Gluten is one of the major proteins found in wheat. Gluten is also found in other grains such as:  spelt, kamut, triticale, barley, rye, and malts. But if you really want to avoid gluten you also have to look out for food additives as stabilizers, flavorings, or even thickening agents that contain gluten.

The word “gluten” comes from Latin and means “glue” and while it may be causing your digestive system all sorts of problems gluten is what makes wheat such a great grain to cook with. If you want light and fluffy breads you need to have something to hold the grain particles together and gluten does that really well. Breads rise when you add yeast to gluten-containing flours because gluten holds the bread together. When you see the pizza guy twirling a crust in the air he can do that because gluten is holding it together, If you grind rice and add the exact same ingredients and all you get is a messy pizza guy with rice dough on his face.

Cooks, scientists and farmers all wanted to have wheat with more gluten and the food scientists actually bred wheat to contain more gluten than found in nature. The result is that our wheat today has a ton of gluten in is and while pastry chefs all over the world applauded this move, our tummies do not.

If you want to read more about gluten, check out this Wikipedia article: gluten

Why does gluten cause problems?

Gluten intolerance is an immune problem; many people’s gut immune system simply doesn’t like gluten and reacts to it. This is due, in part, to the high gluten content in the grains we eat, but also because we eat so much of it. When was the last time you went a meal without eating some form of wheat?

There are people who have full-blown allergic reaction to gluten and these people have Celiac disease. But what I see more often than people with a full blown reaction to gluten is what I would call gluten sensitivity or gluten intolerance. Common problems that I see in people who are sensitive or intolerant to gluten are sinus problems allergies, digestive problems including gas, bloating, diarrhea and problems concentrating and others.

What can you do about gluten intolerance?

The only real answer to gluten intolerance is to avoid gluten and go on a gluten free diet. The best way to do this is to avoid gluten and gluten products for at least two weeks. When you avoid these products for at least two weeks, then your body has a chance to repair all the damage done by the overactive immune system.

Flours that you can bake with that seem to work are corn, potatoes, rice, and tapioca, amaranth, arrowroot, millet, quinoa, sorghum, sweet potato, taro, teff, chia seed, and yams. (see Baking with Non-Gluten Grains)

But I wouldn’t stop there. If you are having digestive problems then I would also remove other common allergens such as dairy foods and corn. If you are really crazy (and maybe want to lose some weight) try my 30 Sugar Free Days Program where people stay away from not only sugar but foods that act like sugar (that means all grains).

Related Posts

• Allergic to Everything, Part Two (16)
• I’m Allergic to Everything! (131)
• Top 10 tips to lose weight (2)
• Gluten Free Flour Guide (2)
• Why is everything that tastes good bad for you (0)

Losing weight is not as difficult as it is keeping the weight off (you probably know that). But keeping the weight off is not as big of a mystery as you might think. You really don’t have to resort to some crazy diet plan like eating only rice or grapefruit, you do (however) have to change what you are doing. Remember the definition of crazy is trying the same thing over and over but expecting new results. In order to lose weight you have to change what you are doing.

If weight loss is your goal, here are the top 10 tips to lose weight.

1. Stop Short Thinking

Most people think that they can go on a diet and lose the weight that they want to lose and once they achieve their goal they can go back to eating the way that they were eating before their diet (not realizing that the way that they were eating is the cause of their weight gain). When you are looking for a new diet plan, find one that you can live with the rest of your life. Yes, you read that correctly: The Rest of Your Life. The reason why you have a hard time losing weight and keeping it off is because you are eating foods that are not meant to go in a human’s mouth. When you are looking for a diet, pick one that nourishes your body and allows you to lose weight. What does that look like? Read on.

2. You Don’t Have to Spend a Lot of Money

Any plan where you have to shell out a lot of money is a bad idea. Weight loss is simple (well, maybe not so simple to do, but simple to understand). In order to lose weight you simply have to give your body what it needs and your body will respond by giving you what you want: a lighter, healthier body.

3. Don’t Trust Prepackaged Anything

If you want to lose weight, you are going to have to stop letting other people make your food. Both restaurants and food companies want to make you happy and in order to make you happy they are going to fill their food with three magic ingredients: Sugar, Salt and Fat. These three are the deadly ingredients of the dietpocalypse are guaranteed to bring you back to the table over and over again, but also guaranteed to add to your waistline.

