Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox (9 page)

CHOOSE ORGANIC VEGETABLES AND FRUITS.
Whenever available and budget permits, make organic your first choice, especially when the exterior of the food is consumed, as with blueberries and broccoli, for example. This helps minimize the now ubiquitous exposure we all have to pesticides, herbicides, and even genetically modified foods, and reduces the potential to be exposed to their endocrine-disruptive, cancer-causing, weight-loss-blocking effects. If you cannot choose organic, at the very least rinse fruits and veggies thoroughly in warm water to minimize pesticide and herbicide residues.

DON'T OVERLY RESTRICT SALT.
For most of us engaging in a grain-free lifestyle, light to moderate use of mineral-rich forms of salt, such as sea salt, is actually healthier than severely restricting salt, particularly when that salt is combined with healthy foods rich in potassium (such as from vegetables, avocados, or coconut). In fact, advice to severely restrict salt has been formally retracted in view of clinical studies that demonstrate increased cardiovascular death with salt restriction of 1,500 mg per day or less. Average salt intake in the United States is 3,400 mg, which may be a perfectly fine level in a grain-free lifestyle.

There can be problems, however, with unlimited salt use, as salt intakes of 6,000 to 10,000 mg per day can indeed be associated with adverse cardiovascular effects. If you have kidney disease, edema, or severe hypertension, you may develop salt sensitivity and should adhere to the sodium prescription provided by your doctor.

BE CAREFUL OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS AND NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS.
Examine any nutritional supplements, protein powders, and prescription drugs for wheat- or other grain-related ingredients. For nutritional supplements, consult the ingredient list. If
there
is something suspicious, such as “hydrolyzed vegetable protein,” consider finding a replacement product. While we are careful how we use the gluten-free concept, this is an area where a gluten-free claim can be helpful. For resources to help determine if your prescription drug contains a problem ingredient, see
Appendix B
.

SURVIVE THE DISASTER

Imagine you and your family endure a hurricane that ripped through your home, tearing shingles from the roof, blasting through windows, and uprooting trees. Everyone in the house is shaken but alive. Neighbors and friends are no better off, all having to pull themselves out of the rubble.

That may be where you're starting in your Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox: addled, disoriented, and confused as to why all your best dietary and exercise efforts went unrewarded. Now it's time to rebuild. You won't, of course, have to replant trees or replace windows, but you will have to declare a health state-of-emergency and acquire new nutritional tools and rethink your approach to food, weight, and health to rebuild from this health disaster called grains.

The first three steps discussed in this chapter will get you started, bulldozing your way to a new lifestyle. Now let's get some new paint and furniture in that house and make it pretty and livable again.

CHAPTER

3

OVERCOME THE ADDICTION

Successfully Surviving Detoxification and Withdrawal

Stop eating broccoli or walnuts, and there is no detoxification or withdrawal process. Stop eating beef or pork, and there is no nausea, sleep disruption, diarrhea, or headache. Stop eating wheat and grains . . . and all hell can break loose emotionally and
physically,
even making you question whether this process is really healthy. This is all part of the reprogramming of your body, an unavoidable process that precedes all the wonderful changes that will unfold.

Don't be fooled. Recall that the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins in other grains (secalin in rye, hordein in barley, zein in corn—the four worst) yield opiates that bind to the brain and cause addictive eating behavior, cravings, and constant hunger. Once you stop this source of opiates—grains—there is a clear-cut opiate withdrawal syndrome that may dominate the first few days of your detoxification process.

ESCAPE THE DARK DIETARY CORNERS OF GRAINS

Someone addicted to heroin, morphine, or Oxycontin will, when their supply of drugs dries up, experience anxiety, nausea, sweating, dysphoria (dark moods), muscle aches, abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, and headache, a withdrawal process necessary to detoxify from the effects of opiate addiction. It is a predictable and painful process, not uncommonly bad enough to be undertaken in a hospital. Bid farewell to your last bit of wheat, rye, barley, and corn, and you can experience anxiety, nausea, sweating, dysphoria, muscle aches, abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea,
incapacitating
fatigue, and headache—an opiate withdrawal process necessary to detoxify from the effects of grains. It won't be bad enough to require hospitalization, but it can still be pretty awful.

Not everyone experiences withdrawal, but those who do describe an unpleasant experience that disrupts lives, annoys family and friends, impairs school and work performance, and causes you to miss yoga class or poker night. (Interestingly,
all
of our detox panelists experienced some form of withdrawal, ranging from mild to pretty nasty.)

Some people with chronic joint pain or migraine headaches will experience a worsening of their symptoms during this withdrawal period, part of the impaired pain tolerance that is characteristic of opiate withdrawal. It does not mean that your condition is getting worse; it means that your tolerance to the pain is temporarily reduced. Do what you must during this period to get through, such as taking the drugs you've been prescribed for migraine headaches. But know that this will be short-lived.

