Peanut butter cookies. Jalapeno poppers. Cheese bread. The supper of champions, right? Sunday night after Mass seemed a good time to sit down and indulge in a few treats before I refocused on health again the next day. Except I didn't. The peanut butter cookies were
so small my indulgence of them spilled over to breakfast on Monday. They were
so good with my coffee (which I'm still not putting sugar in! The little things I tell myself to appease my conscience....) Tuesday morning's walk of shame to the scale was painful. How little time it takes to erase seven days of hard work! I had gained four pounds back. More than I lost the week before.
All week was spent losing those four pounds. It was agonizing every day seeing the same numbers I had already defeated and put behind me. Except I hadn't really, if I was standing here seeing them again. It was with trepidation that I stepped on the scale this morning: I didn't know what to expect. It's the ups and downs of life, and as much as I know this, it doesn't seem to grow any easier to deal with!
I talked some last Sunday about the lectin-free diet I stumbled across. The
Plant Paradox Cookbook came on Tuesday. I started studying it, trying to decide if it was doable, and most importantly, if it was believable. With the myriad of diets out there promising success I'm generally a skeptic; I do not believe there's one way to health, one "bad guy" food to avoid, save for the way the Good Lord intended us to use the nourishment He gave us on this earth. Like Paraclesus, who stated: "The dose makes the poison", I'm more a subscriber to moderation than hacking off entire food groups (pasta is a food group, right?)
If you all are tired of hearing about one more diet, I don't blame you. If so, feel free to skip to the end. If you're curious about what I've read, I'll try to talk just a little (ha!) about why this diet seems to make sense to me and to answer a few questions that I myself had about it.
Hippocrates stated that "all disease begins in the gut". We've also all heard the adage "you are what you eat", which is not far from the mark. Maintaining the delicate balance of our microbiome is necessary for good gut health, and what we introduce to it determines how our bodies digest food, how they extract nutrients from food, and how it communicates with our immune systems. Certain things, when ingested, have been proven to cause various diseases and health issues. While it calls out "lectins" as the main bad guys, we know there are a lot of other things in our diets that are not great for us as well, which it also takes into consideration. If you missed what I wrote about lectins last week,
you can head on over to my last Scale Sunday post to catch up. In a nutshell, lectins are proteins that attach themselves to the lining of your GI tract and create holes in it, causing bacteria to leak out ("leaky gut") and spread throughout your body, which in turn can cause multiple health issues. (More technical description for my fellow geeks: Lectins bind to the sugar molecules in your intestine's microsal lining, triggering the production of zonulin. When your cells produce zonulin they stop "linking arms", and junctions between cells open up, creating a hole in your gut. Lectins that have not attached to your intestinal lining leak out, along with waste bacteria.) Gluten is a lectin, and has become the "media darling" of lectins. But there are so many more lurking in the foods we eat every day. Changing your diet (reducing or eliminating lectins) can heal your gut and reverse other health issues. The plethora of autoimmune disorders people are plagued with anymore is a testament to the war our bodies are waging against
something.
Why am I even looking into this? Because I thought it was odd that I was still feeling sick even when I changed my diet to "mostly healthy". I discovered that most of the "healthy food" I ate when on a diet were veggies from the nightshade family that contain a lot of lectins. These include tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, eggplants. I know, I thought the same thing: what in the world am I going to eat?
Dr. Gundry throws a lot of so-called "facts" out there that I don't necessarily subscribe to, ones that we have no way of proving. For example, he begins with "450 million years ago the world was ruled by plants". I'm really tired of the scientists throwing out dates like we've proven it's accurate (which research has actually shown is not) and stating theories as scientific fact when they can't be proven. It's extremely unscientific of them. What I do believe are facts proven by actual research, trial and error, and results-based studies. Dr. Gundry dedicated his life's work to refining this diet, and seems to have discovered the key to a healing diet by not only trusting the visible results, but also by doing regular blood tests on strict followers of the lectin-free diet to see what it was actually doing to their bodies.
What can I/can't I eat?
The book shares a list of cans and can'ts and goes into detail why. Thankfully the list of cans is three times as long as the can'ts. Here's a little sneak peek of the can't list:
My yogurt is on there...ðŸ˜
People have been eating these foods for hundreds of years, why are they suddenly bad?
The history of food and how we eat it is fascinating to me (forgive me!)
