The Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox: The effortless health and weight-loss solution

COPYRIGHT

Thorsons

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk This edition published by Thorsons 2016 FIRST EDITION © William Davis 2016 Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library William Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green Source ISBN: 9780008146771 Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008146788 Version: 2015-12-08

To all the readers who have come to understand that health begins with personal effort, not with doctors, drugs, or the “health care” system.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: You’ve Been Rolled, Tossed, and Baked

CHAPTER 2: Your 10 Days Start NOW

CHAPTER 3: Overcome the Addiction: Successfully Surviving Detoxification and Withdrawal

CHAPTER 4: A Sucker Punch to the Wheat Belly

CHAPTER 5: Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox: Eat Your Way Back to Health with This 10-Day Menu Plan

CHAPTER 6: Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox Secret Sauce: Fat Blasters, Snacks, and Healthy Waters

CHAPTER 7: The Wheat Belly Family Detox: Secret Weapons to Convert Your Family to This Lifestyle

CHAPTER 8: Beyond the Grains: Additional Important Health Situations You Should Know About

CHAPTER 9: After the Detox: Grain-Free and Reborn

APPENDIX A: WHEAT BELLY DETOX SHOPPING LIST

APPENDIX B: ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

RECIPE INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IF I could provide you with a miraculous pill that caused dramatic weight loss without limiting calories or requiring exercise? What if this pill reduced appetite, shrunk belly fat, dropped your dress size into the single digits, and accomplished all this while sparing you from a Biggest Loser sobfest? What if that same pill freed you from acid reflux, heartburn, bowel urgency, and diarrhea, but also improved mood, increased energy, deepened sleep, and reduced or eliminated joint pain? What if this pill also reversed skin conditions such as seborrhea, eczema, psoriasis, acne, and dandruff and earned you compliments on the smoothness of your skin? What if chronic sinus congestion, sinus infections, and asthma were brought to a halt and you were freed from the repeated need for antibiotics and inhalers? What if that same little pill, taken every day, reversed serious inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis, while causing your teenage children to put down their cell phones, be respectful, bathe without asking every day, and pick up their own clothes?

Okay, forget the part about teenagers. But what if this single pill could also replace cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, antidepressants, and acid reflux drugs while reducing cholesterol values, blood sugars, and inflammation—packing the power of dozens of prescription medications into one pill but with none of the side effects? And what if this same powerful pill not only made you feel better than you have in years but also had the potential to achieve a physical makeover that made you look 10, even 20, years younger without Botox, filler injections, or marriage to Kanye West, without unwanted health consequences but still the unmitigated envy at your 20-, 30-, or 40-year high school reunion?

And, unlike a fistful of daily pills costing hundreds of dollars every month, often adding up to more than your grocery bill, this one pill is inexpensive, even yielding cost savings—money you can put toward a new wardrobe.

Does such a miraculous pill exist that accomplishes this entire list of health and weight benefits at virtually no cost?

No, it does not. If someone told you it did, it would be a blatant instance of “too good to be true.” There is certainly no such magical pill among the thousands of prescription drugs available. Prescription weight-loss drugs that yield billions of dollars per year for the drug industry come with a long list of potential side effects, from diarrhea to damaged heart valves, not to mention the return of the weight when you stop taking the drugs. Anti-inflammatory drugs commonly cause bleeding stomach ulcers, fluid retention, hypertension, and weight gain. Cholesterol-reducing drugs increase risk for diabetes, impair memory, and can cause muscle aches and weakness, making it difficult to even get in or out of a car. Drugs for erectile dysfunction can cause blindness, and in my view an unjustifiable dent in the wallet, and bad TV commercials.

A perfect drug to achieve even one of the benefits listed—let alone the entire list—simply does not exist, despite the extraordinary sums spent to promote them. Likewise, nutritional supplements: As much as I adore nutritional supplements for their power to achieve goals in health, there is no single supplement (nor list of supplements) that can achieve this entire list of benefits. Not even close.

But it does exist, not as a pill, but as a change in lifestyle, a simple collection of health strategies that can achieve all the benefits in the above list. Too good to be true? Hardly.

By far the most powerful factor in this lifestyle that gets the entire process started is to eliminate all foods made of wheat and grains—yes, the foods you were told to eat more of, told should dominate all meals from breakfast and lunch to dinner and snacks. The foods you were told to consume many times per day every day, the widest part of the food pyramid, the largest slice of the food plate, the darling of all conventional dietary advice and agribusiness. These are the foods that most weigh you down and ravage your health, worse than the “friend” who booby-traps your every move.

