Monday, August 30, 2010

Will a Gluten-Free Diet Help Me Lose Weight?

Gluten-free diets are not for weight control. They are a medical diet for people whose immune systems have become reactive to the wheat/rye/barley protein gluten. Celiac disease is the common term for this condition.

If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more.

Strike that.

Eat a lot less and exercise a lot more.

Don't eat things that are fried or otherwise loaded with fat. Eat whole grains, lean protein (in the forms of legumes, egg whites, or very lean meat,) fruit, and a lot of vegetables.

Exercise a lot, mainly resistance training. Cardio is good for your heart and will give you more energy, but strength training burns fat.

If you go GF, you might lose weight at first, just because you don't know what to eat. Any time that you cut a major food group out of your everyday life, you'll lose a couple pounds.

After that first trip to the health food store, however, you'll load up on all that fake GF food: GF bread, GF donuts, GF waffles, GF cookies, etc. Then, you'll be right back where you started.

Indeed, I'm a celiac, and when I went GF, I gained a few pounds, because my body started absorbing nutrients from food. I lost two dress sizes because my abdomen wasn't horrendously bloated.

NO: don't go GF to lose weight.

1 comment:

Kristen O'Sullivan said...

That's some solid advice. I was warned that I would gain weight after going onto the GF diet... but I actually lost weight. Go figure. Maybe I just haven't found all these gluten-free doughnuts and waffles you speak of! ;)
If you want some healthy gf-recipes, come check out my blog:
celiactivism.blogspot.com/