Throughout the years there have been shifts in culture, in discoveries men have made, and advances in food production/preparation that all have contributed to changes in what we eat and how we prepare our food. Humans started out with a mainly plant diet, with occasional meat when hunting was good. We weren't intended to eat a lot of the plants out there; our bodies weren't designed to digest many of them. After consuming certain plants the side effects were obvious, and those foods were not eaten anymore, or rarely. We used to eat plants that were in season...our bodies were in tune with the seasonal banquet available to us. Fruits were in season in the late summer, and these high-sugar foods were consumed to help fatten us up for the winter. Now, fruit is available to us all year round, constantly sending our body signals to "fatten up". As different plants and animals died off that we relied on for food, our diets had to change. Humans began intentionally cultivating crops and storing them to eat later, which introduced more lectins into our diets. The discovery of fire opened up new food options. Cooking foods breaks down lectins, making certain foods edible in small amounts. When the New World was discovered, many lectin-rich foods (tomatoes, squash, corn, quinoa, etc.) were introduced into European diets. Native Americans were apparently equipped with special gut bugs to digest these foods, and/or had special ways to prepare them.
Traditional ways of preparing foods make food easier to digest and "friendly" to your gut, such as fermentation (think kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, etc.) Old World food preparation also involved removing hulls, seeds, and peels from plants that also reduced the lectins in these foods. Many of these old preparatory measures have fallen away from the norm in the last 100 years, making us more susceptible to damage from lectins. In our ultra-busy culture, we also now rely heavily on highly processed food...some of which barely resembles food anymore. Thanks to our agricultural bounty, the amount of wheat, soy, and corn we consume has also skyrocketed in the last century. One of the many lectins out there, wheat germ agglutinin, is particularly nasty: it has the ability to mimic insulin in the body, keeping insulin from doing the job it's supposed to. What's more, many crops are genetically modified to withstand regular dousing of chemicals to kill weeds--and we in turn ingest these chemicals. Even some non-GMO crops are treated with Roundup as a desiccant because dried up, dead plant is easier to harvest. We've become the products of years and years (specifically the last half a century) and millions of dollars worth of marketing about the healthfulness of many of these foods: of whole grains, high fruit/veggie-fruit diets. And obesity has skyrocketed in the meanwhile.
In addition to these issues, our lifestyle is killing us. Advances in technology make it the norm to stay up long past sunset, plugged into blue-light emitting devices (TV's, cell phones, SCREENS). People used to follow the earth's cues for rest...when it was dark, they slept. I've done some research into how blue light affects our circadian rhythms, affecting stress levels, sleep, weight gain, etc. Some new model TV's even come equipped with an "amber light filter" to reduce rhythm interference. Our bodies were designed to take it's cues for fat storage from the environment around us. In summer when light is plentiful, our bodies are being signaled to store fat for the coming winter (I know it sounds contrary to the "slim up for summer" trends...but that just shows how far from nature we've grown!). In winter when light is low and temps are cooler our bodies kick into "burn fat stores for survival" mode. We've created a false "eternal summer" for ourselves with all these light-emitting devices and staying up too late, thereby sending our bodies cues to STORE ALL THE FAT and hoard calories all year round.
We are poisoning ourselves not only with our lifestyles, but with the medicine we hope will make us feel better. Antibiotics are often over-prescribed and taken for things that they cannot possibly help with. They are huge disruptors of healthy gut flora...and are used to help fatten up livestock. They should only be used in serious situations that our bodies cannot handle on their own. NSAIDS (pain relievers) are frequently used for anything and everything, but how many people read the warnings on the labels? They damage the walls of our intestines. Antacids are another harmful "helper". We eat food (usually high in lectins) that causes indigestion, and spend the rest of the day fighting it with Tums, or Ranitidine, or Prilosec, or Zantec. These medicines reduce stomach acid...the one thing that is trying to save your gut. Stomach acid is a tool our bodies use to neutralize bad bacteria in our gut. When the bad bacteria gets the upperhand, we run into even more gut issues and illness. People who use acid blockers have three times the likelihood of getting pneumonia.
Is it doable? The Plant Paradox Program is broken up into three phases, claiming that within six weeks' time you can be reaping the rewards of a healthy gut. It sounds like the perfect Lenten regime, though I probably shouldn't wait that long to actually do it. After that you can add some lectins back into your diet (TOMATOES!) in small amounts, with the skins and seeds removed.
Is it affordable? I have to say, with the amount of food you are asked to cut completely out of your diet, yes. Many of those foods I've already eliminated from my weekly diet (save for Sundays) because of their high calories/high carb count.
If you've stuck with me till now during this information overload, I'm guessing you've had stomach or other health issues and would like to find a real solution. If you're like me, you've already heard a little about many of these things and had suspicions that something was just not right in what we've been told about health food. It is still overwhelming, nonetheless. I'm at the point of reinventing how I think about food, and easing into this slowly. My will is balking at giving up my favorite foods...even if they are killing me.
My stats for the past month (It's been a month already!):
What I've lost:
71 LBS total since April 26, 2017 (one day before giving birth to Adeline)
52 LBS of that total since January 1, 2018
11 LBS since August 30, 2018
