loose on that, since I take a supplement on the daily, but I also eat fruit and vegetables and all sorts of crap that would add to that baseline) to fiber intake (specifically, “prebiotic fiber,” whatever the hell THAT is), so my guess is that this is mostly a dietary issue that I’m going to get to live with for the rest of my life, since consuming large quantities of fiber is my primary method of keeping the amount of tasty fat in my blood in a reasonable range. It doesn’t sound like I’m too far out of normal, though, which is what I really needed some guidance to.
Thanks for the assist, everybody.