Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health (27 page)
Read Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health Online
Authors: William Davis
People who habitually consume wheat products become crabby, foggy, and tired after just a couple of hours of not having a wheat product, often desperately searching for any crumb or morsel to relieve the pain, a phenomenon I’ve watched with dry amusement from my comfortable wheat-free vantage point. But once you’ve eliminated wheat from your diet, appetite is no longer driven by the glucose-insulin roller coaster of satiety and hunger, and you won’t need to get your next “fix” of brain-active exorphins. After a 7:00 a.m. breakfast of two scrambled eggs with vegetables, peppers, and olive oil, for instance, you likely won’t be hungry until noon or 1 p.m. Compare this to the 90- to 120-minute cycle of insatiable hunger most people experience after a 7:00 a.m. bowl of high-fiber breakfast cereal, necessitating a 9 o’clock snack and another 11 o’clock snack or early lunch. You can see how easy it becomes to cut the 350 to 400 calories per day from your overall consumption that results naturally and unconsciously from wheat elimination. You will also avoid the afternoon slump that many people experience at about 2:00 or 3:00 p.m., the sleepy, sluggish fog that follows a lunch of a sandwich on whole wheat bread, the mental shutdown that occurs because of the glucose high followed by the low. A lunch, for instance, of tuna (without bread) mixed with mayonnaise or olive oil-based dressing, along with zucchini slices and a handful (or several hand-fuls) of walnuts will not trigger the glucose-insulin high-low at all, just a seamless normal blood sugar that has no sleep- or fog-provoking effect.
Fasting can be one of the most powerful tools for regaining health: weight loss, reduction in blood pressure, improved insulin responses, longevity, as well as improvement in numerous health conditions.
1
Though fasting is often regarded as a religious practice (e.g., Ramadan in Islam; Nativity fast, Lent, and Assumption fast in the Greek Orthodox Christian church), it is among the most underappreciated strategies for health.
For the average person eating a typical American diet that includes wheat, however, fasting can be a painful ordeal that requires monumental willpower. People who regularly consume wheat products are rarely able to fast successfully for more than a few hours, usually giving up in a frenzy of eating everything in sight.
Interestingly, elimination of wheat makes fasting far easier, nearly effortless.
Fasting means no food, just water (vigorous hydration is also key for safe fasting), for a period of anywhere from eighteen hours to several days. People who are wheat-free can fast for eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six, seventy-two, or more hours with little or no discomfort. The ability to fast, of course, mimics the natural situation of a hunter-gatherer, who may go without food for days or even weeks when the hunt fails or some other natural obstacle to food availability develops.
The ability to fast comfortably is
natural;
the inability to go for more than a few hours before crazily seeking calories is
unnatural.
Most people find it hard to believe that wheat elimination can in the long run make their lives easier, not tougher. Wheat-free people are freed from the desperate cyclic scramble for food every two hours and are comfortable going for extended periods without food. When they finally sit down to eat, they are contented with less. Life … simplified.
Many people are, in effect, enslaved by wheat and the schedules and habits dictated to them by its availability. A radical wheat-ectomy therefore amounts to more than just removing one component of the diet. It removes a potent stimulant of appetite from your life, one that rules behavior and impulse frequently and relentlessly. Removing wheat will set you free.
Approximately 30 percent of people who remove wheat products abruptly from their diet will experience a withdrawal effect. Unlike opiate or alcohol withdrawal, wheat withdrawal does not result in seizures or hallucinations, blackouts, or other dangerous phenomena.
The closest parallel to wheat withdrawal is the nicotine withdrawal that results from quitting cigarettes; for some people, the experience is nearly as intense. Like nicotine withdrawal, wheat withdrawal can cause fatigue, mental fogginess, and irritability. It can also be accompanied by a vague dysphoria, a feeling of low mood and sadness. Wheat withdrawal often has the unique effect of diminished capacity to exercise that usually lasts from two to five days. Wheat withdrawal tends to be short-lived; while ex-smokers are usually still climbing the walls after three to four weeks, most ex-wheat eaters feel better after one week. (The longest I’ve ever seen wheat withdrawal symptoms persist is four weeks, but that was unusual.)
