It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (9 page)

Later in the evening, the serious cravings start. You prowl through the pantry and freezer on autopilot, looking for more fat, salt, and
especially
sugar. You settle on a pint of specialty ice cream and the rest of a bag of pretzels—both highly processed, supernormally stimulating and nutrient-poor (all of which, as we’ve been trying to tell you, promote overconsumption and worsening leptin resistance and insulin resistance over the long term).

You’re exhausted, but your cortisol levels are abnormally high, so you can’t wind down until after the last late-night talk show—and you’re in for another fitful night of sleep.

The worst part?

It starts all over again tomorrow.

In this scenario, those “invisible” hormonal disruptions are finally up close and center. Those additional twenty pounds of body fat are immunologically active—and secreting a lot of leptin. Since leptin’s satiety signal isn’t registering in your brain, you chronically overeat—especially food-with-no-brakes, because it
tastes so
good
.

Your less-than-active lifestyle and continuous overreliance on sugar and carb-dense processed foods has kept your blood sugar and insulin levels chronically elevated for
years
: you’ve progressed well into insulin resistance—diabetes could be right around the corner. You continue to gradually accumulate body fat, glucagon has no opportunity to tell the cells to use fat as fuel, and you’re desperately reliant on sugar for energy.

Thanks in part to cortisol dysregulation, your body stubbornly holds on to your belly fat even when you try to cut calories—making weight loss
even harder
.

This hormonal dysregulation is really powerful, making it very difficult to overcome your addiction to supernormally stimulating foods and
not
to gain fat, and virtually impossible to be healthy in the long-term.

So you’re probably thinking, “I must need to exercise more.”

But you’d be wrong.

And you’ve probably tried that already, haven’t you?

Remember that
hormones
create and perpetuate these dysfunctions. And the single largest factor in the balance and function of these hormones is food.

So maybe now you’re thinking, “Then I must need to eat less.”

Wrong again.

You’ve already tried that, too, with all of the low-fat, low-calorie “health foods” you’ve been eating. But consider the food choices you’ve made in these last two symbolic days. We didn’t have the hypothetical you binging on pizza, cheeseburgers, or Cool Ranch Doritos. Why? Because we can easily make our point with granola bars, bagels, and low-fat yogurt. Surprised that candy, cakes, and cookies aren’t the only foods-with-no-brakes? Processed foods that add or concentrate carbohydrates, sugar, salt, and/or fat—even the “healthy” ones—more than meet the criteria.

Which leads to overconsumption. Which leads to leptin resistance, insulin resistance, and a disrupted cortisol cycle. All of which further promote overconsumption.

Given all this, I wonder if you’re thinking what we’re thinking?

And simply eating less of the same foods isn’t going to improve your hormonal responses. (In fact, cut calories too much and you’ll make your cortisol situation even
worse
.)

If you need to take a breather right now, go right ahead. This is new information for a lot of people, but we hope it switches on some light bulbs.

Why do I crave sweets late at night?

Why can’t I lose weight, even when I eat less?

Why do I get that 3 o’clock slump every afternoon?

Why do I wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. every single night?

Why do I get so cranky if I don’t eat every two hours?

Where did this spare tire come from—I eat so healthy!

If this sounds like you, take comfort in two simple facts.

Now you know why.

And we will help you fix it.

There is some good news. (About time, right?)

The good news is that even after decades of poor eating habits and hormonal dysfunction, all the way through leptin resistance, insulin resistance and, in many cases, a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, your health condition is
highly reversible
.

You can stop overconsuming, dial all the way back to insulin and leptin sensitivity, retrain your body to burn fat and, to a significant degree, restore normal cortisol levels, by doing one simple thing:

Changing the food you put on your plate.

Read on, please.

“Because of my Crohn’s disease, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t stand up straight. Every time I ate something, it hurt. In 1999, I had surgery to remove two and a half feet of intestine, including part of my colon. The surgery relieved the severe pain, but I still dealt with intestinal spasms and gut pain after eating. I completed my first Whole30 in March 2010. Through the process, the intestinal pain, gas, and bloating completely went away—and did not return.
The constant underlying fear of Crohn’s returning is gone because now I understand its root cause.”

—Sarah G., Fort Collins, Colorado

Our third Good Food standard evaluates the effect of certain foods on the digestive tract. We believe you should consume only foods (and drinks) that support normal, healthy digestive function; eating anything that impairs the integrity of your gut impairs the integrity of your health.

Let’s discuss normal gut function first, and then talk about how your food choices can disrupt it.

The purpose of your digestive tract (or gut) is to absorb nutrients from food, but it is also a prominent part of the immune system. (Didn’t know that, did you?) These two functions—digestive and immune—are inextricably intertwined, though the gut’s critical role in regulating immune response often goes underappreciated. We’ll talk more about that in the next chapter.

You’re probably already familiar with the major components of the digestive system: the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. Let’s take a digestion road trip, shall we?

You take a bite of food and start chewing. Chewing breaks your food (i.e., the mishmash of macronutrients, water, fiber, and micronutrients) into smaller pieces, and an enzyme in your saliva starts to break the carbohydrates down into simple sugars.

When you swallow that food, it moves into your stomach. Essentially nothing happens to carbohydrate and fat in the stomach, but protein gets some attention—the acidic environment of the stomach, plus some digestive enzymes, start to break the protein down into smaller pieces.

Your stomach also acts as a sensor for satiety, talking to your brain through both the nervous system and hormones. The stomach’s message that you’ve eaten also tells your brain to allow more energy to be used.

Your stomach then releases a controlled flow of this mixture of food and digestive enzymes into your small intestine, where bile salts and pancreatic enzymes help break food down even further. The carbohydrates are completely broken down into individual sugars; smaller protein molecules are broken down into peptides or individual amino acids; fats are broken down into glycerol and fatty acids.

When everything is properly broken down, most of the useful parts are absorbed through the lining of the small intestine and eventually end up in the bloodstream, which is the primary means of transporting nutrients from place to place.

The remainder of your meal then passes into the large intestine, which reabsorbs water and some minerals. The rest of the solid waste is excreted via, well … you know.

Your small intestine is the key to a healthy digestive tract. It is long and convoluted, with an enormous surface area. (In fact, if you stretched it all out, it would be the size of a
tennis court
!) The small intestine functions as a “holding tank,” keeping your food in place until it’s fully digested, but its most important job is to help you effectively absorb nutrients.

Think of the intestinal lining as similar to the skin on your body—a highly flexible, resilient, semi-permeable membrane that acts as a barrier between your insides and the outside world. Skin is designed to keep good stuff (fluids, tissues, etc.)
inside
your body and bad stuff (bacteria, viruses, etc.)
out
.

Your small intestine does pretty much the same thing—except on a much larger scale. Yep, your gut is your largest interface with the outside world, more so than your skin or respiratory tract. This is why your gut is so critical to your immune system.

Think of food that is still
inside
your small intestine (in the lumen) as technically still
outside
your body. That’s right, until your food passes through the lining of your intestine and into your bloodstream, it is technically not yet
in
your body.

Here is another critical point: The entire process of digestion takes place while your food is still inside the long tube that passes from the one end of your digestive tract to the other. If undigested food somehow finds its way
into
the body, well, it’s as good as wasted.

Useless.

And probably harmful.

Let’s go back to talking about skin. Think about what would happen if your skin was “leaky,” for example, if you crashed your bike and had major road rash. That road rash would expose your unprotected insides to the outside world. If some bacteria found their way inside, they could cause a pretty ugly infection, which your immune system would then have to work hard to fight off.