4. Remove Food Allergies

Most people don’t know that they are carrying around a lot of extra weight in the form of water weight. Your body holds on to water when you are eating foods that you are allergic to. How do you know if this might be you? Try an allergy elimination diet (see my article: I’m Allergic to Everything). The most common food allergies are probably the foods that you like most: wheat (and gluten-containing foods), nuts, shellfish, dairy, soy, corn and eggs.

5. Eat Your Veggies

You don’t eat enough veggies. How do I know that you don’t eat enough veggies? Because no one eats enough vegetables. You may know that eating enough vegetables is a good thing to do (after all, your mom told you to do it), but veggies are not only good for you but they are also good for your weight loss. Researchers have shown that people who eat a lot of vegetables weigh less than those that don’t.

6. Eat Your Fruits

Remember what I just told you about veggies? The same is true of fruit. If you want to lose weight, find a way to get as many fruits into your body as possible.

7. Exercise

I’m guessing that this is not the first time you have heard that you need to exercise in order to lose weight but I’m going to mention it here because exercise is critical to your weight loss. The only way to get your metabolism back is to make sure you are building new muscle. Get out there today and get some exercise.

8. Cut Out Dairy

While many people are allergic to dairy products (and that can cause weight gain) that is not the main reason why you want to kick dairy out of your life. You want to stop eating dairy foods because they are a major source of fat in your diet. After you read that sentence, you might be thinking that you will just switch to low-fat dairy products but even that won’t work because low-fat dairy products are still high in fat. Read the labels on dairy products and compute the number of fat calories compared to the number of total calories and you will find that even skim milk is around 40 percent fat – those milk producers are tricky when the calculate the total fat calories by volume (this is why they can say skim milk is only 2 percent fat). Worried about calcium? Check out this post: Calcium Myths

9. Reduce Meat

Reduce or eliminate meat from your diet is another great way to kick the fat out of your diet. People who are vegan or vegetarian have a much less chance of being overweight than the rest of us. Try a one-month trial of removing meat from your diet and see what it can do for your waistline.

10. Stop the Sugar

If you want to lose weight, you have to stop the sugar insanity. Sugar is easily turned into fat in our bodies and kicking it out of your life is a great way to keep the pounds off. But let me warn you that if you are trying to stop sugar you also have to stop eating the foods that act like sugar in our bodies.

There you go: Top 10 Tips to Lose Weight.

Related Posts

• What is Gluten? (0)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• What Sugar Does to Your Brain (24)
• Best Drug Ever: Exercise (6)
• Confusing Health Advice in a Confusing World (0)

I’ve pondered this question a lot. My kids suggest that “they” should make broccoli taste good if they want people to eat it. And while I’m sure there is at least one scientist out there trying to make broccoli taste like cotton candy, I think that understanding how our taste buds work and what we can do to manipulate our tastes will go much farther to getting good foods on our plates than any genetically altered broccoli.

There are two reasons why foods that are good for you don’t also taste good. Let’s take a look.

Your Taste Buds Have Been Altered

The first reason why everything that is good for you tastes like cardboard is because your taste buds have been altered. The question you have to ask yourself is who changed your taste buds? The quick answer to that question is : The food you eat. If you are like most people, the food you eat is all high in fat, sugar, and salt and when you eat foods that are all high in sugar, fat and salt your taste buds change.

The easiest way to understand this is to imaging that everything you drink is either vodka or whisky. Imagine if you had been drinking vodka or whisky ever since you were a child. How do you think water would taste to you? When you are drinking a high-octane drink like hard alcohol for your whole life, your taste buds get used to it and everything else is going to taste bland and boring.

Your Addictions Run Your Life

The second reason why everything that is good for us doesn’t taste good is that many of the foods you eat you are addicted to. Foods like sugar, milk and milk products, coffee and even meat all have addictive qualities to them. When you eat a food that you are addicted to it changes your brain in some way; it usually makes you feel better. Broccoli will not do this.

We are attracted to sugary-salty-fatty foods in ways that we aren’t attracted to carrots, apples and Brussels sprouts.

Read more about sugar addiction here: Are you addicted to sugar?

Double Whammy

When all the foods you are eating are super strong tasting (like whisky) then of course you are going to think that real and fresh foods taste like junk. But just as if you were drinking alcohol every day, your body is ruined by these foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt. If you add the mood-altering aspect of your food addictions and you are guaranteed to never put something fresh in your mouth.

What Can You Do?

