Coach answers: what happens if you give up gluten, dairy, and meat?

Coach answers: what happens if you give up gluten, dairy, and meat?

We deal with whether it will really work, and tell you what results to expect.

Tells the expert of the “Championship” wellness coach Andrei Semeshov.

I have a good friend who occasionally consults me on the questions “how to lose weight quickly and which dumbbell is better to lift?”. He read in my Instagram about my attitude to the fashion of “gluten free” and said that here I am one hundred percent wrong and behind the times. When asked “why did you think that?” the answer was, as expected, “I gave up gluten and I’ve had great results!”.

At first he wanted to explain that he lost weight because he threw out the lion’s share of products from his diet, and what appeared as a substitute was not up to the previous values in terms of calories. That is, everything is banal – he removed extra calories and began to lose weight. And then a chain reaction starts. The first results motivate, there is a desire to achieve more, you buy a gym membership. And here I’ll get in with my boring math. Why? In general, there is not much harm in giving up gluten, provided that the diet remains generally balanced.

It’s like that notorious “dairy” that makes all the thinners swell up. So on the diet – no cottage cheese and cappuccino. And for nothing that there is not a single case when a person really “flooded” from a pack of cottage cheese and a glass of milk to the official medical diagnosis. Yes, if you are a bodybuilder or fitness bikinistka on a rigid carbohydrate-free diet, then, of course, water from milk-containing products will flood you. It’s just that the body has exactly zero glycogen (all carbohydrates are eventually processed into it), and suddenly there is such a gift – lactose (milk sugar, the same carbohydrate). And one molecule of glycogen will immediately start to hold three molecules of water around it. That’s what gives you the proverbial “dairy flood.”

Well, if you don’t go on stage in your underwear in the morning in front of judges, but only to the mirror in your bedroom, what difference does it make whether a little water is “pulled” under your skin or not? It has nothing to do with fat deposition. But – everywhere there is a strict recommendation to remove milk. I once asked a fitness lady I know, who has long and very successful Instagram “slimming”, why she makes such a condition for her charges. It turned out that everything is very simple. “The girls see that yesterday the abs were peeking through, and this morning they disappeared. It demotivates a lot of them, and they snap.”
If it really does upset someone that much, then perhaps giving up dairy products can be justified. The only thing I’d advise is to keep a closer eye on your calcium levels.

But that’s just me talking about the safe versions of fitness myths. Sometimes it’s much sadder than that. The BBC had a short story about a 20-year-old girl Rebecca, who tried to lose weight from the age of 11, and eventually became a vegan. And not at all for ethical reasons, but only to hide her eating disorder. Diagnosed with anorexia in her medical records, she hid her inability to figure out her own diet under the mask of vegetarianism. Fortunately, doctors helped her in time. And now she realizes that the experience of vegetarianism was a big mistake. The British Society for Eating Disorders notes that Rebecca’s case is probably not an isolated incident. With such a ploy, people try to give their wild versions of restrictive diets a more or less socially acceptable status. Even the British Vegan Society agrees that many people start giving up animal products to hide their eating disorders and use “vegetarianism as a cover”.

By creating us as omnivores, nature did not envision that one day it would occur to someone to voluntarily abandon such universalism. Therefore, such a drastic change in dietary habits should be a really well-considered decision. Vegetarianism automatically implies much more attention to menu planning to make up for the elements that fall out with giving up meat. When the proud “I’m vegan” is only followed by the pursuit of a dream figure, the consequences can be very, very unfortunate.

So fashion is fashion. And if the menu page of a chain coffee shop with a bunch of high-calorie desserts labeled “fitness” and “gluten-free” makes you smile, other experiments may not be so comical.

Take care of yourself and use common sense!