Food Sensitivities

If you are just joining us, be sure to read my first post, "Being the True Story of How a Middle Aged, Overweight, Depressed Woman Changed Her Life ... by Changing Each Day."

My friend Sally and I walk for an hour every morning at 6:30, and we really enjoyed it this morning – yes it was only 20 degrees, but the sunrise was so beautiful and the air smelled great.

So every now and then someone will e-mail me and ask, “What do you and James think about stress and cortisol? What about food sensitivities? I think that I’m bloated. I don’t think this is real fat. I don’t think I can lose weight because I have problems with certain kinds of food.”

It’s true, the body responds to stress by creating cortisol and it’s been proven that this can cause you to store visceral – think tummy – fat. I’ll talk more about this in a later post. Today I want to talk to you about food sensitivities, because there’s been a lot published about them.

It seems like everybody’s read an article or heard from somebody that they shouldn’t eat corn, or they should cut out dairy, or carbs are bad for you, etc., etc., etc. The fact is that most of these foods are fine for most people to eat. Some people have some legitimate food allergies where they truly have a life-threatening response to certain foods. If you are one of these people, you know about it already. You know if you have a peanut allergy. You know if you have Crohn’s disease and have to be super careful to avoid food triggers and get enough calories.

But don’t cut whole categories of food out of your diet without real, science-based evidence that it causes you a problem, and don’t blame your difficulties with weight loss (that is, fat loss) on foods that may or may not be a problem.

Some foods can, indeed, cause water retention, and some can trigger an inflammatory response that will show up in your waist measurement, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. But first, let's remind ourselves of what we know about fat loss and fitness.

In my last post, I talked about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight. (I’d like to call this a healthy fat/muscle-ratio-and-fitness-level, only it takes too long to say.) Remember what those five factors were?

1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.

I worked hard for a year on all five of these factors and achieved most of my weight loss and fitness goals. I lost 65 pounds of fat and put on 15 pounds of muscle. My blood pressure dropped by twenty points and my resting heart rate dropped from 70 beats per minute to 55 beats per minute. My energy level rose and so did my outlook on life. At the same time, I needed less sleep. My body fat percentage went down from fifty percent (yes, fifty percent of me used to be fat) to 26 percent.

But I’ve been maintaining for over two years now, going through menopause and raising a teenage son at the same time, and at some point I started to get a little discouraged. I wanted to get to 24 percent fat. I wanted to get below a magic number on the scale. And I got tired of counting calories and getting into the gym every other day. Somehow I wanted to believe that I could cut out the gym visits and not watch what I ate and still stay at that lovely new low weight and maybe even lose a little more. So when I looked down and saw that tummy creeping back, I wanted to blame it on something other than the missing gym visits and adding the cookies back in. It’s gotta be water weight! It’s cortisol! It’s food sensitivities!

The fact is, if you are sticking with your gym visits, continuing to do your weight training, cardio, keeping your steps up and staying in your calorie window, probably you’re not having a problem with progressing toward your weight and fitness goals and then maintaining once you get there. But if you are doing all those things and still seeing some disturbing fluctuations in your waist measurement, then food sensitivities could be playing a role.

There are a couple of things to remember. You can’t gain a pound of fat overnight (unless you’re eating 3,500 calories while you sleep). It’s physically impossible. But it’s pretty easy to retain three to five pounds of water weight. However, the second thing to remember is that the water retention, while it looks bad, doesn’t have anything to do with your fat ratio or your fitness level. Underneath those five pounds of water, you are lean or a little overweight or obese. Your body composition under that water doesn’t change that rapidly.

This doesn’t make the number on the scale look any nicer. What is making you retain water in the abdominal area?

Food sensitivities can cause an inflammatory response in the liver, which can cause you water bloating in the tummy area. Rodale Press recently cited a study which showed that just one high-fat meal can trigger an inflammatory response. I was interested in this because I always take Friday off from watching calories. Therefore, Kettle chips, a hamburger, French fries, steak…lots of fat. Lots of SATURATED fat, which makes it even worse. Then I’d wake up Saturday morning with a big, big tummy. We’re talking about maybe another three inches in the waist measurement. And it would take a couple or three days to go back down.

Okay. Saturated fat isn’t all good for you anyway, and neither are high-fat meals, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that make me just as happy as my French fries and Kettle chips. (A few times a year, yes. Every Friday – maybe no.) I’ll be sharing these with you in future posts.

I decided to cut out all high-fat meals for a couple of weeks, being especially careful not to eat any saturated fat, and then see what happened to the waist line. After a week, I was happy to see that the ol’ tummy measurement was being more consistent. I could look at my arms and tell that I hadn’t been to the gym in awhile, but at least I wasn’t having an unexpectedly round stomach every Saturday.

Even so, I still would get a round tummy every now and then anyway, and that’s when I decided to get a food panel done and see if I had other food sensitivities.

It turned out that I did. For me, it was eggs and navy beans that triggered an inflammation response. (Navy beans??) An omelet or a white bean soup for dinner and I’d be seeing that round tummy again. And some health professionals say that you don’t want to trigger an inflammation response anyway.

So I don’t eat a lot of eggs and navy beans now. I avoid saturated fat when I can, a good idea anyway, and keep my high-fat meals to holidays (and contrary to my previous belief, not every Friday and Saturday is a holiday). I’ve found treats that don’t affect me physically this way.

But does it let me off the hook with eating in my calorie window, doing my cardio and keeping up with the weight training? Nope!

Stick with your healthy eating, your daily 10,000 steps, and get to the gym at least three times a week for your weight training and cardio. Then if your waist measurement is fluctuating and driving you nuts, it may be worthwhile to see how many high-fat meals you’re indulging in, maybe keep track of the saturated fat in your food and maybe even have a food panel done.