Steve Hofstetter is an author, comedian, and comedy club owner (he also happens to be my husband). He’s watched my transition to a healthier lifestyle, and he took his own journey towards a better diet that led to giving up the main foods in his diet; gluten, sugar, and dairy. In his own words, here is his experience.
Enjoy!
Sara
How I Gave Up Dairy, Sugar, and Gluten
by: Steve Hofstetter
When Sara and I first started dating, if she told me that I’d be dairy-free fewer than 18 months into our marriage, we probably would have stopped dating. And not just because it’s strange to bring that up on a first date.
“Want to go for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“Only if we get married and you give up dairy.”
“Oh, I just forgot, both my legs are broken.”
That thought also would have been strange because I have kept more than a few dairy farmers in business. My go-to lunches were grilled cheese or a bagel with a shmear. I wrote my college essay on starting each day with a bowl of cereal. And I regularly went through two gallons of milk a week. Cows trembled at the thought of me.
Things changed on March 20th. That morning, I received the results of a blood test I’d taken to get life insurance. Every item checked out fine. With one small, insolent insulin exception.
“Pre-diabetic.” Reading those words on official letterhead can floor anyone, but they destroyed me. I was 32 and slim. I didn’t drink soda, and I only indulged in dessert once or twice a month. I wasn’t washing down Pixie Sticks with Mountain Dew. I had a low-sugar diet, especially for the average American.
Sara had been trying to get me to quit sugar cereal for months. So when I called her, I was more afraid of an “I told you so” than actually having diabetes.
She went easy on me, and started educating me on how to reverse what I’d started. The more I learned, the more I realized that my diet was full of sugar. The sugar on the cereal was one thing – but the body also processes flour into sugar. My grilled cheese and bagel habits were full of flour. Add in ketchup-covered fries with the grilled cheese and orange juice with the bagel, and I was also consuming extra sugar every time.
Gluten was everywhere. I ate tons of pasta, lots of sandwiches, and even when I was being “healthy,” I covered my salad with croutons. Sugar was even more insidious. In the marinara on my pasta, in the soup I had with my sandwiches, and in the dressing I put on my salad. I needed to make a change.
The night of March 20th, I had a show in Delhi, NY. Delhi is an aggie town in upstate New York not known for its health conscious options; their idea of a diet is light ranch. I went into a supermarket with the mission of finding better options than the glue and chemicals I’d been putting in my system. I walked through every aisle, and I left with just almonds and grapes.
The conversation that followed with the pear-shaped clerk is what really inspired me to change completely. Noticing her curiously eyeing my almonds and grapes as if I had just plunked down a six-pack of beer and a pregnancy test, I asked if it was odd to see someone eating healthy.
“No, I eat healthy all the time,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll skip lunch and have a slim fast and a diet coke.”
And that’s when it hit me – our society’s view of healthy is not healthy – it is skinny. To most of us, health is short-term benefit in exchange for long-term risk. Thus, I was the picture of perfect health: a 32-year-old skinny guy on an express train to diabetes.
When I got home, Sara and I went through our kitchen and got rid of everything with added sugar. Feeling good about ourselves, we also ditched the gluten. And then it was time for the unthinkable: the dairy.
The human digestive system was not designed to react well to another animal’s milk, let alone hormone-infused milk. That is why so many people are lactose intolerant, and why it takes most people longer to digest dairy than most other foods. But I lived off the stuff. Sara would have to pry the milk from my cold dead hands. Which, if I kept up my diet, would happen sooner than I’d like.
So I made a deal. We wouldn’t buy milk the next time we bought groceries, and I’d see if I could live without it. And four months later, I still haven’t had any. I didn’t realize just how simple it was. We stopped buying cheese. We stopped buying milk. And when dairy wasn’t easily available to me, I stopped craving it.
Sure, I miss pizza. I missed grilled cheese. I miss the occasional slice of cheesecake. And I miss the hell out of a good bagel. But because I’ve been off dairy, sugar and gluten for so long, I get sick at the thought of it.
Our bodies are machines, designed for certain functions. And when we eat processed food like sugar and gluten and dairy, we are mucking up the gears of that machine. Cleanses don’t work, because people who cleanse just put the crap right back in. But when we eat well, we can eat as much as we want because our bodies know how to handle food. And, despite the marketing to the contrary, Velveeta is not food.
On a recent overnight trans-Atlantic flight, I was tired and hungry, and the flight attendant put some tiramisu in front of me. I ate half of it before I felt really ill. My stomach was turning, and it wasn’t the only part of my body that rejected the trifecta of dairy, sugar, and gluten. Let’s just say there were a few more noxious fumes in the cabin than usual. As much as I want to apologize to all those cows I tortured, I also want to apologize to the row behind me.
When I first started eating healthier, I was afraid of two conflicting things. One was death. The other was giving up the lifestyle I’d grown used to. My fear of death won. Incidentally, I was also afraid of becoming one of those annoying preachy health food people. Turns out I had only annoyed by them in the past because I was gassy, and thus annoyed by everyone.
The tiramisu reminded me that the brief good taste of dairy is not worth what it does to you. Four months into this new lifestyle and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I look better, I sleep better, I work better, and I am oddly calm. It’s hard to say exactly why I am calm – perhaps because I look at other people chasing down slim fast with a diet coke, and I am glad I’ve been unplugged from the Matrix.