The worst dietary advice ever conceived tells you to reduce fat, eat more “healthy whole grains,” and eat everything in moderation. Following this advice does not make you thinner and does not reverse health conditions, but only causes them or makes them worse. Removing wheat and grains from your life yields such outsized and unexpected health and weight benefits that it seems impossible, until you witness it day after day and experience it yourself.

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox is unlike all other detox programs. It does not involve cleansing your body with various juices or a magical concoction of supplements purported to remove body “toxins,” nor is it a timetable of daily enemas that complicate your meeting schedule. It is a detoxification process from the toxic effects of wheat and grains, a detoxification in the truest sense of the term. But it is not just a matter of not eating wheat and grains or of eating “gluten-free” (as critics often perceive it). Once the toxic effects of wheat and grains have been removed, additional steps are necessary to undo the entire range of ill effects accumulated from their consumption.

This 10-day detox distills all the wisdom of the original Wheat Belly books and the lessons learned by the millions of people who have adopted this approach—incorporating the most insightful, cutting-edge, and effective strategies, and sharing them with you so that you can begin your path to weight and health success in a short 10 days. This lightning-fast approach has never been detailed in any previous Wheat Belly book.

I start with an overview of the program, give you specific how-tos on shopping and restocking your kitchen, and provide a detailed 10-Day Menu Plan. I also provide you with additional recipes to create little snack morsels that can be used to subdue cravings that crop up during your detox, as well as “Secret Weapon” recipes to help deal with family misgivings. I will also discuss the nutritional supplements we add to take your health even higher and help you feel even better—probably the best you’ve felt in a good long time. I will also share many of the comments and experiences provided by a courageous group of Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox panelists who blazed the path for you and engaged in the detox to help illustrate what you can expect. They will tell you why they engaged in this program, what they felt along the way, and the results they experienced even within these 10 days. While they reported some pretty impressive results, I believe they will tell you that the process was not all fun and games, but serious results require some serious methods!

You are going to learn that the grain detoxification process begins with enduring a genuine withdrawal syndrome similar to that experienced with stopping any narcotic. We will discuss this in some detail so that you don’t misinterpret its meaning and tell yourself that you must need wheat and grains to avoid such unpleasant effects. I will also discuss how we can smooth over (though not entirely eliminate) the withdrawal process, making it less difficult to endure. The first few days of the grain detoxification process are therefore crucial. Only after getting this process behind you will it be possible to take steps to reverse the organ damage incurred and begin the process of healing.

The science and rationale behind this powerful approach was discussed at length in the original book, Wheat Belly, and its follow-up, Wheat Belly Total Health. This book, Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox, is designed for both newcomers as well as those of you who have strayed from the Wheat Belly lifestyle but wish to make a comeback. If you are among those who strayed—and you reacquired all the health and weight problems that come with resuming wheat and grain consumption—this book will get you back on track as fast and efficiently as possible without bogging you down with another discussion of the science and rationale.

The 10-Day Menu Plan, never before used in any other Wheat Belly book, provides a detailed day-by-day road map to keep you on course—or get you back on course—with plenty of delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes. They are all consistent with the Wheat Belly lifestyle and tasty enough to be served to your family, whether or not they are engaging in this lifestyle with you.

This hard-hitting how-to has only the most essential tools required to get you started and take you from zero to 60 miles per hour and on the road back to slenderness and health with breathtaking speed. Though I’m leaving out most of the science that validates this approach, suffice it to say that wheat and grains impair health in so many ways that most people never even suspect that the high-fiber cereal in their breakfast bowl every morning created the “muffin top” they’re trying to conceal under baggy tops and multilayered one-piece bathing suits, as well as their knee pain, migraines, and asthma. Most people never suspect that the annoying, itchy, embarrassing rash they’ve endured for the past 10 years; the crippling joint pain in their hands that complicates the simplest tasks like brushing teeth or writing a check; the need to run to the toilet for an uninvited loose bowel movement; or the constant struggle with constipation, anxiety, depression, headaches, and sinus congestion can all be due to “healthy whole grain” bread, bran muffins, or licorice (yes, licorice is a grain-containing food). People are shocked to learn that fatty liver and high blood sugars, the infertility of polycystic ovarian syndrome, and the embarrassment of man breasts and erectile dysfunction are not due to moral weakness, lack of discipline, or lack of access to better health care, but are grain induced.

Grains have posed a host of health problems for as long as humans have consumed them. But it became much more obvious when agribusiness genetically altered the favorite of all conventional “healthy foods,” wheat, creating modern 18-inch-tall semi-dwarf strains for increased yield that replaced the 5-foot-tall “amber waves of grain” we all remember. Its destructive health effects were compounded by conventional dietary advice to eat more of it, while food manufacturers put wheat, corn, and other grains into virtually every processed food on store shelves, taking the “eat more healthy whole grains” message to an absurd extreme.

