Nobody talks about this one, which is a shame, because everybody has it. You are not going, or you are going and it is hard work, and you have been thinking about it far more than you would like to admit. Here is what people have handed each other about it for two thousand years.
Read in the order the sun finds them — west to east, following the numbers.
You need
Stir into water and leave twenty minutes until it gels. Drink with lime.
Pre-Columbian, and the third independent arrival at soaked mucilage in this list alone.
Clean and limey. The texture takes one glass to get used to.
You need
Eaten in the morning, or soaked overnight first.
The European household answer — and one of the few remedies on this page with good clinical trial evidence behind it.
Sweet, dark, faintly winey.
You need
Taken together, warm, on an empty stomach.
The same warm-and-oily answer as ghee in hot water, from a kitchen that had olives instead of cows.
Grassy and sharp. Go slowly.
You need
Soak overnight, eat in the morning, drink the liquid.
The same principle as munakka, arrived at with the fruit that grows there instead.
Soft, sweet, and much better than the dried fruit alone.
इसबगोल
You need
Stir into a full glass and drink immediately, before it thickens. Then drink a second glass of water.
Used independently in both Ayurveda and Unani practice, and among the best supported by modern trials.
Almost nothing. The texture is the whole experience.
You need
Stir the ghee into hot water and drink it on an empty stomach, before anything else.
Ayurveda reads this as dryness and cold in the colon, and answers it directly — put the warmth and the oil back.
Mild and buttery. Less strange than it sounds after the first time.
मुनक्का
You need
Soak overnight. In the morning eat the raisins and drink the water they soaked in.
Sweet, heavy and moistening — the gentlest of the classical answers, and the one given to children.
Like very soft, very sweet raisins, because that is what they are.
เมล็ดแมงลักmeng lak
You need
Soak in water until each seed swells into a translucent jelly — about fifteen minutes. Drink the lot.
The same mucilage principle as psyllium, from a different plant on a different continent.
Almost none. Slippery, and oddly pleasant.
If you have had falooda, you have met these seeds already.
黑芝麻
You need
Ground, and stirred into warm water or into morning congee.
For dry constipation in particular, and especially in older people. Chinese medicine treats this as moistening rather than pushing.
Nutty and rich, faintly bitter. Very good in porridge.
You need
Before coffee, before food, before your phone.
This is prescribed by more traditions than anything else in this collection, and ignored by more people than anything else in this collection.
Water.
Seven answers, arrived at independently on four continents over two millennia, and they line up almost exactly. Warm oil. Soaked mucilage. Rehydrated fruit. A warm morning drink. Clockwise, always clockwise — the direction the colon actually runs. And every one of these traditions also has a strong purgative, and every one of them warns you not to come to depend on it.
None of the above is medical advice. These are household preparations, described as the households that make them describe them. They sit alongside medical care and never in place of it.
With warmth, from a great many kitchens.