This whole wheat free thing is so new to me that I can't help talking about it. I'm sure the people at work think I am a total freak, always talking about the last book I read about nutrition, exercise, or aging well. But a funny thing is happening, there are a few women that come around my office on a fairly regular basis, or stop me in the hallway, to tell me about progress they are making or to ask me for help on an issue they are having with their own Get Healthy initiatives. I am becoming known as the person in the office that will support and try to help anyone that is trying to make positive changes in their health, no matter where they are in the process. It's kind of nice to be able to help others with something that is so difficult to do all alone.
Lately I have been talking a lot about giving up wheat. I've been so excited about what I read in "Wheat Belly" and the impact that being wheat free has had on me so far, that even Jack has decided to give up wheat for a couple of weeks. So far, he is doing well. He stopped eating wheat on Monday and admits that he feels pretty good. He's not willing to attribute much to the lack of wheat yet, but when I suggested he extend his one week experiment to two weeks, he quickly agreed. That made me happy!! He said he has noticed that he doesn't get as hungry in the afternoons, but so far that is about the only change he has mentioned in the way he feels. He has been surprised to realize how much wheat he was eating. As he says, "Wheat is in everything!" For me, it wasn't that big of a change. Since I had already given up all Dead Food, which encompasses most of the things made of wheat anyway, like cookies, cake, donuts, bagels, breaded and fried foods, crackers, etc... I only had to stop eating the whole wheat toast I was having for breakfast (as much for convenience as anything else) and perhaps a sandwich or bread with my salad at lunch. Therefore, when I stopped eating wheat I didn't have to make a wholesale change in my diet. I added more veggies, like the pan full of vegetables I saute with my eggs in the morning or the veggies I eat with hummus for a snack in the afternoon or evening, but aside from that, my diet has not changed much.
In my opinion, then, given the fact that nothing else has changed (I've been exercising and "eating right" for over a year now), the only thing I can attribute to how different I feel today than I did two weeks ago is the fact that I stopped eating wheat. Jack wonders if it is the "placebo effect," as in I want it to make me feel better so I do feel better. I honestly don't think that's it. I felt like crap on Sunday and was in an equally bad mood on Monday. That is the same time frame that I was having a problem with painful cramps in my foot. I certainly didn't feel good on those days. It took me until the end of the day on Monday to connect the dots to going wheat free, but I think that is what it was. Sunday I was one week into life without wheat and I think my body was adjusting to its new chemical composition. By Tuesday the blues were gone and I was feeling fine. By Wednesday I was feeling incredible. As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday, I was feeling free. Yesterday was a repeat of Wednesday. I felt amazingly good all day long.
One of the most noticeable changes is the fact that I don't think about food very much anymore. Sort of like magic, the cassette tape in my brain that kept saying "eat...eat...eat...eat...eat..." and that I kept having to override with "not now...not now...not now...not now...OK, it's snack time...not now...not now...not now..." has been put on pause. When I am at work I don't sit at my desk, thinking about food and glancing at the clock waiting until it is legitimately "time to eat" again. Instead, I've been very focused on my work and when I look up I am surprised to see how much time has passed. I don't have food cravings at all. I am not having to use up any will power or energy in controlling my food. I'm just focused on work.
I didn't realize how much I've been wearing myself out controlling food. This has been going on my entire life, not just the last year, but my whole life. I've been fighting a war with food. On the one side, I've wanted to eat pretty much constantly. On the other side, I've known what I should eat to be healthy. The war has been a constant series of battles between what I craved and what I knew I should eat. Sometimes the cravings consistently won, and I got fat and felt like crap, sometimes my willpower won and I got thin and felt good, but the war never abated. It was constant.
