Jesus Ate Bread

Cutting out grains from our diet was a big change. While it now feels normal, for awhile it felt anything but. Everywhere I looked I saw advertisements for bread and everywhere I went people served pasta for dinner. I mean, even the tv shows my two year old watches contain pancakes and cupcakes galore.

Many people question making this change for this very reason. It’s hard to forego something they have eaten their entire lives and have been taught through advertisements, habit and media that it is perfectly normal. While the paleo movement and caveman mentality is gaining popularity there are still many people who get hung up on the fact that generations of people have been cultivating and eating grains for thousands of years. I mean, even Jesus ate bread! How could it be wrong for us to consume them as well?

Well, If you eat exactly like Jesus ate, you will be just fine.

Here’s what that entails:

Everything is truly organic
Everything is locally grown and eaten in season
No added chemicals or preservatives
No processed sugar, and little to no sweeteners at all other than locally grown fruit
Fully pastured meat
Truly pastured eggs (next to impossible to find these days!)
No processed food
No soy (unless properly fermented and then only if Jesus traveled to Japan)
No MSG
Only 1-2 high carb items in your diet (the same culture didn’t have both rice and potatoes!)

And the bread Jesus ate? It was made from organic, locally grown wheat that was soaked, sprouted, and baked fresh the day it was ground. And even then it did not comprise the bulk of calories every day but was just a side item.

If you eat just like that, you will be fine.

Thankfully, grains do not have any nutrients that we cannot get elsewhere and in higher amounts. I find it is just easier to do without. The biggest reason I go without them, however, is to keep my body primarily in a fat burning metabolism, burning clean energy. That is the natural state of our bodies and is where they naturally begin to heal themselves from the inside out. It is also the state in which I feel like a kick-ass, fat-burning, never-ending-energy, smoking-hot machine. So yeah, there’s that too.

Gut health is hereditary and if you come from a long line of healthy cattle ranchers that’s a good thing. But if you come from a long line of sugar addicts and grain-relying folk it’s not so good since your gut may be compromised from birth. Add to that a culture over loaded with grains and sugar and seriously lacking in truly pastured meat and fats (I mean, even our meats eat grains now which changes the nutrient makeup of the meat!) and you have a recipe for bad gut health.

People like us need to be even more careful and take more extreme measures to bring our gut back to a place of health and strength. I was grain, sugar, legume, soy, msg and dairy free for 6 months before I felt like my metabolism process had been healed and most likely a leaky gut issue as well. I can now handle the occasional cheat day but to be honest, I like feeling this good and no longer have any plans to go back to regularly consuming any of these irritants. I would rather have truly good health, significantly reduce my risk of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and depression among others (link to symptom Checker page), and start every day feeling great.