Bread Falls Flat

I was beginning to think it was never going to happen. I thought perhaps the diet I was using was too deficient in calories to allow for a weight gain to register and I was just senselessly dieting myself away into nothing. I was losing weight daily, despite the fact that I didn’t need to lose any, and that I was adding foods that are generally considered not to be part of a healthful, weight loss diet.

Yesterday I stuck to my familiar, friendly diet and included one single slice of white bread. This morning, I finally saw evidence of my first reaction. I showed a 0.8 pound gain on the scale. As I mentioned before this is the least amount of gain I needed to see to consider that food reactive.

Ingredients: Unbleached Wheat Flour, Water, Organic Whole Wheat Flour, Organic Rye Flour, Wheat Germ, Sea Salt and Organic Malt.

I had my slice of bread at lunch and felt fine afterwards. Last night, after dinner, which contained no bread or no untested foods, I felt gassy. That’s not to say that I was flatulent. And even if I were, it would be nothing unusual for me. But what I felt was like air moving and shifting around inside my intestines. It never got to a painful place, but there were a few times that I felt like I wanted to fart to relieve the feeling of slight pressure, but nothing came out. 

It wasn’t debilitating or painful; in fact, if I weren’t doing this experiment and paying careful attention to my body’s responses, I might not have given it a second thought. But it was undeniable.

So that, combined with my almost a full pound of unexplained weight gain, leads to be put wheat in the ‘unfriendly’ column.

It doesn’t surprise me. For years, I had been following an instinct that bread wasn’t doing me any good, and it is a very rare occasion that I ever did eat bread anyway. But now I know that there is a physical reason why I shouldn’t. At least not every day.

Today I’ll go back to a totally friendly diet, to give my body a chance to deal with this inflammation. My weight should be back down tomorrow morning.  In the future, I’ll continue to refrain from eating bread. And I assume that this is the wheat in action, and so the same restriction would hold true for cookies, crackers, cakes, pasta and pastries. I’m OK with the crackers and bread, but I think I’m going to miss cookies.

I don’t have to totally deny myself cookies forever, but now I know for sure that when I eat one, it will cause inflammation and if I don’t respect that, by giving my body a chance to recover the next day, weight gain and eventually disease.

Tomorrow I will test a new protein.