The craziest part of the story is that a few weeks later, another check up refuted the original blood test, and my pre-diabetic state was chalked up to equipment error. But in that same checkup, I was commended on just how healthy I was. I was finally the actual scientific picture of good health in every measurable category – leaps and bounds past what I had been less than a month prior. And I don’t even work out – hell, I my fingers are sore just typing this. My health excelled simply because I had cleaned out the gears of the machine.
I never would have been able to do this on my own, as Sara’s knowledge and support fuels a great deal of my diet. I’m lucky to have her. And since she sleeps next to me, she’s lucky I stopped eating dairy.
Nicely done! Good timing, too, because in the last several days I’ve been strongly contemplating doing a 30-day dairy-free/gluten-free trial period, which everyone tells me will last forever because I’ll feel so great that I’ll never want to go back. (But because I am weak and apparently easily susceptible to blatant, conscious self-delusion, I need the 30-day goal to help me kickstart it.) For context, I don’t feel ill and currently have no health problems, so there’s no “stick” motivating me to make a change.
So here’s my question. Several years ago, my husband and I happily and easily transitioned to a pescatarian lifestyle; it was more my thing than his, but he saw the wisdom in it and willingly followed the change. But wheat and milk are another issue entirely — they are staples of his diet, particularly wheat. I don’t for a second expect HIM to change with me, but I know it’ll be infinitely harder with all my old wheaty-milky comfort foods around. How do I do my thing and allow him to continue his without falling into old behavior patterns? And what types of food do you eat out, especially if you don’t eat meat? (Or dairy, or gluten?) And finally, are both beer and wine excluded from the list of edibles — beer for the wheat, wine for the sugar?
Thanks for the article and for being open to change, although I should warn you that kind of open-mindedness could get you kicked right out of ‘Mer’ca.
Hi MBK,
I actually started juicing vegetables and switched to a mostly plant based diet months before Steve did. And it was really hard to have different eating habits under one household but I was able to do it because it was important to me and my lifestyle. His froot loops looked really good next to my pineapple kale juice. What made it easier is that I started feeling so great on my new diet and if I ate any of Steve’s food, I would feel crappy.
Another reason that we cut out gluten and dairy is because we are sensitive to it. I tested my system by eliminating gluten from my diet for 1 week and then I ate a slice of bread. My body had a fairly adverse reaction to it. I felt bloated and my heart rate increased. It was very uncomfortable. Have you tried to see if you are sensitive to gluten and dairy?
If you are serious about this change, my advice to you is to try it for 3 weeks. You can do anything for 3 weeks and It takes 21 days to make a habit. Use soy and almond milk instead of regular milk, cut out the cheese, and the wheat. If you love pasta, there is a quinoa and corn pasta from a company called Ancient Harvest which tastes so close to the real thing. For breakfast if I don’t juice, I have chia seed pudding (I have the recipe on my blog) or oatmeal which are both gluten free. Another option is a breakfast smoothie. It’s an extremely difficult lifestyle change because it’s a decision you’ll be making over and over again everyday for the rest of your life.
It’s important when making big lifestyle changes to focus on what you can eat versus what you can’t eat. We eat a lot of wonderful seasonal vegetables, quinoa, and sweet potatoes. We eat burrito bowls with brown rice, guacamole, and black beans. We eat a lot of salmon and wonderful green salads. I’ve dropped about 10 pounds since we made this change and Steve has dropped quite a bit. My skin has cleared up as well.
As far as what we do when we eat out, this diet is a lifestyle but that doesn’t mean we don’t indulge every so often. We abide by the 90/10 rule where 1-2 meals per week, we eat what we want. Note that we don’t always use this “cheat meal” but it’s there for us if we need/want to use it. The question that we ask ourselves before we indulge in something for taste rather than health is “Is this worth it.” Most often it’s not, but once in a while it is. There is always some healthy option at a restaurant. It may seem limiting at first, but your taste buds will change and it will jump out at you.
The animal products we eat regularly are small low mercury fish like salmon and sardines and omega 3 free range eggs. On occasion (maybe once per month) we will have meat as long as we know the farm where it came from. Beer and wine have become special occasion treats. If I go out, I have a vodka on the rocks with lime. That doesn’t mean I’ll turn down a wine tasting class if the opportunity presents itself. A girl’s gotta live
None of these are easy changes, and none of them happened overnight. We took baby steps to get where we are and we are ever evolving.
I hope this helps.
Sara
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I am planning to start with giving up dairy and sugar to assist in fertility issues (I have pcos) and increasingly annoying acne (I’m 33). I do not have gluten sensitivities so that is not a priority for me. I really enjoy an occasional beer. Usually one or two a few times a month. Is this going to derail me? Thanks for the great post!
Hi Rebecca- Thanks so much for your comment! We strive for 90/10 in our house – we eat well 90% of the time and then 2 or so meals per week we treat ourselves. It’s worked very well for us so far. We have seen some great results in terms of weight and energy, but we still have the occasional indulgence. Those indulgences haven’t derailed us at all, rather it prevents us from bingeing due to deprivation. That being said, everyone is different, and you have to find what works for you and your body.
Love your eco blog!