You Are What You Eat

I'll have to remind myself to see a nutritionist, after this diet, regarding what I should avoid eating to keep my body from blowing up like a whale whenever I have a meal from inflammation.

Speaking of nutritionists... the past few months I have been trying to determine what vitamins I am missing. There is a reason why I gained all this weight in a short amount of time... and yes, that's Celiac, but Celiac creates a vitamin insufficiency, but sometimes the blood tests don't tell you which vitamin it is.

For me, it's not Folate or B12... the blood tests indicated a really low level of vitamin D, which may be due to my age and also because of my weight, so I don't solely blame Celiac on that.  The doc didn't run any other tests, so I'm just testing items that just can't hurt if I take a little extra.

So in my research... Zinc is a huge player in metabolism and the immune system.  See this article by Dr. Barbara that I ran across a couple months ago... Celiac Brain: When you are gluten sensitive, you may be zinc deficient!  She explains in her article that zinc is the most popular mineral that is used by our enzymes, which if you are not absorbing it properly, you're basically going to have some serious issues.

Also, in my obsessive search for an answer, I found magnesium tends to be an issue with EVERYBODY... not just Celiacs or gluten sensitive people.  Magnesium has a major effect on weight loss and also inhibits inflammation.  See this for the full article: Magnesium Can Help Fight Obesity

When I read those items, I started taking 50mg a day zinc supplements as well as 400mg of magnesium along with my normal supplements of 5000iu of D3 (for my low D levels), 400iu of Vitamin E, and my food based multivitamin, and I don't know if this was just the placebo effect, but seriously, I started feeling better.  I had more energy... I just felt brighter.

I know that since I went gluten free 6 months ago, my hair started growing properly and my skin cleared up, but I still had some thinning hair issues (and I'm only 30... so I'm going to avoid that as much as possible!!) but since adding the zinc component to my supplements, I can't help but notice that my hair "behaves". Note that zinc is a major ingredient in shampoos like Head and Shoulders and Selsun Blue.

For the rest of my life I'm just going to keep in mind that I am what I eat... so if I eat crap... I'm going to feel like crap.