Typically, the withdrawal process lasts for about 5 days, though it can last as briefly as a day or as long as several weeks (thankfully uncommon). If I had my way, I would spare you this process, but it is a necessary, unavoidable rite of passage that you must endure to get to the other side.

Don't fall into the trap of believing that this early experience, because it can be so unpleasant, must therefore be bad for health. It is not. It is a form of detoxification, a withdrawal syndrome, a crucial process to undo the effects of addiction. Just as an alcoholic who wishes to rid her life of alcohol can only do so by stopping the bourbon and whiskey and suffering the withdrawal consequences, so the detoxification from grain-derived opiates must be endured to overcome the addictive, appetite-stimulating effects and declare your freedom from its physical, mental, and emotional grip.

If you thought you were just going to do this detox thing to lose a few pounds, you are now beginning to appreciate that there
are
many more dimensions to wheat and grain consumption than just weight. We're talking about having to endure processes you thought didn't apply to you, opiate addictions that even involve children, allowing a form of coercive behavior manipulation that was, and still is, widely exploited by food manufacturers (partially explaining, for instance, why wheat and grains are present in virtually every processed food). But understand this basic principle, and you are on track to be freed of these effects and achieve a level of freedom of appetite, impulse control, health, and weight that you have likely never before experienced. You will be liberated.

Just as an alcoholic can temporarily halt the tremors, paranoia, and hallucinations of alcohol withdrawal with a calming shot (or 10) of whiskey, so can you turn off the uncomfortable process of grain withdrawal by consuming any wheat, rye, barley, or corn product. But you'll also halt your return to health, and you'll have to start the process all over again, suffering all the same symptoms, if you have any hopes of conquering this demon. Even small, inadvertent exposures to grain ingredients, in, say, a package of instant soup mix or a granola bar, are enough to halt the detoxification/withdrawal process. Follow the guidelines we discussed in
Chapter 2
to effectively protect yourself from such exposures and avoid prolonging the agony.

So, if you are going to have grain opiate withdrawal, you are going to have grain opiate withdrawal. There is just no way around it. Thankfully, however, the process can be partially softened by a number of strategies that we discuss next.

GRAIN WITHDRAWAL: SMOOTHING THE TRANSITION

You are facing the prospect of withdrawal, a tumultuous physical and emotional storm. This can be terrifying, especially now that you know it can involve fatigue, nausea, anxiety, headache, light-headedness, leg cramps, and depression, as well as powerful
cravings
for the foods you are avoiding. Many people have previously experienced a small taste of this syndrome with brief lapses in grain intake, though they probably didn't recognize it as grain withdrawal. They might have dismissed the anxiety and headache, for instance, as the effects of hunger or physical weakness which were promptly relieved with a few pretzels or bites of leftover pizza. But with the complete removal of grains from your diet, those feelings are going to persist for a while.

Is there an emotional electroshock therapy that might zap you out of this experience, an antidote to the rigors of removing this mind-active drug, a laxative that purges the poison, anything you can do to smooth the grain withdrawal syndrome? Yes, there are steps you can take to make it less nasty. Nothing will completely ablate the experience, no general anesthetic to make it painless, but you can take measures to soften the blow. Here are a few strategies.

Choose a Nonstressful Period to Experience Withdrawal

If you have the luxury of managing your time, choose a period when you don't anticipate high stress or extended travel. Don't choose, for instance, the week you expect to start a new and challenging work project, or when a disruptive mother-in-law who criticizes your every move is planning to visit, or the week before your dissertation is due, or the week you are planning to fly to Europe. Ideally, choose a long weekend or period of several days without such obligations. And you should pamper yourself: Watch funny movies and laugh (surely you could watch
Bridesmaids
again), enjoy a glass of wine (but just one—any more and your ability to start the weight-loss process will be turned off), lie in the sun, get a massage. Like a bad hangover, this will pass.

But be certain to not use this as an excuse to procrastinate. You should have a very good reason to delay the process, such as those listed above, but don't avoid starting just because you might
be
stressed or inconvenienced. To be freed of all these awful effects, you have to start sometime, sooner rather than later.

Don't Exercise

That may sound odd, given the benefits of exercise. But exercising during the withdrawal process is like trying to jog, swim, or jump rope while suffering the flu: It will be a miserable experience minus the sinus congestion. Don't torture yourself, and don't feel guilty for not exercising. At most, do something at a leisurely pace: Go for a walk in the woods or around your neighborhood, or take a casual bike ride. But it would be counterproductive to force yourself to run, bike hard, or strength-train, as the effort will make you feel worse. Rest assured that, once the fireworks of withdrawal are over, you will feel so wonderful that physical activities and exercise will not just be possible again without all the discomfort, but you will feel eager for the freedom and movement of vigorous physical activity.

Hydrate

The physiologic changes experienced during this process, such as a precipitous drop in insulin, also reverse the sodium retention of wheat and grain consumption, causing fluid loss (diuresis) and reduction in inflammation. If you don't compensate by hydrating more than usual over the first few days, light-headedness, nausea, and leg cramps can result. Hydration is therefore crucial during this first week.