Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox (5 page)

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox is a hard-hitting, no-nonsense, no-romantic-interlude kind of book, an ultra quick-start to a life-changing way of eating, unfettered by the details of the
why
(which, should your curiosity be piqued, can be found in the preceding Wheat Belly books). Be prepared to tighten your belt and to rediscover what freely mobile joints and normal bowel habits feel like and what it means to be clearheaded and energetic while enjoying food like you never have before.

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YOUR 10 DAYS START NOW

Sit down, grab a handle, and strap yourself in: You are going for the ride of your life. It will be a roller coaster of emotional and physical turbulence, with a few yelps, nausea, and moments of panic along the way that will land you in a place you likely have not been before—a world of health, single-digit clothes sizes, feeling wonderful, and being the recipient of jealous looks from the perplexed and frustrated grain-eaters around you, as well as of appreciative looks from your partner. This is your ticket to that world.

It may sound like an overused, over-the-top prediction to say that the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox experience will be life changing, but I assure you it will. It will be as life changing as surviving the throes of adolescence minus the acne and social bumbling, as life changing as having children without the diapers and sleepless nights. I predict that the changes will be so dramatic you will wonder how you managed to endure life before you discovered these answers to your health and weight struggles.

You may come to view your life as pre-detox and post-detox. Those of you who start the process with a health problem or five can typically expect dramatic improvements in health and the way you feel. Even within the first week, joint pains in the fingers and
wrists,
acid reflux, facial redness and rash, and bowel urgency can disappear, while over the second week and onward energy improves, the belly shrinks visibly, and pain in larger joints like knees and hips can begin to recede. It's not uncommon for health to improve in such a broad front that it's hard to keep up with reducing or eliminating prescription medications. People with high blood pressure or diabetes, in particular, commonly witness marked reductions in blood pressure and blood sugar within days, making it necessary to whittle down medications rapidly (to be discussed).

You may find it helpful to record your experience with this detox, as well as your long-term Wheat Belly journey. Maintaining a journal that chronicles the health and life changes that you undergo can help in the future, when you may start telling yourself things like “My life before Wheat Belly really wasn't that bad,” or as memories of your grain-filled tribulations recede (as memories often do), or as friends try to persuade you to go back to the grain dark side. Refer back to your recorded descriptions of the changes you endured, the withdrawal effects, the health transformations you enjoyed, and the improvements in the way you feel, and you will be reminded that you did indeed undergo some dramatic changes and that going back is a really bad idea. Even better, consider also snapping some “before” selfies or find some recent photos of yourself that you can hold up against the “after” pictures. I predict that this graphic record of the changes you are going to experience will astound you with their stark contrast. Include close-up photos of your face, as these will especially highlight the changes you'll experience.

Even people who start this process just to lose a few pounds, but feel pretty good at the start, report that they feel even better after the initial detox, noting that issues they'd come to accept as part of life, such as rashes, foot pain, or mental fog, have disappeared. People will say, “I didn't realize that I really didn't feel that great, but now I feel better than I have in 20 years.” In addition to feeling 20 years younger, many actually look 20 years younger.

But
I won't kid you: For many people, things may get worse before they get better. The first several days of your detox may be tumultuous, filled with emotional ups and downs and unpleasant experiences. You will see this reflected in the experiences of our detox panelists, including Jennifer, who endured a week of incapacitating fatigue and headaches before she began to emerge. An occasional person will experience transient worsening of chronic joint pain or migraine headaches. It will almost certainly disrupt the routine of your life: You may sleep longer; the dishes and dirty laundry may pile up; the family may be annoyed at your apparent malaise.

Much of this is due to stopping the flow of the unique, only partially digestible proteins in grains (gliadin in wheat, secalin in rye, hordein in barley, zein in corn) that yield the opiates that drive appetite. Yes: Law-abiding, PTA-card-holding mothers and fathers, housewives, teachers, and businesspeople who consume grains are opiate addicts. Casts a whole new light on breakfast cereals with names like Krave and Freakies, doesn't it? By stopping the flow of grains in your daily diet, you halt the flow of opiates, and an opiate-withdrawal syndrome can result. Unfortunately, for the people who do experience it, there is no way to avoid this phenomenon. There are ways to make the process less unpleasant that we will discuss, but if you are destined to have it, you must go through this process in order to free yourself from the mind-gripping and appetite-magnifying effects of grain-derived opiates. View it as a necessary step to return to health, much as a drug addict must stop injecting or snorting a drug and endure the withdrawal process before life can start anew.

It will be important to recognize withdrawal for what it is and not mistake it for something else. You especially don't want to think, “Gee, my body must be telling me that I need grains.” There is no intrinsic need for anything in grains, and there is no deficiency created by removing them, but there is everything to gain by removing them and enduring this withdrawal process.

Of
the 10 detox volunteer panelists, by the way, all 10 got to the finish, now sobered by the experience of the withdrawal process, understanding that wheat and grains had been having such a profound effect on their bodies that the process of reversing it was necessary to reclaim control over their lives.

