John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, on the simplest and most effective change we can make to our diets. Trust him, he’s not a doctor.
Want to change your life for the better? Want a private revolution? Here's the first of three ways you can transform how you eat and how you feel. It worked for me, it's worked for thousands of people, and maybe it will work for you. After all, you've nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Ready? Good. First revolutionary act coming up:
Stop eating wheat.
It may be stating the obvious but this means not eating bread or pasta or any kind of pastry, pizza or biscuit or cake. It may seem like a horrendous thought. You might well feel as though life will not be worth living without all these things; that these foods are too much of a pleasure to do without.
Here's my experience though. This is all an illusion. The lust for wheat is a cultural habit we learn from our earliest days which is reinforced every day by marketing. Life will not end if you stop eating it. Once you break the habit it is very easy to do without wheat. Trust me, I'm not a doctor. Your life will likely improve.
Wheat is all encompassing. We never stop eating the bloody stuff. Sometimes it’s almost all we eat. When we were kids we'd have Heinz spaghetti on toast all the time, which is wheat served on wheat!
Think about it: You have toast for breakfast, a sandwich for dinner, pasta for what I still insist, in an unreconstructed working class manner, to call tea and then some cereal or toast again for supper. The bulk of the calories in your diet may well be from wheat. You will almost certainly never go one day in your life without eating wheat. Above all other foodstuffs, wheat is what you eat most frequently.
So what, you may well think, indignantly grabbing hold of a large piece of cake and nursing it closely like a small child.
Firstly, wheat isn't that nutritious. Bread producers fortify bread precisely because its lacks nutrients. It's also a big hit of carbohydrate, which is fine if you're going to be doing a lot of physical activity but let's face it; you're probably not are you? Maybe one or two days a week you will be very active but you're cramming wheat into you at every meal of every day. What do you think your body is going to do with all that energy? More than likely it's going to lay it down as fat.
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There is also research that has concluded modern short straw wheat is a different beast compared to the old fashioned long straw waving fields of wheat of our imaginations. The modern hybrid, though sold to us as natural through a lifetime of bucolic photos of fields of the stuff wafting in a summer’s breeze, is now actually a highly contrived, genetically altered product.
Read a book called Wheat Belly by William Davis to learn more about this. His research shows how quickly it delivers sugar into your blood and what this does to you. It is also much higher in gluten than at any time in our history. It's not a coincidence that gluten intolerance has exploded in the last twenty years when, even allowing for non-diagnosis, it used to be very rare.
So you climb off the wheat train to nowhere. What happens?
Most people report feeling less bloated, leaner and having more energy when they quit eating wheat. Removing this huge input of carbohydrates into your bloodstream is likely to reduce your overall energy intake and help you lose weight, as long as you don't compensate for it by eating lots of sugar or other grains, such as rice. It will help prevent those big energy slumps in the middle of the afternoon, which you know you self-medicate by eating more carbohydrates in the form of sugar and more wheat. A diet based on good quality animal fat or olive oil will stabilize your blood sugar, prevent headaches and keep your mood and emotions more even. I know. It transformed me. I've not had a headache in nearly two years now.
Indeed, if you really want to go for this, I'd suggest cutting out all grains for the same reasons as cutting out wheat. I know this is an extreme measure for many people and probably seems totally whacked out.
Yeah. I know that. But here's the thing. We have only been eating large amounts of grain for around 10,000 years. Grain is a product of agriculture. Our hunter gather ancestors couldn't eat large amounts of grain because it doesn't exist in an edible form en masse in nature. We had to settle into communities, harvest and hybridize wild grasses until we arrived at having something edible. An amazing feat to be sure. But by any proper assessment, eating grain is the same as eating a modern, processed food. Our bodies have not changed much in those 10,000 years. Prior to this, we existed as hunter gatherers for a couple of million years, eating anything we could get our grubby hands on, very little of which was grain or carbohydrate of any kind. Even wild fruit was probably less sugary and sweet and thus less carby.
We evolved to eat that diet, but now we eat this freaky modern processed food-based diet, whilst living in the same bodies. Is it any wonder that things go wrong for some of us?
Incidentally, hunter gatherers were, on average, taller and broader than we are today. Many have commented on how agriculture merely made us smaller and sicker. Oops. Who knew?
So when you open your brain up to the full span of time, you can see that wheat (and other grains) is little more than a fancy modern habit to which we have become enslaved.
Look at it this way, if you stop eating wheat, nothing bad will happen to you. The Wheat Police won't come round your house and arrest you. You don't get anything unique in terms of nutrition from wheat that you can't get elsewhere. Just try it for a couple of weeks and see how you feel.
It will be a small, private, quiet act of revolution. No longer will you be one of the herds chowing down on its nosebag of wheat, you will free of what Williams Davis and many others call an addiction and that will feel bloody brilliant. Trust me, I'm not a doctor.