I'm very grateful to all the people who have shared their experiences. I googled for a while yesterday and found quite a few people, including vegans, who say the fat-free diet made them gain weight. I've been doing McDougall for a couple of weeks now and love the food, but I've only lost 1 pound (negligible) and am so bloated my jeans won't zip comfortably. And I'm having some "gassy" issues - TMI, sorry. My husband asked me this morning to please go back to low carb. On the plus side, I feel calmer than I do on lowcarb, and am sleeping better.



I'd love to hear your theories...besides, this is the war zone.

all i'm going to say is no matter what woe you are incorporating into your life, just make sure you keep it clean. sometimes when we reach our weight loss goals, we get a little to comfortable (or should i say cocky) with our food choices. "cheats" happen a little more often than they should because after all, we still look great on the outside and we deserve to treat ourselves after all of our hard work. that kind of thinking will make you gain again real fast, no matter what plan you are following. consuming sweets (even low carb or gluten free ones), alcohol, eating on a schedule rather than to hunger (by this i mean eating when you are not hungry at all---just for the sake of eating), consuming too many calories in general, etc. people like us will always have to monitor these things closely and tweak them as necessary.

so again i stress clean eating...oh and the gas and bloat you are experiencing is from the fiber. i was bloated practically every single day! i ate lots of fiber rich foods and the gas was ridiculous . also, watch your skin to see if you notice any changes (rashes, acne, etc.). this could mean you have a grain sensitivity. i can't eat gluten or grains anymore with good results.

please keep us updated on how you are doing!

Are you eating grains, especially gluten grains? I wonder if the gas would desist if you stopped the gluten?

I used to have the worst gas in the world whenever I had anything with wheat. I always thought it was "normal" until I stopped eating it.

Okay, I can see why you thought that might start some drama, but it's probably true for a lot of people.

And it's no on the gluten. I've known I have a gluten and/or wheat problem for awhile now.

Tx!

happy, i just received mcdougall's latest newsletter in my inbox. have you seen it yet? here's the link:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2010nl/jun/100600.htm

The only grain I've eaten is brown rice. (I'm vigilant about gluten because when I eat it I get eczema, joint pain and mouth ulcers.) I've chosen sweet potatoes over the gassier white ones. I can't seem to pin it down to any one thing...I just have this huge stomach. I must say I miss that nice, flat, empty abdominal feeling I have on lowcarb.

I recently found myself with awful gas and such from eating butterleaf lettuce. Since I discovered that I stopped eating salads altogether, but I'm still wondering if it was the type of lettuce or perhaps I just needed to clean it (it was the pre-washed, organic sort).

I'll try lettuce again at some point and carefully wash it in vinegar/water to see if perhaps there was some bad bacteria in the lettuce (heard it occurs frequently in bagged lettuce). 1/4 vinegar/water is supposed to do a good job in cleaning off bacteria like that.

grains give me psoriasis and gluten gives me acne (what a combo!).
have you looked into the mary's-mini plan on that site? it's very restricted, but i recall some people lost doing that (i didn't). one of the success stories over there ate like this exclusively. if i recall she had skin issues from certain foods too.

I just took a look at it. It seems like a crash diet to drop some weight quickly...certainly not something sustainable for any length of time.

This part gave me pause...



Yikes! This sounds like anorexia to me.

We tried rice a few different ways when we first went gluten-free, before we started Atkins. We found that brown rice actually has worse effects on us than white rice (and reading Nourishing Traditions taught us why). In the end we gave up rice completely - both kinds give my wife hives now.

Even more strange, the grain that has the absolute worst effect on me is millet. In terms of gluten, FODMAPs, lectins, etc, it's supposed to be one of the safest, but it's horrible for me.

My wife has moved to a higher-carb diet that works very well for her. She eliminated dairy but now she eats lots of potatoes, mainly French fries and some potato chips. Potatoes cause her no problems at all - in fact she feels much better when she eats them. On the other hand, sweet potatoes give us both serious problems.

mike, brown rice didn't work for me either. i tried quinoa too and the result was the same. potatoes didn't cause any skin flare ups, but they seem to make me hungrier. i love homemade sweet potato fries...

happy, that quote gives me pause too! wth? the one lady i mentioned earlier had been doing mary's-mini for years...i don't know if she still is though. i know i couldn't do it!

WHY???

Okay....not to take it out on you, but why is this so hard? And I don't mean that in a whiney, "poor me", way. But why should eating be this hard? Is this a collection of people with food sensitivities? Why the heck can't we just EAT FOOD and get on with life? For crying out loud, NancyLC said she had a problem with butterleaf lettuce! (Not that I don't believe you, Nancy...just that it sucks!)

Does anyone here remember their parents obsessing over every bite of food they put in their mouths?

I initially went lowcarb to lose weight. I accidentally found that it made me feel GREAT!! Two weeks later, not so good. Thus began my now almost six year quest to find the proper diet. In the process I have only lost twenty pounds, and have developed high blood pressure. I also am apparently gluten intolerant. Or allergic to wheat...I'm not sure which. Maybe both.

Now I'm doing McDougall, because, frankly, the thought of one more bite of meat or chicken or cheese makes me want to vomit. And I love fruit and rice and potatoes. And here I am, about two weeks in, with a gigantic bloated stomach and some rather stinky gas.

And no offense to you all, but there are so many people here who I've been following over the years who go from one plan to another, constantly finding new foods that they are sensitive to.

I give up. I just give up.

I can definitely relate, Happy. I feel like that too from time to time. It's like, sometime in the last 40 or 50 years, something got introduced into the environment that made us all REALLY SICK. The Paleo stuff I've read shows a picture of a long-term trend, but this is really a sudden, almost apocalyptic change. I have my theories about the mechanisms involved - leaky gut, acid-blocking drugs, allergy medicines, new NSAIDS, increasing numbers of vaccines, plastics, GMOs, HFCS - but none of them really explain it. It sucks!

Sometimes I think it's just the combination of all these accelerating technologies. Like the BP disaster - I don't blame anyone specifically, I think it's just an inevitable effect of "peak oil" - as demand for oil goes up and supply goes down, we turn to riskier measures to perpetuate the acceleration of industrial technology. Nobody really wants it in an explicit sense, but our circumstances naturally tend to favor that kind of acceleration. Have you heard of the Singularity? I think it's a kind of wacky idea, but in a limited sense, it explains a lot of what's going on, even if its conclusion is bonkers.

I think there are probably a lot of environmental factors at work and they set us up with a leaky gut that's really tough to close.

Besides, I'm not so sure my parents were really all that good with the food they were eating. They were born in 1919, so they had been around awhile. They totally had issues with grain and gluten, they just didn't realize it. It took me 30 years to figure out my IBS issues were caused by gluten primarily and constipation (when I had it) due to dairy. But every time their body's started acting up they blamed it on various disease conditions or "getting older". They didn't really question their diet, which was considered quite health at the time.

Brown rice contains the rice bran which has a lot of phytates in it, which prevents you from getting nutrition out of your food. You might want to read about it on http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/. He's a WAPF'er but a trained scientist/neurologist and he thinks fairly independently of WAPF. Anyway, he talks about ways to make grains easier to digest, like fermenting them with buckwheat because it contains a lot of phytase, which helps break down the phytates.

Believe me, Capmikee (otherwise known as Mr. Jschwab) is often right there with you with the "WHY'S". It sucks so bad, really. It should not be this complicated.