To Exercise Better, Say Goodbye To Gluten

to-exercise-better-say-goodbye-to-gluten_300If you want to improve your health with exercise, there’s a dietary shift taking place among elite athletes you should know about: They’re going on gluten-free diets. Although the change is controversial, a growing number of medical experts believe that giving up gluten can improve athletic performance.

For example, elite tennis player Novak Djokovic found his career rejuvenated when he changed his meals. In his book, Serve to Win: The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence, Djokovic notes: “It wasn’t a new racquet, a new workout, a new coach, or even a new serve that helped me lose weight, find mental focus, and enjoy the best health of my life. It was a new diet.”

So what happened after he gave up gluten? He went on to win three Grand Slams and more than three dozen straight tennis matches. That was enough to garner a No. 1 ranking by the Association of Tennis Professionals.

When you take gluten out of your diet, eliminating foods made of wheat, barley and rye, you remove an indigestible protein that can only cause trouble in the digestive tract.

As Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children tells The Washington Post: “Nutritionally speaking, gluten is useless.” He points out that consuming gluten in bread, cookies, cakes, beer and crackers is “asking your GI system to do an impossible mission: to digest something that’s not digestible.”

The results of eliminating gluten can be stunning. Runner and writer Anna Medaris Miller reports: “Since cutting gluten out of my diet in August of last year, I’ve noticed a profound change: My digestion is gentler, my sleep is sounder, my energy level is more even. These benefits also seem to have led to improved athletic performance. Since going off gluten, I placed in a race for the first time in my adult life, won a small community biathlon and achieved a personal best in a 5K run. Most important, I felt good while doing it.”

Carl Lowe

By Carl Lowe

has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007.

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