While you probably don’t believe me, your tastes can change. The only way they are going to change, though is to stop eating foods high in sugar, fat and salt. All you need is a few weeks away from the super strong tasting foods before your taste buds come back and you start enjoying the sweetness of foods like carrots or avocados (yes, these are sweet foods).

While it is difficult, you can do it (see my 30 Sugar Free Days Program for help) and once you make the transition from processed foods to real foods your taste buds will change back and you will find yourself enjoying foods like broccoli once again.

Take the plunge and try the 30 sugar free days challenge:

Related Posts

• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Sugar Detox (0)
• Best way to lose weight fast (3)
• Is Everything That Tastes Good Bad For Me? (3)
• Diet Success Stories (2)

What to do if you can’t eat anything

There is a food trap that some people fall in to where the number of foods that they feel that they can eat slowly dwindles down to almost nothing.

I’m going to suggest to you that this problem doesn’t make you crazy, but it is largely your brain’s fault (or maybe it is better described as your genes fault).

This problem is probably best explained by the book Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Omnivores have a problem that no other type of eater has: deciding what to eat. A cow, for example, never wonders what it is going to put in its’ mouth, the grass it is walking on is always the answer. Likewise, you don’t see lions or sharks contemplating their dinner choices; if it is running or swimming away then it is on the menu.

We omnivores, though, have to test foods to see if they are okay for us. The key to understand why this might be a problem is to understand that omnivores attach how they feel after they eat something with whether the food is good for them or not. This is a handy tool to have: You eat some berries you think are okay to eat and later you get a stomach ache; next time you see that berry, you stay away from it.

The problem is that this omnivore-avoidance-system isn’t very accurate. Studies have shown that people are poor predictors of what might be good or bad for them. Part of the problem also lies in the complexity of the food we eat; many of the meals we eat are a mixture of many different foods. To add to the difficulty deciding what to eat is that we might be feeling bad for other reasons and just think it is the food we are eating.

So, when you are spiraling out of control and unable to find anything to eat, consider that many things you think are not good for you, may be okay.

What to do next?

Let’s say that you have thought about the above and tried to add in more foods, but still find that there are foods that you still cannot eat. Here is a plan for taking your diet to the next level.

• Testing: Many people want to turn to testing to find out what foods they are allergic to. My experience is that testing generally doesn’t help. Testing done on the skin is silly as the part of the immune system responsible for protecting the skin is different from the immune system in your gut. Blood testing gets you a bit closer, but will only show foods that you are allergic to and not those you have intolerances to (read the Food Allergy vs Food Intolerances part of the previous article). The best testing is removal and reintroducing of foods.
• Brain/Gut: Your brain is closely tied to your digestive system. Scientists are now calling this the Gut/Brain axis: as you think, so your gut feels. If you are stressed out or anxious, your gut will respond. Many people with digestive problems find that they go away when they are on vacation (and they usually eat worse than they normally do). Consider taking supplements for anxiety such as Kava Kava, GABA, theanine, or others.
• Digestive Enzymes: Some of your problems may be due to not having enough digestive enzymes. Get a very high quality digestive enzyme and see if that helps.
• Rebalance Bacteria: The bacteria in your gut may also be part of the problem. Try using a product called Zyflamend that is used for inflammation, but I have found works wonders on the gut. You can also go on an anti-yeast or anti-parasite program; make sure you take enough of the herbs for it to be successful. I recommend these products:
  • CandiGONE – Candida Cleansing Program by Renew Life
  • Paragone – Parasite Cleansing Program by Renew Life

Some combination of the above will work for you. It is a difficult path to return to normalish eating, but one well worth the journey.

Related Posts

• What is Gluten? (0)
• I’m Allergic to Everything! (131)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Metabolic Syndrome (0)
• Insulin Resistance (2)

Allergic to everything is no fun and there is a not-so-easy way out of this mess and it comes in the form of a diet called an allergy elimination diet.

What Does Diet Have to do with Allergies?

