Dr Davis - Wheat Belly Total Health - The effortless grain-free health and weight-loss plan

Even if you’ve already enjoyed a major health success by eliminating wheat, understanding the strategies articulated in Wheat Belly Total Health and putting them to use can take your health efforts several steps further. If you are among the many people who have shed 2, 4, 8 or even more stones of wheat-induced visceral fat and reversed one or more health conditions, there are still many more steps you can take to further improve your health.

Or you may be among those who, minus wheat, failed to enjoy a full return to health. You may find yourself still struggling with 4 or more stones of weight you want to shed, plus joint pains, skin rashes and other health problems; you may be left wondering if there is something you can do, short of prescription medications and procedures, to restore your health. Or perhaps you now realize just how good you feel minus wheat and are motivated to achieve total health in as many ways as possible to ensure long-term ideal health. Or you may be brand new to the wheat-free message. If so, this is your ultimate guide to going grain-free. Regardless of which category you fall into, you have come to the right place for answers.

We are reminded that humans are truly adaptable, resilient, fit and vigorous, and have a natural, innate capacity to be healthy, slender and happy – provided that no grains are permitted entry into our bodies and all health disruptions are corrected in their wake.

Life Ungrained: Unrestrained High Performance

Despotic governments oppress their people. Burdensome health-care costs weigh down our economy. One hundred extra pounds of body fat overtax hips, knees and feet that are ill-equipped to bear such loads, and they groan, creak and erode away under the burden. Likewise, the mix of components in grains undermines human functioning from head to toe. Unload such crushing burdens and people are freed, the economy is boosted, joints are relieved and human functioning is liberated.

Minus the health- and life-impairing effects of grains, we venture into discussions about performance : how well you perform emotionally, mentally, professionally and physically once the major impediments have been removed. This applies to accomplishments in school, at work, in relationships, in sports – in virtually every setting we encounter in life. It means aiming to maximize how good you feel and look to get that extra boost of mojo that can make the difference between getting through your day or blasting through your day. Total health is outwardly evident; you see it in smoother skin, a flatter tummy, freedom from leg swelling, an easy gait, and ease and vigour of motion in all directions. It’s also reflected internally through deeper sleep, less-turbulent menstrual cycles, freedom from headaches and problem-free digestion.

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.