One week in!

When I was doing Project Real Food last year, I stopped eating wheat. It was right after I found Wheat Belly and I just felt so strongly that wheat was a big problem for me. I wrote about the problems with wheat here, here and here. And I was wheat-free for awhile. It was actually pretty great! I found that after a few weeks, it wasn't too difficult to maintain, and the results I got were pretty remarkable. Somewhere along the way (when we moved cross-country), I got off track. Way off track. Like, shoving gluten in my mouth for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack every single day.

As I've learned with my own sensitive children, when you remove a problem food from your diet that is causing your body distress, and then you try to reintroduce it as some point, you are going to have a much more severe reaction than you ever did before. I have no idea what the scientific reason behind this is, but I've heard the same story from enough people now to know that there is a lot of validity here. I can only assume it has something to do with your body having adjusted to the "bad" food well enough that it could somewhat tolerate it before. Once you clean your body out and it's functioning at its best, and then you put that problem substance back in, your body must go crazy trying to readjust.

For me, that meant that the mild and mostly tolerable joint pain I'd been dealing with went into overdrive when I took grains out of my diet and then reintroduced it. By the time I wrote my last blog post, I was in so much pain every day that I lived in fear of what the next few years of my life were going to look like. If I was only 30 and in this much pain, what was 40 going to look like for me? Or 50? And it wasn't just the joint pain. It was the crazy fatigue, the 13 pounds I'd packed on in a month and a half, the headaches, the eye twitching, the hair loss, the dry skin, the acne.

So last week I bit the bullet (I believe it was Tuesday, after gorging myself on pizza - WHAT?!). The first few days I felt zero percent better, and maybe even a little worse. I was dejected but I knew from my experience with the kids that it can take up to 6 months, so 2 days was nothing. By the third day, though, I was feeling much better. So much less pain when I stood up from sitting or laying down. By the fourth day, even better! Today is Monday, and I went to bed at 4:00 yesterday (yeah, that's 4:00 PM) and slept until 7:00 this morning and I was bracing myself for the pain I was going to feel when I stood up, after laying down for so long, but to my surprise, I had almost no pain at all!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is totally worthy of 18 exclamation points, however grammatically incorrect it is. I also lost three pounds, which I desperately needed to see on the scale!

I did succumb and refill my Armour prescription on Saturday and took my first dose yesterday morning. Eventually, I want to get to the point where I don't need meds for my hypothyroidism. I want to heal it on my own. And I know it's possible, because I joined several facebook pages that have thousands of members with thyroid disorders, and so many of these fellow sufferers have gotten completely well just by removing grains from their diet. So much better, in fact, that they can go off their meds. But since I'm still having so many thyroid symptoms, I decided I'd give my body a break and take the meds for a few months until I've really removed all traces of gluten and grains from my body, and then try to wean myself off and see if I'm one of the lucky ones who needs no medicine.

In the last year, after healing my kids by removing grains, and then watching a few friends remove grains and/or gluten from either their diet or the diet of their kids, and completely healing them of things that even modern medicine couldn't, and now my own little experiments, I have no doubt left in my little ole brain that we shouldn't be consuming this stuff. I know that in biblical times, grains were a huge portion of our diet. I can't say with any sort of certainty why we can no longer tolerate them, but I can say with certainty that we can't (I believe no one should eat this stuff anymore, but you could say I'm biased). There are several culprits here. One would be that historically, we know that grains (and legumes, for that matter, which we also no longer eat) were prepared by a process of soaking them for long periods of time. I don't know how traditional cultures knew to do this, but they did. What we now know is that when soaking grains or legumes for long periods of time, we remove a huge percentage of the phytic acid in these items. And the phytic acid, we now know, is what's so hard for our bodies to digest. The second culprit is what I learned about in Wheat Belly, and I believe may be a general cause of so much of our disease in general: changing the genetic makeup of our foods. The wheat we have on supermarket shelves doesn't at all resemble traditional wheat. If genetically, it looks nothing the same, then common sense tells us our body doesn't "read" it the same.

I've been on a quest to determine why my children are so sick, and a common idea that repeats itself over and over again is that, since food is our fuel, and our food has been changed so much in the last few decades, of course our "machine" (ahem, body), isn't running the way it should. If I suddenly decided to put something sort of like gasoline, but not really, it just looks like gasoline on the outside but is really nothing at all like gasoline inside, in my car, what would happen? I would imagine that chances are, the car will not run well for long. If I give my car some sort of mix of partial gasoline, partial looks-like-gasoline-but-really-isn't, it would probably continue to run, but over time, act up more and more, behaving strangely, breaking down more often, etc. Just like us. We're eating a mixture of some things that are good for us that we've eaten for most of time, that our bodies recognize as food, and some stuff that is brand new to our food system, not at all time-tested, not at all food, and suddenly we have spiking disorders and disease like heart disease, asthma, eczema, allergies, autoimmune disorders, developmental disorders like autism, diabetes, obesity, cancer...really, the list just goes on and on and on and on and on and on...and on.

