Getting Started on the Whole 30 - Eliminating Grains & Legumes

Getting ready for a Whole30?   Please head on over to Whole30.com for the official rundown, but here's my abridged version for all of my friends who are doing this with me in January as well as anyone else who is interested...

First a few words on The Whole30, a 30-day elimination diet and an opportunity to see not only what foods are negatively impacting your health, but also an opportunity to take a look at your relationships with food.  The program is designed around the ideas that food should 1) promote a healthy psychological response, 2) promote a healthy hormonal response, 3) support a healthy gut and 4) support immune function and minimize inflammation. 

Program Rules Eat Real Food. eggs, meat, seafood, lets of veggies, fruit and all of the good fats we discussed the other day. All pronounceable ingredients.

Avoid the following for 30 days:
- Added sugar of any kind, real or artificial
- Alcohol
- Grains
- Legumes (includes peanuts and peanut butter so switch now to almond, and soy sauce which you can switch out to coconut aminos)
- Dairy (only Ghee is approved)
- Carrageenan, MSG or sulfite
- Also, do not recreate baked goods, junk foods or treats with "approved" ingredients

You are not allowed to step on the scale or take body measurements for 30 days! 

Never eat anything you don't want to eat. This is not a punishment.

In this post we'll review Grains & Legumes.

Wait? What?  Oatmeal is good for me!  And so are black beans!  Back away from my Cheerios!

Let me give you some rationale - not my words, the words from the book. 

1) Refined grains, during the refining process, have been stripped of fiber, vitamins and minerals. Sometimes they add those back in but it's not the same.  So what ends up happening is these grains lack most of the original health benefits but still all the calories.  

Think you can't get enough fiber?  Broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, green beans, sweet potato, winter squash, apple, banana, blackberries, orange, pear, strawberries and almonds all contain the equivalent or more fiber per serving than whole-grain bread, oatmeal or brown rice. 

2) Legumes.  Without getting to specific, legumes have phytates (here's a link to another blog post) which bind many of the minerals present in the legume, making them unavailable to our body.    

There also "fermenting" of sugars that occurs in the gut when we consume legumes.  Familiar with what I'm saying?  This is creating an issue with the health of your gut, and when your gut is unhealthy it creates all sorts of other issues in your body.  

3) Soy.  Soy contains phytoestrogens, which are recognized by our bodies as a female reproductive hormone.  The book's authors believe that regularly consuming food rich in hormonally active substances for the general population is a bad idea. (There is a LOT of conflicting information on soy.  I have done a lot of research of my own on soy - and this is one of the areas that I can't get 100% behind.  See here for a wealth of oppositional information from Dr. Weill.)  If you are doing the Whole30, the rule is NO soy in January..

Love,
Tracey