During this last year I have been successful at arming my willpower's arsenal with more powerful weapons, so my willpower won more and more of the battles. I turned 50, I have so much left that I want to do in my life and many years left that I have to work, so I need to be as healthy and fit as I can possibly be. I read "Younger Next Year" and that book convinced my that I had to exercise for an hour a day six days a week. It gave me the ammunition I needed to stop making excuses to not exercise. Grow or decay each day. Easy choice. I tapped into all of my years of dieting and learning about nutrition to make decent food choices and to reprogram myself to think of food as fuel rather than a drug that makes me feel good. I pretty much stopped using food as a source of pleasure for myself or as a way to please others. I had to think of other ways to have fun, that did not involve eating. I hired a personal training to help me stay focused on well rounded strength training. I created my charts to plot my progress and keep it "in my face." I blogged and shared just about every step of my journey with the world, or at least the small portion of the world that found my blog and decided it was interesting enough to keep reading every day. My husband and sister have been amazingly supportive and I've leaned on them when I could tell I was losing the strength that I needed to get up and fight another day. As a result of having all of these tools, I have been winning way more battles than I have been losing, and I am a whole lot healthier and thinner and happier as a result. But it has still been a battle.
I have really noticed this battle over the last couple of months. After I reached goal weight, I stopped counting every calorie. I was still paying attention to what I ate, mentally adding it up, but I wasn't putting every calorie into my phone app any more. I also wasn't super strict about not eating anything sweet, so I had let butterscotch candies and tootsie pops creep into my afternoon snacking. I maintained my weight, around 153 pounds...not 150, but close enough I thought... without too much effort, but I was having terrible food cravings in the afternoon and evenings. I was still thinking about food too much. It was still taking a lot of energy to control my food. By the beginning of March I was starting to get a little discouraged and maybe a bit desperate. I did not want to fight this desire to snack all day for the rest of my life. This had to get easier somehow.
I read "Thinner This Year" first. That book convinced me to eliminate Dead Food from my day-to-day diet completely. No more, "just a little bit of crap is OK." I formulated my Food Plan for Life. No Dead Foods except on truly special celebratory occasions. I was still eating my toast in the mornings, though, and occasionally had bread for lunch. My Food Plan for Life, in spite of the fact that I was still eating wheat, made life easier, I will admit. It made it easier to walk by the candy bowl at the reception desk and just say no. I no longer had to decide if I was going to "let myself have" a piece of candy or not. I had already made that decision and I only needed to make that decision once, when I adopted my Food Plan for Life. I did not have to remake that decision every minute or every day, even. Decision made. No candy. Forget about it.
Problem is, I couldn't really forget about it. I knew I would say no to Dead Food when the cravings hit, but the cravings still hit. I was actually starting to consider drinking coffee in the afternoons. Maybe I just needed a jolt. I was almost ready to substitute caffeine for the sugar in spite of the fact that I thought it would affect my sleep. I was anxious about that, I need my sleep. In the past, if I drank coffee after noon I would have trouble sleeping. But that is how badly I wanted to get rid of these food cravings, I was getting ready to sacrifice sleep in order to stop wanting to eat. But I never took that step. Instead, I read "Wheat Belly."
Jack and I saw the book at Barnes and Noble when we stopped in to use the restroom during our stroll on the Plaza after his birthday dinner. Ruth and my friend, Lisa Claro, had both said I needed to read the book; and there it was, out on display. I picked it up and we bought it. I was skeptical about this book, I really was. Come on, wheat has been part of our diet for eons. Everyone says whole wheat is good for us, and that is all I eat, I'm fine. I don't need this book. Those were the thoughts I was having. But more and more I was hearing people, even my dad, mention this book. So, skeptic or not, I decided to read it and once I started, I couldn't put it down. What Dr. Davis has to say about wheat is fascinating. It opened my eyes to the possibility that wheat may have been the culprit in my diet, all along.
The first thing Dr. Davis tells us is that the wheat of today is not the wheat of our forefathers. Through a series of cross breedings, wheat is genetically a very different plant than it was even 50 years ago. It is shorter and hardier, it is draught tolerant and has a higher yield per acre, and because of the this new wheat we are now able to feed a lot more people in the world. On the other hand, this new wheat has never been tested to see if it is safe for human consumption.
