With my redone jpouch I started going ~6 times a day and it stayed consistent like this. I take metamucil every morning and noon, sometimes later. No imodium

Frequency is a tricky thing, because sometimes bathroom trips are optional, so the same frequency may mean very different things for different people. Most surgeons seem to recommend beginning to (gently!) delay bathroom trips, a process often called “stretching the pouch.” This will gradually increase your capacity - the amount of poop your pouch can comfortably hold.

Everyone is different when it comes to this for sure.

I tracked my movements for the first couple of weeks and averaged teens for the first 2 weeks and then began to see a downward trend in frequency. I stopped tracking once I got under 8 a day and now I usually am around 5 in a 24 hour span. 6 months out on the 21st.

I would keep food intake to simple/consistent items. This will help the pouch know what to expect and then you can introduce new foods over time.

Thanks for those responses. I asked my hospital care team about these points, because I have read these on these forums that I've been pouring over for months (starting to train my pouch and using fiber instead of introducing yet another med, lomotil). They told me not to train my pouch this early because it could back up to the suture line which is still healing (seems like it'd have to be a lot of poop, but I'm not the expert here). And for fiber, I was told not to use it this early because for some people it makes things worse. I already have my psyllium powder ready to go, thanks to you guys. I just gotta get to that point.

After some trial and error and talking with hospital nurse, I'm going to try taking two imodium every 6 hours, as they prescribed, and try not to panic when I don't go for several hours. After I adopted this regimen, I am doing better. Last night I woke up to poop 5 times, but I expect that 9 days after my takedown...the difference was that after I pooped, my sphincter relaxed enough that I was able to go back to sleep fairly quickly. The night before with more watery stool, I would just lay there with burning butt waiting to get to the point that I couldn't hold it anymore. Am going to hold off on adding lomotil unless i have "breakthrough" periods where the imodium isn't doing enough.

I'm hoping that after a couple of weeks in, I'll see some slowing down, too. And maybe I'll be cleared for psyllium powder by then.