Introduction

I come from a long line of eaters. Heavy, late night, early morning, eat-when-I'm-not-hungry eaters. And among that family of consumers, I fell heartily under the genus of bread-eaters.

I absolutely love bread.

No, no. I mean, REALLY love bread. And the thing is, with my strong adoration for bread, came the lateral love for anything that remotely resembles bread. Cereal, pasta, crackers, cookies, cereal, crackers, cereal, crackers and cereal. There have literally been times where, after eating an entire meal of bread, that I finally just look up and realize that everything that I ate was brown, lacking protein, mixed with chemicals and baked.

To turn the page on the matter, I'm now in my early 30s. And I'm dizzily learning that my body doesn't process junk like it used to. Going to McDonalds getting two cheeseburgers, a McFlurry and a medium order of fries used to be a great go-to meal for me. Fast, easy, cheap and delicious. Sure, I'd feel a little tired afterward, but I would just blame it on "The Itis" and call it a day. However, when I finally graduated to a new decade of responsibility for my body, "The Itis" turned into dizziness, slight headaches, mild nausea and fuzzy-headedness. Sometimes, even a moodswing. I didn't immediately connect the two together, and handed off my symptoms to stress or the fact that I haven't slept much.

And then there was a voice.

It dawned on me one day, in the midst of feeling cranky, bloated, fuzzy and dizzy (after a huge cereal binge) that I needed to think about how much bread I was consuming. I was eating a lot of it, and I found massive amounts of comfort in it. I would literally have moments of my eyes rolling into the back of my head at the ecstasy of biting into that soft slice of peanutbutter covered multigrain or blissfully munch on crackers until I felt like I was going to pop. All the while, still this gnawing knowing of "This has to stop."

So what now?

This past weekend my husband and I went to Gary, IN to pack up his mother and move her down to Atlanta. During that visit, as we always wonderfully do, we went to visit his aunt and uncle. I had heard that his uncle had actually lost a significant amount of weight, but you never really know how great something is until you see it with your own eyes. When we pulled up to the house, he was outside cutting the grass. And there, pushing that lawnmower, was almost half the guy that I had seen just months prior. I waved as I saw him disappear behind a tree that they had in the front yard, and strolled out from behind it, focusing on keeping the lines straight in the yard.

After spending some time with them, and learning of his new vegetable-juicing regimen, he told me that he read the book "Wheat Belly," which I had heard about beforehand but never read. He says he still enjoys meats, dairy, nuts, etc, but literally has cut out bread. That, with an addition to juicing fresh carrots, celery, beets (leaves included), something else I didn't see and so on, he has really flattened himself out.

Now, talking to someone who was already open-minded about new healthy ways of living/eating to be healthy and lose weight, that is exactly what put me over the edge in this already looming feeling of "I need to cut back on breads..." So, yesterday, I downloaded Wheat Belly on my iPad Kindle app and I, as you can say, "cracked it open" last night. I read some of the excerpts from the book to my husband and he was blown away at some of the issues he was having that relate to some of Dr. Davis' patients. I was sold. Is my husband? I'm not sure yet, but time will tell.

This is the introduction to this journey.