One of the reasons why it was so difficult for people to draw cause-effect relationships between wheat and grains and this long list of health problems is that most of the effects are delayed and only show themselves over the long term. A stack of waffles eaten on May 1 may not yield, for instance, the swollen joints and pain of rheumatoid arthritis until September 30 or later, so it’s tough to connect the dots. But the dots do indeed connect.

So the Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox is not only the nutritional equivalent of a magical pill that can achieve all the above benefits, but also a rejection of the “eat more healthy whole grains” and other dietary advice we hear repeated over and over again. We are going to thumb our noses at the food pyramid and plate, turn a deaf ear to the advice of organizations like the American Diabetes and American Heart Associations, and snicker at the marketing antics of Big Food eager to sell us their cellophane-wrapped, processed foods packed with grains and sugar—all while you get closer and closer to fitting into size 8 jeans, pitching most, if not all, of your prescription drugs into the trash, and feeling the best you have in decades.

Yes, many of the prescription drugs that your doctor advised you to take are really efforts to treat the consequences of eating a diet centered on “healthy whole grains” and the grain-tainted products that fill processed supermarket foods. Being released from these effects does not involve cutting calories, reducing fat, prolonged periods of denial, restraint, or exercise. Get rid of the cause, reverse the effect: The start of this process is really that simple.

Ten days—a week and a half, a third of a month, the time it takes to order and receive a new pair of shoes online—and you can chart a new course for your life and enjoy the wonderful benefits of reprogramming your body along an entirely new design. Once you have gotten through the next 10 days and emerge thinner, faster, stronger, smarter, and healthier for less than the cost of a pair of new shoes, you will wonder what you were thinking over the preceding 30, 40, or 50 years. Your health and your appearance are likely to draw gasps from anyone who witnesses the “after” who lived with your “before.”

So let’s begin!

CHAPTER 1

YOU’VE BEEN ROLLED, TOSSED, AND BAKED

“Follow a balanced diet low in fat.”

“You need whole grains for B vitamins and fiber.”

“It’s unhealthy to eliminate an entire food group.”

“Everything in moderation.”

THIS SHOULD ALL sound familiar to you because these nutritional mantras have been repeated over and over by dietitians, doctors, and the media. And, like many such pieces of conventional “wisdom,” there is a germ of truth in each of them—but just a germ and nothing more. Following such advice not only does not help you control weight or obtain health, it also destroys your grasp over weight and health. It can be as ineffective as believing that total health is restored by taking a prescription drug, subjecting yourself to a 4-week program of “cleansing” enemas, or concealing bulges under a new set of Spanx. Modern misguided dietary advice has made plus-size aisles the busiest place in clothing stores, huffing and puffing commonplace when climbing a single flight of stairs, and type 2 diabetes a double-digit growth industry.

Don’t feel bad if you fell for it, choosing lean cuts and trimming the fat off meat, reaching for low-fat yogurt, and opting for whole grain breads, muffins, and bagels. Many beliefs, once accepted as gospel, have fallen by the wayside over the years, kicked to the curb by new discoveries, new science, and new understanding. It wasn’t all that long ago that you would have been burned at the stake for believing that the earth revolved around the sun, been prosecuted for voicing the wrong political views during the McCarthy-era purges, or cheered for Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True” win at the Grammy Awards. Human history is filled with such campaigns of misinformation. But only in the recent past has misinformation permeated nutritional advice on such a grand scale.

HALF-BAKED

When you lose control over your health and weight because you ate “healthy” whole grains, doctors—stumped by why you feel so awful despite doing everything “right”—prescribe drugs with effects that create the “need” for even more prescription drugs. This is the modern downward health spiral that most people find themselves trapped in today. Once you understand this absurd and self-defeating situation, you are empowered to change it. And you can begin to powerfully reverse this situation over the next 10 days, the number of days it takes your husband to stop procrastinating over fixing a leaky kitchen faucet. This detox process yields a head-to-toe body and health makeover, reprogramming your body at so many levels, both internal and external. Your body and health will undergo a transformation that may even have friends and family not believing it’s you.

