Discover why going gluten-free may have caused you to gain weight. Learn more about the reasons behind this unexpected outcome.
The Surprising Culprits Behind Weight Gain on a Gluten-Free Diet
Have you been struggling with weight fluctuations since going gluten-free? You’re not alone. This article explores the relationship between celiac disease, the gluten-free diet, and weight changes. From personal experiences to the importance of mindful eating and choosing wholesome, unprocessed foods, it delves into how our body’s journey towards healing can impact our weight. The discussion also sheds light on the hidden sugars and fats often found in gluten-free packaged foods, offering insights into finding a balance that not only supports your celiac needs but also promotes overall well-being.
By adopting a more mindful approach to your diet and lifestyle, you can discover a healthier weight and a more vibrant version of yourself. This candid exploration of celiac disease and the gluten-free diet provides valuable information on making informed food choices and nurturing your body with nourishing, earthy foods. It’s a reminder to prioritize your health and well-being, and to listen to your body’s needs as you navigate the world of gluten-free living.
Unveiling the Hidden Culprits: Surprising Reasons for Weight Gain on a Gluten-Free Diet
So if you start to look at some of the packaged foods that you’re buying you might discover that they are a lot higher in sugars than what their gluten counterpart maybe was that you were eating beforehand welcome to the healthy Celiac show I’m your host Belinda wheelan from Belinda wheel.com and here you will.
Learn to live your very best life with celiac disease so we are going to be talking all about health related topics because you my friend are more than just a woman with celiac disease be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss an episode and welcome to the show hello and welcome back to this week’s episode where we are talking.
About some of the reasons that you may have put on weight since your celiac disease diagnosis and of course going glutenfree so I want to just quickly send a shout out to Helen who reached out to me to suggest this episode for you guys today so thank you to Helen I really hope that this gives you some insight and some ansers to what could be.
Going on for you so there’s a number of reasons that people with celiac disease can start to gain weight when they first get a diagnosis and the most simple and obvious answer is because your body is starting to heal and your body is starting to absorb the nutrients that it wasn’t beforehand so for example with me before my diagnosis I dropped two dress.
Sizes so I know throughout the world everyone refers to clothing sizes differently but I generally sit around a size 12 and I had dropped down to a size eight in clothing which is very small for my body size for my height I should say and I did look rather underweight so I was quite happy to gain weight once my body started to heal so once I got a.
Diagnosis for celiac disease and I started to eat gluten-free and I started to eat well um my body was obviously healing and then my body started to find the size that was the healthy weight for my body and that’s somewhere now between a size 10 and a size 12 in Australian sizing so that’s a that’s a really easy one to pinpoint and if if your body.
Isn’t what you would think is a healthy State and you feel like it’s a little bit more overweight than what you think is a healthy weight then it’s probably one of the other reasons that we’re going to talk about but if you were I guess a little bit on the unhealthy side and you’ve put on weight from there then it’s probably a good thing and our.
Bodies generally do that they will balance out and they will find the right weight that suits our height and our lifestyle okay now if it’s not that reason for you and you’ve put on a little bit more weight than you had hoped for then we’ll talk about that as well now many people do actually go on a gluten-free diet even though they don’t.
Have to which I think is just Madness I don’t know why anyone would choose to be on a gluten-free diet when it’s it’s much easier just to eat well and avoid certain foods when you don’t like if you don’t have celiac disease and you just you know you want to lose weight I find it really weird that people think that the gluten-free diet will work that way.
Because at the end of the day gluten-free food as in packaged food is generally not the healthiest okay so if you found that you’ve switched up your diet to include a a lot of gluten-free packaged Foods you could actually be eating a lot more sugars and fats and carbohydrates things that your body may not have been eating beforehand and your.
Body doesn’t know how to break them down as quickly and you’re actually Ting right so if you start to look at some of the packaged foods that you’re buying you might discover that they are a lot higher in sugars than what their gluten counterpart maybe was that you were eating beforehand so I always recommend that we.
Eat less packaged food and I know that sounds hard for some people but packaged food is not an it’s it’s not something that we should be eating all the time it’s something that we can definitely utilize and it makes our life easier but it shouldn’t be what makes up the majority of our diet so we should be eating lots of fresh food lots of.
Wholesome food that isn’t messed with by man it should be as natural as possible so if you can focus on those types of foods so things like you know your fruits and vegetables your natural products that come from the earth you know beans legumes um Meats seeds all of those types of things and then have the packaged Foods less you’ll find a big in.
The way that your body balances out and the way that your body works for you now I know people hate being told this but as a health coach I can’t help but really emphasize that this is a big part of why people put on weight and aren’t happy with the way that they look after going gluten-free when they found out they’ve got celiac disease now I’m going.
To use my brother as an example so you may have heard me talk about my older brother brother before Shane he has always struggled with trying to put on weight over the years and always like this is prior to his Celiac diagnosis he had always struggled to build muscle at the gym he’ always struggled to bulk up and as soon as he went.
Gluten-free his body changed dramatically he was able to bulk up very very quickly and his body was absorbing the nutrients that needed however one day he came over and I couldn’t help but say to him what’s going on what have you been eating you look completely different you could see.
In his face and you could see in his belly and he had developed a very obvious gut and it looked like a beer gut but of course he wasn’t drinking beer he doesn’t drink alcohol and he can’t um obviously have beer because he’s got celiac disease but I just said to him you know what’s going on what are you what are you doing what’s different.
And he just said that he was smashing down the gluten-free bread he was hungry he didn’t know what to eat he was struggling to find the right foods to incorporate into his diet so he was just basically living off of gluten-free bread now if you look at gluten-free bread compared to normal bread you’d think you have to eat twice as much to.