The people who suffer through withdrawal are usually the same people who experienced incredible cravings for wheat products on their former diet. These are the people who habitually eat pretzels, crackers, and bread every day as a result of the powerful eating impulse triggered by wheat. Cravings recur in approximately two-hour cycles, reflecting the glucose-insulin fluctuations that result from wheat products. Missing a snack or meal causes these people distress: shakiness, nervousness, headache, fatigue, and intense cravings, all of which can persist for the duration of the withdrawal period.
What causes wheat withdrawal? It is likely that years of high-carbohydrate eating makes the metabolism reliant on a constant supply of readily absorbed sugars such as those in wheat. Removing sugar sources forces the body to adapt to mobilizing and burning
fatty acids instead of more readily accessed sugars, a process that requires several days to kick in. However, this step is a necessary part of converting from fat
deposition
to fat
mobilization
and shrinking the visceral fat of the wheat belly. Wheat withdrawal shares physiologic effects with carbohydrate-restricted diets. (Atkins diet aficionados call it induction flu, the tired, achy feeling that develops with the no-carbohydrate induction phase of the program.) Depriving the brain of wheat gluten-derived exorphins also adds to the withdrawal effect, the phenomenon that is likely responsible for the wheat cravings and dysphoria.
There are two ways to soften the blow. One is to taper wheat gradually over a week, an approach that works for only some people. However, be warned: Some people are so addicted to wheat that they find even this tapering process to be overwhelming because of the repetitive reawakening of addictive phenomena with each bite of bagel or bun. For people with strong wheat addiction, going cold turkey (shall we call it cold noodle?) may be the only way to break the cycle. It’s similar to alcoholism. If your friend drinks two fifths of bourbon a day and you urge him to cut back to two glasses a day, he would indeed be healthier and live longer—but it would be virtually impossible for him to do it.
Second, if you believe that you are among those who will experience withdrawal, choosing the right time to transition off wheat is important. Select a period of time when you don’t need to be at your best—e.g., a week off from work or a long weekend. The mental fog and sluggishness experienced by some people can be significant, making prolonged concentration and work performance difficult. (You should certainly not expect any sympathy from your boss or coworkers, who will probably scoff at your explanation and say things like “Tom’s afraid of the bagels!”)
While wheat withdrawal can be annoying, and even cause you to snap at loved ones and coworkers, it is harmless. I have never seen any genuine adverse effects, nor have any ever been reported, beyond those described above. Passing up the toast and muffins is
difficult for some, charged with lots of emotional overtones, with chronic cravings that can revisit you for months and years—but it is good for your health, not harmful.
Fortunately, not everyone experiences the full withdrawal syndrome. Some don’t experience it at all, wondering what all the fuss is about. Some people can just quit smoking cold turkey and never look back. Same with wheat.
Yet another odd phenomenon: Once you have followed a wheat-free diet for a few months, you may find that reintroduction of wheat provokes undesirable effects ranging from joint aches to asthma to gastrointestinal distress. They can occur whether or not withdrawal happened in the first place. The most common reexposure “syndrome” consists of gas, bloating, cramps, and diarrhea that lasts for six to forty-eight hours. In fact, the gastrointestinal effects of reexposure to wheat in many ways resemble that of acute food poisoning, not unlike ingesting bad chicken or fecally contaminated sausage.
The next most common reexposure phenomenon is joint aches, a dull arthritis-like pain that usually affects multiple joints such as elbows, shoulders, and knees, and that can last up to several days. Others experience acute worsening of asthma sufficient to require inhalers for several days. Behavioral or mood effects are also common, ranging from low mood and fatigue to anxiety and rage (usually in males).
It’s not clear why this happens, since no research has been devoted to exploring it. My suspicion is that low-grade inflammation was likely present in various organs during wheat-consuming days. It heals after wheat removal and reignites with reexposure to wheat. I suspect that the behavioral and mood effects are due to exorphins, similar to what the schizophrenic patients experienced in the Philadelphia experiments.
No, it’s not a
National Enquirer
headline alongside “New York woman adopts alien!” For people who have walked away from wheat, it might actually be true.
In those susceptible to the addictive effects of wheat, all it takes is one cookie, cracker, or pretzel in a moment of indulgence. A bruschetta at the office party or a handful of pretzels at happy hour opens up the floodgates of impulse. Once you start, you can’t stop: more cookies, more crackers, followed by shredded wheat for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, more crackers for snacks, pasta and rolls for dinner, etc. Like any addict, you rationalize your behavior: “It can’t really be all that bad. This recipe is from a magazine article on healthy eating.” Or: “I’ll be bad today, but I’ll stop tomorrow.” Before you know it, all the weight you lost is regained within weeks. I’ve seen people regain thirty, forty, even seventy pounds before they put a stop to it.
