Advantages Of Starting A Gluten Free Diet
With food choices and tips on how to go gluten free it can be confusing. To understand more about which food contain gluten jump back to part two of this expert interview series with creator of the Gluten free Health Solution.
Today we’ll talk about some of the benefits of a gluten free diet that you will experience from having more energy to fat loss.
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Mike: Speaking of gluten free, obviously, from a fat loss standpoint it could do wonders and we all know that. From what I understand, just based on how I have felt, I see that the vitality of life is obviously more of a plus then the fat loss or the weight that’s coming off.
What would you say are probably the top three advantages of starting a gluten free diet and sticking to a gluten free diet?
Peter: The three advantages come to those who are actually gluten sensitive. I would say if you’re gluten sensitive then the gluten free diet is what you need to be following.
Probably the biggest clinical changes that I see, number one is improved energy. Think about it like this. If you spend 20 or 30 years of eating regular food and you’re gluten sensitive then you’re basically slowly poisoning your body over a number of years. As you poison yourself, then you create this internal damage. It damages the little mechanisms inside your cells that help your body to produce energy.
What happens over time is you become more and more lethargic, you don’t make as much energy, and you become accustomed to that or you get adapted to that. You think oh I’m just getting older and this is all part of the normal process of getting older, is the decline in energy.
As you’ve just stated that you figured out, it’s not age at all. It’s just that damage over time that’s created. Energy being enhanced is probably one of the top symptoms we’re going to see improved.
There are a couple of other things that we see very commonly with gluten sensitivity that have improved in a lot people. One is just generalized muscle and joint pain.
This applies directly to the folks that follow you guys because when you’re trying to workout and you’re trying to lose weight, if your muscles hurt and your joints hurt and it’s hard to recover and it’s hard to stay in the gym and it’s hard to stay after that workout routine because of the pain, then you’re not going to be very successful.
That’s one of the most common symptoms we see clear up which is just this chronic muscle spasm, chronic muscle pain, and joint pain issue.
I would say probably the third most common symptom that we see with patients improving has to do with the resolution of autoimmune conditions. There are about 190 different autoimmune diseases. A lot of people don’t know what these are.
I’ll give you a couple of examples. Migraine headache is an autoimmune disease. We see a lot of times patients who have suffered with 20, 30, or 40 years of chronic migraines that go gluten free and the headaches just stop coming. They resolve because of the diet change.
We see some patients that have rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and hypothyroidism which is a lowering of the thyroid hormone in the body. It’s also an autoimmune condition. We see these patients start to make thyroid hormones again. We see these patient’s joint pains start to go away as a result of their immune system – it’s no longer attacking food and it can now protect them.
That’s what happens with autoimmune disease with those that are gluten sensitive is you have an immune system so busy trying to attack food that’s not really food, but it’s poison. What ends up happening to these people is they wear and tear their immune system to death and then eventually their immune system starts to attack their own bodies because it gets confused.
Those types of conditions we’ll see resolved very frequently with a gluten free diet. To sum it up, we have improved energy and then we also have reduction of muscle joint pain and muscle spasms. Then as well we’ve got the diminution or the resolution of autoimmune disease.
Mike: Fantastic. Those are some great points.
Like I said, the big difference for me was the energy. Just to kind of give you a background story. My wife and I went on vacation a few weeks ago. We decided we were going to reduce the gluten but we’re going to have some fun and eat some foods that we thoroughly enjoy. Something that really struck with me from my wife was that she basically said yes I could see why we went gluten free. She said she noticed such a difference going from gluten free to all of a sudden we’re eating tons of gluten.
I could tell she was just kind of feeling lethargic and tired. Granted, she’s pregnant but still just seeing that difference. The difference that I certainly felt was I’m already kind of geeked up on energy all the time anyway. I found myself more focused.
Like I said, I hadn’t even completely removed gluten yet. I’ve drastically taken it down. Like I said, I have more energy. I have more focus. Obviously, I’m sure you’ll agree that this will turn into more productivity whether you’re a trainer, work at a day job, or whatever.
Peter: Yes. No doubt. Actually, recently on that same topic of mental focus, I recently had a patient who came in to see me. The reason he came in was because he was giving these very big presentations for a multi-billion dollar company.
Here he was up there with a PowerPoint and expected to give this presentation. He couldn’t focus. He actually shut down in the middle of the presentation. It almost cost him his job. It didn’t take but a couple of months of changing his diet before his concentration, focus, and his improved mental clarity came back to him.
That’s just another side affect. Again, when you’re eating food that doesn’t act like food in your body, it slows down your machinery and it can affect your brain as well.
This is all awesome stuff. Tomorrow we’ll talk about a few mistakes people make when starting a gluten free diet
Yours in health and fitness,
Mike (AKA “Mikey”) Whitfield, CTT
Certified Turbulence Trainer