THE PROBLEMS OF WEIGHT LOSS: YOU MAY BE ALLERGIC TO YOUR FAVORITE FOODS

Allergies are an extremely common cause of weight gain. Since virtually everyone is allergic to something, even if they don't recognize the symptoms, we need to explore in more depth the topic of allergies as they relate to excessive weight.

Nadine loves bread. She loves pasta and sweet rolls. She loves anything with wheat in it, and because she works in a coffee shop that sells the most delectable rolls and cookies hot from the oven, she has indulged freely. But when she went on our eating program, which effectively eliminates all wheat products, she found the weight dropping off. Part of her weight loss was the new balance in food, but part of it could have been that she was no longer consuming this highly allergic food which her body stored on her hips.

She had a chance to test her allergy a few weeks later. One afternoon her husband graciously served fresh turkey sandwiches. He used only the finest whole-grain, high-fiber bread, piled it high with roasted turkey, lettuce, and slices of tomato, moistened it with a little mayonnaise, and Nadine enjoyed every delicious morsel.

Within minutes of swallowing the last crumb, she got so sleepy she couldn't hold her eyes open, and she lay down to take a little nap. She said she felt like she was in a coma.

Turkey is high in tryptophan, which can produce a sedative effect. (Remember how you feel shortly after Thanksgiving dinner!) When I asked Nadine if turkey ever did that to her, she replied, "No, we have turkey all the time. The only thing I hadn't eaten for a while was the bread. It had to be the bread." She recalled that before she went on the diet, she tended to get sleepy after eating wheat products but had never associated the two events.

Nadine's story is not uncommon. Wheat often causes symptoms such as depression, inappropriate sleepiness, headaches, gastrointestinal upsets, arthritic pains, and almost any other symptom imaginable in any part of the body.

Wheat isn't the only bad guy here. Let me share some really bad news with you: The food you crave desperately or the food you love the most is typically the food to which you are allergic. Almost every time.

We've all heard the expression: "One man's food is another man's poison." We're not talking here about eating synthetic foodlike products that have no biological activity in the human body. We're not talking about food additives, preservatives, coloring agents, flavor enhancers, or the like, although these agents may certainly produce the same effects. We are talking about good foods that nourish other people: foods like milk, yogurt, cheese, corn, soy, chocolate.

The real question is why do we become allergic or reactive to common foods that don't affect other people? There are several causes of allergy, not the least of which is genetics. We can inherit allergic tendencies from ancestors, even though we may not be allergic to the same foods. Allergies have been a real issue in several generations of both my husband's family and mine, so when our children tested high for food sensitivities, we weren't surprised.

A theory that is difficult to prove but interesting to contemplate is that our bodies have difficulty distinguishing between chemicals secreted by negative emotions and the foods we happen to be eating when we experience these emotions. One reason we shouldn't eat when we're upset is that negative emotions can shut down the digestive system, which can cause undigested proteins to be received into the body and attacked by an overzealous immune system. If we're eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while we're being disciplined for sloppy table manners or get angry when being kicked under the table by an older brother, our bodies may associate that peanut butter sandwich with depression, frustration, or anger and initiate an allergic response upon every exposure to peanuts, bread, or jelly!

"My dad would always harass my mom about her weight and she would ignore him or get mad at him. It was okay for him to be overweight but not for my mom. Men think that a man can be heavy and it's perfect."

BETH

If we consoled ourselves during a time of grief or depression with Oreo cookies and a glass of milk, possibly any exposure to chocolate or milk reproduces the same feelings of depression or grief. Or if we just happened to eat a piece of toast while suffering from a raging headache, the body now connects the headache and the toast—and reproduces the effect year after year.

A number of years ago, I experienced a devastating bout of stomach flu that lasted for weeks. The last food item I ate before I started vomiting was a certain brand of shortbread cookies. For years after recovering from the flu, my stomach lurched every time I passed a package of shortbread cookies in the cookie aisle of the supermarket. Maybe we develop our own unique set of allergens the same way. Our bodies just can't separate those events from the internal chemicals they produce.

