I got the "get out of jail" card.....

[osodecanela]

I've been seasoning posting this, but now a week and a half in, I guess it's time.

So, it's no news to anyone that I'm fat. It's also likely no news to anyone that I'm sick and tired of it, and likely, from it. I've had success before doing low-carb in the past (think Southbeach instead of Atkins) and the beginning of last week I started again. The vast majority of my simple carbs went out the window and with it 90% of my wheat products.

In 36 hours my arthritis pain evaporated.

I've carried a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis for the past 20 odd years. It's an inflammatory arthritis that usually behaves like a milder form of rheumatoid and it accompanies the skin disease psoriasis in one case in 20. My initial diagnosis was sero-negative rheumatoid, until 3 months into treatment when my then rheumatologist took a harder look at my skin. My skin disease has always been pretty mild, mostly scalp and above my ears. In my case the arthritis has hit mostly small joints, basically my fingers, toes, wrists and ankles and then not always the entire joint. It's been the medial side of my right ankle and the lateral side of the left, the latter of which has made me miserable and really limited my mobility for the past several years. If I walked more than a couple of blocks, or spent too much time on my feet, my left ankle was on fire, red, swollen and even warmer than usual.

Almost all of that ended a week ago Tuesday. Sans the bulk of my wheat (and the bulk of my simple carbs), the joint effusions, the redness, the increased warmth, in just about every last inflammed joint in my feet AND my hands has stopped and I've been out hiking every day since. I'm back right now from a 4 mile, 80 minute hike, and nothing other than the blister on the side of my big toe hurts.

I feel like I just got out of prison.

I saw my primary care provider on Monday, who like me is very suspicious of gluten intolerance. This both pleases me and ticks me off. Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly grateful to not be in the kind of pain that I was. However, eliminating all wheat products permanently feels daunting. I have in fact not yet done so. I've still been consuming very small amounts of uber high fiber, organic bread, no more than a slice per day. My gut has always been happier with a higher fiber content in my foods and my choice of bread comes in at 6 grams per slice, so there's a part of me that is not completely gung ho on giving it up.

Still, I have a sibling that is now off of gluten due to presumed celiac disease, so perhaps I really should take that step. For now, it's going to be at the 12-steppers say,"one day at a time".

Oh, and I'm down 6 lbs since I started this journey.

Comments

[jharish.livejournal.com]

I haven't shared this with you because I wasn't sure where you stood on this whole '21st Century Nutrition', but the late 90s saw me on a LOT of medications: Remeron, Elovil, Prozac, two statin drugs, and a drug that helped me sleep. I was not miserable but I was getting fatter and fatter and despite the TWO statin drugs, my cholesterol/triglycerides were maxing out(if you remember one of the last tests you did for me it was in a similar state).

I went to see a 'Naturopath' who was German, trained in Ayurvedic, Homeopathic and even Western medicine. He said 'Melancholy, when you break down the word, means black bile. You have a sick liver'.

He put me on the most daunting diet I've done to date: No Wheat, No Dairy, No sugar(including fructose from fruit).

I stayed on the diet for 18 months. It was torture. Fortunately, I did this during the .com downturn circa 2001-2002, when I had little work and could afford the time to make all my meals from scratch. However: two weeks in I had serious heroin-like withdrawal symptoms that had me with shakes and cravings for a banana split or pretty much any sweets. The phelgm my body produced was copious and rainbow-colored. After that, I've never been depressed. Also, my allergies, headaches, and weird knee pains(I was 29!!) went away. Since then, I've been on different kinds of diets, but that initial cleanse was so deep and powerful that I've not had allergies, depression, sleep problems or any of the things I was suffering from back in my late 20s. I've also had healthy cholesterol readings as well as much better physical checkups.

So I can say from experience that some of us just aren't meant to be eating certain foods. If you imagine what your basic racial stock is, then think about the regions and foods that racial stock historically was exposed to and you get an idea of what you are probably genetically stacked to digest fully. Me, I'm Irish/Scottish. Barley does my body wonders, but wheat wreaks complete and total havok. Lots of fat and meat do me wonders. Lots of sugars and fruits are terrible and I get hypoglycemic. Corn... don't get me started, but I think only full-blooded Native Americans can handle corn, yet we're pretty much made of corn here in America. (The meat you eat is made of corn and corn is in almost every processed food in one way or another.)

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

Your ethnic background commentary makes much sense, but wheat is very much in my ethnic background. There are some questions being raised at this point, given the increasing rate of individuals appearing to have problems with wheat; is it us or has the wheat changed? I would suggest the same about corn.

The older I, get the more concerned I become about our tendency to monoculture for our food stuffs. Don't know how much a fan you are of tomatoes, but I can't wait for the local heirlooms to come to market each year. Each variety has a different taste and texture. Shouldn't the nutritional value vary from plant to plant and strain to strain as well? Not only that, but with the havoc we are wreaking on the environment and bringing about significant climate change, I am truly worried that we are going to see many of our cash crops fail, with too many eggs in too few agricultural baskets.