With the bad science and politics that drove the “cut your cholesterol, fat, and saturated fat” agenda of the latter half of the 20th century, the bonfire was lit even brighter by over-the-top profit opportunities for Big Food. The low-fat message gained a huge following. In its wake now lies the result: obesity, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and other health disasters on a scale never before witnessed in the history of mankind. It’s an unprecedented man-made social and health apocalypse that makes reports of tornadoes and radiation spills seem like small-scale annoyances, even banal, with nearly two billion overweight or obese people worldwide (including nearly 50 million children under age 5) and more than half of Americans with diabetes or prediabetes. The low-fat message, because it eliminated a source of satiating calories from fat, caused everyone to resort to more carbohydrates, particularly the carbohydrate source that most nutritional authorities felt to be the healthiest: whole grains, such as whole wheat, oats, and rye.

But, like the message to cut fat and saturated fat—now debunked by more recent studies showing that fat and saturated fat have nothing to do with cardiovascular disease—so the “eat more healthy whole grains” message was also based on flawed science and misinterpretations. The purported health benefits of whole grains were based on epidemiological studies (i.e., studies of health in large populations) demonstrating that if white flour products are replaced with whole grains, there is less diabetes, less weight gain, less heart disease, and less colon cancer in the population observed. That is indeed true and not in question. Careers and entire university departments of nutrition have been built on this premise. But the next question should have been: What is the effect of removing grains, white and whole, altogether? We cannot answer that question with the same “replace one with the other” epidemiological studies; we have to look elsewhere. Such grain-eliminating studies have indeed already been performed.

What happens when we remove grains? Clinical studies have shown:

 Weight loss (not less weight gain)

 Reduction in overall calorie intake

 Drops in blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c (a long-term measure of blood sugar)—many people with diabetes are cured

 Reduction of blood pressure

 Increased likelihood of remission of rheumatoid arthritis

 Reversal of neurological conditions such as cerebellar ataxia, some forms of seizures, and peripheral neuropathy

 Reversal of multiple forms of skin rash

 Reductions in paranoia and hallucinations in people with schizophrenia

 Improved attention span and behavior in children with attention deficit disorder and autistic spectrum disorder

 Relief from the bowel urgency and disruption of irritable bowel syndrome

That’s just a sample of the evidence that already exists in the scientific and clinical literature. This is not conjecture or claims based on a few anecdotes. It is based on a rational, scientific examination of the evidence, coupled with the experiences of millions of people who have come to understand the power of this lifestyle change. When a wheat- and grain-free lifestyle is put to work in real life, the benefits documented in clinical studies can be seen in action with unexpected and dramatic reversal of numerous health conditions.

Such a collection of changes is rare to impossible when weight loss is achieved through a painful few weeks of calorie counting, liposuction, or kickboxing or other strenuous exercise. If this were just a weight-loss program or just a program to shrink your waist, well, that would be sort of interesting in a reality TV sort of way, complete with emotional outbursts and breakdowns. But it would not be accompanied by the sorts of body and health transformations we are seeking. In this detoxification process, we are going to go further than just losing weight; we are going to work to restore health from head to toe. Weight loss, feeling better, and looking younger are simply reflections of the dramatic improvements in health you are going to experience.

In particular, you are likely to experience a powerful reversal of inflammation throughout your body. The reversal of redness, swelling, pain, and hormonal signal disruption that we may experience variously as seborrhea, rheumatoid arthritis, acid reflux, leg swelling, or irrational anger all reflect the receding wave of inflammation previously caused by grains.

These are changes that I observe in people every day with the health strategies detailed in the Wheat Belly books. In this easy-to-consume, bite-size book, you will read about such changes from our detox panelists, even in the brief 10-day timeline of this program. I predict that many of you, like our volunteer panelists, will receive compliments from family and friends after these initial 10 days on how different you look: thinner, yes, but it’s not uncommon for your appearance to begin to change, especially that of the face with less eye puffiness, less facial edema, and relief from the redness of the cheeks and seborrhea along the nose (what I call the signature rashes of wheat and related grains), as well as developing better defined facial contours, reduced waist size, smaller hips, reduced cellulite on the thighs, loss of edema in the ankles, even smaller feet—no kidding. I bet you’ll even smile more readily, given how much better you feel inside.

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Detox program begins with the elimination of wheat and grains, the essential first step that gets the detoxification process under way. But this detox involves additional strategies for full benefit. These strategies are necessary because they undo many of the unhealthy effects that grains have exerted on your body and that have accumulated over the years, such as abnormal rises in insulin levels and altered composition of bowel flora (the microorganisms that inhabit your intestinal tract). Many of the drugs that your doctor prescribed to treat the destructive health effects of wheat and grain consumption will also need to be reduced or discarded. Remove the initial cause, correct the varied consequences, and the majority of drugs are no longer needed and health can finally reassert itself. Without grains, life is indeed good.