In addition to less-disruptive menstrual cycles, women can enjoy improved fertility and reductions in perversely high oestrogen levels, and they get reacquainted with the concept of feeling good most or all of the time, rather than just once in a while or not at all. Male sexual performance improves as men enjoy lower levels of oestrogen, higher levels of testosterone and reductions of embarrassingly large breasts.
Total health can, in many instances, be measured. You can aim for perfect metabolic health as it’s reflected in triglycerides and cholesterol panels, blood sugars, haemoglobin A1c (long-term blood sugar), thyroid tests, and screenings to determine levels of various nutrients. It can also be reflected in measures such as blood pressure and body fat percentage.
While you may be able to walk, run or jump more easily, faster, farther and higher minus the aches, pains and energy impairment of grains, high-performance competitors enjoy similar benefits, and a growing number of professional athletes are embracing the grain-free lifestyle. In this book, we discuss how to gain an even greater competitive edge with strategies that go beyond eliminating grains. Sometimes the additional steps are wonderfully simple, such as correcting iodine and iron deficiencies; at other times the solutions are more elaborate, such as the strategies required to restore and maintain bowel health and undo the effects of endocrine disruption. But the goal is to unmask your individual potential and achieve the highest levels of performance in health and life in as many ways as reasonably possible. We aren’t trying to create a race of superhuman grain-free men and women, but we can achieve levels of life performance that we previously enjoyed only fleetingly, if at all.
Many of these efforts may not have been necessary had we not been blindsided by these nutritional blunders in the first place. Had we grown up without exposure to Frankengrains with unique, health-disruptive effects, or without thyroid and sex hormone disruption from grains that are compounded by the ocean of endocrine gland–impairing industrial chemicals we swim in, things might be different. Had we also enjoyed the luxury of living outdoors in a semitropical climate and getting a full night of restorative sleep each and every night and had we not been exposed to the chronic, unrelenting stress of modern life, well, maybe we would have enjoyed peak functioning all along. But that is simply not the case for the majority of people. Thankfully, once we understand what went wrong, we can right the situation and, in most cases, fully restore your innate capacity for high levels of life performance.
Achieving Ungrained Total Health in Three Steps: No More, No Less
Wheat Belly Total Health is presented in three parts that are a logical and necessary sequence that must occur if your goal is total health. Like learning to crawl before you walk or studying algebra before cracking the code on calculus, total health unfolds in a natural progression.
You cannot, for instance, regain health as long as grains remain a part of your diet: health cannot be perfect as long as multigrain buns, rye toast or tacos made from genetically modified cornflour remain a part of your dietary experience. You might not even be aware that grains are exerting their harmful effects while you go about your business working, sleeping, sitting in the drive-thru or watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. You might be unaware, for instance, that an abnormally increased degree of intestinal permeability is boiling away beneath the surface, waiting to eventually trigger an autoimmune condition in your body that will result, for instance, in the stumbling speech, incoordination and muscle weakness of multiple sclerosis. Or opacities may be accumulating in the lenses of your eyes, obscuring your vision with milky blurriness, waiting to be diagnosed as cataracts when you’re 53, despite the ‘balanced diet’ and exercise programme you’ve been following for the last 30 years. Or a gradual impairment of mind function may develop beneath your awareness until one day you find that you can’t remember where you parked your car, your way home or who that unfamiliar stranger is that you share your bed with. Just because you fail to perceive it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s there regardless of how good you feel, and it needs to be corrected before you can even begin to hope for total health.
In Part I, I discuss why the elimination of all grains, wheat and otherwise, is essential if you are to begin your journey back to total health. It is essential because no amount of other healthy foods, nutritional supplements, exercise or drugs can fully overcome the health-thwarting effects of grains should they remain in your diet. Grain elimination is evolutionarily appropriate for a member of the species Homo sapiens; it is consistent with your physiology and metabolism, and it begins – but does not complete – your journey back to total health.
In Part II, we deal with just how to accomplish this journey, including how you can survive the process of withdrawal from the opiates in grains – probably the most challenging hurdle to overcome in your journey back to health and the one that, if you are not properly coached and equipped, can backfire and set you back to your former grain-consuming ways. I teach you how to know when you’ve been reexposed to closely related proteins that force your body to revisit the havoc you thought you’d eliminated and threaten to undo everything you’ve accomplished. I also discuss how your body adapts to this new situation in life without grains, and why and how adaptation may not be complete until you take the reins and make it complete.
In Part III, I discuss how to pursue health as far as possible once you have removed all the health destruction of grains: how to achieve new heights of energy, sleep, mental clarity, mood, bowel function, endocrine health, metabolic health, exercise and physical functioning. We’ll apply all of the lessons we’ve learned along the way as we discover that, minus grains, life and health are actually quite wonderful.
Too many of us, forced to accept this mantra of ‘healthy whole grains’, have never been shown the path to easily and effortlessly accomplish total health. Once the health disruptions of grains are exorcised from your life and you recognize their purported health benefits for the fictional notions they are, everything gets so much better. Without grains, wondrous things begin to happen in just about every way. That is what ‘total health’ means.
Liberate Your Inner Cow: Life Ungrained
Goldfish do not eat sausages. John Cleese, ‘How to Feed a Goldfish’, Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Since you are reading this book, I take it that you are a member of the species Homo sapiens. You are probably not a giraffe, toad or woodpecker. Nor are you a ruminant, those taciturn creatures that graze on grass.
Ruminants, such as goats and cows, and their ancient, wild counterparts, ibex and aurochs, enjoy evolutionary adaptations that allow them to consume grasses. They have continuously growing teeth to compensate for the wear generated by coarse, sandlike phytolith particles in grass blades; cows produce in excess of 100 litres of saliva per day; have four-compartment stomachs that host unique microorganisms to digest grass components, including a compartment that grinds and then regurgitates its contents up as a cud to rechew; and a long, spiral colon that’s also host to microorganisms that further digest grassy remains. In other words, ruminants have a gastrointestinal system uniquely specialized to consume grasses.
You don’t look, smell or act like a ruminant. Then why would you eat like one?
Those of you who have already forgone wheat do not, of course. But if you remain of the ‘healthy whole grain’-consuming persuasion, you have