Further, I'm concerned about the way we raise things, ie,pesticides, GMO, and the way we chemically fertilize and that's just talking about unprocessed foods. How many of us actually really cook? How often do we open something once we get home, that was either canned or frozen or pick up something at a take out on the way home? I work to avoid things such as high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, but you really have to work at that to be successful. Don't even get me started on preservatives. And how we treat and feed our livestock? You're right, for the most part, they're just as much surviving on a diet as alien to their evolution as we are, not to mention antibiotics in their feed. Then we eat them, and we expect there not to be both heath and ecologic consequences?

Lastly, our lives have evolved, but our genetic make up? Not so much. We are still very much the same species our ancestors were, 4 and 5 generations back. We evolved over the millenia as a mobile species, but how many of us spend our days sitting at a desk or working in an office, and not walking, lifting, carrying, harvesting, etc. Where is the labor to actually burn the calories we're consuming? I cannot tell you how many people I have seen arrive in this country from the third world at normal weight, and 10-15-20 years later, are 20-35-50 lbs heavier than they were when they arrived, suffering from all the illnesses so rampant with the western diet and lifestyle.

So, in short, yeah, I do believe what we said back in the 60's. You are what you eat.

[jharish.livejournal.com]

You're right. I've watched a few documentaries recently, on YouTube, like King Corn and similar where they question the wisdom of our food supply chain. In King Corn is where they break down the carbon of a average American and show that it's 90+% corn. Then they discuss that corn today is nothing like corn yesterday.

This is the same with wheat. Things like oats, barley, millet and rye are pretty much so sturdy that they haven't been modified much in the last century. Wheat, however, is completely different now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. I'm searching for the place I found this but I can't seem to find it so I can't name the book that discusses the alteration of wheat over the years. Things like selective breeding for gluten and cross breeding species to get more cold resistance and insect resistance... while it's more like 'old fashioned' genetic engineering through 'plant eugenics' and not the Monsanto-level genetics we get today with 'roundup ready'.

Soy, Wheat, Corn are huge in the food industry and they're the hardest for almost every human to digest because we have yet to evolve the kinds of enzymes that can break down these genetic freaks.

One promising thing I have been seeing in my science blogs(Slashdot covered it a few times as well) is the gut bacteria research. They're finding that slender people have different gut bacteria that is more efficient at absorbing nutrients and even produce anti-inflammatory byproducts. Fat people tend to have bacteria that putrefies food making harder to absorb the nutrients, they also have byproducts that produce inflammation.

I'm betting that when you and I quit eating wheat, our joints get better because we stop feeding one or two strains of inflammation-producing bacteria.

[grizzlyzone.livejournal.com]

I became lactose-intolerant in my early 50s. I tried lactose-free cow's milk for a while, then soymilk. My cardiologist commented that the phyto-estrogens might make me a little "chesty". I told him, "Too late!"

In any event, I've switched to almondmilk and coconutmilk now. I was getting concerned that GMO soybeans may be "Roundup Ready", and contain a higher amount of organophosphates than Almonds or Coconuts.

[bosendorfer-boy.livejournal.com]

It is fantastic that you're feeling so much better. The withdrawal must surely be daunting, but such immediate results have to be very encouraging!

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

I'm so delighted its hard to not overdo. It was nice to be able to work up a sweat yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. The muscles are a bit achy & there's a blister on my left big toe with its own zip code. I think I'll limit it to 2 miles at a clip for the next few days.

[bosendorfer-boy.livejournal.com]

Yeah. . . I imagine that there, just as here, it's getting to be great hiking weather. Resistance is hopefully not futile. :)

[grizzlyzone.livejournal.com]

New article for you.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24273607

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

Most interesting.

[epinoid.livejournal.com]

I am glad you are feeling better. There are wheat allergies other than celiacs - I get migraines and sinus inflammation from wheat. I eliminated as best as I could sources of wheat and gluten from back in 2005 and my migraine frequency dropped dramatically and I haven't had my two or three times a year sinus infections that needed Cipro to kill since. I discovered the allergy through South Beach, the day after I started it felt like my head was clear, two weeks when I added wheat back, smash I had a migraine. I have other triggers but the times I have accidentally gotten too much wheat I also get a migraine. (I test borderline on the gluten intolerance blood test). My Mom starts to cough when she eats wheat and has full blown celiacs. I am not so sensitive that I need to check the sources of glucose syrup or maltodextrin in things but a friend actually has a contact allergy to wheat.

It is challenging but there are more and more products out there and making food on your own helps a lot. Yes, there are a lot of GF trends and it seems like everyone has decided they are gluten intolerant, but some of us really do have problems. I understand your skepticism but it does make it easier to find food.

Edit: the other effect of not eating wheat, I am mostly lactose tolerant when wheat is out of my diet.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Hoorah for immediate pain relief!

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

Amen!!

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

Going wheat free is daunting, but doable. Good luck and Yay for being out of prison.

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

Grazzi bello.

[andywhobear.livejournal.com]

This is great news!