Skip to main content

Wheat Free (Almost): On the Right Track

It's been three and a half weeks since I stopped eating wheat (except on my weekly free day). I haven't changed my exercise routine, just my diet. Keep in mind I that about the only wheat I ate in one day was two slices of bread, maybe a pita too on a rare day. I've substituted fruit, beans, rice and potatoes for wheat. Results:

  • My cravings for junk food have disappeared. I've stopped snacking on caramel corn, chocolate and diet soda on my non-free days. I eat two tiny pieces of chocolate per day, at most.
  • My hair stays clean longer.
  • Certain foods taste better. Coconut chai tea tastes like a candy bar in a cup (yes, I drink it straight) and even sardines taste better.
  • Since I got a scale ten days ago, I've lost two pounds. I even had to tighten the straps on my backpack today.
  • Three happy words: no menstrual pain.
  • I have more energy. If I were a horse, my name would be Secretariat.

My mother, who is diabetic and in a rehabilitation center with a broken leg, agreed two days ago to try a wheat-free diet. Results so far:

  • Her blood sugar the first day was 110--very close to ideal.
  • The second day, it was 130. That day, she ordered white toast because she didn't want the wheat toast. Oops. We had a conversation about what foods are made of wheat. "Well," she said, "most food is just trash, isn't it!"
Just to be clear, most foods that are made of flour contain wheat, even if they aren't named "Wheat Thins" or "Wheaties" or "Whole wheat bread." Even potato bread might have wheat in it. Read the label! All of the following foods are made mostly of wheat unless the list of ingredients says otherwise:

  • Breakfast cereal
  • Crackers
  • Cake
  • Pie crust
  • Rolls
  • Bagels
  • Bread
  • Buns
  • Pastries
  • Pitas
  • Pasta
  • Noodles
  • Doughnuts
  • Tortillas

But what about "healthy whole grains"? Those are what you'd give to Secretariat's friend Bessie the Cow if you wanted to fatten her up. Grains are what I eliminated from my dog Sasha's diet when he had cancer. The results left my veterinarian flabbergasted. More on that in my next post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more