I am new to this site tonight and am self diagnosed (I guess). I have been on a low carb diet for years and
only had specific bloating trouble for the past two to three years. My blood tests are negative, but my bloating which has been bad enough that people think I'm pregnant is seemingly disappearing after going gluten free for a couple of weeks. Does anyone else have any experience with both low carb and gluten free? Low carb is absolutely the only way I can keep the weight off. At my worst, I was 5' 6" at 165+ and now 130 - 135 so long as I stay low carb.

I wonder if my low carb diet might be why my blood tests are negative, but I seem better already gluten free. Does anyone have any similar experience or am I still the weirdo?

It seems like my low carb diet and gluten free are quite compatible. Fast food is rough low carb anyway There are those nasty hidden glutens like soy sauce that I'm having to deal with, but, mostly, I don't feel very deprived. Maybe low carb might be a way for some that are having troubles going gluten free to feel better since the low carb lifestyle doesn't leave you hungry, etc. and, if you cook, you can have a great diet.

Thanks to anyone.

Well, as you've noted, low carb and gluten-free is an easy one to do. I am wondering though, if your trouble with carbs has been the gluten. After all, the typical American diet has wheat as the main source of carbs. If that turns out to be the case, gluten-free carbs might be a welcome addition to your diet. However, I wouldn't suggest diving right in though.

I've been finding that certain carbs work for me, while others do not. For instance, some gluten-free flours with a high carb content are ok, and others bother me terribly.

Are you able to eat rice, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, bananas, or tapioca pudding, etc? Some gluten-free grains are higher in carbs than others. For example, millet is higher than buckwheat, which is higher than amaranth, which is still higher than t'eff.

Some particularly low carb gluten-free flours I know of are coconut, t'eff, fava, garbanzo, and various other bean flours. I've read coconut flour makes great cakes.

We're on day 3 of our low carb diet. It for sure it simple to stay gluten free on it.

We're both a little foggy but the weight is for sure coming off. Buy some Ketone strips and keep an eye on your keytone levels.

I think low carb diets get a bad wrap because people just follow the diet in the book and are not watching their levels. The idea is to be in ketosis most of the time and if you go back and forth thats is what screws you up.

You want to eat carbs upto the point where you go out of ketosis, or using fat for energy. I have boughts of energy and I'm for sure missing the carbs. My bill at the restaurant the other day was 9.56 for lunch, I went to add 1.50 for the tip on the CC receipt and had to think about it It for sure messes with you for a bit but in less than a week we'll start adding the carbs back in.

Make sure you take your suppliments the first 2 weeks too. Another myth is that you have to keep taking them...you take the majority of them for the first couple of weeks until you re-add that part of your diet in and and can cut back.

Some of us eat a version of the Paleo diet. Paleo is no grains, no sugar, no dairy, no potatoes, no beans, no peanuts which is a legume & no rice which is a grain.

I eat a lot of meat & seafood & fruits & veggies & nuts. Paleo is also about getting enough fats in the diet.

I recommend the book "Good Calories Bad Calories" I am half way thru it.

today I went to Galveston & had crab claws, shrimp cocktail, and a huge lobster. I cheated & had butter which I seem to be able to eat, although I am dairy free. Along with this feast I had steamed broccoli & spaghetti squash.

I do not stay strictly to low carb, because occasionally I like to have sweet potatoes & sometimes pinto beans & cornbread. But it seems that the longer I eat Paleo that I want these foods less & less. Sometimes on the weekends I will have white corn tortillas but now I make sure that each one has at least two or three pieces of bacon rolled up in it, & I heat the tortillas in the bacon grease - yum!!!

I have eaten mostly the Paleo way since Aug 2007. Although, I never could eat the gluten-free replacement grains - I finally just gave up...

Uhm, pardon my ignorance of the "Paleo" diet, but my instinct tells me all that bacon and grease is a great way to get a coronary (i.e. heart attack). Am I missing something here?

