Tuesday, August 4, 2009

2 Common Foods in Your Diet That May be Making You Gain Weight and Get Sick

2 Common Foods in Your Diet That May be Making You Gain Weight and Get Sick

Of course, you've probably heard a million times now how bad trans fats and high fructose corn syrup are for your health... so I'm not going to give you that same old story.

Instead, we need to look at a couple common foods that are probably in your diet in large quantities and may be causing major problems such as weight gain, headaches, sicknesses, indigestion, etc, etc... and those possible culprits are: Wheat and Dairy
Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you that both of these staples need to be eliminated permanently from your diet... but read on to see an interesting test that may help you a great deal...

In all of my years of personal training and nutrition counseling, if I had to choose a couple VERY simple dietary changes that have made the biggest difference for my clients in allowing them to FINALLY see fat loss results (and other health problems solved), it would be this following test:
1. Test removing all wheat products from your diet for 2 entire weeks, and take notice of how you feel, look, and your body composition.
2. Test removing all dairy from your diet for 2 entire weeks, and take notice of how you feel, look, and your body composition.

The best way to do this is to eliminate them both for 2 full weeks, and then reintroduce one at a time so that you can determine if one of them or both wheat and dairy are causing negative health effects for you.
Wheat and dairy are easily 2 of the biggest intolerances that a large percentage of the population has.
Now this doesn't mean that I'm saying you have to entirely eliminate wheat and dairy for the rest of your life, but what I am saying is that this is an important test to do for about 2 weeks to gauge if you see some dramatic changes in your body fat percentage, how you look and feel overall, your energy levels, and other health issues.

If you do the 2-week elimination of wheat and dairy and don't feel that it helped you at all or made you feel better, than you can probably do ok on moderate amounts of each.
Most people do not realize this, but a large percentage of the population has at least some degree of intolerance to the gluten in wheat and several other grains. The biggest offender is wheat though, as it's in such a large percentage of the average western diet... from breads, to pastas, to bagels, to cakes, wraps, cereals, etc, etc.

Most people don't have the extent of intolerance that a celiac has, but most people feel much better, improve all sorts of health problems, and also lose fat faster when they eliminate wheat from their diet.
In fact, I just had a client last week tell me that when she eliminated wheat from her diet, her chronic headaches disappeared almost instantly... these are headaches she's been having for years, and after eliminating wheat from her diet, they are gone (along with some body fat that she lost too!).

What about me? Do I still eat wheat?
Well, what I do is try to only eat wheat on cheat days, which many times means when I'm out at restaurants or at parties, barbeques, etc. Since wheat is so integral in the typical western diet, it's almost impossible to avoid when eating out or at other people's houses.

But I have virtually ZERO wheat products in my own house usually. Anything is simple to avoid at least 90% of the time, when it doesn't even exist in your cabinets!

Now with as anti-wheat as I am, I'm actually a big fan of dairy... However, ONLY if the dairy is raw milk or raw cheese and from grass-fed cows. Did you know that many people who "think" they are lactose intolerant actually can drink raw milk without a problem? This is because the live enzymes and friendly bacteria in raw milk aid in the digestion of the lactose and the proteins in milk. These enzymes and friendly bacteria are destroyed in pasteurized milk, which makes it more difficult to digest for many people.

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