How to Reconnect Your Diet and Your Body

Previous Lesson Review:
You learned the power of superfoods—the dietary equivalents of the world’s top high-performance athletes—and identified the best-of-the-best foods that deliver exceptional nutritional value.

When much of what you eat comes in a package, it becomes a real challenge to link what you’re eating to how you feel—culturally, the standard North American diet disconnects us from our bodies, blurring our ability to distinguish the cause of discomfort from the discomfort itself. This lesson you’ll learn how you can reconnect your diet with your body and how systematically listening to your body can help you solve nagging health challenges.

Sneaky Sensitivities: How You Can Avoid Allergens to Solve Mystery Illnesses

Whether you know it or not, your body could be sensitive to one or more of many common foods in the modern diet. If you’ve spent years dealing with unexplained headaches, persistent low energy, ongoing mild flu-like or hay fever-like symptoms or difficulty shedding body fat, you’re not going crazy—these are classic symptoms of food sensitivities.

Sensitivities ≠ Allergies

What’s the difference between a food allergy and a food sensitivity? With food allergies, your body’s reaction to the allergen is usually immediate and obvious—itching, hives, tingling in the mouth, difficulty breathing, abdominal cramps, vomiting or even anaphylactic shock are clear signals you need to avoid that food! In contrast, food sensitivities are more difficult to identify because the symptoms of the food sensitivity are rarely severe and might not show up for days—or weeks!—after you’ve eaten the food.

If symptoms of food sensitivities occur with such long delays after exposure—and the symptoms you experience masquerade as other common illnesses—how are you supposed to identify what you’re sensitive to? The simplest method is to eliminate the most common allergens—if your mystery illnesses disappear, you know you’re sensitive to something. I stick with avoiding most common allergens as a long-term strategy, since sensitivities can develop over time with continued exposure. You also have the option of re-introducing what you’ve eliminated slowly, one item at a time—this way, you can get a better picture of what the culprit food is.

The Usual Suspects: Common Allergens to Avoid

Corn

This relatively new addition to the human diet causes an allergic reaction in some people and sensitivities in many more (only introduced a few hundred years ago, our bodies haven’t evolved to effectively digest corn). High-fructose corn syrup—one of the most health-damaging derivatives of corn—is frequently used in sport drinks and other processed foods requiring a cheap sweetener. In fact, you’ll find corn derivatives in up to 90 percent of processed food!

Corn is the source of such non-corn-sounding ingredients and additives as: maltodextrin, dextrose, glucose-fructose, invert sugar or modified starch. With all these forms in common use, if you’re eating processed foods, corn and its derivatives can be a challenge to avoid.

If you find you are not sensitive to corn, there’s no need to avoid whole food corn (such as fresh corn on the cob).

Wheat and Gluten

Gluten, the protein found in wheat, rye, kamut, spelt, barley, and most oats, is difficult for some people to digest. High levels of gluten are not historically natural to our diet—they are a modern creation introduced by the hybridization and genetic modification of wheat. No longer a natural food, today’s wheat has been tinkered with to produce higher yields in industrial farming; the trade-off in these higher yields is a much higher gluten content.

Celiac disease (gluten intolerance) is more common now than ever—but even if you’re not completely intolerant, a gluten sensitivity can result in symptoms ranging from a general sub-par feeling to mild or severe digestive problems.

Wheat—or a wheat derivative—is found in nearly all processed foods. You can avoid gluten by substituting it with any of the pseudograins introduced in the last session. If you discover you are not sensitive to gluten after using the elimination method and want to re-introduce it, switching from and avoiding standard wheat in favor of the less-modified grains spelt or kamut is a positive long-term strategy. Breads made from sprouted whole grains are also a better option.

Dairy

Cow’s milk comes from a lactating cow. Natural unpasteurized milk from a mother cow is an ideal source of nourishment—for the calf. When humans eat dairy, that milk is no longer being used as it was intended.