I've moved away from Paleo into raw food veganism. I know, I know. Anyway, I did Paleo for a while. Bacon is not a good choice for anyone to eat, most likely. Even the best bacon, gluten free, no nitrites (in other words, uncured bacoon), is still mostly fat -- the key, though, is that it is mostly BAD fat. Good fats are avocados, coconut, hemp, flax, olive, etc. ... all raw except coconut, which stays healthy at high temps.

So no, you're not crazy. MMMMMM...bacon. When I went vegetarian years and years ago (20 years?) it was the first thing I missed. When I switched from veggie to eating meat again, it's one of the first things I added back. But now I'm back to veggie again. It was a fun bacony vacation.

As to low carbs, the danger is in getting too acid. In my case, my diet is extremely alkaline - only nuts really as acid food since I eat zero grains. (acid = meat, protein, grains, baked stuff/alkaline = most fruits and veggies) If you're balancing out acid/alkaline, you should be fine. But otherwise, it can be dangerous to focus your attention solely on "low carb". No bad carbs might be a better way to put it.

Good luck!

The paleolithic diet concentrates on meat, fat and veggies, omitting glutenous grains and sugar, and cutting out, or way back on, non-gluten starches. The idea is precisely to use oils and fats for energy.

Coronaries don't come from eating fat. Coronaries come from atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is an allergic reaction to glutenous grains, sugar and starches. Don't misunderstand, allergic reactions, all allergic reactions, are actually autoimmune attacks. And that's exactly what atherosclerosis is.

Humans have two methods of converting food to energy. The most popular is mitochondrial conversion of carbohydrates into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The process requires complete digestion of ingested proteins and precise mitochondrial membrane integrity. As you might know, people with intolerance to gluten 1) do not completely digest proteins before placing them into the bloodstream, and 2) place the cytokine zonulin into the bloodstream. Zonulin destroys membrane integrity.

Both factors destroy the mitochondrial cycle. A broken mitochondrial cycle produces an overabundance of oxidants and incomplete protein chains which the immune system has to handle .........while trying to handle the influx of raw stomach contents.

The other method of converting food into energy is ketosis. Ketosis is cells directly consuming ketones. We use ketosis every time we exert ourselves. It's good for us.

Liver mitochondria produce ketones from fats. Human fat cells store excess ketones in the form of human fat.

Dieticians call for high omega 3 consumption, and low consumption of fats in order to help combat the problems caused by carbohydrate consumption. Without carbohydrates, the mix of consumable fats can be far heavier than with carbohydrate consumption.

It's called a paleolithic diet because it's the diet humans consumed for millions of years before we started growing and consuming grain. The unusual, harmful diet in this discussion is the high-carbohydrate diet.

Here's a bit of info from 3 institutes-all basically the same info. My lab lab as well as many others treat Mayo as sort of a gold standard for cardiac info....


From Mayo clinic:
Causes

Atherosclerosis is a slow, progressive disease that may begin as early as childhood. Although the exact cause is unknown, researchers suspect that atherosclerosis starts with damage or injury to the inner layer of an artery. The damage may be caused by:

High blood pressure
High cholesterol
An irritant, such as nicotine
Certain diseases, such as diabetes
Once the inner wall of an artery is damaged, blood cells called platelets often clump at the injury site to try to repair the artery, leading to inflammation. Over time, fatty deposits (plaques) made of cholesterol and other cellular waste products also accumulate at the injury and harden, narrowing your arteries. The organs and tissues connected to the blocked arteries then don't receive enough blood to function properly.

Eventually pieces of the fatty deposits may rupture and enter your bloodstream. This can cause a blood clot to form and damage your organs, such as in a heart attack. A blood clot can also travel to other parts of your body and partially or totally block blood flow to another organ.


From NIH:

What Causes Atherosclerosis?
The exact cause of atherosclerosis isn't known. However, studies show that atherosclerosis is a slow, complex disease that may start in childhood. It develops faster as you age.

Atherosclerosis may start when certain factors damage the inner layers of the arteries. These factors include:

Smoking
High amounts of certain fats and cholesterol in the blood
High blood pressure
High amounts of sugar in the blood due to insulin resistance or diabetes
When damage occurs, your body starts a healing process. Fatty tissues release compounds that promote this process. This healing causes plaque to build up where the arteries are damaged.