Sadly, those who suffered most severely from wheat withdrawal on removal are the same people who are prone to this effect. Unrestrained consumption can result even after the most minimal “harmless” indulgence. People who are not prone to this effect may be skeptical, but I’ve witnessed it in hundreds of patients. People who are susceptible to this effect know quite well what it means.
Short of taking opiate-blocking drugs such as naltrexone, there is no healthy and easy way to bypass this unpleasant but necessary stage. People prone to this phenomenon simply need to be vigilant and not let the little wheat devil standing on their shoulder whisper, “Go on! It’s just one little cookie.”
The best way to avoid reexposure effects: Avoid wheat once you’ve eliminated it from your diet.
After you’ve removed wheat from your diet, what’s left?
Remove wheat and you’ve removed the most flagrant problem source in the diet of people who follow otherwise healthy diets.
Wheat is really the worst of the worst in carbohydrates. But other carbohydrates can be problem sources as well, though on a lesser scale compared to wheat.
I believe that we’ve all survived a forty-year period of excessive carbohydrate consumption. Reveling in all the new processed food products that hit supermarket shelves from the seventies onward, we indulged in carbohydrate-rich breakfast foods, lunch, dinner, and snacks. As a result, for decades we’ve been exposed to wide fluctuations of blood sugar and glycation, increasingly severe resistance to insulin, growth of visceral fat, and inflammatory responses, all of which leads us to have tired, beaten pancreases that are unable to keep up with the demand to produce insulin. Continued carbohydrate challenges forced on flagging pancreatic function leads us down the path of prediabetes and diabetes, hypertension, lipid abnormalities (low HDL, high triglycerides, small LDL particles), arthritis, heart disease, stroke, and all the other consequences of excessive carbohydrate consumption.
For this reason, I believe that, in addition to wheat elimination, an overall reduction in carbohydrates is also beneficial. It helps further unwind all the carbohydrate-indulgent phenomena that we’ve cultivated all these years.
If you wish to roll back the appetite-stimulating, insulin-distorting, and small LDL-triggering effects of foods beyond wheat, or if substantial weight loss is among your health goals, then you should consider reducing or eliminating the following foods in addition to eliminating wheat.
- Cornstarch and cornmeal
—cornmeal products such as tacos, tortillas, corn chips, and corn breads, breakfast cereals, and sauces and gravies thickened with cornstarch - Snack foods
—potato chips, rice cakes, popcorn. These foods, like foods made of cornstarch, send blood sugar straight up to the stratosphere. - Desserts
—Pies, cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, sherbet, and other sugary desserts all pack too much sugar. - Rice
—white or brown; wild rice. Modest servings are relatively benign, but large servings (more than ½ cup) generate adverse blood sugar effects. - Potatoes
—White, red, sweet potatoes, and yams cause effects similar to those generated by rice. - Legumes
—black beans, butter beans, kidney beans, lima beans; chickpeas; lentils. Like potatoes and rice, there is potential for blood sugar effects, especially if serving size exceeds ½ cup. - Gluten-free foods
—Because the cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch used in place of wheat gluten causes extravagant blood sugar rises, they should be avoided. - Fruit juices, soft drinks
—Even if they are “natural,” fruit juices are not that good for you. While they contain healthy components such as flavonoids and vitamin C, the sugar load is simply too great for the benefit. Small servings of two to four ounces are generally fine, but more will trigger blood sugar consequences. Soft drinks, especially carbonated, are incredibly unhealthy mostly due to added sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, colorings, and the extreme acid challenge from the carbonic acid carbonation. - Dried fruit
—dried cranberries, raisins, figs, dates, apricots - Other grains
—Nonwheat grains such as quinoa, sorghum, buckwheat, millet, and possibly oats lack the immune system and exorphin consequences of wheat. However, they post substantial carbohydrate challenges, sufficient to generate high blood sugars. I believe these grains are safer than wheat, but small servings (less than ½ cup) are key to minimize the blood sugar impact.