Strong adrenal glands help protect us from the negative side effects of stress. If the adrenal glands have been weakened by unrelenting stress, drugs, or illness, we may become increasingly reactive to foods and other environmental chemicals.

Other adrenal-weakening factors include deficiencies in key nutrients like vitamin Ñ and pantothenic acid; excessive consumption of coffee, alcohol, sugar, and other central nervous system stimulants or depressants; or recreational drugs. If you find that you simply can't wake up in the morning without your morning cup of coffee and sugar-coated donut, chances are good that you're self-medicating with caffeine and sugar to support a barely functional adrenal gland. You are setting yourself up for food and airborne allergies.

Another common cause of allergy is incomplete digestion. This is a complex function that frankly doesn't get done very efficiently for most of us.

The first step of digestion begins in the mouth where the teeth chew and grind the food into tiny fragments and mix it with saliva. Saliva contains small amounts of amylase, an enzyme that helps break down carbohydrates into simple sugars. When the food is swallowed, it rests in the upper portion of the stomach (the cardiac region) for up to an hour. If the food was raw and contained its own supply of enzymes, the warmth and moisture of the stomach allow the enzymes in the raw food to take the next step in the process of digestion and break it down further.

The food remains in the cardiac region of the stomach for about thirty to forty minutes, during which time the lower portion of the stomach (the duodenal portion) prepares to receive the partially digested food by secreting its own digestive juices, including pepsin and hydrochloric acid (HCL). The HCL turns the pepsin into pepsinogen, which then cleaves the protein molecules into individual amino acids. After passing from the stomach into the small intestine in the form of chyme, the food continues to be further digested and absorbed all along the digestive tract.

"You go to the store, kids make comments. It makes you feel real conscious when you're buying things. People look at you like they're saying, 'Wow, she really needs that!'"

CASSIE

Each section of the digestive tract contains juices that break down the food into smaller and smaller particles, each step critical in the overall digestive process. Protein digestion takes place primarily in the stomach and small intestine. Carbohydrate digestion takes place in the mouth, stomach, and small intestine. Fat digestion takes place in the small intestine. Conditions along the entire length of the alimentary canal must be optimum for full digestion to take place, and it doesn't take much imagination to realize that with most people, optimum conditions rarely exist.

When digestion is incomplete, particles of undigested food pass through the small intestine. Constipation, harmful bacterium and yeasts, and malnutrition can riddle the walls of the small intestine with tiny holes that allow entry of these large, undigested protein and carbohydrate particles directly into the bloodstream. At this point the immune system becomes involved.

The job of the immune system is to recognize and destroy foreign invaders, proteins, or other objects that don't belong in the bloodstream. When an immune body homes in on a partially digested protein molecule, it calls out the body's armed forces. It matters little to the immune body that the protein molecule on which it has sent out a "search and destroy" mission is an innocuous glass of milk or a slice of toast with peanut butter. It may not know that most of the world has no problem with walnuts; it only knows that this tiny cluster of amino acids doesn't match up to "self; it must be destroyed.

It doesn't seem practical to call out the armed forces when one foreign soldier steps foot over the border, but that is essentially what the body does when undigested food slips through the intestinal barrier into the bloodstream. Although everyone else may enjoy a piece of whole wheat toast with peanut butter and jam, your body may not perceive that piece of toast as food. It may set out to eliminate it from the body in a variety of interesting ways, including diarrhea; sneezing; itchy, watery eyes; headaches; or vomiting. It can "seal off toxins by chronic constipation or encasing them in adipose tissue; i.e., fat cells. If the body has to deal with large amounts of these toxic by-products of poor digestion or allergies, it may need to build large storage depots of fat all over the body to handle the load.

Another common technique the body uses to deal with allergic material is to flood the affected area with water, a condition we recognize as water retention or edema. People can lose ten to twenty pounds of excess fluid just by eliminating allergic foods from their diet.

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