The only reason to delay starting your 10-day transformation would be to choose a time without an impending period of high-pressure work or school deadlines or other stressful situations in order to better endure the withdrawal process. It will be especially difficult if, for instance, you have to work 16-hour days for an upcoming deadline while enduring the emotional roller coaster, mental fogginess, nausea, and fatigue of grain withdrawal. It's not much worse than having a bad case of the flu without the nasal stuffiness, except that you are in charge of when you are going to endure it. You might also delay it if you have a major travel obligation coming, such as a family vacation, as it will be best to have your kitchen available to you during this period. Short of these potential disruptive factors in your near future, however, you should brace yourself and just get started now.

But don't delay unnecessarily. Much as you do not want to delay the delivery of a baby at the 9-month mark of pregnancy or the bellyache of an urgent bowel movement triggered by the intestinal irritants of wheat and grains, so you shouldn't allow another moment to pass before you consider beginning your journey.

THE
THREE STEPS OF GRAIN DETOX

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox begins with the concept that the foods we are told (over and over and over again) should dominate our diet—grains—need to be completely removed in all their varied forms. This is the first big step in taking back control over weight and health. It means removing the appetite-stimulating effects of cookies and bagels, the autoimmune disease–triggering effects of multigrain bread, the behavior-distortion and learning impairment of animal crackers, and the gastrointestinal disruption of breakfast cereals. It may sound drastic, some even say impossible. Others say it will lead to nutrient deficiencies, difficulty navigating social situations, getting kicked out of the country club, friends no longer talking to you, having to take confession with your priest, even malnutrition and disabling deficiencies. None of this is true.

Once you are aware of a few basic ground rules in your newly empowered grain-free life, I predict that you will find this lifestyle entirely manageable, liberating, delicious, and healthy. Yes, there will be efforts that take some getting used to, such as asking waitstaff at restaurants about ingredients in dishes you order, but such efforts are minimal and easily accomplished. And this is what you must do in order to gain extraordinary control over appetite and health.

To make the transition to grain-free living a digestible process for you, even if your life is hectic and crammed with other responsibilities, I've broken it down into three bite-size, grain-free, sugar-free pieces. The three steps to getting started on this lifestyle are:

2.
Eat real, single-ingredient foods.

3.
Manage carbohydrates.

When we revert to eating foods that we are adapted to consume (since grains were added only a moment in time ago, speaking anthropologically), there are no concerns about saturated fat or fiber, there is nothing sugared-up, nobody needs to count calories, and there are certainly no products made from grains. We leave behind worries about portion size or overeating. We return to foods that allowed humans to survive and thrive for more than 99 percent of our time on Earth, when being overweight and the diseases of civilization (such as diabetes, hypertension, and autoimmune diseases) were unknown, before we mistakenly turned to grains in desperation as a source of calories when nothing better was available; we used grains then as food to provide sustenance, grow, and reproduce without knowing their enormous long-term health-disrupting impact.

Re-creating such a new, yet really old, pre-grain diet means making allowances for the modern choices we are presented, since we will not be spearing wild boar or digging in the dirt for wild roots. We therefore need to learn how to navigate their closest modern counterparts in places like supermarkets.

We begin with the indispensable, unavoidable, and absolutely necessary first step.

STEP 1: Eliminate All Grains

We start by eliminating the unexpected and surprising source of so many problems: no, not your nitpicky mother-in-law or your spouse's excessive sports TV–watching habits, but grains. It is not uncommon for people to obtain more than half of their daily calories from grains. Eliminating them represents a major disruption of shopping, eating, and cooking habits. But I know of
nothing—
extreme exercise, prescription drugs, nutritional supplements, cleansing enemas, meditation, a year in a monastery—that can match the benefits of removing these disrupters of health.

Grain elimination is by far the most important step in the detox, because the next few steps will follow this crucial first step naturally. By banishing grains, you eliminate the appetite-stimulating effects of grain-derived opiates, effects that encourage consumption of junk carbohydrates. You will also eliminate gastrointestinal toxins in grains that alter your sense of taste. Minus these effects, your appetite will be reduced, you will spend far less time being hungry (if you are hungry at all), and your sense of taste will be reawakened. You will actually find former goodies no longer good, even sickeningly sweet, and you will enjoy healthy foods more. You will discover, for instance, that Brussels sprouts and blueberries have dimensions of flavor you never experienced before. The physiological changes that you undergo in Step 1 make the two subsequent steps of your detox easier.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: Eliminate all grains. I don't mean cut back. I don't mean every day except Friday. I don't mean only at home, while drifting back to grain-consuming ways at restaurants or friends' homes. Even a little compromise can completely block your success, halt the detoxification process, sustain the opiate addictive and appetite-stimulating effects, and continue to cultivate inflammation. So when I say “eliminate all grains,” I mean 100 percent without compromise, no matter where you are, what other people say, or what day of the week it is.