by Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author of best-seller: The Truth about Six Pack Abs & The Top 101 Foods that FIGHT Aging
Of course, you've probably heard a million times now how bad trans fats and high fructose corn syrup are for your health... so I'm not going to give you that same old story.
Instead, we need to look at a couple common foods that are probably in your diet in large quantities and may be causing major problems such as weight gain, headaches, sicknesses, indigestion, etc, etc... and those possible culprits are:
Wheat and Dairy
Don't worry, I'm NOT going to tell you that both of these staples need to be eliminated permanently from your diet... but read on to see an interesting test that may help you a great deal...
In all of my years of personal training and nutrition counseling, if I had to choose a couple VERY simple dietary changes that have made the biggest difference for my clients in allowing them to FINALLY see fat loss results (and other health problems solved), it would be this following test:
1. Test removing all wheat products from your diet for 2 entire weeks, and take notice of how you feel, look, and your body composition. This means removing all bread, pasta, crackers, cookies, cakes, muffins, bagels, and other wheat-based foods, unless they are 100% wheat-free. Don't worry, it's only 2 weeks for this test... you'll survive! Just beware of gluten-free versions of these junk foods unless they are low-carb as well.
"milk was bad choice"
2. Test removing all dairy from your diet for 2 entire weeks, and take notice of how you feel, look, and your body composition. Don't worry, we'll talk in a minute about how to keep dairy in your life if you find out that you are sensitive to some forms of it.
The best way to do this is to eliminate them both for 2 full weeks, and then reintroduce one at a time so that you can determine if one of them or both wheat and dairy are causing negative health effects for you.
Wheat and dairy are easily 2 of the biggest intolerances that a large percentage of the population has.
Now this does NOT mean that I'm saying you have to entirely eliminate wheat and dairy for the rest of your life, but what I am saying is that this is an important test to do for about 2 weeks to gauge if you see some dramatic changes in your body fat percentage, how you look and feel overall, your energy levels, and other health and digestive issues.
If you do the 2-week elimination of wheat and dairy and don't feel that it helped you at all or made you feel better, then you can probably do ok on small to moderate amounts of each.
Most people do not realize this, but a large percentage of the population has at least some degree of intolerance to the gluten in wheat and several other grains. The biggest offender is wheat though, as it's in such a large percentage of the average western diet... from breads, to pastas, to bagels, to cakes, wraps, cereals, etc, etc.
Most people don't have the extent of intolerance that a celiac has, but most people feel much better, improve dozens of health problems, and also lose fat faster when they eliminate wheat from their diet.
Source: Randy Rzeszutko