Many people—especially adults—experience digestive problems from dairy products (cow, goat and sheep’s’ milk included) due difficulties digesting lactose. While severe lactose intolerance is easily identified by the immediate—often violent—reaction following dairy consumption, milder dairy sensitivities show up as general digestive unrest, difficulty losing weight, mysterious inflammation, respiratory congestion (dairy is mucous-forming), unexplained skin issues, chronic reduced energy or impaired immunity. Eliminating dairy from your diet can drastically improve your sense of wellness.

Soy

Soy has traditionally been eaten in Asia as a condiment, not as a main course. With the recent adoption by the Western world of soy as a meat substitute, soy has found its way into our diets on a large scale.

The irony of this wholesale embrace of soy in the otherwise positive shift away from meat comes from the fact that many health-conscious people who choose soy-alternatives fail to experience the vitality of a plant-based diet as a result of an unrecognized soy sensitivity. Soy sensitivity—like most food sensitivities—builds up over time, so years of drinking soy milk, eating tofu burgers, TVP (textured vegetable protein) and tofu stir-fry can leave you feeling less than energetic (an all-too-common—and unnecessary—reason given for abandoning a vegetarian diet).

If you discover you’re not sensitive to soy after experimenting with elimination, there’s nothing wrong with eating organic tofu once a week, if that’s your only source of soy (watch for it in processed foods—like corn and wheat, soy-derivatives are in almost everything). I recommend you follow the Asian-diet lead, choosing soy as a tasty condiment instead of your main meal.

Active Yeast

There are two categories of yeast: inactive and active. Nutritional yeast is inactive, meaning that it is no longer growing. Active yeast is living and needs sugar to survive once in contact with moisture.

Used to make bread dough rise, active yeast is a standard ingredient in most baked goods-the problem when you eat products made with active yeast is that the active yeast is not completely destroyed in the baking process. Once active yeast enters your body, it feeds on your body’s sugars, multiplying, often causing systemic yeast over-growth and candidiasis.

Your body may not be susceptible to this yeast. If you don’t develop bloating and mild flu-like symptoms after eating yeast-leavened breads, it’s perfectly fine to eat them—just choose ones made from whole sprouted grains.

Peanuts

Peanut allergies and sensitivities are on the rise in North America, affecting children most severely (though 20 percent will outgrow this allergy). Reactions to peanuts range from mild to severe anaphylaxis—some people are affected by the mere presence of peanut-containing foods in the same room, thanks to air-borne peanut particles. Peanuts are also highly susceptible to mould growth (a factor suspected as a cause of peanut allergies).

If you’re sensitive to peanuts but miss peanut butter, sunflower seed paste makes a good alternative.

Take Action:

• If you experience ongoing, unexplained shortages of energy, mental clarity or other health mysteries, there is no better time than now to start the elimination experiment—it could be an action with impactful results! Identifying your possible food sensitivities puts you back in control of the chronic discomforts you may have been suffering for years. Here are two approaches to starting the elimination experiment:

1. If your current diet does not rely heavily on these foods, drop the usual suspects—wheat, dairy, corn and soy—from your diet all at once for at least two weeks.

Your body may need more than two weeks to detox or resolve lingering reactions—I recommend continuing for longer if you do not notice any improvements in suspected food sensitivity-related symptoms. Consult your physician or naturopath for further advice.

1. If you’re not quite ready to eliminate all common allergens at once—or your diet currently relies on a lot of several of them—choose one allergen and eliminate it from your diet for the next two weeks. If you don’t notice any changes (and the pesky symptoms you’re trying to find the source of don’t fade), pick another allergen to eliminate, systematically repeating the experiment until you notice a change.

If you’ve tried eliminating all four with no observable change, your body may need more than two weeks to detox or resolve lingering reactions—it is worth either trying the experiment again with longer times, or trying the first approach (you may discover you have multiple food sensitivities). As with option 1, consult your physician or naturopath for further advice

Next Lesson Preview:
You’ll tie what you’ve learned about nutrition together even more and get strategies for how—and when—to use superfoods to fuel your body to maximize your fitness results.

Keep thriving!

Brendan