Over time, the plaque may crack. Blood cells called platelets (PLATE-lets) clump together to form blood clots where the cracks are. This narrows the arteries more and worsens angina (chest pain) or causes a heart attack.

Researchers continue to look at why atherosclerosis develops. They hope to find answers to such questions as:

Why and how do the arteries become damaged?
How does plaque develop and change over time?
Why does plaque break open and lead to clots?


From American Heart Association:

How does atherosclerosis start?

Atherosclerosis is a slow, complex disease that typically starts in childhood and often progresses when people grow older. In some people it progresses rapidly, even in their third decade. Many scientists think it begins with damage to the innermost layer of the artery. This layer is called the endothelium (en"do-THE'le-um). Causes of damage to the arterial wall include:

elevated levels of cholesterol and triglyceride (tri-GLIS'er-id) in the blood
high blood pressure
tobacco smoke
diabetes
Tobacco smoke greatly worsens atherosclerosis and speeds its growth in the coronary arteries, the aorta and arteries in the legs. (The coronary arteries bring blood to the heart muscle; the aorta is the large vessel that the heart pumps blood through to the body.)

Because of the damage to the endothelium, fats, cholesterol, platelets, cellular waste products, calcium and other substances are deposited in the artery wall. These may stimulate artery wall cells to produce other substances that result in further buildup of cells.

These cells and surrounding material thicken the endothelium significantly. The artery's diameter shrinks and blood flow decreases, reducing the oxygen supply. Often a blood clot forms near this plaque and blocks the artery, stopping the blood flow.

What does research show?

Males and people with a family history of premature cardiovascular disease have an increased risk of atherosclerosis. These risk factors can't be controlled. Research shows the benefits of reducing the controllable risk factors for atherosclerosis:

High blood cholesterol (especially LDL or "bad" cholesterol over 100 mg/dL)
Cigarette smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke
High blood pressure
Diabetes mellitus
Obesity
Physical inactivity
Research also suggests that inflammation in the circulating blood may play an important role in triggering heart attacks and strokes. Inflammation is the body's response to injury, and blood clotting is often part of that response. Blood clots, as described above, can slow down or stop blood flow in the arteries.

Lots of folks have their lipids improve on low carb diets.

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is an awesome book. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, to the OP, there's a forum dedicated to low carb, paleo eating here: http://forum.lowcarber.org/forumdisplay.php?f=107 There's also forums for other sorts of low carb diets here too, like South Beach and others.

We have lots of different interpretations of paleo and implementations. But pretty much all of us avoid gluten like mad. Lots of good recipes, support and so on here.

I've been doing low carb for 5 years, 2 of them gluten/dairy free. It's helped my health a ton! Blood pressure restored to normal, blood sugar restored to normal, autoimmune diseases in remission and so on.

Another very interesting thread! Glad you asked the questions and great to see so many replies.

I just read, and highly recommend, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Not about gluten, but he sheds a lot of light on the low-fat debate in relation to heart disease and other chronic diseases. Basically says low fat diets are based on bad science. And he talks a lot about refined carbs being a big problem.

Many of us are on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. There is a big thread under Leaky Gut. The book is called Breaking the Vicious Cycle. Those considering shedding carbs might look into it.

I was also going to post about the SCD. Since being put on the diet by my doctor and reading along in many places, I discovered that the explanations for the carb problem has been here all along in the celiac info. I have been reading Scott's newsletters and there are several articles about it. There is also several articles about weight, carbs, gluten, etc.

Villi damage means we don't make lactase--most of us here know that by now. What we don't realize is that there are several other carb digestive enzymes also impacted. So we just may lack the ability to break down some carbs leading to many problems and symptoms. SCD addresses this by removing the carbs that can't be digested, but leaving the ones that can be broken down.

I have had the exact same weight problems you mentioned. What has been very amazing to me is on SCD I can have honey and fruit--which I thought would make me gain weight right away. It hasn't, I have lost weight. The thing is, I can directly absorb these carbs they don't have to be digested. So it is bypassing the problem in the gut.