The first question that pops into most people’s head when I tell them to try a diet for their allergies is: what does a diet have to do with allergies? After all, they may be allergic to something in your environment. Environmental allergies happens to a lot of people in spring when there are dramatic increases in pollen, but it can also occur in winter when we are spending more time inside and there is less fresh air in the house. But there are good reasons why, even if you have environmental allergies that you would want to try the allergy elimination diet:

The key to understanding using diet to control your allergies are these points:

• The first is that there is very little you can do to change the outside world. Yes, you can stay inside when the pollen counts are high, but what if your problem is the mold in the house?  Food allergies are something you can change easily: simply avoid the food and you solve the problem. By reducing your food allergies, you are reducing the overall “allergic load” on your body, so that when you do encounter environmental allergies, they are less likely to impact you.
• The second reason why using diet works to reduce allergies has to do with your immune system.  Most people are unaware that over 80 percent of the immune system is located surrounding the digestive system. This makes sense because, when you eat foods, you are bringing the outside world into your body and your body has to determine whether this “outside world” or food is safe or not. When you are constantly eating foods that you are allergic to, you cause your immune system to become hyper-aware – leading to a more allergic you.

Food Allergies and Food Intolerance

Before we move on to the diet, I should spend a moment explaining food allergies and food intolerances:

• Food Allergies: A food allergy generally means that your immune system is attacking the food you are eating as if it were a foreign invader. The body produces immunoglobulins (Ig for short) that attach to the protein in the food and then you immune system creates inflammation to try and rid itself of the foreign “invasion”. It is fairly easy to discover food allergies as there are a wide variety of skin and blood tests that can measure your body’s immune response (or the amount of Igs in your body).
• Food Intolerance: Food intolerance is different. The classic food intolerance is lactose intolerance, where your body lacks the ability to digest the sugar in lactose. There are many other intolerances that are the result of different parts of the immune system being activated (other than the Igs), sensitivities to certain foods, inability to digest other foods, or a toxic reaction.

The most common food allergies and intolerances are: eggs, grains (especially gluten grains), soy, nuts, shell fish and seafood.

Allergy Elimination Diet

The best way to uncover your allergies is to do an allergy elimination diet. You will find different types of these diets all over, but this is the one I recommend:

For two weeks, remove the following foods:

• Food Additives: Including monosodium glutamate (MSG), artificial preservatives,sweeteners, flavors and all food colorings.
• Grains: Avoid all gluten-based grains, including: wheat, spelt, barley, kamut, rye, oats or triticale. Avoid pasta, flour, breads, cereals, cookies and other foods made with gluten grains. You should also exclude corn, along with high fructose corn syrup, corn oil, vegetable oils, corn chips and popcorn.
• Alcohol: Avoid beer, wine and other alcohols. If you are really strict, you want to avoid mouth wash with alcohol and cough medicine containing alcohol.
• Citrus Fruits: Including, tangerines, oranges, grapefruits, limes, lemon and any other citrus fruits.
• Shellfish: These include, crab, lobster, clams, mussels and other shellfish.
• Nuts: All nuts, including peanuts, pecans, walnuts, cashews, pistachios and other nuts.
• Diary: All sources of dairy, including butter, cheese, milk, cottage cheese, whey protein, yogurt, sour cream and other dairy foods.
• Soy: Soy is in a lot of processed foods, so you have to watch our for this, including tempeh, edamame, soy nuts, textured soy protein, tofu.
• Eggs: Yolks and the whites.
• Sweeteners: honey, fructose, dextrose, maple syrup, white sugar, maltose.

Foods that may be allowed include:

• Grains: You can choose any of these grains: rice, quinoa, millet, amaranth, foods such as rice cakes or crackers made from these grains are okay.
• Fruits and Vegetables: All vegetables and fruits are okay except the citrus fruits and strawberries. Salad greens are generally great, as are broccoli, cabbage, carrots and other vegetables.
• Beans: All beans are okay except soy beans.
• Protein: Meat is generally okay.

If you find you react to a food that is generally considered safe (I’ve seen this with potatoes), then add that to your avoid list. The foods you crave, unfortunately are often the foods you are allergic to, so be prepared to have some serious cravings. The foods you crave are also the ones you should reintroduce first. I generally recommend that you stay away from all allergic-like foods for two weeks and then start testing. You test by trying just one food at a time (per day), you should also consider eating a lot of it to make sure of the reaction. Wait a day or two and then try the next food.

There is hope if you are allergic to everything. Following an allergy elimination diet is hard, but it is the best way to find foods that don’t agree with you.

READ PART TWO OF THIS ARTICLE: Allergic to Everything, Part Two

Related Posts

• What is Gluten? (0)
• Allergic to Everything, Part Two (16)
• Top 10 tips to lose weight (2)
• Why is everything that tastes good bad for you (0)