What I did on my hiatus

7 Responses

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1. pellucid says

   EXCELLENT! and you migrated from Blog­ger to Word­Press. I stum­bled upon your blog months ago and have enjoyed the Flem­ish tech­niques and art sup­ply posts. Thanks for shar­ing and look for­ward to see­ing more.

   3 January 2011, 4:29 PM Reply
   • David says

     I migrated to Word­Press years ago. Glad you like the blog. Hope to have more posts soon.

     4 January 2011, 10:10 PM Reply
2. Chad says

   David,

   It’s good to see you back.

   14 January 2011, 6:02 PM Reply
3. Michael says

   Wel­come back. 35lbs is impres­sive. Does the elim­i­na­tion of gluten facil­i­tate weight loss? That has become such a wide­spread issue that it is fairly easy to find some­thing on a restau­rant menu accom­mo­dat­ing specif­i­cally gluten-free diets, at least where I live. All of the gro­cery stores have health sec­tions with gluten-free prod­ucts. Any new insights regard­ing Vit­a­min A supplements?

   16 January 2011, 12:43 AM Reply
   • David says

     Michael,

     Elim­i­na­tion of refined car­bo­hy­drates such as sugar and white flour are def­i­nitely asso­ci­ated with weight loss. Elim­i­na­tion of gluten per se is not all that related to weight loss as far as I know. How­ever, gluten and other anti-nutrients in wheat inter­fere with proper nutri­ent absorp­tion and increase gut per­me­abil­ity, which can cause a vari­ety of autoim­mune prob­lems. When I eat wheat, for exam­ple, I get rashes and my joints hurt. Since elim­i­nat­ing wheat, the osteo-arthritis I was expe­ri­enc­ing in my right shoul­der has dis­ap­peared. In oth­ers, this gut per­me­abil­ity results in more seri­ous autoim­mune ill­nesses such as rheuma­toid arthri­tis, mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis, and lupus.

     If you don’t get enough vit­a­min A in your diet, then sup­ple­men­ta­tion is a good idea. I recently started tak­ing cod liver oil, which con­tains vit­a­min A among other nutrients.

     16 January 2011, 8:13 AM Reply
4. Michael says

   I was think­ing that weight loss might be a con­se­quence of elim­i­nat­ing cer­tain fat­ten­ing foods because it would be eas­ier, and per­haps health­ier, than switch­ing to a gluten-free form of the same food.

   I recall that you had posted about expe­ri­enc­ing improved vision after tak­ing high doses of vit­a­min A. Are you still doing this?

   16 January 2011, 7:07 PM Reply
   • David says

     Michael,

     Many peo­ple have proven that you can lose weight with­out cut­ting out gluten. I find that a paleo/primal/ancestral style diet, with­out gluten grains, has many health ben­e­fits for me—weight loss among them.

     It was vit­a­min D3, actu­ally. Yes, I still do take 4,000 IU daily in gel­cap form except on days with lots of sun expo­sure and my vision is still good. D3 sup­ple­men­ta­tion makes sense to me because your body can’t make it with­out sun­light. Almost no one these days gets as much sun as our hunter-gatherer ances­tors did. Low serum vit­a­min D (“hypovi­t­a­minosis D,”) is asso­ci­ated with many health problems.

     16 January 2011, 7:19 PM Reply