Dr. Davis then tells us that wheat has two unique properties that make it different from every other food out there. First, it has a very high glycemic index. Two pieces of whole wheat toast convert to glucose in the bloodstream faster than 2 tablespoons of table sugar. Second, when wheat is digested it is degraded into a mix of polypeptides that have the, "Peculiar ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain. This barrier is there for a reason: The brain is highly sensitive to the wide variety of substances that gain entry to the blood, some of which can provoke undesirable effects should they cross into your amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, or other brain structure. Once having gained entry into the brain, wheat polypeptides bind to the brain's morphine receptor, the very same receptor to which opiate drugs bind." The scientist that discovered this, Dr. Christine Zioudrou, called these polypeptides "'exorphins,' short for exogenous morphine-like compounds, distinguishing them for endorphines, the endogenous (internally sourced) morphine-like compounds that occur, for instance, during a 'runner's high.'"
There is a lot more discussion of this phenomena in the book, but the conclusion that Dr. Davis draws, and the evidence is pretty compelling, is that digesting wheat generates morphine-like compounds that bind to the brain's opiate receptors. Therefore eating wheat "induces a form of reward, a mild euphoria. When the effect is blocked, either with opiate blocking drugs or when no wheat is consumed, some people experience a distinctly unpleasant withdrawal."
Wow! Basically, Dr. Davis claims that wheat, not sugar, is the drug that has been keeping me addicted to carbs my entire life. He sites numerous studies, experiments, and anecdotal evidence to support his theory. Again, it is compelling. After I read the book I had heard enough to stop eating wheat.
It's been almost two weeks. At first, the only thing I noticed was a lessening of my food cravings in the afternoon. That was good enough for me! That was the problem I was trying to solve, after all. If that was all I got out of not eating wheat, I was done eating wheat for good. Then I had my crummy weekend, when I was moody, had foot cramps, etc... I thought, "Wow, I am having withdrawals." Then on Wednesday, then Thursday, and now today, I felt amazing. All of a sudden I have so much more energy. All of a sudden I can stay focused on my tasks at hand. All of a sudden I feel like I am not battling the food demons any more.
My brain is quiet. I don't hear, "eat...eat...eat...eat...eat...eat..." constantly, anymore. I am eating less often. I stop eating when I'm not hungry. Last night was a perfect example. My food day was thrown off for a couple of reasons. First, I ate breakfast early because I needed to get to work a couple hours early. Second, I had a lunch planned with someone (I had forgotten about it, so I ate my snack around 11 anyway) so I ate lunch early. Third, I forgot to pack my nuts for a snack, so I had fewer fats that I normally do. The result was I was hungrier than normal when I got home from work. In the good old days, as in a few weeks ago, I would have responded to this by eating a piece of toast with peanut butter, or cheese and crackers (usually wheat thins), or something like that. That snack would then morph into eating more carbs, and then I would just keep eating until I couldn't eat anymore. Coming home hungry was always a recipe for disaster. I avoided it whenever I could. Last night, I came home hungry. I opened the fridge and saw the hummus staring me in the face. I picked it up, grabbed a carrot, and started eating it. Then I got my nuts out, mixed a small bowl of walnuts, macadamia nuts, and almonds. I ate some of those. I was halfway through my carrot and my nuts when I realized I wasn't hungry any more. I was startled by that. I put my snacks away, and started making our dinner, a salad. I had a small salad with a boiled egg and avocado for dinner. It was perfect. What would have been a binge a few weeks ago just didn't happen. Not because I will-powered my way through it, but because when I satisfied my hunger I didn't want to eat anymore. I was just simply done with my snack. Wow. Yes, this really does feel like a miracle.
The most striking change for me is how this is changing the way I feel about every aspect of my life. All of a sudden, I have more energy. I don't feel drained at the end of the day. Because I am not fighting the cravings vs. willpower battle all day long, I have reserves left for other things. I feel more confident about everything in my life. This is as big of a change in my life as I felt when I had my throat surgery and my sleep apnea was cured. I feel like a brand new person. I feel like shackles have been removed from my feet and I can walk freely through life for the first time. It's an amazing feeling. I am convinced this is all because I stopped eating wheat. I'm done with it, forever. Unless, somehow, I accidentally consume wheat because it is in something I don't know it's in, I will not eat wheat again. I have no need for it. I can't tell you how good this feels.
I feel free. It's as simple as that!
I take a class every, usually a science or math class. That means studying and taking exams after working all day. I have noticed a much greater ability to concentrate. It is great.
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