Learning to Listen

“There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it."
-Elizabeth A. Behnke

I have been dabbling with idea of going gluten-free for years now. I have been allergy tested multiple times and it always shows sensitivity to gluten but for some reason giving it up for my health has always seemed like too big a sacrifice. When I was on a low carb diet, I didn’t suffer nearly as much with joint or digestive issues and I attributed it to the lack of gluten. In that case, giving it up to lose weight was a no-brainer. Talk about messed up priorities.

This journey to lose 100 pounds in 2013 is ultimately about building a new, healthy body. I am trying to pay attention to how I am feeling as much as how the scale is moving. It has been a hard mind shift to accomplish but every day it is getting easier. I mentioned recently about listening to the whispers from my body and last night it YELLED.

With Weight Watchers you get 45 weekly points to use for special occasions, meals out, or to spread out over the week so you have more points daily. I usually keep all those points and use them on Monday night since that is our weigh-in day. Last night I was craving a chicken burger so we had Wendy’s. I decided I would have the bun and I was fine. A few hours later I was craving rye toast and still had some points left so decided to make some. Literally within 5 minutes of eating the toast my hands started itching. 5 minutes later I had 3 large hives on my arms. My body was YELLING at me that it did not enjoy my bombardment of wheat. Lesson learned sweet temple of mine, I heard you loud and clear!

Itching and hives are no big deal but they are an indication of a much more serious problem, systemic inflammation. I will blog about this separately at some point but bottom line, inflammation like that is BAD and the underlying cause of most diseases. My body is telling me that gluten is not a fit for it and I should respect that. Does that mean I will never eat wheat again? No but it does mean that I have to make a choice to honour my body and feed it the fuel that suits it. Most importantly, I have to make that choice MOST of the time.  So screw the 21 day gluten-free challenge, I am choosing to make this a challenge to last a lifetime. I will close with another quote that applies (even if my body isn’t quite so quiet about it).

“What is always speaking silently is the body."
-Norman Brown