Girls Just Wanna Be Regular

Like many content creators, Hally Lee (not her government name) posts popular step-by-step recipe videos on TikTok for smoothies, muffins, and other snacks. But unlike the food-prep how-tos we’ve all become familiar with, Hally’s recipes and routines are specifically designed to help you poop better.

“This is what I meal-prepped as a certified pooper,” begins one of Hally’s videos with more than 2 million views. “I like to hit my butthole first thing in the morning with a poop juice,” she says in a voice-over, referring to a smoothie with kale, banana, and spirulina powder. “My friends say this makes their poops very smooth and nice.”

“I’ve got to start poopmaxing,” one commenter wrote.

Lately, certain corners of social media have been flush with content focused around bowel health, with creators touting the benefits of getting enough fiber and discussing the cadence of one’s bowel movements as a wellness metric. Being regular is a flex.

The “fibermaxxing” trend is partly a response to the protein-focused content overload we saw last year, moving fitness creators to remind followers that looking and feeling good depends as much on fiber intake as on protein. There are other factors, too. New data showing increases in colorectal cancer in people under 50 has many young people eager to be proactive about digestive health. And as GLP-1 drugs become more popular and accessible, more people are becoming familiar with one of their common side effects: constipation.

The virality of Hally’s poop juices, along with that of relatable memes about, say, the intricacies of pooping on vacation, suggest that more young people are willing and eager to compare notes and are abandoning stigmas around discussing what has traditionally been a topic reserved for behind bathroom doors.

“People are starting to wake up to the idea that not just protein is important, but in fact, we need to balance the protein with fiber in order for ourselves to be healthy.”

Hally leans into that awkwardness. Because she has a regular job in tech, Hally, who is in her late 20s and is based in San Diego, chooses to film her videos from the neck down — allowing her to be at once unfiltered and not fully identifiable. She says that people tell her that the “juxtaposition between my soft, girly vibe and outfits, and between me saying ‘sh*t’ and ‘fart’ and ‘poop,’ is hilarious.” The poop-centric page she started last July now has more than 36,000 followers.

But viewers who started watching Hally’s videos because they’re funny, and occasionally outrageous, might find themselves sticking around for more practical inspiration. The public conversation around fiber is personal for her in more ways than one. She traces her interest in fiber-rich recipes to smoothies her father has made for her grandfather, who was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Hally makes clear that she’s not a medical or nutrition professional — just someone who wants a more open conversation around what sort of diet makes for healthy pooping. “People are starting to wake up to the idea that not just protein is important, but in fact, we need to balance the protein with fiber in order for ourselves to be healthy,” she told me. “Americans definitely don’t get enough fiber.”

She speaks the truth: American adults get around 10 to 15 grams of total fiber per day, falling short of recent federal dietary guidelines for adults under 50, which say that women should get around 25 to 28 grams of fiber and men should get 31 to 34 grams. Ideally, your fiber should come from whole foods rather than supplements. Some of your daily intake should come from sources of soluble fiber, like oats, bananas, avocados, and carrots, which slow down digestion, while some should come from insoluble fiber sources, like whole-wheat flour, nuts, and what your grandparents might call roughage: leafy greens and vegetables like cauliflower or green beans, which help stuff move through your digestive system. (A warning to fiber newbies: There’s a risk of fibermaxxing too hard, too quickly. Your body needs time to adjust, so don’t crank up your intake too fast. Instead, add more fiber into your diet gradually, by one serving a day — and drink lots of water.)

“I’ve got to start poopmaxing.”

In January, when Natalie (@beefqabob), a Los Angeles creator interested in restaurants, nutrition, and wellness, felt like she had run out of ideas for posts, she threw together a TikTok slideshow with images of high-fiber packaged foods and fruit from her camera roll and Pinterest boards. “The girls are fiber maxxing in 2026, so here’s what to keep at home to reach your daily fiber goals,” she headlined the post. The carousel featured some classic fibrous foods like raspberries and chia seeds but also had some less typical suggestions, like Rip Van Wafels, with 6 grams of fiber, and artichokes, which have around 7 grams each. The post, which is among her most popular videos, now has more than half a million views.

