Sunday 9.18.11

We have always maintained that in order to see the best gains in your performance in and out of the gym, your nutrition should be the focal point. You do not get better from working out, you get better by recovering from a workout. Proper nutrition helps you recover faster, which in turn makes you perform better. 

We do not preach any one diet, although diets can help people stick to a program better and we suggest certain ones to people from time to time; Paleo, Primal, Zone, etc.  However, it is easy to get stuck on one diet looking at scales and points and calories and other numbers that ultimately mean nothing in your overall health and wellness.

The easiest thing to prescribe is to eat natural foods such as lean meat, vegetables, nuts, seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.  That's the easiest way we can say it and the fastest way to recovery, muscle gains and fat loss.

There are many books that come out that can help us on the path of health and performance gains through nutrition.  The latest book that I have come across is called "Wheat Belly" by Dr. William Davis:

This book is getting great reviews in the natural health and nutrition world.  Here is an excerpt from a review:

Some people were gluten sensitive; I was carb sensitive, but I’d never shown any signs of celiac – my guts work just fine, thank you (I’m sure you wanted to know that) – so gluten didn’t seem to be a concern.

I had no idea that the list of health problems attributable to gluten was so long and so frightening. Among the health conditions Dr. Davis links to gluten are:

* Schizophrenia. May as well start with the Big Casino, huh? Turns out that taking wheat products away from institutionalized schizophrenics reduced auditory hallucinations, delusions, all that stuff that makes schizophrenia the terrible illness it is. Adding wheat back caused the symptoms to reassert themselves. There are even some reports of complete remission with the removal of wheat from the diet.

* Autism. Research is preliminary, but in a Danish study of 55 autistic children, removing gluten from the diet reduced formal measures of autistic behavior.

* Liver diseases, including chronic hepatitis and biliary cancer.

* Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, the most common cause of hypothyroidism.

* Lupus

* Asthma

* Inflammatory bowel disease

* Crohn’s disease

* Seizures.

* Several forms of cancer, including bowel cancer.

* Ataxia – loss of balance and coordination. Indeed, apparently half of all patients with otherwise unexplained ataxia test positive for celiac markers – aka gluten sensitivity. This involves progressive, irremediable brain damage.

* Dementia. Doesn’t get any scarier than that. Again, gluten sensitivity can cause permanent brain damage. Gluten ataxia can progress to dementia.

But why this apparent increase in gluten sensitivity? Is it just a fad? After all, people have been eating wheat for millennia, but dementia, for example, has only started accelerating recently.

Turns out that we’re getting more wheat than we did, thanks to the big push for everyone to eat lots of Healthy Whole Grains! There’s also increased awareness, and research into the effects of gluten on the body. But that’s not the whole problem.   For the whole review, go here.


Check out the book, it reads easily and is a good first step in shifting your nutrition towards lean meat, vegetables, nuts, seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.  cc