Hi,
I'm a 49 year old male, 20 pounds over weight, with a small hernia in the left groin, who eats plenty of fiber (I eat a vegan diet), but has been suffering from hard stools for the past couple of years since the hernia showed up. I drink a lot of water, and that helped for a while, but now it doesn't. MiraLAX helps most of the time, but I don't want to keep taking laxatives. I do spend a lot of time sitting because of my job which seems to put a lot of pressure on the rectum.

The problem is that I have a perfectly normal transit time, from 8-24 hours. 2-3 bowel movements a day. Yet often I get these large hard stools that are difficult and painful to pass. This has caused hemorrhoids and fissures that will cause some bright red blood on the outside of the stools occasionally when passing very large hard stools that really stretch the rectum. It's always the first part of the stool that is hard.

For the past 7 weeks my stools went back to being soft and normal without using the MiraLAX, and I thought I had finally gotten over this. But over the past week it's back again.

Question: What could possibly cause these large hard stools, even though there is normal transit time? Any ideas?

*I should also mention that three years ago I was diagnost with Hashimoto's Disease(Hypothyroidism).