Natalie, who like most women interviewed for this story asked that we use just her first name, took that post’s success as a sign to pivot to more digestion-forward content and began researching ways to incorporate more fiber into her diet and her feed. For example, she’s since pointed to Floura bars, a new line of high-fiber bars from Jeni Britton, the founder of Jeni’s Ice Creams, that come in flavors like blueberry matcha and mango cardamom. (This is “not your granddad’s fiber,” Britton says in a video message.)

Gym-tok creators, too, are finding that people are curious about how fiber can help them look better. Dela (@delaliftsthings), a personal trainer who also happens to live in San Diego — California’s new poop capital? — says she doesn’t typically post about her diet, preferring to focus more on strength training. But she has been looking into the benefits of fiber recently, she says, and wanted to share some of what she found with her followers: that eating more fiber can help you feel fuller on fewer calories, which can make it easier to lose weight.

Her post in March on “high fiber foods to keep the tummy flat” has more than 2 million views and is her most viral video to date. In the comments, she says, are “a lot of people providing their own insight into how they increase their fiber, and sharing their own fiber sources.”

As more people connect online over how to get and stay regular, doctors are finding ways to keep the conversation going in the exam room. It turns out that being willing to actually say the word “poop” goes a long way toward helping people with this aspect of their health, says Dr. Trisha Pasricha (@TrishaPasrichaMD), a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Because we are typically taught from a young age that bathroom topics don’t make for polite conversation, even as adults we might be shy to discuss or seek out information around bowel health — and therefore people might not always have a clear understanding of what’s normal, or else, when to seek medical help.

Dr. Pasricha told me she wants to change this. While she sees patients of all ages in her clinic, she said that it can sometimes be especially challenging to get young people to tell her what’s bothering them, digestively speaking.

“A lot of the younger people, like college students, would come to my clinic, and I’d say, ‘Well, tell me about your bowel movements’ — it was often the first time they had heard that phrase,” she said. “Some students actually didn’t know exactly what I was even talking about when I said it like that. And people are so embarrassed to talk about these symptoms that I think when we over-medicalize it, it can kind of make this already embarrassing entity even more distant from us.”

So one day, she decided to try an experiment. “Let me just ask this in a more normal way,” she remembered thinking. “I was like, ‘What does your poop look like?’ And the whole atmosphere in the room changed. For the first time, somebody smiled in my clinic,” she said. The effect made her realize that “if I just use the language that people are using, then people feel more comfortable, and they feel that they can trust me to talk about it.”

“There’s a huge aversion, especially for women, to poop and fart freely.”

This breakthrough shaped her thinking when she titled her new book, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. She points out that many of us spend too much time in the bathroom scrolling on our phones — more than five minutes of straining on the toilet puts you at risk for hemorrhoids, she writes — while on the other hand, we’re not budgeting enough time in the morning for unhurried bowel movements. And now, when Dr. Pasricha, who is a health columnist for The Washington Post, shares social-media content, she tries to keep her choice of words casual and breezy.

In a recent video, she describes the state of “poo-phoria” to which we might aspire: “What poo-phoria means to me is this state of living and existing where thinking about your bowel movement, having a bowel movement, is like the absolute least of your daily concerns,” she said in the clip. “It should just be a part of your day that happens effortlessly, quickly, and you don’t think about it again.”

As with any trending topic, misinformation — and people looking to sell you stuff — abounds in online conversations around gut health. Dr. Pasricha urges caution, especially when sponsored content is involved, referencing the proliferating menu of celebrity-shilled gummies, drinks, and powders that purport to be high in fiber.

She knows that young people are more concerned than ever about their digestive health. A recent American Cancer Society study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that while overall cancer mortality decreased by 44% for people under 50 in the U.S. between 1990 and 2023, colorectal cancer has increased by around 1% each year since 2005, becoming the leading cause of cancer deaths in this age group. Consuming more dietary fiber is linked to a lower risk of some types of cancer, especially colorectal cancer, according to Memorial Sloan Kettering. Getting the right amount and types of fiber can also help lower the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

And while there are a handful of fiber-focused creators, like Alan Lin, aka “Fiber Daddy,” who keep it real about pooping, Hally says she’s proud to be among the small number of women who say “poop” on the internet. For her, this is in part a feminist mission.

“There’s a huge aversion, especially for women, to poop and fart freely,” Hally told me. “If I can help people poop and fart freely without shame, that would be so, so cool.”