Be full right because it’s so small isn’t it it’s so much smaller than your normal bread but that’s actually not the case when you start to get used to eating gluten-free bread you’ll find that it is the equivalent to eating normal bread you you only need your normal size your normal serve to be able to be full and feel like you’ve eaten.
Enough so when you compare gluten-free bread to gluten bread you absolutely don’t need twice as much okay it it’s just one of those things where it will still fill you up the same amount as normal bread even though it’s smaller and if you compare the nutrition panel on gluten-free bread to gluten bread you’ll be very very surprised at what.
You find so go ahead and do that next time you’re at the shops or if you’ve got normal bread at home for another member in your family just check it out you’ll be very very surprised the difference in it so I suggested to my brother that he cut back on the bread and he did and I gave him some other food suggestions and from there he has.
Been able to get his body in a state that he’s really happy with and he looks much much healthier now than he probably ever has which is fantastic so be very wary of what types of foods that you are consuming just because it’s gluten-free does not mean it’s healthy okay my son and I we both eat gluten-free and we were going somewhere yesterday and my.
Husband had packed snacks for my son and my youngest daughter who’s three she gets to eat whatever she wants she’s very lucky and um we were talking about tim tams so she had a Tim Tam in her lunchbox and my son asked me if I like tim tams and tim tams if you don’t know are a very famous biscuit in Australia or cookie and they’re covered in.
Chocolate and apparently they’re delicious and I said to my son I’ve never actually tried a Tim tan so so before my diagnosis I’d never even tried one it was never on my radar okay I was never reaching for cookies or biscuits beforehand it just wasn’t something that I as a person enjoyed really eating I probably eat more of them now since.
Going glutenfree than before because it’s just one of those things that I can have but back then it just it was never on my radar like I said so you might be eating things that you didn’t even eat before just because you can have them right does that make sense so sometimes it can be really exciting when we go to the.
Shops and we go oh that’s gluten-free oh that’s gluten- free and we grab it and we put it in our in our trolley or our C and we buy it and take it home but probably before our diagnosis we might not have eaten that food so it’s about changing habits and working out what works for you I’m a little bit comfortable with having a treat every.
Now and again it doesn’t bother me I’m I’m very I guess self-aware of the way that I treat my body and I’ve been able to learn to not have guilt around food so that’s a whole another ball game and another thing that we might talk about on another episode but when there’s guilt attached to food that also changes the way that our body takes that food on.
Board so that’s that’s another thing that we can dive a little bit deeper into now when you feel better you tend to eat more as well I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but before my diagnosis I was feeling unwell all the time and I could start to see that it was food I could start to understand that food was making me feel pretty.
Crappy so what automatically happens is your brain starts to tell you that you probably shouldn’t eat too much because that could be causing issues so for me I know that in the leadup to my diagnosis I was not eating as much as before I felt sick because I was just so scared of what was going to make me sick I had no idea what was going on so once you.
Start to feel better you eating more aren’t you you’re feeling more comfortable about eating regularly because you know that you’re eating safe foods and it’s gluten-free so you might be overc consuming food and it’s just based on that you feel better so you might need to start to learn how much food your body really needs to be at its.
Peak performance okay and that’s something we’ll chat about in a moment as well and another thing is food habits so you may have developed very different habits since going gluten-free and that is an area that I guess is a bit of a rabbit hole that depends on whether you’re sneaking food because you don’t want others to see.
That you’re you know you’ve got a stash of gluten-free food so you could be devouring food before other family members are able to find that food or you don’t want them to see you eating this particular food so there’s certain food habits that some people fall into um I had a client years and years ago and she had a habit of she would walk.
Into her house I think I might have talked about this on another episode she would walk into her house each day from work and she would go straight to her fridge and she would devour cheese and she didn’t understand why she didn’t know why she was craving cheese as soon as she got home from work but when we sat down and we nutted it all.
Out it was boredom and loneliness she was coming home she was bored after work she was lonely and this just became a habit so you may have some new food habits you may have created some different ways of eating that you may need to look at now I don’t know about you but there’s lots to dive into there’s lots to process when we talk.
About weight gain when we talk about weight loss there’s a lot of mental side of things so there’s a lot that goes on in our brains as well it’s not always it’s not always as simple as what we’ve just talked about here it can be quite deep and it can be from a lot of issues from your past it could be from a relationship it could be from something.
That’s going on at work there’s so many things that can cause the way that we eat and the way that we treat our body this is what I dive into very deeply with my one-on-one clients but at the moment I’m not working with any oneon-one clients I just don’t have the capacity to do that with two young children at home and a teenager however.
I am starting up group coaching again so if you would like to be in one of my group coaching sessions then I urge you to reach out to me and get on the wait list for that I’ve mentioned this numerous times now but if you would like to get on the wait list and be the first one to be part of any of those groups then please let me know I will be.
Opening this up internationally and having different times for different time zones so just send me a DM on Instagram if that’s something you’d like to learn more about or you can send me an email which is info@ Belinda wheel.com and and I can yeah chat with you about it there but otherwise I hope that these few ideas just help you.
Understand a little bit why you could have put on weight since your Celiac diagnosis and also help you to see that it can be a little bit deeper than what we’ve chatted about here and I would love to work with you on that further it’s absolutely my passion to help women with their health to thrive so absolutely reach out to me if that.
Resonates with you in any way and we can go further with that and talk how I can support you in that area so otherwise thank you so much for listening and if you are new here please go back and listen to any of the episodes that I’ve previously recorded for you and you know learn what you can from me but if you are a regular listener here thank you so.
Much for popping back in and listening to the show I appreciate you so much you guys are amazing so I will talk with you again next week have a wonderful week take care I’ll see you soon bye if you enjoyed this episode head to Belinda wheel.com to get yourself a free copy of my exclusive ebook 11 mistakes people make going gluten-free living with.
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