‘No Poop July’ TikTok Challenge: Do The Doo, Doctors Warn

ACROSS AMERICA — Do the doo. Don’t be the TikTok “No Poop July” dude. Everybody poops, and you should, too.

Paraphrasing, that’s the response from doctors and other medical professionals weighing in on the TikTok challenge du jour. It encourages people to resist the urge to go to the bathroom for a month — or to at least post videos on the platform making that seem the case.

Sure, it’s a joke. A poop spoof, if you will.

No one seriously believes the people participating in the challenge aren’t regularly flexing their sphincter muscles and emptying their bowels. But even if you could clench your cheeks and hold your poop inside your body for the 31 long, hot and quite likely painful days of July, why would you?

You wouldn't, not with purpose, anyway. People who don’t have regular bowel movements are looking at constipation, hemorrhoids and a host of gastrointestinal health issues, doctors warn. They become a toxic mess. Just ask anyone who has a disorder that stands in the way of a good, healthy, down-to-earth poop.

“It’s a funny thing to joke about, but it’s a potentially serious thing to do,” Dr. Steven Miller, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, told NBC News.

Anyone who isn’t persuaded should look at the 2018 case of a guy in England who vowed to “hold back nature” for 40 days so he wouldn’t poop out the drugs police saw him swallow, BBC reported. He reportedly exceeded his goal by at least eight days, fasting much of the time.

Gastroenterologist Ian Lustbader of New York University Langone Health told Live Science what that can do to the human body, starting with a poop joke:

“Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim and colons gotta poop," he said.

Seriously, though, failure to defecate for long periods of time can cause “megacolon,” a condition which causes the colon to become dangerously distended. Feces can become hard and impacted, and the bowel can rupture, Live Science reported.

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“If you constantly suppress the need to poop, you do run the risk of altered bowel motility in the future, or possibly needing laxatives or other things to stimulate your colon to work again," Lustbader said.

Google Trends data shows the No Poop July challenge started in 2020 — perhaps to ease the boredom of isolation during pandemic lockdowns.

TikToker OKCron posted the first known No Poop July challenge video, featuring Meg & Dia’s “Monster” as background music, on July 1, 2020. Since then, it has gotten more than 723,000 likes, nearly 4,500 comments and nearly 8,500 shares.

Bathroom humor is big on TikTok, it seems.

Earlier this year, kids were smearing feces on school bathroom walls because someone on the social media platform told them to. That’s not all they did in the rooms set aside for them to do their business, but it was the most foul example of damage to school restrooms.