I'm not pretending to be a scientist, or even a researcher. I'm just a mom who cannot possibly deny what my family has been through this year. We were sick, and we're getting well now. And it's not because of what modern medicine was able to do for us. The hydrocortisone and steroids weren't the answer. The thousands and thousands of dollars we spent last year did NOTHING for us. Well, I suppose it did shrink our savings. It was changing our diet. It was eating healthfully 100% of the time and figuring out what foods have been altered genetically and removing them from our diet.

Perhaps we could tolerate traditional grains that haven't been hybridized or genetically modified, that have been soaked and sprouted and properly prepared. It would make sense. I just don't know where or how we could get our hands on that sort of wheat anymore. I used to think the Ezekiel brand would be the answer for us, but it doesn't appear to be that way, judging from this blog post on Wheat Belly's blog:

"'People have asked about the “sprouted wheat” breads and I just wanted to relay some personal experience with them, my normal use of them and what happened after I just gave that form of wheat up.

I would periodically go on Dr. Gott”s Diet: No white flour and sugar. It would work and I felt good because it was higher protein and no sugar or white flour will do a pretty good job of moving weight off. Kind of normal slow though. I was eating Sprouted Wheat flourless bread though.

When Wheat Belly came onto my radar and I read the reviews on Amazon while waiting for the book to come to me from my library, I too thought of the sprouted wheat. It is really delicious and I would have at least 4 slices per day on Dr. Gott”s plan.

WELL–in late December after I read the book, I got rid of the sprouted bread and my shape changed faster than it ever has on a diet. My belly fat is disappearing. I had gotten rid of the sugar way before that, but after taking ALL the wheat out, the last in the form of the sprouted bread, I was on the fast track losing fat. THEN, my aches and pains went away. But only after the wheat in any form was gone.

Since that was the only change I made–my experience tells me most definitely the sprouted variety of breads is going to hinder you and put WHEAT into your system. Just thought folks here would like to get a real life experiment result.'"

Sprouted wheat bread is made by allowing the wheat seeds to sprout, thereby reducing carbohydrate content slightly and making some of the nutrients more bioavailable. The Ezekiel brand, for instance, claims to be adhering to the advice provided in the Bible in Ezekiel 4:9:

'Take also unto thee Wheat, and Barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and Spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it…'

But, as Janet’s experience illustrates, it’s still wheat. And it’s not the wheat of the Bible, i.e., 28-chromosome emmer or 14-chromosome einkorn; it’s the sprouted seeds from 42-chromosome modern wheat. And what a difference 14 chromosomes can make!

It is folly to believe that such a process as simply allowing the seed to germinate somehow disables all the bad potential of modern wheat. It still contains the gliadin protein that clouds your thinking and stimulates appetite. It still contains glutens that disrupt intestinal health. It still contains amylopectin A that sends your blood sugar through the roof. It still contains lectins that disable the normal intestinal barriers to foreign substances. It still contains apha amylase, peroxidases, lipid-transfer proteins, and thioredoxins responsible for a variety of allergic phenomena."

This is our reality, our world. There is so much wrong with our food system right now, but I really, really, really believe that things will get better. I don't think it will happen next year, or probably even in the next five. But I do believe that it's something that we simply won't be able to ignore any longer. I trust and believe in science, no matter how corrupt things are right now, and I know that someday, enough research articles will be published, and in combination with results of so many people just like me (and the thousands of people I've "met" in the last few months online, healing themselves with no medicine at all), that we will have no choice but to change or die off. We're killing off our society. With FOOD. So pathetically sad.

And sadder, still, is the fact that for so many families who don't make plenty of money, the choice is simply to eat crappy food or not eat at all. I had a breakdown in the Trader Joe's parking lot on the phone with my mom this weekend about how much money I spent on groceries. It's the same story every single week. I go shopping, I feel like I bankrupt our family, but I don't know what else to do. It was this diet that saved my kids' skin, yet it's this diet that has ballooned our grocery budget. What's a family to do? Knowingly feed their children food they know is actually harmful to their health or starve them?

Or probably, more importantly, what we need to learn to do as a culture is to reprioritize. At some point, having fancy clothes and a fancy house and fancy electronics became the norm. And with that, the expectation that our grocery budget should be a nominal part of our family's monthly expenses became the new reality. The advent of cell phones and Pinterest has taken all of that up a notch - almost no one doesn't have a smartphone in this country anymore, and with Pinterest came the expectation that our homes be immaculately decorated thrones reflective of our worthiness. In 1901, 40% of a family's income was spent on food. I don't know what the exact statistic is today, but in 2003, a family spent 13% of its income on food. Yikes, guys. No wonder we've lost our way. I am 150% guilty of this!

Someday, I just know that this won't be an issue. I believe it with every fiber of my being! I think I have to. I need to believe it for my children and their future.